Listen to this article:

The opening day of the United States (US)-Israel invasion of Iran was marked by the horror of tomahawk missiles targeting the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in the Minab city of Iran. It left 170 dead, a majority of them eight- to ten-year-old girls. A flurry of accusations and denials followed, without any acceptance of guilt or expression of remorse.

While there has been some formal condemnation of this killing, if one expected an outcry, a groundswell of to follow such egregious acts of invasion and killings, one is disappointed. On the contrary – perhaps it should not shock us any longer – a survey by Israel Democracy Institute has documented an overwhelming approval amongst the Israelis for Prime Minister Netanyahu’s war against Iran.

If the slaughter of schoolgirls has at least managed to prick the conscience of some international bodies – the United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch – the assassination of 86-year-old Ayatollah Khamenei, the unarmed, quasi-political, spiritual leader of Shia Muslims along with his wife and members of their immediate and extended family, has invited virtually no condemnation. The ‘war on terror’ pursued by Pakistan army bombed a drug rehabilitation centre in Kabul leaving nearly 400 dead – with nary a regret, leave aside accountability.

War has no morality, as we have been reminded often. Everything is fair in love and war, goes the adage. For the apologists of hawkish regimes, each war has its own morality, not to be judged by the universal binaries of the virtuous and the wicked. Yet declarations of war are invariably accompanied by an ethical alibi: ‘pre-emptive strike’, ‘deterrence’, ‘right to defend’, ‘shielding humanity’ from a dreadful present, impending horror and so on. War is presented as the last resort, the unsought but unavoidable necessity.

Warring commanders and soldiers are heroes, venerated for their devotion and valour. They are immortal even in death, for they turn martyrs. Wars are considered legitimate, as they are proclaimed by the state – whether modern constitutional states or monarchies and empires of the bygone era. For war theorist Clausewitz, modern warfare is rational; a continuation of policy or politics by other means. They are fought by professional militaries led by experienced commanders and the combat is confined to the uniformed.

Also read: In Illustrations | All War Is a War on Children

The Just War theories in Christian theology or other religious philosophies endorsed wars undertaken by the king for they acted on God’s command. Nonetheless, the atrocities of war had to be contained by considerations of just intentions, righteous conduct and fair play in the course of war. Thus, St. Thomas Acquinas, the 13th-century Christian theologist and philosopher, laid down absolute prohibition against wantonly killing innocents, even during the course of a war necessitated by religion and prevailing law.

In the Hindu dharmic texts too, wars, when unavoidable, were to be fought among equals, and certainly not against those unarmed. In the Gita, Lord Krishna invokes the duty of a kshatriya to urge a reluctant Arjuna to fight a righteous war. Yet he is forbidden to use weapons such as Brahmastra or Pasupastra considered to be massively destructive (unless they are used against him). In Islam, an elaborate moral fortification guides wars that are to be fought only in self defence.

“Do not kill women, children, or whoever comes to you with peace’, goes the Quranic injunction. The classical principles of jus ad bellum (justness of wars) and jus in bello (just conduct of war) are epitomised in the UN Convention of 1945 and Geneva Conventions of 1949 that restrict the logic of wars to self defence and lay down rules to ameliorate the condition of the wounded and the sick, guarantee fair treatment to prisoners of war and affirm protection of civilians in times of war. Pivotal to war is its morality that restricts as much as licenses legitimate states and armies to wage wars, albeit bound by humanitarian concerns.

Terrorism is deemed precisely its ‘other’. Willfully contemptuous of humanity, terrorism relishes mindless bloodshed of the innocent and the complicit alike. The UN Security Council broadly refers to terrorism as primarily ‘criminal acts’ committed to cause deaths, bodily injury or taking of hostage with the intention to provoke a state of terror in the general public or to compel a government to act accordingly.

Terrorists are not martyrs but figures of disgrace. (Though insofar as they are objects of adoration, for those who revere them, they are not terrorists.) In the dominant framework, terrorism is not contained by conventions, rules of conduct or any other ethical contemplation. Since terrorism functions outside of law, it does not enjoy the sanction of the state. In fact, its non-state locus augments its illicitness. It is this illegitimacy accorded to terrorism and terrorists that allows governments, police and armies to claim exemption, often impunity, when combating what they perceive as terrorism.

