Cuba Aff Starter Pack

Affirmative.............................................................................................................................................. 2
1AC..................................................................................................................................................... 3
The Advantage is State Terrorism.................................................................................................... 4
Plan............................................................................................................................................... 13
Solvency....................................................................................................................................... 14
Case Extensions................................................................................................................................ 22
XT: Inherency................................................................................................................................ 23
XT: List Unjustified......................................................................................................................... 24
XT: Leads to Oppressive Foreign Policy.......................................................................................... 25
XT: Solvency.................................................................................................................................. 26
XT: Epistemology Key.................................................................................................................... 27
AT: Status Quo Solves WoT............................................................................................................ 28
AT: Framework.................................................................................................................................. 30
2AC - Framework........................................................................................................................... 31
1AR Framework Cede the Political............................................................................................ 35
AT: Cap............................................................................................................................................. 37
Perm Solvency.............................................................................................................................. 38
Link AT: Cuba.............................................................................................................................. 39
Link AT: Reformism Bad.............................................................................................................. 40
Impact AT: Root Cause................................................................................................................ 41
Alt Fails Cede the Political........................................................................................................... 43
Alt Fails Pragmatism Key............................................................................................................. 44
Alt Fails Rejection Not Enough.................................................................................................... 45
Alt Fails Totalizing....................................................................................................................... 46
Alt Fails Transition Wars.............................................................................................................. 47
Alt AT: Neolib Uniqueness........................................................................................................... 48
AT: DAs............................................................................................................................................. 49
Predictions Fail.............................................................................................................................. 50
Try or Die Bad............................................................................................................................... 52
Negative............................................................................................................................................... 53
Case Advantage 1NC...................................................................................................................... 54
Case Advantage Extensions........................................................................................................... 58
XT: 1 Status Quo Solves.............................................................................................................. 59
XT: 2 Threat Construction Wrong................................................................................................ 60
XT: 3 No Knowledge Distortion.................................................................................................... 61
XT: 4 No Escalation..................................................................................................................... 62
XT: 5 Cuba List Justified.............................................................................................................. 63
Case Solvency 1NC........................................................................................................................ 65
Case Solvency Extensions.............................................................................................................. 67
XT: 2 Plan Strengthens WoT........................................................................................................ 68
XT: 3 Epistemology Fails............................................................................................................. 69
XT: 4 Terror Critique Fails............................................................................................................ 70
Framework........................................................................................................................................ 71
1NC............................................................................................................................................... 72
2NC Framework First..................................................................................................................... 74
2NC Policymaking Good................................................................................................................ 75
2NC Policymaking Good Terrorism Specific................................................................................. 77
2NC Roleplaying Good................................................................................................................... 78
2NC Fairness Good........................................................................................................................ 79
2NC Reps dont Matter.................................................................................................................. 81
DA Helpers........................................................................................................................................ 82
Predictions Good........................................................................................................................... 83
Extinction Outweighs.................................................................................................................... 84
Consequentialism......................................................................................................................... 86

Affirmative

1AC

The Advantage is State Terrorism

Cuba is on the list of state sponsors of terrorism and there are no
plans to remove it. This designation is unjustified and being used as
a thinly veiled political weapon.

Bolender, research fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, 5-31-13 [Keith, Cuba is hardly a 'state
sponsor of terror', 31 May, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/31/cuba-us-terror-sponsors-list]

The long-awaited annual report on international terrorism from the State

Department was released Thursday, and confirmed what officials had already indicated that Cuba
is staying on the list along with Iran, Sudan and Syria. State Department spokesman
Patrick Ventrell confirmed the administration "has no current plans to remove
Cuba". The decision came as a disappointment for those who were expecting new Secretary of State John Kerry,
a long-time critic of America's counter-productive policy against the Castro government, might recommend Cuba's
removal. The fact he hasn't demonstrates how difficult it is to change the dynamics of the antagonistic relationship
between these two ideological adversaries. Cuba was originally included on the list in 1982, replacing a then-

The designation levies comprehensive economic punishments

against Havana as part of the overall strategy of regime change that includes a
friendly Iraq.

decades-long economic embargo, unrelenting propaganda, extra-territorial application of American laws. For it's
part, Cuba calls its continued inclusion on the list "shameful" and pandering to a small community of former Cuban
citizens who now live in Florida. Cuba also asserts that the US has actually undertaken actions on the island that
have resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians. An official of the country's foreign relations department, MINREX,
who asked to remain anonymous, complained: "It

is ridiculous that the United States continues

to include Cuba on an arbitrary list of states that sponsor terrorism, while it is Cuba that
has suffered so much from terrorism originating from the United States." The so-called
terrorism against Cuba began shortly after the triumph of the Revolution in 1959. In the early 1960s a covert CIA
program known as Operation Mongoose led to the killing of teachers, farmers, government officials and the
destruction of agricultural and non-military industrial targets. Other incidents involved attacks on villages, biological
terrorism including the introduction of Dengue 2 that resulted in the deaths of more than 100 children in 1981, and
a 1997 bombing campaign against tourist facilities in Havana and Varadero that killed Canadian-Italian tourist Fabio
Di Celmo and injured dozens. The most infamous act of terrorism occurred with the bombing of Cubana Airlines in
1976, killing all 72 on board. One of the two recognized masterminds, former CIA agent Luis Posada Carriles, has a
long history of suspected terrorist activities against his former homeland; at one point bragging to the New York
Times of his involvement in the hotel bombings. Posada continues to live a quiet life in Miami, considered a hero
among many of the first generation exiles whose anti-revolutionary fervor has yet to diminish. The other architect of
the Cubana Airlines bombing, Orlando Bosch, died peacefully in Miami a few years ago. As a result of these terrorist
activities, the Cuban government sent intelligence officers to Florida in the 1990s to infiltrate Cuban-American
organizations in an effort to thwart further acts. The agents, known as the Cuban Five, were uncovered by the FBI

While Cuba's status as a state sponsor of terrorism

remains unchanged, other countries that might be considered more
deserving, such as North Korea and Pakistan, aren't on the list. What makes
it all the more galling for the Castro government are the arguments the United States has
advanced to justify Cuba's inclusion the most egregious stemming from the
charge Cuba was not sufficiently supportive of the US war on terror or the
invasion of Iraq, and was unwilling to help track or seize assets allegedly held
by terrorists. A 2004 State Department report asserted that "Cuba continued to actively oppose the US-led
coalition prosecuting the global war on terrorism." In reality, the Cuban side has consistently
denounced all forms of terrorism, including the recent Boston Marathon bombings that brought
quick condolences from the island leadership. Other rationales over the past 30 years to
keep Cuba on the list have ranged from its support for left-wing rebels in
Latin America, its relationship with the former Soviet Union, treatment of political prisoners
and allowing members from alleged terrorist organizations such as Columbia's FARC and Spain's
and are serving long prison terms.

separatist Basque movement ETA to reside on the island. Even when those issues were resolved,
including the dissolution of the Soviet Union more than 20 years ago, Cuba found its unmerited designation had not

One long standing reason, that Havana permits refugees from

American justice to find safe haven on the island, was re-invigorated with a
ruling that was timed almost perfectly with the announcement that Cuba
would not be taken off the terrorist list. Assata Shakur, accused of killing a New Jersey
changed.

state trooper 40 years ago, was suddenly labeled as a most wanted terrorist by the FBI, with a $2m price tag on her
head. Shakur, who fled to Cuba in 1979 and was given political asylum, has consistently maintained her innocence.

Categorizing Shakur as a terrorist could potentially endanger her life from those wanting to collect
the bounty, and has led State Department officials to utilize her changed status as
justification to keep Cuba on the list. There is no legitimate reason to use the
arbitrary terrorism list as a political weapon against Cuba. To continue to do
so simply exposes the State Department to charges of hypocrisy and
manipulation of a serious threat based solely on ideological differences. Most
importantly, it gives insult to all those who have been actual victims of
terrorism.
Cubas place on the list masks a long history of US violence against
it violence that by the lists own standards should only be
understood as anti-Cuban terrorism.

Bolender, research fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, 13 [Keith, The Terrorist List, and
Terrorism as Practiced Against Cuba, April 22nd, http://www.coha.org/22355/]

Havana has long drawn attention to the double standard that

permits Washington to label others as a terrorist state, all the while ignoring its
own culpability in the multiple acts of terror that have been responsible for the
deaths of thousands of innocent Cuban civilians. This relatively unreported
history stretches back to the early months following Castros victory over the Batista regime, when
the United States was determined to eliminate the Cuban revolution not only through
On an emotional level,

economic and political means, but with violence. Operation Mongoose, a program developed by the State
Department under the overarching Cuba Project, coordinated terrorist operations from the period following the

in April 1961 to the October missile crisis 18 months later. During this time State
Department officials provided logistical and material support to violent antirevolutionary groups carrying out terrorist activities on the island. The terrors
included torturing and murdering students who were teaching farmers to
read and write, blowing up shoppers at Havanas busiest department stores,
bombing sugar cane plantations and tobacco fields, killing Cuban fishermen and
the innumerable attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro and other top government officials.
[3] Historian Arthur Schlesinger reported in his biography of Robert Kennedy that Operation Mongoose
was formulated under the Kennedy administration to bring the terrors of the earth
to the Cuban people. [4] It has been called one of the worst cases of state
sponsored terrorism of the 20th century. [5] When Operation Mongoose ended,
violent anti-Castro groups based in South Florida, such as Alpha 66 and
Omega 7, took over operations, often with the tacit approval and knowledge of local and
federal authorities. In 1971, the village of Boca De Sam on the northeast coast of
Cuba was attacked, leaving two civilians dead and a dozen more injured. Alpha 66 continues to claim credit
for this act of terrorism on their website. [6] A series of biological agents were purportedly
introduced into Cuba in the 1970s, harming a number of plants and animals. These biological
failed Bay of Pigs invasion

attacks included an outbreak of swine fever that killed a half-million pigs.

Perhaps the worst case was the1981 epidemic of Dengue 2, totally unheard of
in Cuba prior to this period. More than 300,000 people were affected within a
six-month period. An estimated 102 children died as a result of the disease. Cuban-American Eduardo
Arocena, former member of Omega 7, testified in 1984 that he travelled to
Cuba in 1980 to introduce some germs into the country to start the chemical war, as
reported by The New York Times. [7] One of them was Dengue 2. Havana and Varadero tourist
facilities were targeted during a 1997 bombing campaign, resulting in the death of
Italian-Canadian businessman Fabio di Celmo when a bomb exploded in the lobby of the Hotel Copacabana. Dozens
were injured before the explosions ended with the arrests of a group of Salvadorians who later testified they were

Claiming responsibility for the campaign was Luis Posada

Carriles, a Cuban-American long known for his violent actions against the Castro regime. He bragged to a The
being paid to plant the bombs.

New York Times reporter that the intent of the bombings was to discourage tourists from visiting the island just as

In addition to the
tourist attacks, former CIA agent, Posada Carriles, is infamously known for
his alleged masterminding of the bombing of Cubana Airlines flight 455 in
October 1976, killing all 73 on board. The incident remains the second worst act of air
terrorism in the Americas, exceeded only by the attacks on 9/11. Evidence points to
Cuba was opening up the industry following the collapse of the Soviet Union. [8]

the involvement of Posada Carriles and fellow Cuban Orlando Bosch with organizing the crime, based on extensive
U.S. documentation. [9] Bosch passed away in his Florida residence a few years ago, while

Posada Carriles

continues to live unfettered in Miami, despite requests for his extradition from the Cuban and
Venezuelan governments. Cubas demands for Posada Carriles to be brought to justice
in part rest on former President George Bush Jr.s own statement in 2003,
Any person, organization, or government that supports, protects, or harbors
terrorists is complicit in the murder of the innocent, and equally guilty of
terrorist crimes. [10] The Cuban government was motivated by such acts of terrorism to send intelligence
officers to Florida to infiltrate violent anti-revolutionary organizations. The effort led to the arrest and conviction of
five Cuban nationals in 1998 on charges of conspiracy to commit espionage. Known as the Cuban Five, the release
of these agents, who were attempting to prevent further terrorist attacks on their country, continues to be a high
priority with Havana and adds another layer of complexity to rapprochement between the two countries. Those
close to the Cuban Five episode have always been troubled by the probity of the whole affair and whether the entire
trial was fixed by U.S. legal authorities as well as intelligence officials.

Listing Cuba as a state-sponsor of terror is emblematic of

continually vague and arbitrary expansions of terrorisms meaning
to serve pre-existing imperialist political goals. The state-sponsor
label is used to obscure mass terrorism caused by western
governments in the name of American exceptionalism.

Jackson, Professor in International Politics at Aberystwyth University, 2007 [Richard, Critical reflection on
counter-sanctuary discourse, In: M. Innes, ed. Denial of sanctuary: understanding terrorist safe havens, p. 30-33]
A related problem for the "terrorist sanctuaries" discourse is that it has always been characterized by a certain political bias and

terrorism
Cuba , the Soviet Union and many other mainly communist

selectivity. For example, an analysis of the mainstream terrorism literature during the Cold War demonstrates that

experts regularly identified Iran, Libya,

countries as "state sponsors" of "international terrorism ," but failed to include

countries like Israel or South Africadespite the fact that South Africa, for example, not only
engaged in numerous acts of terrorism against dissidents in neighbouring states but also
sponsored movements like Unita and Renamo who engaged in extensive terrorism. The
"terrorist sanctuaries" literature from this period also focused heavily on the assistance provided by states like Libya and Syria

to groups like the PLO, but

failed to discuss U.S. support for groups like

the Afghan

anti-Castro groups , and the Contras, despite the fact these groups
engaged in numerous acts of terrorism, including planting car bombs in markets, kidnappings, civilian
massacres, and blowing up civilian airliners.51 Many would argue that from this perspective, the "terrorist
sanctuaries" discourse has functioned ideologically to distract from and deny
the long history of the West's direct involvement in state terrorism and its
support and sanctuary for a number of anticommunist terrorist groups. Western
involvement in terrorism has a long but generally ignored history, which
includes: the extensive use of official terror by Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, the United
States, and other colonial powers in numerous countries throughout the colonial period;
U.S. support and sanctuary for a range of right-wing insurgent groups like the
Contras and the Mujahideen during the Cold War 53; U.S. tolerance of Irish Republican
terrorist activity in the United States54: U.S. support for systematic state terror by
numerous right-wing regimes across the world, perhaps most notoriously El
Salvador, Chile, Guatemala, Indonesia. and Iran 55; British support for Loyalist terrorism in
Mujahaddin.

Northern Irelands 56 and various other "Islamist" groups in Libya and Bosnia, among others57; Spanish state terror during the "dirty
war" against ETA58; French support for terror in Algeria and against Greenpeace in the Rainbow Warrior bombing; Italian
sponsorship of right-wing terrorists; and Western support for accommodation with terrorists following the end of several high profile

the discourse has often been used

in a highly selective manner to highlight some acts of terror whilst selectively
ignoring others. Arguably, this political bias continues today: the Taliban forces in Afghanistan are
wars59among many other examples. In short. there is no denying that

more often described as terrorists than insurgents, while various warlords, including General Rashid Dostum, are rarely,' called
terrorists. despite overwhelming evidence of their use of terror and intimidation against civilians. This situation is mirrored in
Somalia, where the Islamist Al Itihad Al Islam iya group is typically described as a terrorist organization with links to al Qaeda, while
U.S.-supported Somali warlords who also use violence against civilians arc exempted from the terrorist label.61 Similarly,

Cuba remains on the State Department's list of "state sponsors of

terrorism," but continued U.S. sanctuary and support of anti-Castro
terrorists,62 former Latin American state terrorists63 and other
assorted Asian anticommunist groups64 is completely ignored . Most
glaringly, the state terror of countries like Uzbekistan, Colombia, and Indonesiaand continued tolerance and support for it from the
U.S.65is hardly ever discussed in the mainstream "terrorist sanctuaries" literature. From a discourse analytic perspective, it can

the "terrorist sanctuaries" discourse often functions to promote a set of

partisan political projects. For example, the discourse describes an almost infinite
number of potential "terrorist sanctuaries" or "havens," including: all failed, weak, or
poor states; the widely accepted list of state sponsors of terrorism: a much longer list of passive
state sponsors of terrorism; states with significant Muslim populations; Islamic charities and NGOs;
informal, unregulated banking and economic systems; the media; the Internet; diasporas in Western countries;
further be argued that

groups and regions characterized by poverty and unemployment; the criminal world; radical Islamist organizations; mosques and

insurgent and revolutionary movements; and "extremist" ideologiesamong others.

The identification of these groups and domains as "terrorist sanctuaries" or
"havens" then functions to permit a range of restrictive and coercive actions
against themall in the name of counterterrorism. The point is that there may be other political
reasons for taking action against such groups which the "terrorist sanctuary" label obscures. From this perspective, the
"terrorist sanctuaries" discourse can be shown to support a range of discrete political
projects and interests, including: limiting expressions of dissent; controlling the media;
centralizing executive power; creating a surveillance society; expanding state regulation
Islamic schools;

of social life; retargeting the focus of military force from dissident groups and individuals (which privileges law enforcement) to
states (which privileges the powerful military-industrial complex);

legitimating broader

counterinsurgency programmes where the real aims lie in the maintenance

of a particular political-economic order66; de-legitimizing all forms of
counterhegemonic or revolutionary struggle, thereby functioning as a means of
maintaining the liberal international order; and selectively justifying projects
of regime change,67 economic sanctions, military base expansion, military occupation,
military assistance for strategic partners, and the isolation of disapproved political
movements. In short, the discourse functionsin its present form to permit the
extension of Western state hegemony both internationally and
domestically.

I Ineffectual Policies A final criticism of the "terrorist sanctuaries" discourse is that it has proved in its

prescriptions to be largely ineffectual and in many cases, counterproductive. In particular. the policy of employing military force
against "terrorist sanctuaries" or "havens," a reasonable policy within the confines of the discourse, actually has an astonishing
record of failure. For example, Israel has mounted military strikes and targeted assassination against "terrorist sanctuaries" in the
Palestinian territories and surrounding states for over fifty years without any significant reduction in the overall level of terrorism.
The apartheid regime in South Africa adopted a similarly futile policy against its neighbours during the 1980s. U.S. military strikes on
Libya in 1986, Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998, and the use of force in the current War on Terror against Afghanistan and Iraq, have
also failed to noticeably reduce the overall number of terrorist attacks against U.S. interests. More broadly, the use of military force
against "terrorist sanctuaries" in Colombia, Chechnya, Kashmir, Sri Lanka. the Philippines, Turkey, and elsewhere has in every case
failed to appreciably affect the level of antistate terrorist violence. It could be argued that the attempts since September 11 to
eliminate "terrorist sanctuaries" in Afghanistan. Iraq, and South Lebanon in particular, have in fact, had the opposite effect. In many
respects, these military interventions have solidified and greatly strengthened various Middle Eastern insurgent and "terrorist"
groups, reinforced new militant movements and coalitions, provided new regions of conflict where dissident groups can gain military
experience and greatly in creased overall levels of anti-Western sentiment across the region." It is probable that the price of these
policies will be many more years of insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, and an ongoing international terrorist campaign against U.S.
interests and its allies. The main problem of course, is that the discourse focuses on the symptoms and enablers of dissident

it is
actually an impediment to dealing with terrorism because it functions as a
terrorism, rather than its underlying drivers and poses a palliative remedy rather than a curative one. From this viewpoint,

closed system of discourse, preventing discussion of the political

grievances which cause individuals and groups to seek out places of
sanctuary from where they can launch attacks in the first place. CONCLUSION
There is a need for researchers and public officials to be far more reflective
and critical of the language they employ and the "knowledge" they produce,
because discourse and knowledge is never neutral; it always works for
someone and for something. In this case, the language and knowledge of the "terrorism sanctuaries"
discourse frequently works to maintain the hegemony of certain powerful
states and a particular international order which is beneficial to a few, but
violent and unjust to many more. It also works to obscure the much greater
violence and suffering caused by current Western counterterrorism policies
(which have cost the lives of well over 40,000 civilians69 and caused incalculable material destruction since September 11. 2001),
the double standards and selectivity of Western approaches to terrorism and the ongoing problem of civilian-directed state terror.

