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Originally posted by Airbornelawyer
I didn't choose a date at all for the war on terrorism because I don't consider there to be a such a thing. This is no more a "war on terrorism" than World War Two was a war on blitzkrieg or the U.S. Civil War was a war on rifled muskets.
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I strongly disagree. The war is on terrorism (which is more than just a tactic - it is a mindset), just as the World War II was on fascism or the Cold War a war on Communism, or the Geneva and Hague accords a war (via legislation and agreement) on the use of brutal and uncivilized methods.
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Some would disagree with my argument that the current war can be directly linked to the long struggle against totalitarianism. I think we can all agree that this current war, or the current phase of my larger war, though, is not against terrorism. It is primarily against a particular movement - call it Islamism, Islamist fundamentalism, political Islam, Islamofascism or jihadism - that uses terrorism as its main weapon. The war is secondarily against the states and groups that may not share the Islamists' vision, but provide support for their actions.
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Such as FARC? ETA? RIRA?
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But if there is a start date for this particular conflict, NDD's 1983 is a little too late but close.
This war (or phase of the Great War) probably began in 1979 with the Iranian Islamic Revolution and the rise of Egypt's Islamist terrorist organizations. Prior to then, and in many cases after then, most international terrorism was conducted by Marxist and anarchist groups supported directly or indirectly by the Soviet Union, other Communist states, and their clients.
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The IRA must love that comment.
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For Iran we have 1979. Egypt's Islamic Jihad, al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya and other Islamist groups were organized in the late 1970s, with their first attacks occuring by 1980. They grew for the most part out of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood traces its roots as a political movement back to the late 1930s and committed terrorist acts in the 1940s, but it never became an international terrorist movement. While most Palestinian terrorist groups were still Marxist, Palestinian Islamic Jihad was also formed in this period, in 1979-80.
With the stunning success of the 1981 assassination of Sadat and with the base of support Iran now provided to Shi'ite Islamists, Islamist terrorist groups grew. The April 1983 Beirut embassy bombing and the October 1983 simultaneous bombings of the U.S. Marine and French airborne compounds in Beirut became their first big attacks on the West.
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I recommend you research the hijacking of 4 airliners at the same time, all blown up on the tarmac. I think you might find that the "Islamists" (a label I find completely ridiculous, as Islam is an excuse for these people, not a reason) consider that event as more of a benchmark than the bombings in Beirut. Avoid the American-centic and Euro-centric focus. You aren't generally discussing Americans or Europeans.
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This April-October 1983 timeframe when the "shooting" war began is perhaps when we should have recognized we were in this war, but to be fair we did still have the Soviets and their minions to deal with. In this Great War, fighting the Soviets was still our Western Front, while dealing with the minions of Khomeini and Qutb was our Dardanelles campaign.
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Since the campaigns against Communism and Terrorism are unrelated, that isn't exactly a valid analogy, is it (the Dardanelles and the Western Front are related by a common enemy and goal)? A better one if you wish to compare the Cold War to WWI era would be to compare the war against terrorism as the equivilant to the use of troops in an attempt to stabilize Russia, or the use of troops in China during the rebellions... events which were a half-hearted attempt to deal with what would grow into far larger problems.