by John Welford

Created on: June 08, 2008

When President Bush, in the wake of the outrages of 11th September 2001, declared his "war on terror" I remember thinking at the time that there was something unsatisfactory about this terminology. How can you fight a war against a concept? On the other hand, I suppose that it is no stranger than fighting a "war on poverty" or a "war on waste".

However, although most people would agree that poverty, waste, disease, and many other ills that we can fight global campaigns against, are easily recognizable, the same is not true of terrorism. The statement that "one's man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" is absolutely true, so finding international agreement on what constitutes terrorism is likely to be an impossible task.

At the outset, I think we need to distinguish "terror" from "terrorism". The most basic definition of terror is "extreme fear", which can be caused by many things, although the word is usually used when the person experiencing terror is in fear of their life. On the other hand, we also use the word in a trivial way, for example when a young child is described as a "little terror"; but this is a million miles away from the world of Al Qaeda.

The word "terror" was first used in a political sense in the phrase "Reign of Terror", coined during the French Revolution when the revolutionary government under Robespierre used the state apparatus of torture, kangaroo courts and mass executions to place France in a state of continual fear. The knowledge that your life was in jeopardy if you opposed the governing faction was enough to preserve a kind of peace.

But this is not what we mean by terrorism today. There would seem to be one factor that must be present if an act can safely be defined as a terrorist one, which is that the motivation of the perpetrator is political. A murder committed with any other motive is not an instance of terrorism. Therefore, the Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh was a terrorist act because he was deliberately seeking to punish the United States government for its previous actions. Had his motivation been non-political, such as hatred for one or more of the individual victims, then he would not have been a terrorist. However, I can well understand that many people would have a problem with that distinction.

The definition of a "political act" is not an easy one. It could be argued that McVeigh was not a terrorist because he was seeking to punish a government and not to overthrow one. On the other hand, Lee Harvey

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