The designation constructs Cuba as a foil for a fantasy of American

innocence and benevolence. Locating blame for terrorism in foreign
others like Cuba is designed to play to racist predispositions and
sanitize brutal American foreign policy

Grosscup, International Relations Professor at CSU-Chico, 2000 [Beau, Terrorism-at-a-Distance: The

Imagery That Serves US Power, GLOBAL DIALOGUE, Volume 2, Number 4, Autumn]

American foreign policy was based on the moral

constructs of American benevolence and the uniqueness of the American social and political
For nearly two centuries the rationalisation system of

experiment. From the late 1960s, a politicised image of terrorism was added to that system. The product of a closed system of
discourse dominated by researchers and security analysts with close ties to government and private institutionslabelled the
terrorism industry by Edward Herman and Gerry OSullivanthis image encourages Americans to view terrorism as the most
dastardly of evil deeds. More to the point,

it portrays the terrorist as an enemy of the Western

establishment, somebody who stands in the way of the realization of Western aims.1 This jingoistic imagery has been

highly effective in rallying public support for US foreign policy for nearly three decades.2 Initially, American policy makers took
advantage of terrorisms pejorative connotations to undermine public support for various anti-colonial nationalist movements by
linking them, and them alone, to the terrorist label. The Palestine Liberation Organisation in the Middle East, the Irish Republican
Army in Northern Ireland, the National Liberation Front in Vietnam, the African National Congress in South Africa and Namibias
South West African Peoples Organisation were all affected by this effort. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration and its terrorism
industry experts insisted that anyone opposed to Western, in particular American, interests was a Soviet-sponsored terrorist.

Americans rallied behind the administrations

revitalised Cold War agenda against an evil Soviet empire and its
international terrorist network. The same is true in the postCold War era.
Terrorism industry experts, who continue to monopolise the terrorism discourse , argue
that rogue state, Islamic, narco and ad hoc terrorism are central components of a New
World Disorder threatening the American way of life. Their efforts have not been in vain.
Restricted to this jingoistic analysis,

During the Persian Gulf War, linking Saddam Hussein to anti-American terrorism heightened American support for the slaughter of
Iraqi military and civilians, much as linking Manuel Noriega with narco-terrorism rallied public support for the illegal invasion of
Panama in 1989. Terrorism imagery also produced public acquiescence in American military interventions in Somalia and Haiti,
interventions which were presented as humanitarian missions. In the mid-1990s, revitalised images of Iranian-backed Islamic
terrorism dominated foreign policy discussions of the threats to American initiatives in the Middle East and beyond. By the end of
the 1990s, the evil terrorism of Osama bin Laden and Slobodan Milosevic provided rationales for the humanitarian use of American
air power. Essential to the success of the jingoistic concept of terrorism is a carefully constructed imagery labelled here terrorismat-a-distance. Two assertions combine to produce this imagery. The first contends that terrorism occurs over there, that it is a
product of foreign cultures and a sinister act of foreign adversaries whose treachery victimises Americans who live in or travel to faroff lands. The second, reinforcing the first, is the warning that although Americans have been spared the horrors of contemporary
terrorism at home, our luck is running out, our day is coming. It is only a matter of time before Americas global pursuit of freedom
and democracy and its open society make enemies of foreign terrorists and draw them to the United States, both as a land of exile

unless preventative foreign and domestic policy

measures are taken, the stage is set for the victimisation of America. The
Foreign-Policy Factor Richard Falk argues that the concept of terrorism has been useful in sanitising US
foreign policy: This process is aided by locating terrorism in the foreign other, a
process that can build on the racist convenience of non-Western
challenges.3 Locating terrorism in the foreign other has been a consistent theme of American
expert analysis of contemporary terrorism. In its Cold War construction, terrorism was
the work of the Soviet Union, both in its own actions (Afghanistan) and via its control and/or
sponsorship of foreign states, namely Cuba, Libya, Syria, East Germany, North Korea, Nicaragua and
and as a potential target of terrorist actions. Thus,

Iran. The Soviets were said to be behind the non-state terrorism of the PLO, the BaaderMeinhof gang, the IRA, ANC, Swapo and
individuals such as Carlos, Abu Nidal and Mehmet Ali Agca. Despite the demise of the Soviet Union, terrorism has not disappeared,
and the terrorism-at-a-distance thesis continues to underlie American analysis.

State-sponsored terrorism is

now the work of foreign rogue states (retitled states of concern by the Clinton administration in June
2000), namely Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria and North Korea. The centre of the international terrorist network, allegedly

headquartered in Moscow during the Cold War, is said to have moved three times, initially to Baghdad in August 1990, then after the
Persian Gulf War to Tehran. In August 1998, President Clinton informed the world that under Osama bin Laden, the international
terrorist network was now headquartered in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan. Non-state terrorism is described as multifaceted,
complex and foreign-based. Among its agents are leftist groups newly orphaned by the demise of their Soviet parent. In the post
Cold War climate they frantically search the political landscape for foster parents to supply them with the materials of terrorism.
Even more dangerous to the American-led new world order are the dual foreign threats of Islamic terrorism and narco-terrorism.
Islam is portrayed as a monolithic menace and a universal threat to Western civilisation in general and to the United States in
particular. This contemporary consensus about Islam is built upon historical images of Islamic militancy, of an Islamic mentality,
of Islamic fundamentalism or the Shia penchant for martyrdom, all of which helped provoke the fervently hostile Western
response to the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. Commenting on the media coverage of that crisis, Edward Said writes: We were back to
the old basics. Iranians were reduced to fundamentalist screwballs by Bob Ingle in the Atlanta Constitution, Claire Sterling in the
Washington Post argued that the Iran story was an aspect of Fright Decade I while Bill Green on the same pages of the Washington
Post wrote of the Iranian obscenity aimed directly at the heart of American nationalism and self-esteem.4 In the 1990s, the Persian
Gulf War against Iraq, the New York World Trade Center bombing, the HamasHizbollah challenge to the US-sponsored Middle East
peace process, and the terrorism tied to Osama bin Laden and his fundamentalist colleagues have re-ignited the fires of antiIslamic sentiment in the United States. New Forms of Terrorism A by-product of the Cold War, narco-terrorism, too, has survived the
end of the Soviet Union. According to terrorism industry experts, its growing presence is connected to central features of the
emerging political order. First, with the loss of Soviet support, the modern terrorist, in need of financial resources, seeks to gain huge
profits from illegal activities. How else, American terrorism experts ask, but through the sale of drugs could terrorists afford the
costly weapons of mass destruction they ardently desire? Second, the politically constructed image of the lawless rogue state
directly supports former Secretary of State George Shultzs claim that drug trafficking requires an environment of lawlessness and
corruption to enhance the production and marketing of illicit drugs. Conversely, the insidious imagery of narco-terrorism
exaggerates the nature of the threat, providing the American architects of the new world order with the pretext for intervention in
the affairs of the designated rogue regimes in direct violation of the right to national sovereignty. Although the United States is the
major market for insidious drugs, the plague of narco-terrorism is located exclusively in the foreign other. Its origins are found
either in the Islamic fundamentalist regimes of Iran, Iraq and Libya, or in the drug cartels of South America, Asia and the Middle

East. In August 1995, terrorism industry experts discovered a new form of foreign-instigated terrorism threatening America and its
friends. In this decentralised or ad hoc model, specialist guerrillas are brought together to commit a specific terrorist act and
then quickly returned to their country of refuge. The new modus operandi is allegedly followed by Muslim extremist groups and
possibly by those who bombed the World Trade Center. It is a new operational design in which there are no clear patterns,
associations or the traditional cell structure used by terrorist organisations in the past. Ad hoc terrorism is difficult to counter and
even to analyse as it involves general guidelines coming from religious leaders, rather than precise commands. Terrorism industry
experts say the new model has probably been seen in Argentina, the United Kingdom, Egypt, France, Algeria and Israel. American

Firmly established in Cold War and postCold War constructs, the imagery of
terrorism-at-a-distance serves the US national security establishment by
reinforcing American ethnocentricity and jingoism. First, insisting that terrorism is the dastardly
Jingoism

deed of foreigners strengthens the high moral opinion American citizens hold of themselves, their society and their benevolent role
in the world. Armed with this view and believing US foreign policy to occupy the firmest of moral ground, Americans see their
nations adventures abroad as beyond reproach, deserving support with vigour and righteous indignation. In this bipartisan,
jingoistic climate, the assessments of foreign policy analysts, particularly terrorism experts, are held in high esteem as moral
truths and as making moral sense. Typical of these moral truths is a distinction made by revered terrorism expert Brian Jenkins.

it is morally defensible to drop American bombs on Iraqi cities

Jenkins argues
from
twenty thousand feet, or to lob sixteen-inch shells for six months into Druse and Shiite towns in Lebanon from the battleship New

Yet the suicidal car bomb terrorist who killed 241 marines in Beirut committed a
cowardly and morally indefensible deed. Typical also was the climate of official and public
moral outrage evident in February 1996 when Cuba shot down two private planes belonging
to Brothers to the Rescue, a Cuban-American anti-Castro organisation. Despite diplomatic
objections by the Cuban government, the groups planes had been violating Cuban airspace and dropping anti-communist
leaflets over Havana for nearly a year. Yet for most Americans, Cubas status as a state sponsor of
terrorism (a US State Department designation) and the alleged innocence of the humanitarian Brothers to the Rescue
overrode Cubas claims to sovereignty and national self-determination. As a
result, the crimes of the Brothers were sanitised, while the intensified US embargo and the UN censure of
Cuba captured the moral high ground. Second, the imagery of terrorism-at-adistance connects with American views about foreigners, the inferiority of their
culture and the danger they pose to the American way of life. The construction of a heightened foreign
Jersey.

threat to Americans at home and abroad permits US policy makers to pursue means and measures that would otherwise be highly
controversial with the full approval of most Americans.

The moralistic fundamentalism endemic to this method of counterterrorism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Filtering the world
through the dichotomy of our exceptional innocence and the
terrorist enemys absolute evil simplifies political complexity
and reproduces terrorism, causing endless violence.

Zulaika, director of the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno, 2003 [Joseba, The
Self-Fulfilling Prophecies of Counterterrorism, Radical History Review 85 (2003) 191-199]
Welcome to the promised land of terrorism. At the turn of the eighties, the problem with the terrorism industry
might have been to convince the rest of us that a phenomenon that for years had not produced one single fatality

Soon the problem is going to be to

convince the rest of us that not everything is terrorism. The self-fulfilling
prophecies of the 1980s and 1990s pale compared with the new scenario
between "Good and evil" that George Bush has laid down for us, apparently to
everyone's approval. The danger with such morality plays is that by
constantly repeating them, one ends up believing them. Splitting the world
radically in Good/Evil terms, calling all Evil terrorism, and declaring that the
destiny of the Good side is to combat the Evil one to death, must surely be a
preface to political silliness. As he told Congress, the Bush doctrine states that "from this day forward,
any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the
United States as a hostile regime." The problem is, of course, that the very "evildoer"
blamed for sending suicide bombers to kill innocent Israelis, and the very nations
was still the most dangerous threat to national life.

supporting such "martyrs" (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan), are also the ones we
need as partners in the war. And the great morality play reveals itself for what
it isan intellectual and political sham. A painful example of this is translating the PalestinianIsraeli conflict into one more chapter in the new global war on terror. From the outset, this has forced the Bush
administration into simultaneously trumpeting the "moral clarity" of the war against terror, according to which
"there is no such a thing as a good terrorist," while at the same time having to dispatch the secretary of state to
meet with the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, often labeled by his enemies a world-class archterrorist. As in other
prominent cases (Nelson Mandela, Sean McBride, Menachem Begin), the terrorist Arafat is also the Nobel Peace
Prize winner Arafat. So much for Bush's proclamations that "my job isn't to try to nuance" between good guys and
bad guys, while his secretary of state Powell will soon be having "constructive" meetings with the archterrorist. Of
course, as everyone agreed, Powell's mediation had nothing much to do with the perpetual tragedy of the Middle
East per se and everything to do with removing the obstacle for Bush the son to complete his father's unfinished
war against Iraq. As Benjamin Netanyahu put it, "Saddam Hussein is driving United States foreign policy." 9
Netanyahu knows what he is talking about. He is the man to the right of Ariel Sharon, waiting to replace him as the
next prime minister of Israel. Sharon is a warrior hawk who sees everything in actual military terms. Netanyahu is
something [End Page 194] much worse: a hawk whose only assets are the windmills of terrorism. Is there a better
example than Netanyahu of the interdependencies between the terrorist and the counterterrorist? Bush should
learn from Netanyahu about the fables and follies that inevitably accompany terrorism as ide fixe. His political
career heavily dependent on terrorism from the very beginning, Netanyahu is "a sort of Israeli Rambo," who has
never had "anything particularly interesting or authoritative to say about terror, or anything else," but who,
nevertheless, has "built a successful career in the United States as a regular and articulate participant in talk
shows, much sought after because of his reputation as a leading expert on the 'war on terrorism.'" 10 One of his
"students" was Ronald Reagan, who decided to attack Libya after he read in Time magazine excerpts from a
conference that Netanyahu organized at the Jonathan Institute, an action censured by a General Assembly
resolution at the United Nations. Antonio Cassesse devoted an entire book to the complex legal implications of this
entire affair, including the United States interception of an Egyptian airliner "in a way that was totally unjustified
under international law" and concluded that "the United States preferred violence to law, leaving behind an
unfortunate legacy that has polluted international law and aggravated political and diplomatic relations between

it is not surprising that some critical legal scholars have had no

qualms in describing the United States counterterrorism policy as "itself both
terroristic and illegal." 12 The critical point, one that can be illustrated with countless examples
from Great Britain, Spain, Israel, Chechnya, South America, India, and other nation-states, has to do with
the inevitable tendency of how the semantics of terrorism work in relation to law. By charging
the other with terrorist lawlessness, it allows oneself to dispense with the rule
of law. The final result is what Agamben describes as "the state of exception," in which "it
is impossible to distinguish transgression of the law from the execution of the
law, such that what violates a rule and what conforms to it coincide without any reminder." 13 To the poststates." 11 Thus

September 11 question of "why they hate us," a generalized response was "because of our freedoms," rather than
because of the legal, political, and social justice implications of our policies, and because of our main ally in the

By letting terrorism become the main United States public discourse

and by thus enshrining categorical totalization and moral fundamentalism, we are
blinded so as not to see the everyday realities of history, culture, and politics. As a consequence, we become
immune to the one realization that really matters: the extent to which our
own counterterrorism policies foster more terrorism. "Bibi Netanyahu is a Hamas
Middle East, Israel.

collaborator," charged late Israeli prime minister Rabin. 14 His words were not mere sarcasm; they pointed out the
strong umbilical cord between terrorists and counterterrorists. In typical irony, the very day on which Rabin was
assassinated, Netanyahu had published an op-ed article in the New York Times, which warned of the existence of at
least fourteen militant terrorist groups in Europe, "their active membership reaching tens of thousands," as well as
"a number [End Page 195] of terrorist groups" in America with widespread connections to Iran, Sudan, Egypt, Gaza,
Tunisia, Pakistan, and Indonesia. "This new terrorism poses unprecedented dangers," he went on, "especially
because . . . a nuclear Iran could resort to indirect blackmail." 15 One thing that Netanyahu did not alert the readers
to was the possibility that, as the columnist Thomas Friedman put it, his own primer minister and political adversary
Rabin might be murdered by a "gunman whose politics is virtually identical with that of Mr. Netanyahu's Likud Party
and its allies in the Orthodox Jewish right." 16 In his op-ed article, Netanyahu demanded a "systemic investigation
of groups openly preaching terror," but he had no qualms about allowing himself to be photographed in the
company of West Bank settlers who "routinely described Rabin as an evil killer." 17 The administrations of
presidents Carter and Reagan were also replete with instances in which the slippery phantom qualities of terrorism
came to haunt its promoters. Gary Sick, the expert in charge of Iran during the hostage crisis, wrote an insider
account of the Carter White House's war on terrorism, in which reacting to fictional threats played a major part.