A Palestinian man walks past a mural depicting late South African leader Nelson Mandela, right, and late Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi, in Gaza City, Wednesday, December 11, 2013, a week after Mandela died. Photo: Adel Hana/AP.

This exceptionalism assumed by the enactment of extra-ordinary laws – the Patriot Act in the US, and TADA, POTA, UAPA and AFSPA in India – allows extra-judicial killings, fast-track trials, prolonged incarceration without trial and so on.

It is another matter that history is replete with examples of the rebelliousness of the non-state actor resulting in the founding of the state. Nelson Mandela and his comrades, once enlisted in the US and United Kingdom watchlists on terrorists, are not an exception in this regard. Interestingly, the state/non-state binary that is critical to the distinction between terror and war is more recent. It, in fact, betrays its origins, often traced to the post-revolutionary government of France.

In response to the threats posed by former aristocrats and upper-class emigres to restore the ancien regime, the National Convention led by the Jacobins, the ruling revolutionaries, declared “terror to be the order of the day”. As an instrument of politics, terror had its origins in the realm of the state, as a necessary measure to consolidate the newly founded Republic. An estimated 17,000 lives fell to the Jacobin’s reign of terror as a state policy.

According to Michael Walzer, terrorism, implying the random killing of innocent civilians, emerged as a strategy of non-state actors/revolutionaries only after it had become a feature of conventional wars involving state militaries.

To be sure, the conjunction of state and terrorism is not entirely absent – it is mobilised, however, only in contexts of states that stand at a significant distance from the model of (Western) liberal democratic states, and whose violence (and potential for violence) blurs into the mindlessness characteristic of terrorism rather than that of rational state.

Civilian killings in war are dismissed as ‘collateral damage’, unpremeditated and accidental. It is argued that in terrorism, the logic of violence is reversed – deliberate random killings of innocents are perpetrated to instill fear and force governments to concede demands.

If citizen killings are the leitmotif of terror, why do the numbers speak to the contrary? Why does the scale of civilian deaths in wars vastly outscore those lost in terrorist actions? Nearly 3,000 innocent lives were lost in what was seen as a wanton act of civilian killings by the Al Qaeda in its twin tower attack on September 11, 2001.

Also read: ‘Destruction Is Not the Same as Political Success’: US Bombing of Iran Shows Little Evidence of Endgame Strategy

Hot pursuit of the terrorists followed. The ‘war on terror’ or the good war against the forces of evil, as President Bush described it, took the US and its allies to expand the theatre of hostilities to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates collateral killings – bombings of schools, hospitals, civic facilities, residential quarters – to the extent of 4,32,000, nearly 150 times higher than the lives lost in the 2001 attacks on the twin towers.

Estimates of indirect deaths owing to destruction of economies, healthcare systems, infrastructure and the environment take the toll to 3.6-3.8 million. The October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks cost about 1,200 human lives including 300-plus Israeli security forces. Israel’s retaliatory violence as per the Cost of War Project has so far caused 2,36,505 casualties (67,000 deaths and the rest injured) constituting nearly 10% of the pre-war population of Gaza.

How do we explain the targeted bombings of hospitals, schools, residences, shelter homes of displaced people, food and water supplies by the IDF as collateral, unintended outcome of an inevitable war?

The war-versus-terrorism binary is a false one, a lazy construct fed into public discourse, popular narrative and scholarly formulations. The idea that war is guided by moral constraints and fought by professional armies, as against terrorism, which is unbounded pursuit of violence targeting civilians, has no historical validity as such. It serves to rationalise the horrors of war and the crimes of state armies and combat forces.

To reinforce the distinction between war and terrorism, the often-cited case is that of a British admiral who protested the reckless bombardment of German cities during the Second World War: “We are hopelessly unmilitary nation to imagine that we can win the war by bombing German women and children instead of defeating their army and navy.” The just war against the fascist alliance is blemished with the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki leaving nearly 2,50,000 dead. War and terror do not inhere distinct moral spheres, they co-exist in a seamless relationship. It is time that the war and terror binary is dismantled.

Tanweer Fazal is Professor of Sociology and Public Policy, BML Munjal University, Gurgaon.

© The Wire