By Richard D. Erlich

In Robert Redford's film Lions for Lambs, Tom Cruise's Senator Jasper Irving demands of Meryl Streep's reporter Janine Roth, "Do you want to win the War on Terror? Yes or no?"

It's an important question. It's also a trick question.

As most peaceniks or military wonks will tell you (given a chance), terror is an emotion and terrorism is a tactic, and the phrase "war on terrorism" is a figure of speech.

Trust me on terrorism as a tactic, and an old and widespread tactic: state terror answered with popular terrorism goes back at least to the early stages of the repression of Jewish customs under the Selucid Empire in the second century before the Christian era, answered by an insurgency led initially by the Jewish patriot Mattathias and, after his death, by his sons, notably Judah, "the Hammer" (the Maccabees, celebrated in the minor Festival of Hanukkah).

According to the First Book of the Maccabees, one royal decree ordered death for any women who had their sons circumcised, with death also "for their families and those who circumcised them; and they hung the infants from their mothers' necks" (1.60-61). The response to such decrees, the story continues, included an act of defiance in which Mattathias kills a collaborating Jew and "the king's officer who was forcing them to sacrifice" (2.23-25), possibly to King Antiochus as the god Baal Shamin. Then Mattathias "and his sons fled to the hills" (2.28), "and all who became fugitives to escape their troubles joined them and reinforced them. They organized an army, and struck down sinners in their anger," i.e., Jews who accepted Greek culture, "and lawless men in their wrath; the survivors fled to the Gentiles for safety" (2.43-44). The Maccabees and their followers won often enough and cemented enough popular support to move from guerilla warfare to open warfare and, eventually, victory, and respectability.

In the 20th century of the Christian era, terrorism was also used, at least occasionally, in the struggles for national liberation from occupiers ranging from the Nazis to the British to the earlier-annexed Boers/Afrikaners to the French and Americans: from occupied Yugoslavia to Ireland and England, to Palestine and to what was the Union of South Africa, to Algeria and Indochina.

So terrorism is a tactic – old, well-established, and nasty – and we can't literally make war against a tactic.

So let's rephrase Senator's Irving's question. I'll suggest, "Do you want to live in a world without terrorism?"

It might be a world without terrorism because no one wants to commit terrorism, or it might be a world without terrorism because no one dares: a world so well policed that terrorism is impossible.

I would like a world without state terror and non-governmental terrorism, a world where all large disputes could be resolved peacefully, or, a distant second best, with totally professional militaries fighting highly limited, set-piece battles, far from civilian populations.

Such a world would be a large step toward utopia. And with that comes a problem.

How does one get to where no groups have grievances so grave they are willing to try to right them by killing people? How does one get to a peaceful utopia peacefully? In a world of limited resources and rapidly-growing populations, in a world of nations large and small, ethnic groups, and tribes, how do you allow only current states to use lethal violence? Would it be right to limit some right to violence only to established states?

(If you celebrate the Fourth of July and the American Revolution, you should think carefully before denying violence to independence movements.)

I don't know how to get to even a modest utopia; I do know that 20th-century attempts to build immodest utopias led to such horrors as the Nazis and Stalinists, Cambodia under Pol Pot and his murderous followers.

Real-world utopianism can lead to a dystopia, to a bad world. We'd get to dystopia more directly and much faster in moving to where people might want to commit terrorism, but couldn't.

For a world kept by force totally free of terrorism, we'd need, I think, police states on a world-wide scale. For a USA free from the threat of terrorism, we'd need, I think, a totalitarian police-state here and endless "police actions" abroad.

So to "Do you want to win the War on Terror? Yes or no?" I think we should reply, No, not if you mean by victory another bloody adventure in utopia-building, or Zero-Tolerance through dystopian near-zero freedom.

For other alternatives, I'll go to the 2002 formulation of an old-fashioned Republican: retired US Air Force Lt. General and National Security Advisor to Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush, Brent Scowcroft. With a lot of effort, international cooperation, courage, and common sense, we can "win the war on terrorism" in the sense that "we can break its back so that it is a horrible nuisance and not a paralyzing influence on our societies" ("Remarks by Brent Scowcroft at the U.S. Institute of Peace Conference on America's Challenges in a Changed World," September 5, 2002).

Short of terrorists with nukes or, far less likely, effective biological weapons of mass death, terrorism is horrible when it happens, but unlikely to happen to most of us. Never for the victims and their families and friends, but as a social/political issue, terrorism for Americans outside of Iraq and Afghanistan is still mostly "a horrible nuisance." If we show some courage, we won't be terrorized, and the threats we face can be minimized.

So toughen up, my fellow Americans; for the foreseeable future, that is the one possible and tolerable victory.

Richard D. Erlich is an Emeritus Professor in English, now living in Ventura County, California.