Whatever policy mistakes the government made, the tendency was always

to blame them on "intelligence failures." But there was something else far harder to correct
regarding that administration's myopia, Sick tells us: "[It] was not so much a failure of sources
or observation of data as a structural inadequacy of the system itself to
make a conceptual leap from chessboard to hurricane." 18 He complains how, during the
Iran crisis, the journalist Robert Moss, who lacked hard evidence and had no qualifications as a specialist on Iran,
still had an enormous influence on top United States policymakers when he wrote a piece stating what many in the
administration feared, namely, that the Soviets must have guided the events of the Iranian hostage crisis. Sick
shows that this influenced United States policy disastrously. 19 Similarly, it was no secret that Ronald Reagan,
Alexander Haig, William Casey, and other high officials read and praised Claire Sterling's book The Terror Network,
only to later discover to their embarrassment that it was based essentially on CIA disinformation "blown back." 20
The final result of playing with terrorism was of course the Iran-Contra fiasco, in which the White House secretly
traded arms for hostages with Iran, while proclaiming a highly publicized policy of no negotiating whatsoever with
states sponsoring terrorism, and which almost derailed the presidency of Reagan and the vice presidency of the
senior Bush. It doesn't look like the present Bush administration has learned much from its predecessors. And what
are we to make of the massive intelligence failures leading to September 11, according to which the CIA knew that
two of the Al-Qaeda hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawag Alhazmi, were in the United States and never shared
that information with the FBI or any other federal agency? By simply tracking the two men, who were living openly
in Los Angeles without even concealing [End Page 196] their real names, the entire group taking part in the
September 11 plot could have been uncovered. Similarly, an FBI agent's repeated warnings that Al-Qaeda
operatives might be training as pilots in the United States went unheeded by her superiors. Don't these inexplicable
lapses point once again to the systemic complicity between terrorists and counterterrorists? Guilt and Innocence:

The events of September 11 are not immune to the possibility

that counterterrorism is complicit in creating the very thing it abominates. We
mentioned earlier that Sheik Omar, condemned to a New York prison for the rest of his life as the mastermind
of the 1993 attack on the WTC, was directly a product of the CIA that recruited him for
Reagan's anti-Soviet crusade in Afghanistan and gave him visas to come to the United States. The
same pattern fits Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. The United States initially trained and
The Double Blackmail

armed them. When the Taliban became a pariah regime, the United States' main ally in the Arab world, Saudi
Arabia, gave them primary support. But the blame game leads us at once into what Slavoj Zizek has labeled "the
temptation of a double blackmail." 21 Namely, either the unconditional condemnation of Third World evil that
appears to endorse the ideological position of American innocence, or drawing attention to the deeper sociopolitical
causes of Arab extremism, which ends up blaming the victim. Each of the two positions prove one-sided and false.
Pointing to the limits of moral reasoning, Zizek resorts to the dialectical category of totality to argue that "from the
moral standpoint, the victims are innocent, the act was an abominable crime; however, this very innocence is not
innocentto adopt such an 'innocent' position in today's global capitalist universe is in itself a false abstraction." 22

the
two sides are not really opposed, that they belong to the same field. In short, the position to
adopt is to accept the necessity of the fight against terrorism, BUT to
redefine and expand its terms so that it will include also (some) American
and other Western powers' acts." 23 As widely reported at the time, the Reagan administration,
This does not entail a compromised notion of shared guilt by terrorists and victims; "the point is, rather, that

led by Alexander Haig, would self-servingly "confuse terrorism with communism." 24 As the cold war was coming to
an end, terrorism became the easy substitute for communism in Reagan's black-and-white world. Still, when Haig
would voice his belief that Moscow controlled the worldwide terrorist network, the State Department's bureau of
intelligence chief Ronald Spiers would react by thinking that "he was kidding." 25 By the 1990s, the Soviet Union no
longer constituted the terrorist enemy and only days after the Oklahoma City bombing, Russian president Yeltsin
hosted President Clinton in Moscow who equated the recent massacres in Chechnya with Oklahoma City as
domestic conflicts. We should be concerned as to what this new Good-versus-Evil war on terror substitutes for. Its
consequences in legitimizing the repression of minorities in India, Russia, Turkey, and other countries are all too

such a categorically ill-defined,

perpetually deferred, simpleminded Good-versus-Evil war echoes and recreates the very absolutist mentality and exceptionalist tactics of the
insurgent terrorists. By formally adopting the terrorists' own gameone that by
obvious. [End Page 197] But the ultimate catastrophe is that

definition lacks rules of engagement, definite endings, clear alignments between enemies and friends, or formal
arrangements of any sort, military, political, legal, or ethical the

inevitable danger lies in

reproducing it endlessly. One only has to look at the Palestinian-Israeli or the Basque-Spanish conflicts
to see how self-defeating the alleged "victories" against terrorism can be in the absence of addressing the causes of
the violence. "A

war against terrorism, then, mirrors the state of exception

characteristic of insurgent violence, and

in so doing it reproduces it ad infinitum.

The question remains: What politics might be involved in this state of alert as normal state? Would this possible
scenario of competing (and mutually constituting) terror signify the end of politics as we know it?" 27 It is either
politics or once again the self-fulfilling prophecy of fundamentalist crusaders who will never be able to entirely
eradicate evil from the world. Our choice cannot be between Bush and bin Laden, nor is our struggle one of "us"
versus "them." Such a split leads us into the ethical catastrophe of not feeling full solidarity with the victims of
either sidesince the value of each life is absolute, "the only appropriate stance is the unconditional solidarity with

We must question our own involvement with the phantasmatic

reality of terrorism discourse, for "now even the USA and its citizens can be
regulated by terrorist discourse. . . . Now the North American territory has become the most global
and central place in the new history that terrorist ideology inaugurates." 29 Resisting the temptation
of innocence regarding the barbarian other implies an awareness of a point Hegel made
and that applies to the contemporary and increasingly globalized world more than ever: evil, he claims,
resides also in the innocent gaze itself, perceiving as it does evil all around
itself. Derrida equally holds this position. In reference to the events of September 11, he said: "My unconditional
ALL victims." 28

compassion, addressed to the victims of September 11, does not prevent me from saying it loudly: with regard to

we are all included in the

picture, and these tragic events must make us problematize our own
innocence while questioning our own political and libidinal investment in the
global terrorism discourse.
this crime, I do not believe that anyone is politically guiltless." 30 In brief,

This reproduction of insecurity necessitates escalation the

endpoints of the exceptionalist violence at the heart of the war on
terror are total wars of annihilation and mass imperialist violence.

Lifton, professor of psychiatry, 2003 [Robert Jay, American Apocalypse, The Nation, Dec 22

nd

http://www.thenation.com/article/american-apocalypse]
War itself is an absolute, its violence unpredictable and always containing apocalyptic possibilities. In this case, by
militarizing the problem of terrorism, our leaders have dangerously obfuscated its political, social and historical
dimensions. Terrorism has instead been raised to the absolute level of war itself. And although
American leaders speak of this as being a different kind of war, there is a drumbeat of ordinary war rhetoric and a
clarion call to total victory and to the crushing defeat of our terrorist enemies. When President Bush declared that
this conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others [but] will end in a way, and at an hour, of our choosing,
he was misleading both in suggesting a clear beginning in Al Qaedas acts and a decisive end in the battle against
terrorism. In that same speech, given at a memorial service just three days after / at the National Cathedral in
Washington, he also asserted, Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the
world of evil. Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, not a man given to irony, commented that the

president was casting his mission and that of the country in the grand vision of Gods
master plan. At no time did Bush see his task as mounting a coordinated international operation against
terrorism, for which he could have enlisted most of the governments of the world. Rather, upon hearing of the
second plane crashing into the second tower, he remembers thinking: They had declared war on us, and I made up
my mind at that moment that we were going to war. Upon hearing of the plane crashing into the Pentagon, he told
Vice President Cheney, Were at war. Woodward thus calls his account of the Presidents first hundred days
following / Bush at War. Bush would later recall, I had to show the American people the resolve of a
commander in chief that was going to do whatever it took to win. With world leaders, he felt he had to look them
in the eye and say, Youre either with us or youre against us. Long before the invasion of Iraqindeed, even
before the invasion of AfghanistanBush had come to identify himself, and be identified by others, as a wartime

Warmaking can quickly become associated with war fever, the

mobilization of public excitement to the point of a collective experience of transcendence. War then becomes
heroic, even mythic, a task that must be carried out for the defense of ones
nation, to sustain its special historical destiny and the immortality of its
people. In this case, the growth of war fever came in several stages: its beginnings, with Bushs personal
president.

declaration of war immediately after September ; a modest increase, with the successful invasion of
Afghanistan; and a wave of ultrapatriotic excessestriumphalism and labeling of critics as disloyal or treasonous
at the time of the invasion of Iraq. War fever tends always to be sporadic and subject to disillusionment.

Its

underside is death anxiety, in this case related less to combat than to fears of new terrorist attacks at
home or against Americans abroadand later to growing casualties in occupied Iraq. The scope of George Bushs
war was suggested within days of / when the director of the made a presentation to the President and
his inner circle, called Worldwide Attack Matrix, that described active or planned operations of various kinds in
eighty countries, or what Woodward calls a secret global war on terror. Early on, the President had the view that
this war will be fought on many fronts and that were going to rout out terror wherever it may exist. Although
envisaged long before /, the invasion of Iraq could be seen as a direct continuation of this unlimited war; all
the more so because of the prevailing tone among the President and his advisers, who were described as eager to

The war on terrorism is apocalyptic, then,

exactly because it is militarized and yet amorphous, without limits of time or
place, and has no clear end. It therefore enters the realm of the infinite.
Implied in its approach is that every last terrorist everywhere on the earth is to be
hunted down until there are no more terrorists anywhere to threaten us, and in that way the
world will be rid of evil. Bush keeps what Woodward calls his own personal scorecard for the war in the
emerge from the sea of words and pull the trigger.

form of photographs with brief biographies and personality sketches of those judged to be the worlds most
dangerous terrorists, each ready to be crossed out if killed or captured. The scorecard is always available in a desk
drawer in the Oval Office. War and Reality The amorphousness of the war on terrorism is such that a country like
Iraqwith a murderous dictator who had surely engaged in acts of terrorism in the pastcould, on that basis, be
treated as if it had major responsibility for 9/11. There was no evidence at all that it did. But by means of false
accusations, emphasis on the evil things Saddam Hussein had done (for instance, the use of poison gas on his
Kurdish minority) and the belligerent atmosphere of the overall war on terrorism, the Administration succeeded in

The war on
terrorism, then, took amorphous impulses toward combating terror and used
them as a pretext for realizing a prior mission aimed at American global
hegemony. The attack on Iraq reflected the reach not only of the war on terrorism but of deceptions and
manipulations of reality that have accompanied it. In this context, the word war came to combine
metaphor (as in the war on poverty or war on drugs), conventional military combat,
justification for pre-emptive attack and assertion of superpower
domination. Behind such planning and manipulation can lie dreams and fantasies
hardly less apocalyptic or world-purifying than those of Al Qaedas leaders, or of
convincing more than half of all Americans that Saddam was a major player in 9/11.

Aum Shinrikyos guru. For instance, former Director of Central Intelligence James Woolsey, a close associate of
Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz in the Pentagon, spoke of the war against
terrorism as a Fourth World War (the Third being the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union). In
addressing a group of college students, he declared, This Fourth World War, I think, will last considerably longer
than either World Wars I or II did for us. Hopefully not the full four-plus decades of the cold war.

That kind of

apocalyptic impulse in warmaking has hardly proved conducive to a shared international approach.
Indeed, in its essence, it precludes genuine sharing. While Bush has frequently said that he prefers
to have allies in taking on terrorism and terrorist states worldwide, he has also made it clear that he does not want
other countries to have any policy-making power on this issue. In one revealing statement, he declared: At some

has all but

claimed that Americans are the globes anointed ones and that the sacred
mission of purifying the earth is ours alone. The amorphousness of the war
on terrorism carries with it a paranoid edge, the suspicion that terrorists and
their supporters are everywhere and must be pre-emptively attacked lest
they emerge and attack us. Since such a war is limitless and infinite
extending from the farthest reaches of Indonesia or Afghanistan to Hamburg, Germany, or
New York City, and from immediate combat to battles that continue into the unending futureit
inevitably becomes associated with a degree of megalomania as well. As the
worlds greatest military power replaces the complexities of the world with
its own imagined stripped-down, us-versus-them version of it, our distorted
national self becomes the world. Despite the constant invocation by the Bush
Administration of the theme of security, the war on terrorism has created the very
point, we may be the only ones left. Thats OK with me. We are America. In such declarations, he

oppositea sense of fear and insecurity among Americans, which is then mobilized
in support of further aggressive plans in the extension of the larger war.
What results is a vicious circle that engenders what we seek to destroy: Our
excessive response to Islamist attacks creates more terrorists and more terrorist attacks,
which in turn leads to an escalation of the war on terrorism, and so on. The projected
victory becomes a form of aggressive longing, of sustained illusion, of an
unending Fourth World War and a mythic cleansingof terrorists, of evil, of
our own fear. The American military apocalyptic can then be said to partner and act in concert with the
Islamist apocalyptic.

Plan
The United States federal government should remove Cuba from the
list of countries subject to economic penalties governed by Section
6(j) of the Export Administration Act.

Solvency
The plan would remove Cuba from the list of terror sponsors the
EAA is the statutory authority for the list.

Peed, Editor of Duke Law Journal, 2005 [Matthew, BLACKLISTING AS FOREIGN POLICY: THE POLITICS AND
LAW OF LISTING TERROR STATES, DUKE LAW JOURNAL Vol. 54:1321,
http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1255&context=dlj&sei-redir=1&referer=http%3A%2F
%2Fscholar.google.com%2Fscholar%3Fstart%3D40%26q%3Dcuba%2Bterrorism%2Blist%26hl%3Den%26as_sdt
%3D0%2C44#search=%22cuba%20terrorism%20list%22]

The list of state sponsors of terrorism is primarily a product of the

law of economic sanctions.

During World War I, the U.S. first began to use economics sanctions

systematically as a tool of foreign policy through the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 (TEA).16 The Act allowed
the president to declare a national emergency with respect to a country and comprehensively regulate financial
transactions with that country. Eventually these powers were extended through the International Emergency
Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA),17 which allows the president to promulgate sanctions toward individual
countries after first declaring a state of national emergency with respect to that country.18 In addition to this
emergency power, Congress also delegated to the president the power to regulate all foreign commerce as a tool
of foreign policy through the Export Control Act of 1949 (ECA).19 This act was intended as a temporary measure
that would give the president substantial powers to deal with the postWorld War II security threat.20 The periodic

the Export Administration Act (EAA) of 1969,21 constitute

the statutory basis of most economic sanctions.22 During each lapse between renewals, the
president has continued sanctions by declaring national emergencies under the IEEPA.23 When the EAA
came up for renewal after the terrorist atrocities of the 1970s, an
amendment was added that would become the main statutory authority
renewals of the Act, beginning with

for the list of state sponsors .24 Section 6(j) of the act requires a license for
the export of militarily relevant goods or technology to any country that the
secretary of state determines has repeatedly provided support for acts of
international terrorism.25 The section also requires the secretary to list the
designated countries in the Federal Register26 and submit a report to
Congress before the designation is rescinded.27 For a country to be removed, the secretary must certify that
there has been a fundamental change in the leadership and policies of the government of the country concerned,
i.e., that a coup had occurred, or that the government has not provided any support for terrorism in the preceding
six months.28 Although the statutory basis of the terrorism list is not limited to Section 6(j),

most of the

economic consequences of being included on the list relate to a

fabric of export restrictions that reference Section 6(j) .29 For example,
under the International Security and Development Cooperation Act of 1985, the president has almost unlimited
discretion to restrict or ban imports from countries on the Section 6(j) list.30 Similarly, specific statutes have been
enacted against certain countries on the list, creating presidential authority for severe sanctions.31 Though these
statutes do not depend upon the Section 6(j) list for their authority, they typically do not expire until the country is
removed from that list.32 In addition to the trade restrictions applied by the 1979 amendments to the EAA, two
other acts require the State Department to identify terrorist states as means of applying economic pressure to
countries based on their support for terrorism. First, the Foreign Assistance Act (FAA)33 prohibits U.S. agricultural
aid, Peace Corps involvement, and Export-Import Bank assistance to countries identified by the secretary of state as
state sponsors of terrorism.34 These provisions were enacted in 1976 when human rights became more of a policy
focus in U.S. foreign aid programs.35 Second, the Arms Export Control Act restricts the sale of munitions to
countries identified as supporting terrorism.36 This act plays prominently in the multifarious sanctions concerning
nuclear nonproliferation and state sponsors of terrorism.37 Although all three of these statutes presuppose a
terrorsponsoring designation process and require that those designations be published in the Federal Register, none

an official list of state sponsors of terrorism, nor do they define either

sponsorship or terrorism.38 Rather, these provisions were added in a 1987 statute requiring
the secretary of state to provide Congress with an annual report on
require the creation of

worldwide terrorism that includes the list of states designated as state

sponsors.39 The statute provides a definition of terrorism to guide the report: premeditated, politically
In
the report, Patterns of Global Terrorism, the secretary of state must identify
motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.40

those countries which will be subject to the Section 6(j) and other
sanctions , and thus compose the official terrorism list. Unfailingly, the annual release
of this report creates a regular media splash despite the unchanging nature of the list itself.41

Voting affirmative means more than imagining the adoption of a

simple policy its an endorsement of a critical interrogation that
destabilizes hegemonic knowledge about terrorism. As activistscholars we have an obligation to uncover subjugated knowledge
hidden by the War on Terror.

Jackson, Professor in International Politics at Aberystwyth University, 8

[Richard, State terror, terrorism

research and knowledge politics, paper presented at the British International Studies Association,
http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/handle/2160/1949/BISA-Paper-2008-Jackson-FINAL.pdf?sequence=1]

critique involves the adoption of a critical

standpoint outside of the discourse. In this case, based on an understanding of discourse as
In contrast to first order critique, second order

socially productive or constitutive, and fully cognisant of the knowledge-power nexus, a second order critique

to expose the political functions and ideological consequences of the

particular forms of representation enunciated by the discourse. In this case, we
want to try and understand what some of the political effects and
consequences of the silences of state terrorism are. A number of such effects can be
attempts

identified. First, the discourse naturalises a particular understanding of what terrorism is, namely, a form of
illegitimate non-state violence. Such an understanding of terrorism functions to restrict the scholarly viewpoint to
one set of actors and to particular kinds of actions, and functions to distract and obscure other actors and actions
which should be named and studied as terrorism. It also narrows the possibilities for understanding terrorism
within alternative paradigms, such as from the perspective of gender terrorism (see Sharlach 2008). In other words,
it has a restrictive and distorting effect within the field of knowledge which gives the impression that terrorism
studies is more of a narrow extension of counter-insurgency or national security studies than an open and inclusive
domain of research into all forms and aspects of terrorism. Consequently, Andrew Silke (2001) concludes that

terrorism studies is largely driven by policy concerns and

largely limited to government agendas (p. 2). In addition, the broader academic,
social, and cultural influence of terrorism studies (through the authority and legitimacy
provided by terrorism experts to the media and as policy advisers, for example),
means that this restrictive viewpoint is diffused to the broader society, which in turn
generates its own ideological effects. Specifically, the distorted focus on non-state
terrorism functions to reify state perspectives and priorities, and reinforce a
state-centric, problem-solving paradigm of politics in which terrorism
is viewed as an identifiable social or individual problem in need of
solving by the state, and not as a practice of state power , for example.
From this perspective, it functions to maintain the legitimacy of state uses of violence and delegitimize all forms of
non-state violence (which has its own ideological effects and is problematic in a number of obvious ways). This
fundamental belief in the instrumental rationality of political violence as an effective and legitimate tool of the state
is open to a great many criticisms, not least that it provides the normative basis from which non-state terrorist
groups frequently justify their own (often well-intentioned) violence (see Burke 2008, Oliverio and Lauderdale
2005).

There is from this viewpoint an ethical imperative to try and undermine the

widespread acceptance that political violence is a mostly legitimate and

effective option in resolving conflict for either state or non-state actors. Political violence is in fact, a moral
and physical disaster in the vast majority of cases. From an ethical-normative perspective,
such a restricted understanding of terrorism also functions to obscure and
silence the voices and perspectives of those who live in conditions of daily
terror from the random and arbitrary violence of their own governments, some of whom are
supported by Western states. At the present juncture, it also functions to silence the voices of
those who experience Western policies directly, as in those tortured in the war on terror, and
indirectly, as in those suffering under Western-supported regimes as a form of terrorism. That is, it deflects and
diverts attention from the much greater state terrorism which blights the lives of tens of millions of people around
the world today. Related to these broader normative and ideological effects, the treatment of state terrorism within
the discourse the silences on it and the narrow construction of statesponsored terrorism also functions to
position state terrorism (should it even exist within the dominant framework) as seemingly less important than nonstate terrorism, and as confined to the actions that states take in support of non-state terrorism. This also distorts
the field of knowledge and political practice by suggesting that the sponsorship of Palestinian groups by Iran for
example, is an infinitely more serious and dangerous problem than the fact that millions of Colombians, Uzbeks,
Zimbabweans, and so on, are daily terrorised by death squads, state torture, and serious human rights abuses.

Within this discursive terrain, it can also function to provide legitimacy to

Western policies such as sanctions, coercive diplomacy, and pre-emptive war
against politically determined state-sponsors of terrorism which may be
terroristic themselves, and which ignore the involvement in statesponsorship by Western states. From a political-normative viewpoint, the silence on state terrorism,
and in particular the argument of many terrorism scholars that state actions can never be defined as terrorism,
actually functions to furnish states with a rhetorical justification for using what may actually be terroristic forms of

it provides them
with greater leeway for applying terror-based forms of violence against
civilians, a leeway exploited by many states such as Israel, Russia, China, Uzbekistan,
Zimbabwe, and others who try to intimidate groups with the application of massive
and disproportionate state violence. From this perspective, a discourse which occludes and
violence against their opponents and citizens without fear of condemnation. In effect,

obscures the very possibility of state terrorism can be considered part of the conditions that actually makes state
terrorism possible. In addition, the silence on state terrorism within the field also functions to undermine the
political struggle of human rights activists against the use of terror by states by disallowing the delegitimizing
power and resources that come from describing state actions as terrorism. It is pertinent to note in this context
that the worlds leading states have continually rejected any and all attempts to legally define and proscribe a
category of actions which would be called state terrorism, arguing instead that such actions are already covered

The silence on state terrorism has

another political effect, namely, the way in which it has functioned, and continues to
function, to distract from and deny the long history of Western involvement in
terrorism, thereby constructing Western foreign policy as essentially benign
by other laws such as the laws of war (see Becker 2006).

rather than aimed at reifying existing structures of power and domination in the international system, for example.

That is, by preventing the effective criticism of particular Western policies it

works to maintain the dangerous myth of Western exceptionalism. This sense
of exceptionalism and the supportive discourse of terrorism studies permits
Western states and their allies to pursue a range of discrete political projects
and partisan interests aimed at maintaining international dominance. For
example, by reinforcing the notion that non-state terrorism is a much greater threat and problem than state
terrorism and by obscuring the ways in which counter-terrorism can morph into state terrorism, the discourse
functions to legitimise the current war on terror and its associated policies of military intervention, extraordinary
rendition, reinforcement of the national security state, and the like. More specifically, the discourse can provide
legitimacy to broader counter-insurgency or counterterrorism programmes where the actual aims lie in the
maintenance of a particular politicaleconomic order such as is occurring in Colombia at present (see Stokes 2006).

Importantly, the silence on state terrorism also functions to de-legitimise all

forms of violent counterhegemonic or revolutionary struggle (by maintaining the
notion that state violence is automatically legitimate and all non-state violence is inherently illegitimate), thereby

maintaining the liberal international order and many oppressive international power structures (see also Duffield
2001). Lastly, the discourse can be used to selectively justify particular projects of regime change,14 economic
sanctions, military base expansion, military occupation, military assistance for strategic partners, and the isolation
of disapproved political movements such as Hamas or Hezbollah. In the end, the discourse functions to permit the
reification and extension of state hegemony both internationally and domestically, and perhaps more importantly,
the belief in the instrumental rationality of violence as an effective tool of politics. Despite the intentions of
terrorism scholars therefore, who may feel that they engage in objective academic analysis of a clearly defined
phenomenon, the discourse actually serves a number of distinctly political purposes and has several important
ideological consequences for society. Conclusion As noted above, there is a real puzzle revealed through this
analysis, namely, why there is such a deep and pervasive silence on state terrorism within the discourse, especially
given the genealogical origins of the term and the mountain of empirical examples of the phenomenon? There are a

there may be cases in which scholars

have been co-opted through various means into state perspectives and
projects. Given the benefits that can accrue from close association with state
power, it is not surprising that some scholars choose to participate directly in
such projects. Related to this, some scholars may be intimidated by state power, fearing the ways in which
number of likely answers to this puzzle. In the first place,

state officials and state apologists can punish and harm scholars who apply the term terrorism to state actions.
This could be a major reason why the silence on Israeli state terrorism is so pervasive. In the U.S. at least, scholars
who criticise Israeli policies in public are regularly attacked and intimidated as anti-Semitic. Alternately, many
scholars who joined the field following the terrorist attacks in 2001 did so out of a genuine desire to work with the

Another reason is likely to be

simply the failure of academic procedure and scholarly reflection the failure
to interrogate and question the assumptions and accepted knowledge of the
field. This is related to a broader process of socialisation into the accepted discourse and practices of the field;
U.S. government to prevent further occurrences of such atrocities.

scholars are trained into viewing terrorism in a particular light. Related to this, most scholars feel an inherent
affinity to the values and interests of their own societies, which may make facing the reality of their governments
involvement in terrorist atrocities difficult and disturbing. Finally, it may be related to the inherent difficulties
involved in studying state terrorism: not only is obtaining primary data a challenging exercise, especially in cases
where state agents may want to prevent potentially damaging international publicity, but a great deal of conceptual
and theoretical work often has to be done to determine which acts constitute state terrorism (Blakeley
forthcoming). In the end however, the puzzle of why state terrorism has been so neglected in the field is less
important than recognising that there are important reasons for bringing the state back into terrorism studies
(Blakeley 2007). First, there are obvious analytical reasons for taking state terrorism seriously, including the
imbalances and distortions which a narrow focus on non-state terrorism introduces. Second, there are normative
reasons for studying state terrorism in a rigorous and systematic manner, notably that such knowledge furnishes a
powerful means of holding states to account for their actions and reinforcing norms of behaviour that exclude the
use of violence to intimidate and terrorise civilians. By any measure, states have been responsible for infinitely
more human suffering and terror than any other actor; the promotion of human security therefore depends on
protecting citizens from the abuses and predations of states. In conclusion,

exposing the

ideological effects and political technologies of the discourse has

the potential to open up critical space for the articulation of
alternative and potentially emancipatory forms of knowledge and
practice . The good news is that discourses are never completely
hegemonic; there is always room for counter-hegemonic struggle and
subversive forms of knowledge. In this case, not only is the discourse
inherently unstable and vulnerable to different forms of critique, but the
continual setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, ongoing revelations of state
torture and rendition by Western forces, and increasing resistance to
government attempts to restrict civil liberties suggest that the present
juncture provides an opportune moment to engage in deliberate and
sustained critique of a dominant discourse which focuses on non-state actors and obscures the
much greater terrorism of state actors

Terrorism policy is performative. The process of discourse and

deliberation matters more than a policys outcome because it
frames the terms of debate.

de Graaf, Associate professor Associate Professor at the Centre for Terrorism and Counterterrorism at Leiden
University, and de Graaff, history professor at Utrecht University, 10 [Beatrice, and Bob, Bringing
politics back in: the introduction of the performative power of counterterrorism, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 3:2,
261-275]

it is almost impossible to measure arithmetically the outcome of

counterterrorism efforts. However, this does not mean that we cannot and should not try to assess the
effect of governmental policies. The issues outlined above suggest that it is not necessarily the policy
measures and their intended results as such, but much more the way in which they are
presented and perceived that determine the overall effect of the policy in
question. The key question is therefore really: What do counterterrorism policymakers want? They set the agenda with respect to the phenomenon of terrorism,
define it in a certain way and link it to corresponding measures. Subsequently, they execute these
In sum,

measures, behind closed doors, and with the tacit permission of the public or, conversely, they feel forced to

The way in
which they perform, or in other words carry out the process of countering
terrorism, can have more impact than the actual arrests being made (or not being
made). This is what we call the performativity of counterterrorism, or its performative
market their measures first, in order to generate a substantial level of public and political support.

power. The authors would like to introduce the concept performativity1 in this discussion, expressing the extent to

government, by means of its official counterterrorism policy and

corresponding discourse (in statements, enactments, measures and ministerial remarks), is
successful in selling its representation of events, its set of solutions to the
terrorist problem, as well as being able to set the tone for the overall discourse
regarding terrorism and counterterrorism thereby mobilising (different) audiences for its
purposes.2 There is of course a difference between threat assessment and threat perception, and there are
which a national

other players in the field apart from official state actors. Here, however, our focus is on the governments attempts
to persuade public opinion of the legitimacy and accuracy of its threat assessment. In terms of developing
counterterrorism policies, this is particularly relevant because counterterrorism officials and we as academics and
advisers can exert influence particularly on this field (see also the introduction and conclusion in Forest 2009).

Counterterrorism measures (in statements, enactments, activities, expressions made by cabinet

members) set the tone for the political and public debate. Government
statements and memoranda are not mere texts: they create reality. This is
certainly the case when the presentation and definition of new policy dovetails
with existing threat perceptions in the population (on communism, immigration or new religions, for
instance); when they tune in to historical experiences (such as previous conflicts, attacks or
major disasters); if they depict the alleged terrorist threat as foreign, radically
different and alien or fundamentally hostile; or if they succeed in promoting
terrorism as a central issue in a political game or campaign (by portraying the opposition as being
soft on terrorism or by presenting themselves as the nations saviour from all evil).3 When these
implicitly or explicitly formulated representations of threats, enemies and
security are accepted by the majority of the population, political and social conflicts could be
heightened. Consensus subsequently gives way to polarisation, acceptance
of the limitation of civil liberties and stigmatisation of radical ideas.
Counterterrorism measures therefore clarify which radical ideas are still
tolerated, what level of sympathy with revolutionary terrorists is still permitted and which infringements on civil
liberties are accepted for the sake of national security.

Cuba is a crucial starting point. First, it strikes an unnerving chord

because of its persistent, decades-long confrontation with
imperialism and potential to set an example of resistance for the
global South.

Whitney, Cuba solidarity activist and member of Veterans for Peace, 5-8-13 [W.T., Reflections on AntiCuban Terror, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2013/whitney080513.html]

The U.S. government itself is a purveyor of terrorism. Its wars, drones,

economic sanctions, puppet insurgencies, torture regimens, and prison
abuses terrorize peoples throughout the world. The United States exports spies and
informants and supports the militarized police forces and national armies of puppet governments. Terror fostered by
the United States aggravates hostilities and swells enemy ranks. Vicious cycles ensue and conflicts expand.
Openings then multiply for the U.S. government to claim victimization and to rationalize its own terror attacks.

Cuba, however, stands apart from this deadly interchange seen elsewhere. Terror
strikes in only one direction -- against Cuba. Cuban sources indicate that U.S.-based
terrorists have killed almost 3,500 people over 50 years, either Cubans or friends of
Cuba. By contrast, U.S. military and intelligence officials now and then reiterate that Cuba represents no military or

Yet the U.S. government maintains Cuba on its list

of state sponsors of terrorism. Apologists point to Basque separatists welcomed in Cuba and to
economic threat to the United States.

sanctuary given leftist Colombian guerrillas. But Spain asked that Cuba take in the Basques, and Colombia
embraced Cuba's offer to host government negotiations with the guerrillas. So, political refuge provided for Assata
Shakur has long been cited. Having escaped from a U.S. prison, the black liberation combatant moved to Cuba. The
United States recently simultaneously announced that Cuba will remain on its list of terror-sponsoring states and
that, conveniently enough, Assata Shakur was being placed on the FBI's ten "most wanted terrorist" list, as well as
that the bounty for her capture and return to the United States was raised to $2 million. Many legal observers,
however, remain highly critical of the prosecution and trial in 1977 through which she was convicted of murdering a

Considering that Cuba is quite blameless, refusing to engage

in tit-for-tat, one may ask: Why have terror attacks against Cuba continued?
One answer is that the U.S. government, as minder of an empire, is serious about its
duty to counter revolutionary and anti-imperialist movements from their
earliest stirrings to their takings of power and beyond. U.S. governments have been
dealing with Cuban revolutionaries for almost 150 years. In reaction to antiNew Jersey policeman.

annexationist, anti-racist independence struggles led by Jose Marti and Antonio Maceo, the United States ended up
invading Cuba. U.S. troops helped beat down an Afro-Cuban uprising in 1912. Then in the early 1930s came Cuban
student and labor mobilizations, anti-imperialist in nature -- harbingers of a socialist revolution that took charge in

Special treatment for Cuba may stem, in part, from enmity to an antiimperialism that never quits. Cuban anti-imperialism is not all U.S. power brokers have to worry
about. Despite bashings, Cuba poses the threat of a good example. The socialist state
has ensured long life expectancy, low infant mortality, ready access to high
quality education, jobs, adequate nutrition and housing, and inculcation of
ethical, communitarian values and cultural heritages. Cubans even weather natural
disasters in exemplary fashion. Cuba's adventures in international solidarity add insult
to injury. Beleaguered Cuba contested apartheid in southern Africa, cares for
the sick and injured throughout the world, and educates young people from
all over. And annoyingly Cuba defends itself against terror in targeted, nonviolent ways. Cuban volunteers moved to Florida to monitor U.S.-based terrorists so that Cuba could prepare
1959.

against attacks and maybe prevent them. For their pains, the Cuban Five, as they are known, were subjected to a
biased trial and long, cruel sentences. A worldwide movement is demanding that U.S. President Obama release
them.

Second, persecution of Cuba in the name of fighting terror is the

continuous thread between the current War on Terror and the
original one started by Reagan. Cuba has consistently been
portrayed as a threat throughout the modern history of American
exceptionalism.

Chomksy, Professor of Philosopy and Linguistics at MIT, 6 [Noam, The Terrorist in the Mirror,
Counterpunch, JANUARY 24, http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/01/24/the-terrorist-in-the-mirror/]

the "War on Terror." Since facts matter, it matters that the War
was not declared by George W. Bush on 9/11, but by the Reagan administration 20 years earlier. They
Suppose, then, that we accept these simple guidelines. Lets turn to

came into office declaring that their foreign policy would confront what the President called "the evil scourge of terrorism," a plague spread by "depraved
opponents of civilization itself" in "a return to barbarism in the modern age" (Secretary of State George Shultz). The campaign was directed to a
particularly virulent form of the plague: state-directed international terrorism. The main focus was Central America and the Middle East, but it reached to

the war was declared and implemented by pretty much

the same people who are conducting the re-declared war on terrorism. The civilian
component of the re-declared War on Terror is led by John Negroponte, appointed last year to supervise all counterterror operations. As
Ambassador in Honduras, he was the hands-on director of the major operation of the first War on Terror, the contra war
against Nicaragua launched mainly from US bases in Honduras. Ill return to some of his tasks. The military component of the redeclared War led by Donald Rumsfeld. During the first phase of the War on Terror, Rumsfeld was Reagans special
representative to the Middle East. There, his main task was to establish close relations with Saddam Hussein so that the
southern Africa and Southeast Asia and beyond. A second fact is that

US could provide him with large-scale aid, including means to develop WMD, continuing long after the huge atrocities against the Kurds and the end of the
war with Iran. The official purpose, not concealed, was Washingtons responsibility to aid American exporters and "the strikingly unanimous view" of
Washington and its allies Britain and Saudi Arabia that "whatever the sins of the Iraqi leader, he offered the West and the region a better hope for his
countrys stability than did those who have suffered his repression" New York Times Middle East correspondent Alan Cowell, describing Washingtons
judgment as George Bush I authorized Saddam to crush the Shiite rebellion in 1991, which probably would have overthrown the tyrant. Saddam is at last
on trial for his crimes. The first trial, now underway, is for crimes he committed in 1982. 1982 happens to be an important year in US-Iraq relations. It was

in 1982 that Reagan removed Iraq from the list of states supporting terror so that aid

could flow to his friend in Baghdad. Rumsfeld then visited Baghdad to confirm the arrangements. Judging by reports and commentary, it would be impolite

Removing
Saddam from the list of states supporting terrorism left a gap. It was at once filled by Cuba,
perhaps in recognition of the fact that the US terrorist wars against Cuba
from 1961 had just peaked, including events that would be on the front
pages right now in societies that valued their freedom, to which Ill briefly return. Again, that tells us
to mention any of these facts, let alone to suggest that some others might be standing alongside Saddam before the bar of justice.

something about the real elite attitudes towards the plague of the modern age. Since the first War on Terror was waged by those now carrying out the

anyone seriously interested in the re-declared

War on Terror should ask at once how it was carried out in the 1980s. The topic,
redeclared war, or their immediate mentors, it follows that

however, is under a virtual ban. That becomes understandable as soon as we investigate the facts: the first War on Terror quickly became a

murderous and brutal terrorist war, in every corner of the world where it reached, leaving
traumatized societies that may never recover. What happened is hardly obscure, but doctrinally
unacceptable, therefore protected from inspection. Unearthing the record is an enlightening exercise, with enormous implications for the future. These are
a few of the relevant facts, and they definitely do matter. Lets turn to the second of the guidelines: elementary moral principles. The most elementary is a
virtual truism: decent people apply to themselves the same standards that they apply to others, if not more stringent ones. Adherence to this principle of
universality would have many useful consequences. For one thing, it would save a lot of trees. The principle would radically reduce published reporting
and commentary on social and political affairs. It would virtually eliminate the newly fashionable discipline of Just War theory. And it would wipe the slate
almost clean with regard to the War on Terror. The reason is the same in all cases: the principle of universality is rejected, for the most part tacitly, though
sometimes explicitly. Those are very sweeping statements. I purposely put them in a stark form to invite you to challenge them, and I hope you do. You
will find, I think, that although the statements are somewhat overdrawnpurposely they nevertheless are uncomfortably close to accurate, and in fact
very fully documented. But try for yourselves and see. This most elementary of moral truisms is sometimes upheld at least in words. One example, of
critical importance today, is the Nuremberg Tribunal. In sentencing Nazi war criminals to death, Justice Robert Jackson, Chief of Counsel for the United
States, spoke eloquently, and memorably, on the principle of universality. "If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes," he said, "they are crimes
whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others
which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on
which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well." That is a clear and honorable
statement of the principle of universality. But the judgment at Nuremberg itself crucially violated this principle. The Tribunal had to define "war crime" and
"crimes against humanity." It crafted these definition very carefully so that crimes are criminal only if they were not committed by the allies. Urban
bombing of civilian concentrations was excluded, because the allies carried it out more barbarically than the Nazis. And Nazi war criminals, like Admiral
Doenitz, were able to plead successfully that their British and US counterparts had carried out the same practices. The reasoning was outlined by Telford
Taylor, a distinguished international lawyer who was Jacksons Chief Counsel for War Crimes. He explained that "to punish the foeespecially the
vanquished foefor conduct in which the enforcing nation has engaged, would be so grossly inequitable as to discredit the laws themselves." That is
correct, but the operative definition of "crime" also discredits the laws themselves. Subsequent Tribunals are discredited by the same moral flaw, but the
self-exemption of the powerful from international law and elementary moral principle goes far beyond this illustration, and reaches to just about every
aspect of the two phases of the War on Terror. Lets turn to the third background issue: defining "terror" and distinguishing it from aggression and
legitimate resistance. I have been writing about terror for 25 years, ever since the Reagan administration declared its War on Terror. Ive been using
definitions that seem to be doubly appropriate: first, they make sense; and second, they are the official definitions of those waging the war.

To take

official definitions, terrorism is "the calculated use of violence or threat

of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in
naturethrough intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear," typically targeting civilians. The British governments definition is about the same:
one of these

"Terrorism is the use, or threat, of action which is violent, damaging or disrupting, and is intended to influence the government or intimidate the public and
is for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, or ideological cause." These definitions seem fairly clear and close to ordinary usage. There also

But a problem at once

arises. These definitions yield an entirely unacceptable consequence: it
follows that the US is a leading terrorist state, dramatically so during the Reaganite war on terror. Merely to
seems to be general agreement that they are appropriate when discussing the terrorism of enemies.

take the most uncontroversial case, Reagans state-directed terrorist war against Nicaragua was condemned by the World Court, backed by two Security

Another completely clear case is Cuba,

where the record by now is voluminous, and not controversial. And there is a
long list beyond them. We may ask, however, whether such crimes as the state-directed attack against Nicaragua are really
Council resolutions (vetoed by the US, with Britain politely abstaining).

terrorism, or whether they rise to the level of the much higher crime of aggression. The concept of aggression was defined clearly enough by Justice
Jackson at Nuremberg in terms that were basically reiterated in an authoritative General Assembly resolution. An "aggressor," Jackson proposed to the
Tribunal, is a state that is the first to commit such actions as "Invasion of its armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of the territory of another
State," or "Provision of support to armed bands formed in the territory of another State, or refusal, notwithstanding the request of the invaded State, to
take in its own territory, all the measures in its power to deprive those bands of all assistance or protection." The first provision unambiguously applies to
the US-UK invasion of Iraq. The second, just as clearly, applies to the US war against Nicaragua. However, we might give the current incumbents in
Washington and their mentors the benefit of the doubt, considering them guilty only of the lesser crime of international terrorism, on a huge and
unprecedented scale. It may also be recalled the aggression was defined at Nuremberg as "the supreme international crime differing only from other war
crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole"all the evil in the tortured land of Iraq that flowed from the US-UK invasion, for
example, and in Nicaragua too, if the charge is not reduced to international terrorism. And in Lebanon, and all too many other victims who are easily
dismissed on grounds of wrong agencyright to the present. A week ago (January 13), a CIA predator drone attacked a village in Pakistan, murdering
dozens of civilians, entire families, who just happened to live in a suspected al-Qaeda hideout. Such routine actions elicit little notice, a legacy of the
poisoning of the moral culture by centuries of imperial thuggery. The World Court did not take up the charge of aggression in the Nicaragua case. The
reasons are instructive, and of quite considerable contemporary relevance. Nicaraguas case was presented by the distinguished Harvard University law
professor Abram Chayes, former legal adviser to the State Department. The Court rejected a large part of his case on the grounds that in accepting World
Court jurisdiction in 1946, the US had entered a reservation excluding itself from prosecution under multilateral treaties, including the UN Charter. The
Court therefore restricted its deliberations to customary international law and a bilateral US-Nicaragua treaty, so that the more serious charges were
excluded. Even on these very narrow grounds, the Court charged Washington with "unlawful use of force"in lay language, international terrorismand
ordered it to terminate the crimes and pay substantial reparations. The Reaganites reacted by escalating the war, also officially endorsing attacks by their
terrorist forces against "soft targets," undefended civilian targets. The terrorist war left the country in ruins, with a death toll equivalent to 2.25 million in
US per capita terms, more than the total of all wartime casualties in US history combined. After the shattered country fell back under US control, it
declined to further misery. It is now the second poorest country in Latin America after Haitiand by accident, also second after Haiti in intensity of US
intervention in the past century. The standard way to lament these tragedies is to say that Haiti and Nicaragua are "battered by storms of their own
making," to quote the Boston Globe, at the liberal extreme of American journalism. Guatemala ranks third both in misery and intervention, more storms of
their own making. In the Western canon, none of this exists. All is excluded not only from general history and commentary, but also quite tellingly from the
huge literature on the War on Terror re-declared in 2001, though its relevance can hardly be in doubt. These considerations have to do with the boundary

What about the boundary between terror and resistance?

One question that arises is the legitimacy of actions to realize "the right to
self-determination, freedom, and independence, as derived from the Charter of the United Nations, of
between terror and aggression.

people forcibly deprived of that right, particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes and foreign occupation" Do such actions fall under terror
or resistance? The quoted word are from the most forceful denunciation of the crime of terrorism by the UN General Assembly; in December 1987, taken
up under Reaganite pressure. Hence it is obviously an important resolution, even more so because of the near-unanimity of support for it. The resolution
passed 153-2 (Honduras alone abstaining). It stated that "nothing in the present resolution could in any way prejudice the right to self-determination,
freedom, and independence," as characterized in the quoted words. The two countries that voted against the resolution explained their reasons at the UN
session. They were based on the paragraph just quoted. The phrase "colonial and racist regimes" was understood to refer to their ally apartheid South
Africa, then consummating its massacres in the neighboring countries and continuing its brutal repression within. Evidently, the US and Israel could not
condone resistance to the apartheid regime, particularly when it was led by Nelson Mandelas ANC, one of the worlds "more notorious terrorist groups," as
Washington determined at the same time. Granting legitimacy to resistance against "foreign occupation" was also unacceptable. The phrase was
understood to refer to Israels US-backed military occupation, then in its 20 th year. Evidently, resistance to that occupation could not be condoned either,
even though at the time of the resolution it scarcely existed: despite extensive torture, degradation, brutality, robbery of land and resources, and other
familiar concomitants of military occupation, Palestinians under occupation still remained "Samidin," those who quietly endured. Technically, there are no
vetoes at the General Assembly. In the real world, a negative US vote is a veto, in fact a double veto: the resolution is not implemented, and is vetoed
from reporting and history. It should be added that the voting pattern is quite common at the General Assembly, and also at the Security Council, on a
wide range of issues. Ever since the mid-1960s, when the world fell pretty much out of control, the US is far in the lead in Security Council vetoes, Britain
second, with no one else even close. It is also of some interest to note that a majority of the American public favors abandonment of the veto, and
following the will of the majority even if Washington disapproves, facts virtually unknown in the US, or I suppose elsewhere. That suggests another

Terrorism directed or
supported by the most powerful states continues to the present, often in shocking ways.
conservative way to deal with some of the problems of the world: pay attention to public opinion.

These facts offer one useful suggestion as to how to mitigate the plague spread by "depraved opponents of civilization itself" in "a return to barbarism in
the modern age": Stop participating in terror and supporting it. That would certainly contribute to the proclaimed objections. But that suggestion too is off
the agenda, for the usual reasons. When it is occasionally voiced, the reaction is reflexive: a tantrum about how those who make this rather conservative

Even with careful sanitization of discussion, dilemmas

constantly arise. One just arose very recently, when Luis Posada Carriles entered the
US illegally. Even by the narrow operative definition of "terror," he is clearly
one of the most notorious international terrorists, from the 1960s to the present. Venezuela requested
that he be extradited to face charges for the bombing of a Cubana airliner in Venezuela, killing 73
proposal are blaming everything on the US.

people. The charges are admittedly credible, but there is a real difficulty. After Posada miraculously escaped from a Venezuelan prison, the liberal Boston
Globe reports, he "was hired by US covert operatives to direct the resupply operation for the Nicaraguan contras from El Salvador"that is, to play a
prominent role in terrorist atrocities that are incomparably worse than blowing up the Cubana airliner. Hence the dilemma. To quote the press: "Extraditing
him for trial could send a worrisome signal to covert foreign agents that they cannot count on unconditional protection from the US government, and it
could expose the CIA to embarrassing public disclosures from a former operative." Evidently, a difficult problem. The Posada dilemma was, thankfully,

resolved by the courts, which rejected Venezuelas appeal for his extradition, in violation of the US-Venezuela extradition treaty. A day later, the head of
the FBI, Robert Mueller, urged Europe to speed US demands for extradition: "We are always looking to see how we can make the extradition process go
faster," he said. "We think we owe it to the victims of terrorism to see to it that justice is done efficiently and effectively." At the Ibero-American Summit
shortly after, the leaders of Spain and the Latin American countries "backed Venezuelas efforts to have [Posada] extradited from the United States to face
trial" for the Cubana airliner bombing, and again condemned the "blockade" of Cuba by the US, endorsing regular near-unanimous UN resolutions, the
most recent with a vote of 179-4 (US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau). After strong protests from the US Embassy, the Summit withdrew the call for

Posada is therefore free to join his

colleague Orlando Bosch in Miami. Bosch is implicated in dozens of terrorist
crimes, including the Cubana airliner bombing, many on US soil. The FBI and Justice Department wanted him
extradition, but refused to yield on the demand for an end to the economic warfare.

deported as a threat to national security, but Bush I took care of that by granting him a presidential pardon. There are other such examples. We might
want to bear them in mind when we read Bush IIs impassioned pronouncement that "the United States makes no distinction between those who commit
acts of terror and those who support them, because theyre equally as guilty of murder," and "the civilized world must hold those regimes to account."
This was proclaimed to great applause at the National Endowment for Democracy, a few days after Venezuelas extradition request had been refused.
Bushs remarks pose another dilemma. Either the US is part of the civilized world, and must send the US air force to bomb Washington; or it declares itself
to be outside the civilized world. The logic is impeccable, but fortunately, logic has been dispatched as deep into the memory hole as moral truisms. The
Bush doctrine that "those who harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves" was promulgated when the Taliban asked for evidence before
handing over people the US suspected of terrorismwithout credible evidence, as the FBI conceded many months later. The doctrine is taken very
seriously. Harvard international relations specialist Graham Allison writes that it has "already become a de facto rule of international relations," revoking
"the sovereignty of states that provide sanctuary to terrorists." Some states, that is, thanks to the rejection of the principle of universality. One might also
have thought that a dilemma would have arisen when John Negroponte was appointed to the position of head of counter-terrorism. As Ambassador to
Honduras in the 1980s, he was running the worlds largest CIA station, not because of the grand role of Honduras in world affairs, but because Honduras
was the primary US base for the international terrorist war for which Washington was condemned by the ICJ and Security Council (absent the veto). Known
in Honduras as "the Proconsul," Negroponte had the task of ensuring that the international terrorist operations, which reached remarkable levels of
savagery, would proceed efficiently. His responsibilities in managing the war on the scene took a new turn after official funding was barred in 1983, and he
had to implement White House orders to bribe and pressure senior Honduran Generals to step up their support for the terrorist war using funds from other
sources, later funds illegally transferred from US arms sales to Iran. The most vicious of the Honduran killers and torturers was General Alvarez Martnez,
the chief of the Honduran armed forces at the time, who had informed the US that "he intended to use the Argentine method of eliminating suspected
subversives." Negroponte regularly denied gruesome state crimes in Honduras to ensure that military aid would continue to flow for international
terrorism. Knowing all about Alvarez, the Reagan administration awarded him the Legion of Merit medal for "encouraging the success of democratic
processes in Honduras." The elite unit responsible for the worst crimes in Honduras was Battalion 3-16, organized and trained by Washington and its
Argentine neo-Nazi associates. Honduran military officers in charge of the Battalion were on the CIA payroll. When the government of Honduras finally
tried to deal with these crimes and bring the perpetrators to justice, the Reagan-Bush administration refused to allow Negroponte to testify, as the courts
requested. There was virtually no reaction to the appointment of a leading international terrorist to the top counter-terrorism position in the world. Nor to
the fact that at the very same time, the heroine of the popular struggle that overthrew the vicious Somoza regime in Nicaragua, Dora Mara Tllez, was
denied a visa to teach at the Harvard Divinity School, as a terrorist. Her crime was to have helped overthrow a US-backed tyrant and mass murderer.
Orwell would not have known whether to laugh or weep. So far I have been keeping to the kinds of topics that would be addressed in a discussion of the
War on Terror that is not deformed to accord with the iron laws of doctrine. And this barely scratches the surface. But let us now adopt prevailing Western
hypocrisy and cynicism, and keep to the operative definition of "terror." It is the same as the official definitions, but with the Nuremberg exception:
admissible terror is your terror; ours is exempt.. Even with this constraint, terror is a major problem, undoubtedly. And to mitigate or terminate the threat
should be a high priority. Regrettably, it is not. That is all too easy to demonstrate, and the consequences are likely to be severe. The invasion of Iraq is
perhaps the most glaring example of the low priority assigned by US-UK leaders to the threat of terror. Washington planners had been advised, even by
their own intelligence agencies, that the invasion was likely to increase the risk of terror. And it did, as their own intelligence agencies confirm. The
National Intelligence Council reported a year ago that "Iraq and other possible conflicts in the future could provide recruitment, training grounds, technical
skills and language proficiency for a new class of terrorists who are `professionalized and for whom political violence becomes an end in itself," spreading
elsewhere to defend Muslim lands from attack by "infidel invaders" in a globalized network of "diffuse Islamic extremist groups," with Iraq now replacing
the Afghan training grounds for this more extensive network, as a result of the invasion. A high-level government review of the "war on terror" two years
after the invasion `focused on how to deal with the rise of a new generation of terrorists, schooled in Iraq over the past couple years. Top government
officials are increasingly turning their attention to anticipate what one called "the bleed out" of hundreds or thousands of Iraq-trained jihadists back to
their home countries throughout the Middle East and Western Europe. "Its a new piece of a new equation," a former senior Bush administration official
said. "If you dont know who they are in Iraq, how are you going to locate them in Istanbul or London?" ( Washington Post). Last May the CIA reported that
"Iraq has become a magnet for Islamic militants similar to Soviet-occupied Afghanistan two decades ago and Bosnia in the 1990s," according to US
officials quoted in the New York Times. The CIA concluded that "Iraq may prove to be an even more effective training ground for Islamic extremists than
Afghanistan was in Al Qaedas early days, because it is serving as a real-world laboratory for urban combat." Shortly after the London bombing last July,
Chatham House released a study concluding that "there is `no doubt that the invasion of Iraq has `given a boost to the al-Qaida network in propaganda,
recruitment and fundraising,` while providing an ideal training area for terrorists"; and that "the UK is at particular risk because it is the closest ally of the
United States" and is "a pillion passenger" of American policy" in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is extensive supporting evidence to show that as
anticipated the invasion increased the risk of terror and nuclear proliferation. None of this shows that planners prefer these consequences, of course.
Rather, they are not of much concern in comparison with much higher priorities that are obscure only to those who prefer what human rights researchers
sometimes call "intentional ignorance." Once again we find, very easily, a way to reduce the threat of terror: stop acting in ways thatpredictablyenhance
the threat. Though enhancement of the threat of terror and proliferation was anticipated, the invasion did so even in unanticipated ways. It is common to
say that no WMD were found in Iraq after exhaustive search. That is not quite accurate, however. There were stores of WMD in Iraq: namely, those
produced in the 1980s, thanks to aid provided by the US and Britain, along with others. These sites had been secured by UN inspectors, who were
dismantling the weapons. But the inspectors were dismissed by the invaders and the sites were left unguarded. The inspectors nevertheless continued to
carry out their work with satellite imagery. They discovered sophisticated massive looting of these installations in over 100 sites, including equipment for
producing solid and liquid propellant missiles, biotoxins and other materials usable for chemical and biological weapons, and high-precision equipment
capable of making parts for nuclear and chemical weapons and missiles. A Jordanian journalist was informed by officials in charge of the Jordanian-Iraqi
border that after US-UK forces took over, radioactive materials were detected in one of every eight trucks crossing to Jordan, destination unknown. The
ironies are almost inexpressible. The official justification for the US-UK invasion was to prevent the use of WMD that did not exist. The invasion provided
the terrorists who had been mobilized by the US and its allies with the means to develop WMD namely, equipment they had provided to Saddam, caring
nothing about the terrible crimes they later invoked to whip up support for the invasion. It is as if Iran were now making nuclear weapons using fissionable
materials provided by the US to Iran under the Shah which may indeed be happening. Programs to recover and secure such materials were having
considerable success in the 90s, but like the war on terror, these programs fell victim to Bush administration priorities as they dedicated their energy and
resources to invading Iraq. Elsewhere in the Mideast too terror is regarded as secondary to ensuring that the region is under control. Another illustration is
Bushs imposition of new sanctions on Syria in May 2004, implementing the Syria Accountability Act passed by Congress a few months earlier. Syria is on
the official list of states sponsoring terrorism, despite Washingtons acknowledgment that Syria has not been implicated in terrorist acts for many years
and has been highly cooperative in providing important intelligence to Washington on al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups. The gravity of
Washingtons concern over Syrias links to terror was revealed by President Clinton when he offered to remove Syria from the list of states sponsoring
terror if it agreed to US-Israeli peace terms. When Syria insisted on recovering its conquered territory, it remained on the list. Implementation of the Syria
Accountability Act deprived the US of an important source of information about radical Islamist terrorism in order to achieve the higher goal of establishing

OFAC, Office of
Foreign Assets Control) that is assigned the task of investigating suspicious financial transfers, a central component of the "war on
terror." In April 2004, OFAC informed Congress that of its 120 employees, four were
assigned to tracking the finances of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein,
while almost two dozen were occupied with enforcing the embargo against
in Syria a regime that will accept US-Israeli demands. Turning to another domain, the Treasury Department has a bureau (

Cuba. From 1990 to 2003 there were 93 terrorism-related investigations with $9000 in fines; and 11,000 Cuba-related investigations with $8 million in
fines. The revelations received the silent treatment in the US media, elsewhere as well to my knowledge. Why should the Treasury Department devote

basic reasons were explained in internal

documents of the Kennedy-Johnson years. State Department planners warned that the "very
existence" of the Castro regime is "successful defiance" of US policies going
back 150 years, to the Monroe Doctrine; not Russians, but intolerable defiance of the master of the hemisphere, much like Irans crime of
successful defiance in 1979, or Syrias rejection of Clintons demands. Punishment of the population was
regarded as fully legitimate, we learn from internal documents. "The Cuban people [are]
responsible for the regime," the Eisenhower State Department decided, so that the US has the right
to cause them to suffer by economic strangulation, later escalated to direct
terror by Kennedy. Eisenhower and Kennedy agreed that the embargo would hasten Fidel Castros departure as a result of the "rising
vastly more energy to strangling Cuba than to the "war on terror"? The

discomfort among hungry Cubans." The basic thinking was summarized by State Department official Lester Mallory: Castro would be removed "through
disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship so every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the
economic life of Cuba in order to bring about hunger, desperation and the overthrow of the government." When Cuba was in dire straits after the collapse
of the Soviet Union, Washington intensified the punishment of the people of Cuba, at the initiative of liberal Democrats. The author of the 1992 measures

All of this continues

until the present moment. The Kennedy administration was also deeply concerned
about the threat of Cuban successful development, which might be a model
for others. But even apart from these standard concerns, successful defiance in itself is intolerable, ranked far higher as a priority than
to tighten the blockade proclaimed that "my objective is to wreak havoc in Cuba" (Representative Robert Torricelli).

combating terror. These are just further illustrations of principles that are well-established, internally rational, clear enough to the victims, but scarcely
perceptible in the intellectual world of the agents.

Finally, reject the try or die logic at the heart of the War on Terror.
Counter-terrorists distort rational risk analysis by relying on highmagnitude impacts based on decontextualized internal-link chains.

Kessler 8 [Oliver Kessler, Sociology at University of Bielefeld,

From Insecurity to Uncertainty: Risk and

the Paradox of Security Politics Alternatives 33 (2008), 211-232]

If the risk of terrorism is defined in traditional terms by probability and potential loss, then the
focus on dramatic terror attacks leads to the marginalization of probabilities .
The reason is that even the highest degree of improb- ability becomes irrelevant as
the measure of loss goes to infinity.^o The mathematical calculation of the risk of terrorism thus tends to
overestimate and to dramatize the danger. This has consequences beyond the actual risk assessment for the

If one factor of the risk calculation approaches

infinity (e.g., if a case of nuclear terrorism is envisaged), then there is no balanced
measure for antiterrorist efforts, and risk manage- ment as a rational endeavor breaks
down. Under the historical con- dition of bipolarity, the "ultimate" threat with nuclear weapons could be balanced
formulation and execution of "risk policies":

by a similar counterthreat, and new equilibria could be achieved, albeit on higher levels of nuclear overkill. Under
the new condition of uncertainty, no such rational balancing is possible since knowledge about actors, their motives
and capabilities, is largely absent. The second form of security policy that emerges when the deter- rence model
collapses mirrors the "social probability" approach. It represents a logic of catastrophe. In contrast to risk

the logic of catastro- phe does not

attempt to provide means of absorbing uncertainty. Rather, it takes uncertainty as
constitutive for the logic itself; uncer- tainty is a crucial precondition for catastrophies. In
particular, cata- strophes happen at once, without a warning, but with major impli- cations for the world
polity. In this category, we find the impact of meteorites. Mars attacks, the tsunami in South East
Asia, and 9/11. To conceive of terrorism as catastrophe has consequences for the formulation of an adequate
management framed in line with logical probability theory,

security policy. Since catastrophes hap- pen irrespectively of human activity or inactivity, no political action could

framing of terrorist
attack as a catastrophe points to spatial and temporal characteristics that are beyond
"ratio- nality." Thus, political decision makers are exempted from the
responsibility to provide securityas long as they at least try to pre- empt an
possibly prevent them. Of course, there are precautions that can be taken, but the

attack. Interestingly enough, 9/11 was framed as catastro- phe in various commissions dealing with the question
of who was responsible and whether it could have been prevented. This makes clear that under the condition of
uncertainty, there are no objective criteria that could serve as an anchor for measur- ing dangers and assessing the
quality of political responses. For ex- ample, as much as one might object to certain measures by the US
administration, it is almost impossible to "measure" the success of countermeasures. Of course, there might be a
subjective assessment of specific shortcomings or failures, but there is no "common" cur- rency to evaluate them.
As a consequence, the framework of the security dilemma fails to capture the basic uncertainties. Pushing the door
open for the security paradox, the main prob- lem of security analysis then becomes the question how to integrate
dangers in risk assessments and security policies about which simply nothing is known. In the mid 1990s, a Rand
study entitled "New Challenges for Defense Planning" addressed this issue arguing that "most striking is the fact

that we do not even know who or what will constitute the most serious future threat, "^i In
order to cope with this challenge it would be essential, another Rand researcher wrote, to break free from the
"tyranny" of plausible scenario planning. The decisive step would be to create "discontinuous scenarios ... in which
there is no plausible audit trail or storyline from current events"52 These nonstandard scenarios were later called
"wild cards" and became important in the current US strategic discourse. They justified the transformation from a
threat-based toward a capability- based defense planning strategy.53 The problem with this kind of risk assessment

even the most absurd scenarios can gain plausibility. By construct- ing
a chain of potentialities, improbable events are linked and brought into the
realm of the possible, if not even the probable. "Although the likelihood of
the scenario dwindles with each step, the residual impression is one of
plausibility. "54 This so-called Oth- ello effect has been effective in the dawn of the recent war in Iraq. The
connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda that the US government tried to prove
was disputed from the very begin- ning. False evidence was again and again presented and refuted,
but this did not prevent the administration from presenting as the main rationale for war the
improbable yet possible connection between Iraq and the terrorist network and the improbable
yet possible proliferation of an improbable yet possible nuclear weapon into the hands of Bin Laden. As Donald
Rumsfeld famously said: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." This
is, however, that

sentence indicates that under the condition of genuine uncer- tainty, different evidence criteria prevail than in
situations where security problems can be assessed with relative certainty.

Case Extensions

XT: Inherency
Cuba will continue to be on the state sponsors list

Arab Herald,

2013,

May 2,
US doesnt intend to remove Cuba from terror list,
http://story.arabherald.com/index.php/sid/214248221

Cuba will remain on the US list of states sponsoring terrorism

State
Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said that the government doesn't
intend to change "our list of state sponsors of terrorism". "The Department has no
WASHINGTON -

alongside Iran, Syria and Sudan, in a move that is bound to ruffle feathers in the communist-ruled state.

current plans to remove Cuba from the state sponsors of terrorism list," Ventrell was quoted by AFP as saying in an
email. The US State Department was expected to publish its annual report on terrorism on Tuesday. However, the
release has been delayed and could be released later this month.

XT: List Unjustified

Cubas inclusion on the state sponsors list is utterly unjustifiable.

Lopez Levy

2013, Its

Autoro
, lecture, Phd Candidate, University of Denver, The Huffington Post, May 8,
Time to Delist Cuba, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arturo-lopez-levy/its-time-to-delist-cuba_b_3232766.html

the U.S. State Department announced that Cuba would

remain on its list. It's a serious mistake. State Department reports from the
last decade have provided no substantive evidence to justify keeping Cuba
on the list. In fact, the country's inclusion is based on dubious allegations. The
reports allege that Cuba has provided medical treatment and refuge for terrorist
groups from the FARC in Colombia to the ETA in Spain. However, the reports
do not acknowledge that the governments of both countries have expressed
appreciation for Cuba's cooperation in this arena. The reports mention some
fugitives from American justice who live in Cuba, but neglect to say that the
United States stopped honoring the 1904 extradition agreement between the
two countries in early 1959. Cuba has sent back most U.S. fugitives and has generally recognized the
Nonetheless, on May 1,

validity of U.S. courts, but has occasionally offered asylum to people it considers victims of "political persecution,"
including former Black Panther Assata Shakur, accused of killing a New Jersey highway trooper in 1973.

Shakur's asylum in Cuba has precedent in international law, as well as in

decisions by U.S. Courts not to equate all violent political acts to terrorism.
Her case constitutes a reason to raise the issue diplomatically and negotiate
a new bilateral extradition treaty, but it is not sufficient motive to keep Cuba
on the list. It is no coincidence that those Cuban-American politicians who demand that Cuba unilaterally
return these few U.S. fugitives are the same ones who have advocated providing refuge for anti-Castro terrorists like
Luis Posada Carriles--who in 1976 was responsible for a bomb that took 73 lives (including the Cuban national
fencing team) on a Cuban civilian plane. Posada lives freely in Miami. The Bush administration removed North Korea
from the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism in 2008 as part of a larger diplomatic strategy to shut down the
country's nuclear program. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice explained the thinking behind that decision
in No Higher Honor, her recently published memoirs. The list, she wrote, was supposed to single out "countries that
supply a terrorist organization with training, logistics, or material or financial support. Technically, the North Koreans
should have already been removed from the list much earlier; there had not been, at the time, any known terrorist
incident involving Pyongyang for two decades." Using Rice's same substantive criterion for determining whether a
country belongs on the list (no terror incident involving the country in question for twenty years), it is very difficult
to argue that Cuba should be there. Confronted with this double standard and the lack of evidence for keeping Cuba
on the list, some defenders of the Obama administration's decision to keep Cuba on the list simply reply that Cuba
is not as important economically or strategically as South Florida is electorally. Yet these self-proclaimed political
realists miss an important reality. The Cuban-American community, including the majority of those who oppose
Castro, has changed. For most Cubans who came to the United States in the last two decades, the inclusion of their
country of origin in the terrorism list is not only unfair, but also an obstacle to promoting changes on the island that

Defenders of including
Cuba on the list point to Cuba's imprisonment of Alan Gross, an American citizen who
could take place through exchanges between Cuba and the United States.

was arrested for his participation in a United States Agency for International Development regime change program

They also claim that Cuba violates human rights and point to an increase of
short-term detentions of Castro's opponents during the last year. Yet these actions have nothing to
do with the congressional mandate to create a list of States Sponsors of
Terrorism under the 1979 Exports Administration Act. Mixing these unrelated
issues only demonstrates that the list has become a pretext to punish the
Cuban government. This situation feeds into the Cuban government's narrative that its revolution is under
on the island.

siege, and that because the island is a victim of U.S. double standards and hostility, it has to adopt emergency
measures. Using the list in this way is therefore not only inconsistent, but also counterproductive.

XT: Leads to Oppressive Foreign Policy

The terrorism justification has empirically been used for oppressive
foreign policy in Latin America

LeoGrande, government professor at American University, 6 [William, From the Red Menace to Radical
Populism U.S. Insecurity in Latin America, World Policy Journal, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Winter, 2005/2006), pp. 25-35]

U.S. policy toward Latin America has been eclipsed by the post- September 11 war
on terrorism because there is virtually no threat of Islamic terrorism in the region. As General Craddock
testified in March 2005, there are no known Islamic terrorist cells operating in Latin America, though there are some

The dearth of a real terrorist

threat and the con- sequent tendency of senior policymakers to focus on the Islamic East has allowed
mid- level policymakers to gain attention for their favorite policy initiatives in
Latin America by recasting them as ancillary to the war on terrorism. Thus,
the war in Colombia, which before September 11, was justified as a war on drugs, has
been reframed as a new front in the war on ter- rorism, with the main guerrilla
movements and paramilitaries - the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia ( farc), the National Liberation Army
(eln), and the United Self Defense Forces (auc) - added to the State Department s list of
terrorist organizations. Congressional restrictions that prevented U.S. military aid from being used to
supporters willing to provide financial and logistical assistance.20

fight the guerrillas were lifted and aid to the Colombian military increased.21 This linguistic legerdemain constitutes
a serious confusion of threats. No doubt the Colombian groups have all engaged in acts of terrorism, including
kidnappings, extra- judicial executions, massacres, and planting bombs in public places. However, they are not
"international terrorists" in the sense that members of al-Qaeda are. The aim of the Colombian groups is to
achieve political ends inside Colombia, and the targets of their violence are Colombian. Unlike al- Qaeda, they have
no intention of attacking the United States, and their aims are not in- ternational. Their threat to U.S. interests is
therefore fundamentally different. Guerrillas and paramilitaries in Colombia pose a threat to Colombians and their
state. They may pose a threat to neighboring states as a re- sult of the internal conflict "spilling over" borders. But

do not pose a physical threat to the United States as do Islamic ter- rorist
groups. Ignoring this distinction by lumping all violent actors under the label
"terrorist" is simply an attempt to transfer the legitimacy enjoyed by the real
war on terrorism to less popular policies. Similarly, hardliners in the Bush admin- istration
also seized on the terrorism threat as a rationale for their confrontational policy
toward Cuba. Cuba remains on the State Department's list of state sponsors
of inter- national terrorism, despite a dearth of evi- dence that the Cubans have actually done anything
they

recently to actively support foreign revolutionaries, let alone terrorists.22 This is not to say that there are no in-

The most persistent campaign of

international terrorism in the Americas has been the series of paramilitary
attacks against Cuba conducted by a small num- ber of Cuban exiles. These
ternational terrorists in the Western Hemi- sphere.

attacks date to the early 1960s, when they were organized by the U.S. government, acting through the Central
Intelligence Agency. The end of U.S. support for such activities did not end the attacks, however. The most notorious was the bombing of a Cuban civilian airliner off Barbados in 1976, which killed 73 people. In 1997, a series of
bombs were detonated in Cuban tourist hotels and nightspots, injuring dozens and killing an Italian tourist bombings for which the Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles took re- sponsibility.23 Posada Carriles is currently in the
United States fighting deportation. In 2000, Panamanian authorities thwarted an assassination plot against Fidel
Castro (also involving Posada Carriles), and the U.S. Coast Guard foiled another apparent exile plot to assassinate
Castro in Venezuela in 1997.24

XT: Solvency
Removing Cuba from the list is a huge step forward towards
reversing Americas historic persecution of the country

Perez, J.D. from Yale Law School, 10 [David, ARTICLE: America's Cuba Policy: The Way Forward: A Policy
Recommendation for the U.S. State Department, 13 Harv. Latino L. Rev. 187, Lexis]

(5C) Consider Removing Cuba from the State Sponsors of Terrorism List
Cuba has been on the State Department's list of State Sponsors of Terror since
1982, a distinction that is both factually inaccurate and politically costly. n74
Since the end of the Cold War no evidence indicates that the Cuban state has
at any time supported terrorism. Keeping Cuba on the list fosters a
combative relationship, and hinders any hope for substantive progress . Since
this move would be unilateral and within the power of the President alone, and would also realign U.S. standards of
what qualifies as a State Sponsor of Terror to reflect accurate, rather than political, judgment,

it is hard to

imagine a less costly and more helpful initial step.

If we are willing to remove North Korea, a state that blatantly proliferates
weapons of mass destruction, from the List of State Sponsors of Terrorism, n75
[*214] we should be willing to remove Cuba. The island is no longer a threat, yet the implications of
having them on the list are immense. n76
Cuba should be removed from the list

Ryan

2013

Patrick
, The Hill, April 30,
, Former U.S. diplomat Patrick Ryan: Time to drop Cuba from terror
list, http://thehill.com/blogs/global-affairs/guest-commentary/296867-former-us-diplomat-patrick-ryan- (Ryan is a
12-year veteran of the U.S. Foreign Service who previously worked on Capitol Hill. Recently having returned after 14
years away, he has a degree in International Studies from Johns Hopkins and is currently consulting in D.C. on
issues that have nothing to do with Cuba, the embargo, or potential business interests there)

As a former U.S. diplomat who authored the 2007-09 Country Reports on Terrorism for Nigeria and
visited Cuba many times on official business, I believe keeping Cuba on the list of State
Sponsors of Terrorism is absurd and highly political, particularly given its
glaring omissions. Where is North Korea, which has conducted small-scale attacks against the South over
the past several years and recently threatened a nuclear first strike against the United States? Despite the
fact that Cuba maintains a capable espionage network, no credible
intelligence sources claim it is currently a security threat to us. Cubas listing is
about Florida electoral politics. A small minority of Cuban-American politicians has been dictating U.S. foreign policy
toward one of our most geographically proximate neighbors for too long and using the highly questionable
terrorist listing to justify continuation of the Cold War-era embargo. Ironically, these members of Congress support
Cubans ability freedom to travel to the United States but not Americans freedom to travel to Cuba, and use the
terrorist justification for this. If we truly want to undermine the Castro regime, the best way would be to end the
listing, including the embargo and travel ban, and flood Cuba with American visitors, as well as our products and
democratic ideas. Ending the restrictions would also demonstrably help the Cuban people a stated aim of these
same politicians. In comparison, most Vietnamese-Americans who also lost a civil war to communists, 16 years
after the Cubans long ago accepted reality and supported the 1994 normalization of relations with Vietnam. The
U.S. buried the hatchet and engaged a country whose human rights record, like Cubas and Chinas has been
disappointing, and with whom we were actually involved in a war that took the lives of more than 58,000
Americans. So why not Cuba? The fact that members of the Basque separatist group ETA have retired to the island
with the blessing of the Spanish government, that FARC members are residing in Cuba during peace talks hosted by
Havana and supported by the Colombian government and that various fugitives from American justice none of
whom have been accused of terrorism, by the way have lived in exile there since the 1970s, are simply not
credible arguments for maintaining the designation. Frankly,

its well past time that U.S.

policymakers had the courage to tell the most vocal Miami exiles to
acknowledge reality and move on, as many of them already have. Fortunately, the
younger generation of Cubans in Miami isnt as obsessed with the island as their forebears and Cubans are no
longer a majority of the Latin American population in South Florida. President Obama won Florida twice, and is in a
unique position to remove Cuba from the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism and push Congress to end the embargo
in his second term. As Cuba continues its sporadic offshore oil exploration with foreign partners, including U.S.
allies, it would seem advantageous for it to be a part of the process, in order to help ensure there will not be
another disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, not to mention the economic benefits it would receive from
increased exports to the island. The only way to do so is to take Cuba off the terrorism list.

XT: Epistemology Key

Prefer specificity in the context of the war on terror we have to
focus on epistemology because knowledge is so tilted towards state
security elites

Jackson et al., professors of International Politics at

2007

Aberystwyth University,
[Richard, The
Case for a Critical Terrorism Studies, paper delivered for 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science
Association, August 30 September 2, http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/handle/2160/1945/APSA-2007Paper-final2.pdf?sequence=1]
In addition to its conceptual and methodological weaknesses, a more serious challenge for the field lies in the fact
that a great deal of terrorism research tends towards statecentrism. In the first
instance, much of the literature defines the terrorist as the main or exclusive security problem and inquiry is
largely restricted to the assembling of information and data that would solve or eradicate the problem as the

This focus ignores both terrorism being a social phenomenon

which is typically the outcome of a long dynamic process, and the potential
state defines it.

contribution of the state itself to the creation of the conditions in which terrorist action by non-state actors occurs.
Where terrorist motivation is considered, it is usually viewed as the result of individual pathology. The futile search
for the terrorist personality26 for example, is an attempt to pick out the deviant, evil or sick terrorist from the
population of normal people. Whilst one can see the application of this approach to forensic profiling of terrorists,
the pathologising mode dispenses with the need for deeper understanding and instead renders terrorism

terrorism studies has long been criticised

for its overly prescriptive focus, which is a reflection of its theoretical and institutional origins in
inexplicable, unknowable and overwhelming. In fact,

orthodox security studies and counter-insurgency studies.27 An influential review described much of the fields
early output as counterinsurgency masquerading as political science, 28 while Andrew Silke has concluded that

much terrorism research is driven by policy concerns and is limited to

addressing government agendas.29 Moreover, it can be argued that the prescriptive
focus has diverted attention from other critical matters, not the least of
which is the development of a sound theoretical understanding of the
dynamics of terrorism.30 Another serious challenge for the field pertains to the
embedded or organic nature of many terrorism experts and scholars; that is, the extent to which
terrorism scholars are directly linked to state institutions and sources of power in ways
that make it difficult to distinguish between the state and academic spheres.31 A good illustration of this dynamic,
and its contribution to the development of what has sometimes been called the terrorism industry, is the
influence of the RAND Corporation, a non-profit research foundation founded by United States Air Force with strong
ties to the American military and political establishments.32 The main consequence of such links is that

together with certain state, military, think tank and public intellectuals, the
leading terrorism studies scholars now constitute an influential epistemic
community a network of specialists with a common world view about
cause and effect relationships which relate to their domain of expertise, and common political values
about the type of policies to which they should be applied although it is important to underline that even within
embedded institutions such as RAND divergent views do exist (cf. Glenn Robinsons work on Hamas). 33 Employing
a Gramscian perspective, it can be argued that the core terrorism studies scholars function as organic
intellectuals intimately connected institutionally, financially, politically and ideologically with a state hegemonic

such a situation has serious implications for the integrity and

independence of research on terrorism. Given this state of affairs, and as discussed in greater
detail elsewhere, the dominant knowledge of the field functions as a type of
problem-solving theory. 34 As Robert Cox argues, problem-solving theory takes the
world as it finds it, with the prevailing social and power relationships and the
institutions into which they are organised, as the given framework for action
and then works to make these relationships and institutions work smoothly
project. Clearly,

by dealing effectively with particular sources of trouble.35 In this case, as we have already suggested,

orthodox terrorism studies does not question the extent to which the status

quo the hierarchies and operation of power and the inequalities and
injustices thus generated is implicated in the problem of terrorism and
other forms of subaltern violence. Moreover, through the use of social scientific language and
modes of inquiry, political assumptions about terrorism are presented as
immutable facts and the scholar typically aligns him or herself with the
orthodoxy usually the state on terrorisms major ethical and political questions.

AT: Status Quo Solves WoT

Obama is all talk and no action on the War on Terror its still in full
force.

Greenwald, constitutional lawyer and Guardian columnist on national security for the Guardian, 5-272013 [Glenn, former debater!, Obama's terrorism speech: seeing what you want to see,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/27/obama-war-on-terror-speech]

beyond dispute at this point is that Obama's speeches have very

little to do with Obama's actions, except to the extent that they often signal
what he intends not to do. How many times does Obama have to deliver a speech embracing a set of values and polices, only to
But whatever else is true, what should be

watch as he then proceeds to do the opposite, before one ceases to view his public proclamations as predictive of his future choices? Speeches, especially
presidential ones, can be significant unto themselves in shaping public perceptions and setting the terms of the debate, so Obama's explicit discussion of
the "ultimate" ending of the war on terror can be reasonably viewed as positive. But it signals nothing about what he actually will do. I'm genuinely
amazed that there are still smart people who treat these speeches as though they do. As Esquire's Tom Junod put it after the speech: "if the Lethal
Presidency reminds us of anything, it's that we should be a long way from judging this president on his rhetoric or his portrayal of himself as a moral

Obama "has a long record of broken promises and

misleading rhetoric on civil liberties, and it would be naive to assume that he'll follow through on everything he said on
Thursday." What Obama has specialized in from the beginning of his presidency is putting pretty
packaging on ugly and discredited policies. The cosmopolitan, intellectualized flavor of his advocacy makes
actor." The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf added that

coastal elites and blue state progressives instinctively confident in the Goodness of whatever he's selling, much as George W. Bush's swaggering,

. The CIA presciently recognized this as a valuable

asset back in 2008 when they correctly predicted that Obama's election would stem
the tide of growing antiwar sentiment in western Europe by becoming the
new, more attractive face of war, thereby converting hordes of his admirers from war opponents into war supporters. This
evangelical cowboy routine did for red state conservatives

dynamic has repeated itself over and over in other contexts, and has indeed been of great value to the guardians of the status quo in placating growing
public discontent about their economic insecurity and increasingly unequal distribution of power and wealth. However bad things might be, we at least

The clear purpose of Obama's

speech was to comfort progressives who are growing progressively more
uncomfortable with his extreme secrecy, wars on press freedom, seemingly
endless militarism and the like. For the most part, their discomfort is far more about the image being created of the
have a benevolent, kind-hearted and very thoughtful leader doing everything he can to fix it.

politician they believed was unique and even transcendent than it is any substantive opposition to his policies. No progressive wants to believe that they
placed such great trust and adoration in a political figure who is now being depicted as some sort of warped progeny of Richard Nixon and Dick Cheney.
That creates internal discomfort and even shame. This speech was designed to allow progressives once again to see Barack Obama as they have always
wanted to see him, his policies notwithstanding: as a deeply thoughtful, moral, complex leader who is doing his level best, despite often insurmountable

The terrorism
speech, when dissected, provided very little in the way of actual concrete
substance. Its most heralded passage, as the ACLU quickly pointed out, did nothing more than
call for the "ultimate" repeal of the AUMF; "the time to take our country off the global warpath and fully restore
the rule of law is now," said the ACLU's executive director Anthony Romero, "not at some indeterminate future point." Moreover, he noted, " the
president still claims broad authority to carry out targeted killings far from
any battlefield, and there is still insufficient transparency." In lieu of
substance, the speech was heavy on feel-good rhetoric, mostly designed to signal that unlike the
obstacles, to bring about all those Good Things that progressives thought they would be getting when they empowered him.

mean and simplistic George Bush - who presumably pursued these policies thoughtlessly and simplistically - Obama experiences inner turmoil and deep
moral and intellectual conflict as he embraces them. "For me, and those in my chain of command, those [civilian] deaths will haunt us as long as we live,"
the president claimed. He added that drones and other new weapons technologies "raise[] profound questions about who is targeted, and why; about
civilian casualties, and the risk of creating new enemies; about the legality of such strikes under US and international law; about accountability and
morality." This "he-struggles-so-very-much" conceit is one Obama officials have been pushing for awhile, as when they anonymously boasted to the New
York Times about Obama's deep personal involvement in choosing the targets of his "kill list", something he insists upon because he is "a student of
writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas" and wants to ensure compliance with those lofty principles. That same article quoted the supremely
obsequious former Obama adviser Harold Koh as hailing torture advocate and serial deceiver John Brennan as "a person of genuine moral rectitude" who
ensures that the "kill list" is accompanied by moral struggle: "It's as though you had a priest with extremely strong moral values who was suddenly
charged with leading a war," Koh said. Obama may do things you progressives find distasteful, but at least marvel at how thoughtful and torn up he is
about it all. The New York Times' Ross Douthat had quite a good column this week about this preening pageantry. He aptly described the speech as "a
dense thicket of self-justifying argument, but its central message was perfectly clear: Please don't worry, liberals. I'm not George W. Bush." Douthat
explained: "This willingness to grapple with moral complexity has always been one of the things that Obama's admirers love about him, and even liberals
who feel disappointed with his national security record still seem grateful for the change from George W. Bush. If we have to have an imperial president,
their attitude seems to be, better to have one who shows some 'anguish over the difficult trade-offs that perpetual war poses to a free society' (as The
New Yorker's Jane Mayer put it on Friday), rather than falling back on 'the secrecy and winking smugness of the past'. . . . . "I am not particularly nostalgic
for the Bush era either. But Obama's Reinhold Niebuhr act comes with potential costs of its own. While the last president exuded a cowboyish certainty,
this president is constantly examining his conscience in public but if their policies are basically the same, the latter is no less of a performance. And

there are ways in which it may be a more fundamentally dishonest one,

because it perpetually promises harmonies that can't be achieved and policy
shifts that won't actually be delivered. "That's a cynical reading on Obama's speech, but it feels like the right one.
Listened to or skimmed, the address seemed to promise real limits on presidential power, a real horizon for the war on terror. But when parsed carefully,
it's not clear how much practical effect its promises will have. . . . "There is no good reason to overpromise yet again. Where the United States can step
back from a wartime footing, we absolutely should. But where we don't actually intend to, we should be forthright about it rather than pretending that
change is perpetually just around the corner, and behaving as though our choices are justified by how much anguish we express while making them."
When it comes to liberals eager to be fooled, Douthat could easily have been talking here about his own newspaper's editors. Within minutes after the
completion of Obama's speech, literally, the New York Times editorial page posted a lengthy and gushing editorial headlined "The End of Perpetual War". In
their eyes, the speech was "the most important statement on counterterrorism policy since the 2001 attacks, a momentous turning point in post-9/11
America." It analyzed the speech section-by-section and insisted that each called for a "shift [that] is essential to preserving the democratic system and
rule of law for which the United States is fighting, and for repairing its badly damaged global image." It concluded: "There have been times when we
wished we could hear the right words from Mr. Obama on issues like these, and times we heard the words but wondered about his commitment. This was
not either of those moments." How was the NYT able to post such a detailed and lengthy editorial about Obama's speech almost immediately upon its
conclusion? Clearly, they were given a special preview of the speech by some administration official, who fed them exactly the message the White House
wanted them to receive. And they ingested it fully. As one civil liberties lawyer put it to me, the NYT editors got snookered not despite the special access
they received, but because of it. Most of all, they got snookered because they wanted to, because - like so many progressives - they are eager to see
Obama in the light in which they originally saw him. Nobody likes to believe they were fooled or tricked or so enthusiastically supported a politician who
does things they find horrible. That's why a mere speech, filled with all sorts of mixed messages, leads the NYT editors to all but declare that Obama has
heroically ended the war on terror - even though just one week before, one of his top military officials told the US senate that the war would last at least
another decade or two. After NYT Editorial board editor David Firestone posted the NYT's editorial on Twitter and heralded the speech as "a momentous
turning point, making clear an unending state of war is unsustainable," I asked him: "Will it be 'momentous' if it's not followed up with decisive and prompt
action?" His reply: "Yes, I hope it doesn't turn out like universal pre-K or an infrastructure bank. But at least he set the bar at the right height." In contrast
to the NYT's instant swooning, serious journalists and commentators - who weren't given special pre-speech access to a marketing pitch by the White
House - began analyzing the speech's content and reached a much different conclusion. McClatchy's Leslie Clark and Jonathan Landay astutely noted that

Obama's formulation for when drone strikes should be used was broader than past government statements, which meant he "appeared
to be laying groundwork for an expansion of the controversial targeted
killings". The Brookings Institution's Benjamin Wittes similarly observed that Obama's speech seemed written to align the president "as publicly
as possible with the critics of the positions his administration is taking without undermining his administration's operational flexibility in actual fact." In
other words, said Wittes (summarizing the vintage Obama rhetorical device), "the president sought to rebuke his own administration for taking the
positions it has but also to make sure that it could continue to do so." Slate's national security writer Fred Kaplan observed this morning that "the
speech heralded nothing new when it comes to drone strikes." In an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper, Jeremy Scahill argued this about the Obama speech:

I]t really is sort of just a rebranding of the Bush era policies with some
legalese that is very articulately delivered from our constitutional law professor, Nobel Peace Prize-winning president. But effectively,
Obama has declared the world a battlefield and reserves the right to drone
bomb countries in pursuit of people against whom we have no direct
evidence or who we're not seeking any indictment against." The national security reporter
[

Michael Hastings said much the same thing on MSNBC over the weekend ("That speech to me was essentially agreeing with President Bush and Vice
President Cheney that we're in this neo-conservative paradigm, that we're at war with a jihadist threat that actually is not a nuisance but the most

there was a lot of

Bush in that speech", as Obama spoke as though we are in a "long-term
ideological struggle in a way that he's not talked about radical Islam before . ..
important threat we're facing today"), while Carnegie Mellon Professor Kiron Skinner on the same show said that "
George W.

where he's going will take him away from his liberal base."

AT: Framework

2AC - Framework
1. We meet: The plan is a statement of the desirability of the plan
implementation by the government.
2. We arent extra-topical Normal means includes justifications and
clarifications of policy-maker intent

Duke Law School 2011 [http://www.law.duke.edu/lib/researchguides/fedleg]

documents created by the legislature during the process of
the laws passage. This material often becomes valuable later, when disputes arise from
vague or ambiguous statutory language. Although some courts disapprove of using such "extrinsic evidence" to clarify the meaning of a law, the
sheer volume of legislation in recent years has resulted in an increasing reliance on
The "legislative history" of a particular law consists of all the

legislative history, particularly in the federal court system. Today there is an abundance of legislative history material published for most federal statutes. All legislative history materials
have only persuasive legal authority, although courts consider certain types of documents to be more persuasive than others. Normally, the reports of the congressional committees that
considered the proposed legislation and recommended its enactment are considered the best source for determining the intent behind a law. Other documents generated prior to

statements made

in legislative debate

enactment include
on the floor of Congress
, statements or testimony at committee hearings,
and earlier or alternative versions of the bill. Statements made and reports written after enactment are usually found to be less persuasive, and are not considered part of the "legislative
history". This guide should serve as an introduction to the basic documents and procedures for researching the legislative history of a federal law. Resources available at the Goodson
Law Library as well as the Perkins/Bostock Library Public Documents & Maps Department are highlighted. II. Getting Started All current general and permanent federal legislation in force
is codified in the U.S. Code, which is available in the Law Library's Stevens Federal Alcove (Level 3), as well as online through LexisNexis, Westlaw, and the Government Printing Office's
FDsys site. The language of each Code section is based on the original act that created it and any later laws that amended it. To compile a complete legislative history for a current
federal law, it is necessary to locate the documents related to both the creating act and any later amendments. To begin the process, it is helpful to locate as much as possible of the
following information for each act: its Public Law (or chapter) number; its location in the U.S. Statutes at Large (Federal Alcove; Documents AE 2.111); the date of enactment; the number
of the House or Senate bill that was enacted. The Public Law number and Statutes at Large citation are easily found with the text of the codified language in the official U.S. Code. This
information may also be found in the two commercial versions of the Code which are shelved in the Federal Alcove (U.S. Code Annotated, also available in Westlaw; and U.S. Code
Service, also available in Lexis). Each edition of the Code also provides a short note explaining how the amendments changed the existing text. Prior to 1957, each act was given a
separate chapter number in the Statutes at Large. Later laws are identified and cited by individual Public Law numbers and by their volume and page location in the Statutes at Large,
e.g.: ch. 347, 61 Stat. 516 (1947) Pub. L. No. 96-374, 94 Stat. 1367 (1980) Although it is increasingly easier to find material with only the Public Law number or Statutes at Large location,
much information in the official records of Congress is indexed and organized around the bill number. The bill number for a law enacted since 1903 can be found with its text in the
appropriate volume of the Statutes at Large. Bill numbers are also published with the full text of the act in U.S. Code, Congressional & Administrative News (USCCAN) (1941- present)
(Federal Alcove; also available on Westlaw). For very recent acts, bill numbers are included with the slip law (a pamphlet version of the new law, which serves as the official version until
the next compilation of Statutes at Large is published). Slip laws are available in the Federal Alcove and full-text via FDsys. Bill numbers for earlier laws can be most easily found through
the tables in Eugene Nabors, Legislative Reference Checklist: The Key to Legislative Histories from 1789-1903 (1982) (Ref.KF49.L43). They can also be found through the indexes and
tables of the Congressional Record and its predecessors (see section V, part B, for more information on the Congressional Record). III. Compiled Legislative Histories Considerable
research time can be saved if a legislative history has already been compiled for the law in question. Compiled legislative histories are of two types: those assembled for selected laws
by previous researchers, and those issued on a regular continuing basis by commercial sources. Available compilations of the first type are listed by Public Law number and by Statutes
at Large location in Nancy P. Johnson's Sources of Compiled Legislative Histories: A Bibliography of Government Documents, Periodical Articles, and Books (Ref.KF49.J63 and HeinOnline's
U.S. Federal Legislative History Library), which includes materials dating back to the 1st Congress. Most sources listed by Johnson provide the actual texts of legislative history
documents (with many available in the library's book collection); some are journal articles or other sources that provide only citations to relevant documents. Hein's Federal Legislative
History Title Collection includes online versions of compiled legislative history publications for a wide variety of laws, making it an excellent starting point for legislative history research.
Current members of the Duke Law community have access to have access to various legislative history databases on Westlaw, which compiles the legislative history documents for a
number of major laws. Its FED-LH database includes PDFs of legislative histories compiled by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, beginning in 1915. This database provides a
comprehensive and searchable collection of documents related to a particular Public Law number, including alternate versions of bills which did not become the final law. Westlaw's
Arnold & Porter Legislative Histories collection includes compiled legislative histories for many major federal statutes. A complete list can be accessed in Westlaw by searching the
Directory for arnold and porter. Westlaw also includes PDFs of legislative histories compiled by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, beginning in 1915 (FED-LH database).
LexisNexis offers similar compiled legislative histories for important laws, particularly in the areas of treasury appropriations and environmental protection. A complete list may be
accessed by following the path: Legal > Legislation & Politics, U.S. & U.K. > U.S. Congress > Legislative Histories. The Law Librarians' Society of Washington, D.C. (LLSDC) indexes
Legislative Histories of Selected U.S. Laws on the Internet as part of its Legislative Sourcebook. The site points to compiled legislative histories in Lexis, Westlaw, HeinOnline, the
Department of Commerce, and other sources. Two other legislative history services that are no longer published are the CIS Legislative History Service, published only for the 97-98th
Congresses (1981-84) (Microforms Room) and the Information Handling Service (IHS) Legislative Histories Microfiche Program, that covered selected major laws enacted between the 82d
and 93d Congresses, and internal revenue laws back to the 61st (Microforms Room). As noted below, however, since 1984 the annual compilation of the CIS basic set contains a separate
volume of Legislative History. IV. Researching Recent Laws (1970 - present) When researching recent laws (generally 1970-present), online resources have greatly simplified the process
of locating legislative history documents. The Library of Congress provides free Bill Summary & Status information for the 93rd Congress forward (1973-present), as part of its THOMAS
government information service. This site links users to the text of legislation as well as related bills, amendments, and committee documents. The "All Congressional Actions" portion is
useful for determining what legislative history materials exist for a particular law, and will link to any available reports and debates (generally 1994-present). Current members of the
Duke University community also have access to other legislative history resources. ProQuest Congressional is the online counterpart to Congressional Information Service (CIS). CIS is an
index/abstract service and full-text microfiche publisher of congressional documents (print Index/Abstracts in Federal Alcove, Level 3; microfiche in Microforms Room, Level 1). CIS
provides detailed and highly specific subject indexing of congressional publications. The CIS index found in ProQuest Congressional is also available in the Law School's LexisNexis as the
CIS/Historical Index database, or CISHST. Tips for searching the print volumes are below. From 1970-83, the print service's annual Abstracts volume contains a table of legislative history
information for all laws passed that year. The table is arranged by public law number, and provides citations to bills, reports, hearings and dates of consideration on the floor of each
house. References are given to each document's CIS accession number (e.g., S183-4), which provides access to its CIS abstract or to the microfiche text. (Note: The microfiche service
does not include the text of the Congressional Record. However, the dates cited can be used to locate debates in both the daily and permanent editions of the Record.) Beginning in
1984, the CIS annual cumulation includes a volume of Legislative History of U.S. Public Laws, which provides detailed references and abstracts for documents accompanying significant
laws. Although the basic CIS service (and the Legislative History tables) goes back only to 1970, the publisher has also developed a number of retrospective indexes of congressional
publications, some of which are discussed in later sections of this guide. For pre-1970 laws, or if CIS publications are not available, it is a more complicated process both to determine
whether useful documents exist and where they can be located. The rest of this guide discusses research procedures for several common types of legislative history material. V. Locating

the most persuasive sources of legislative history are the written reports that
accompany a bill from committee to consideration on the floor of the House or Senate. This is because committee reports are written to explain
the proposal, as well as its intended effects, by the legislators who looked at the bill most closely. Normally, there are
Specific Document Types A. Committee Reports Usually

separate House and Senate reports available for each enacted law, as well as a conference report if the final language was developed by a conference committee of legislators from both
chambers.

3. Counter-interpretation: Affirmatives are responsible for their

discourse and the desirability of the plan.
Resolved means To determine or decide in purpose; to make ready in mind; to fix; to
settle; as, [s/]he was resolved by an unexpected event,
That was Websters 96 [Webster's revised unabridged dictionary, 1996,
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=resolved]*GENDER MODIFIED

should (DUTY) auxiliary verb used to express that it is necessary, desirable, advisable, or
important to perform
the action of the following verb
That was Cambridge Dictionary of American English, 07
(http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=should*1+0&dict=A)

4. Ground: Defending discourse increases negative critique ground

and counter-advocacies. That ground outweighs because its the
most relevant we can control how we speak about the world well
before we can implement policy.
AND, well always defend links to the plan, which means they still
get the same positions.
5. The aff is an impact turn to their education claims terrorism
policy is performative and cant be reduced to instrumental
implementation in a vacuum. Hegemonic knowledge formations
delineate the boundaries of acceptable truths in favor of elite
interests. Challenging these discursive structures is necessary to
prevent the endless violence and destruction caused by the war on
terror thats De Graaf and Jackson
6. Agency DA their interpretation is incapable of questioning the
broader structures that drive policymakers to war. That limits the
scope of policy and defers responsibility for action, which means
their education is bad.

Burke, Professor of Politics and International Relations in the University of New South Wales 2007 [Anthony,
Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence, and Reason, Theory and Event, vol. 10.2]
My argument here, whilst normatively sympathetic to Kant's moral demand for the eventual abolition of war,

war is not an enduring historical or

a neutral and rational instrument of policy -- that it is rather
the product of hegemonic forms of knowledge about political action and
community -- my analysis does suggest some sobering conclusions about its power as an idea and formation.
militates against excessive optimism.86 Even as I am arguing that
anthropological feature, or

Neither the progressive flow of history nor the pacific tendencies of an international society of republican states will

violent ontologies I have described here in fact dominate the conceptual and
policy frameworks of modern republican states and have come, against everything Kant hoped
save us. The

for, to stand in for progress, modernity and reason. Indeed what Heidegger argues, I think with some credibility, is
that the enframing world view has come to stand in for being itself. Enframing, argues Heidegger, 'does not simply
endanger man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is...it drives out every other possibility of
revealing...the rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a
more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth. What I take from Heidegger's
argument -- one that I have sought to extend by analysing the militaristic power of modern ontologies of political

the challenge is posed not merely by a few

varieties of weapon, government, technology or policy, but by an
overarching system of thinking and understanding that lays claim to our
entire space of truth and existence. Many of the most destructive features of
contemporary modernity -- militarism, repression, coercive diplomacy, covert
intervention, geopolitics, economic exploitation and ecological destruction -existence and security -- is a view that

derive not merely from particular choices by policymakers based on their

particular interests, but from calculative, 'empirical' discourses of scientific
and political truth rooted in powerful enlightenment images of being. Confined
within such an epistemological and cultural universe, policymakers' choices become
necessities, their actions become inevitabilities, and humans suffer and die.
Viewed in this light, 'rationality' is the name we give the chain of reasoning which
builds one structure of truth on another until a course of action, however
violent or dangerous, becomes preordained through that reasoning's very
operation and existence. It creates both discursive constraints -- available choices
may simply not be seen as credible or legitimate -- and material constraints that derive from the
mutually reinforcing cascade of discourses and events which then preordain militarism and violence as necessary
policy responses, however ineffective, dysfunctional or chaotic. The force of my own and Heidegger's analysis does,
admittedly, tend towards a deterministic fatalism. On my part this is quite deliberate; it is important to allow this
possible conclusion to weigh on us. Large sections of modern societies -- especially parts of the media, political
leaderships and national security institutions -- are utterly trapped within the Clausewitzian paradigm, within the
instrumental utilitarianism of 'enframing' and the stark ontology of the friend and enemy. They are certainly
tremendously aggressive and energetic in continually stating and reinstating its force. But is there a way out? Is
there no possibility of agency and choice? Is this not the key normative problem I raised at the outset, of how the
modern ontologies of war efface agency, causality and responsibility from decision making; the responsibility that
comes with having choices and making decisions, with exercising power? (In this I am much closer to Connolly than
Foucault, in Connolly's insistence that, even in the face of the anonymous power of discourse to produce and limit
subjects, selves remain capable of agency and thus incur responsibilities. 88) There seems no point in following
Heidegger in seeking a more 'primal truth' of being -- that is to reinstate ontology and obscure its worldly
manifestations and consequences from critique. However we can, while refusing Heidegger's unworldly89 nostalgia,
appreciate that he was searching for a way out of the modern system of calculation; that he was searching for a
'questioning', 'free relationship' to technology that would not be immediately recaptured by the strategic,
calculating vision of enframing. Yet his path out is somewhat chimerical -- his faith in 'art' and the older Greek
attitudes of 'responsibility and indebtedness' offer us valuable clues to the kind of sensibility needed, but little

When we consider the problem of policy, the force of this analysis suggests that choice
and agency can be all too often limited; they can remain confined (sometimes quite wilfully) within
the overarching strategic and security paradigms. Or, more hopefully, policy choices could aim to
bring into being a more enduringly inclusive, cosmopolitan and peaceful logic
of the political. But this cannot be done without seizing alternatives from
outside the space of enframing and utilitarian strategic thought, by being
aware of its presence and weight and activating a very different concept of
existence, security and action.
more.

[With extra time]

7. The aff is the best of both worlds in the terrorism context.

Endorsing policy while critically interrogating knowledge solves
their education offense but avoids the risk of co-option.

Jackson et al., professors of International Politics at

2007

Aberystwyth University,
[Richard, The
Case for a Critical Terrorism Studies, paper delivered for 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science
Association, August 30 September 2, http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/handle/2160/1945/APSA-2007Paper-final2.pdf?sequence=1]
[Note: CTS = Critical Terrorism Studies]
At the heart of any critical project lies the notion of emancipation, however implicitly it is conceived. The
challenge is that contending critical schools approach emancipation in different ways. Some denounce it as too
implicated in grand meta-narratives and normative projects, including past and not so past, (neo)-colonial
projects.49 Yet, an increasing number of critical voices have observed that all critical projects derive from an
underlying conception of a different order.50 Even some of those most critical of the term, notably Derrida, have
(re)-embraced the notion.51 To be critical, it seems, one has to have some normative notion of what is wrong and
how things should be different. This need not involve a predetermined blueprint of utopia; indeed, such a blueprint
is anathema to contemporary conceptions of critical. Rather, critical scholars typically acknowledge the nonexclusivity and revisability inherent to any normative position. 52 If emancipation is central to the critical project,
we would argue that CTS cannot remain policy-irrelevant without belying its emancipatory commitment. It has to

The challenge of CTS

is to engage policy-makers as well as terrorists and their communities
and work towards the realization of new paradigms, new practices and the
transformation of political structures. That, after all, is the original meaning of the notion of
move beyond critique and deconstruction to reconstruction and policy-relevance.53

immanent critique. Striving to be policy-relevant does not mean that one has to accept the validity of the term
terrorism or stop investigating the political interests behind it. Nor does it mean that all research must have
policy-relevance or that one has to limit ones research to what is relevant for the state, since the critical turn
implies a move beyond state-centric perspectives. End-users could, and should, include both state and non-state
actors, as long as the goal is to combat both the use of political terror by actors and the political structures that

However, engaging policy-makers raises the thorny issue of cooption. One of the fears of critical scholars is that by engaging with policymakers, either they or their research become co-opted, whether through governments
encourage its use.

(ab)using independent research findings for their own ends, allowing ones research to be overly shaped by the
agendas of major grant-awarding bodies, or by gradually coming to uncritically adopt the perspectives and values
of policy-makers. A more intractable problem is the one highlighted by Rengger that the

demand that
theory must have a praxial dimension itself runs the risk of collapsing critical
theory back into traditional theory by making it dependent on instrumental
conceptions of rationality.54 A related problem is that by becoming embedded in existing power
structures, one risks reproducing existing knowledge structures or inadvertently
contributing to counter-terrorism policy that uncritically reifies the status
quo. Such dilemmas have to be confronted and debated; non-engagement is not an
option. Engagement is facilitated by the fact that as counterterrorism projects
flounder, advisors to policy-makers are increasingly eager for advice, even
when it is critical. For obvious reasons, embedded terrorism scholars and traditional
think-tanks have enjoyed a much closer relationship with policy-makers, allowing
them both more institutionalized and more direct access. This is partly structural, since critical studies have been

Critical scholars have also at

times unnecessarily burned bridges by issuing blanket condemnations of all
things associated with the state, whilst failing to engage with the public safety obligations of the
seen as inherently adversarial towards existing power structures.

authorities, and the challenges terrorism poses to such safety. Critical scholars cannot indulge in the unilateral
demonizing of all state actors, at the same time as arguing against the comprehensive demonizing of all
terrorists. Simply because a piece of research originates within RAND does not automatically invalidate it;
conversely, a study emanating from a critical scholar is not inherently superior. Just as Fred Halliday critiqued those
who privileged voices from the South as somehow more authentic, critical scholars must guard against either

critical
scholars have to think carefully about how to engage with the status quo and
centres of power without losing critical distance. The establishment of dedicated critical
privileging terrorist voices or uncritically dismissing state or state-related actors.55 In sum,

journals, seminars and conferences which actively seek to engage policy-makers is one way forward, as are
collaborative efforts with traditional conferences already habitually attended by policy-makers. The creation of
dedicated research centers and think-tanks which strive to hold these tensions in balance may similarly be

Engaging policy-makers is not the only way forward; engaging terrorists and
In the age of the
blog, alternative news websites and transnational grassroots activism, CTS
must be at the forefront of broadening the spectrum of discourses and
making space for counter-hegemonic accounts. It can do this at universities over the past
necessary.

suspect communities, as well as civil society actors more generally, is equally important.

four and a half years, over 600 students have been exposed to critical perspectives on terrorism at Aberystwyth
University alone.

This can also be achieved through participative research partnerships with

publicly challenging new laws or directives, as some have already

suspect communities, or through

begun to do.

1AR Framework Cede the Political

They cede the political terrorism policy requires beginning from
normative concerns, not just implementation and problem-solving.

Jackson, Professor in International Politics at Aberystwyth University, 9 [Richard, The Study of Terrorism
after 11 September 2001: Problems, Challenges and Future Developments, POLITICAL STUDIES REVIEW: 2009 VOL
7, 171184, http://www.olympiaseminars.org/2012/readings/Cycle_C/Jackson_Study%20of%20Terrorism.pdf]

Terrorism studies has its theoretical and institutional origins in orthodox security studies and counterinsurgency studies (Burnett and Whyte, 2005, pp. 113). Much of the fields early output has been
described as counterinsurgency masquerading as political science (Schmid and
Jongman, 1988, p. 182). Consequently, much terrorism research adopts state-centric
priorities and perspectives and tends to reproduce a limited set of
assumptions and narratives about the nature, causes and responses to
terrorism. From this perspective, it can be described as an exemplary form of problemsolving theory (Gunning, 2007a). As Robert Cox suggests, problem-solving theory takes
the world as it finds it, with the prevailing social and power relationships and the
institutions into which they are organised, as the given framework for action, and then
works to make these relationships and institutions work smoothly by dealing
effectively with particular sources of trouble (Cox, 1981, pp. 1289). Importantly,
problem-solving theory does not question the extent to which the status quo
the hierarchies and operation of power and the inequalities and injustices thus generated is implicated in
the very problem of non-state terrorism and other forms of subaltern violence. It
is partly for these reasons that the vast majority of terrorism research takes for granted
that terrorism is a social problem in need of a solution and attempts to
provide policy-relevant advice for governments, an orientation that has greatly intensified since
2001. It is in this context that Giuseppe Nesis (2006) edited volume, International Cooperation in CounterTerrorism,
provides an informative and at times illuminating overview of current international attempts to respond to the
challenges of non-state terrorism.While much of the book adopts a state-centric approach which assumes for
example that international terrorism imperils the entire fabric of the international community (Gioia, 2006, p. 21)
and several of the chapters are not much more than descriptions of recent resolutions, conventions and measures
by particular international organisations, it also has moments of genuine insight and import for the broader field. In
particular, the analysis does much to illuminate how current state-centric understandings of terrorism have evolved
over many decades from initial attempts to outlaw practices such as the assassination of heads of state during the
anarchist campaign of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also clearly reveals the ways in which

states have attempted to proscribe terrorism while simultaneously allowing

certain non-state actors to engage in violent liberation struggles. The
recognition of legitimate insurgency by liberation movements has consequently remained one of
the primary obstacles to the realisation of a comprehensive counter-terrorism treaty and is the reason
why the United States is unlikely ever to extradite anti-Castro terrorists to
Cuba to stand trial, for example (Gioia, 2006, p. 16). One of the most important issues tackled in
Nesis book is the question of state terrorism, even though it is not a primary intention of the volume. Several of the
chapters demonstrate how there have been numerous international efforts to outlaw systematic terrorism by
states during wartime, including measures adopted at the ends of both the First and Second World Wars (Paust,
2006, p. 30). The International Military Tribunal of Nuremberg, for example, directly condemned the Nazi policy of
terror (Arnold, 2006, p. 127). At the same time, the analysis also makes clear that states have continuously
attempted to define terrorism in ways that would exclude their own actions from the relevant treaties and
instruments of international counter-terrorism, often by excluding activities insomuch as they are governed by
other rules of international law (Gioia, 2006, p. 17). Nesis book is also useful for revealing the ways in which
international organisations and jurists have attempted to criminalise terrorism (see ch. 2), in opposition to the
efforts of the great powers to rewrite it as a serious issue of national security (thereby legitimising the use of
military force as a primary means of response). It is telling that the term war on terrorism is largely absent from
the book, replaced instead by the phrase the fight against terror (Nesi, 2006, p. xi). In the end, and perhaps

terrorism is first and foremost a social

and political construction, negotiated between powerful actors in specific
historical circumstances for particular purposes. On the basis of this review, it can be
argued that recognition of the fundamental ontological uncertainty of what
terrorism actually is should be at the heart of counter-terrorism research, as
should the acceptance that counter-terrorism itself can all too easily cross the line into state terrorism. It seems
clear that a great many policies of the war on terror, such as the systematic use of
torture, strategic bombing in Afghanistan and Iraq, extra-judicial killings, disappearances and
the maintenance of internment camps at Guantnamo Bay, have crossed the line from
legitimate defensive measures to state terrorism. As such, they have become justifications
for further acts of non-state terrorism such as the 7 July 2005 bombings in London. In such a context,
terrorism scholars require a heightened critical normative sensitivity to such
distinctions in order to provide a more balanced analysis of contemporary counterterrorism efforts and perhaps better advice for government agencies. What is
disturbing about much of the recent counter-terrorism literature including Nesis book in parts is that
so little attention is paid to these normative issues and that the essential
critical attitude is conspicuous by its absence
without realising it, the book reveals the extent to which

AT: Cap

Perm Solvency
The perm solves best class analysis on its own is too reductionist.
Combining both methods is best able to address the complexities of
the war on terror.

Herring, Professor of International Politics at the University of Bristol, 2008 [Eric, Critical terrorism
studies: an activist scholar perspective, Critical Studies on Terrorism,1:2, 197 211]

Those who do historical materialist analysis generally do not do security

studies. This is mainly for political reasons, in that they see it overwhelmingly as a field which serves primarily as an instrument of class
domination, and for intellectual reasons, in that the concept of security is seen as a relatively unsatisfying one for theorising about world politics. The
problem with this approach is that students new to security studies will effectively, even if
unintentionally and despite Booths assertion to the contrary, be guided to the conclusion that they have
little to learn from historical materialism and do not need to think about class
and capitalism. Path dependency roads more and less travelled will operate in a powerful way. For example, the Approaches to Security
section of the first edition of the Collins Contemporary Security Studies (2007) textbook effectively sets out security studies as involving choices between
a traditional state-centric realist-liberal framing, a discursive-constructivist critical framing, or one focused thematically on peace studies, gender,
securitisation, or human security. Marxism is discussed briefly in the traditional approaches chapter which is structured around realism and liberalism. The

critical terrorism studies

lessons for the emergent field of

are clear. Bringing the state back into terrorism studies is valuable, but
not enough what is required is a class analysis of the state and terrorism, one that is historically specific to the changing dynamics of capitalist
globalisation, and one which considers the ways that terrorism can be a tactic of all sides in class conflict, rather than just a tactic of a subordinate class.

would also provide it with a way of

describing, explaining, and challenging Northern state terrorism, because it would frame it in terms of the
extent to which it is functional for shoring up or challenging exploitative relations which favour
capital over labour. The good news is that the work of scholars such as Stokes (2005, 2006)
and Blakeley (2007, forthcoming) is leading the way, building on the work of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, and
ensuring that critical terrorism studies has a major strand which puts the
discursive and ideological into the context of US-led capitalist globalisation and
Such a perspective would distinguish it sharply from mainstream terrorism studies up to now. It

associated class relations. Bringing class back in begs the question of what one means by class, of course. This is a huge question far beyond the scope of

while class has an important economic dimension, it is

not reducible to economics with the non-economic separate and secondary . As
this article. What can be said here is that

Overbeek (2004, p. 3) puts it: Class is a broad and inclusive concept that refers to the situation of human beings in the social relations through which they
produce and reproduce their existence, and by which they are in turn constituted as social beings. These social relations of (re-)production are hierarchical
and exploitative. They are furthermore guaranteed by the state: in the era of the dominance of capitalist social relations, they are guaranteed by the

A whole host of related issues must be addressed, such as how

capitalist state.
many
classes there are, how distinct they are, how movement occurs between them, the extent to which and the ways in which classes are antagonistic, how

particular social formations are stabilised through means such as class compromises compared with the
threat or use of coercive means such as terrorism, the relationships between classes and elites (i.e.
social and agentic concentrations of power of whatever kind), how classes are organised within and across states, how they can be united on some things

The class role that terrorism plays

may be functional or dysfunctional and driven by complex interaction of
fractions of classes and elites (subnational, national, transnational), and progressive or reactionary
opposition. States may tolerate or promote progressive developments such as a move from dictatorship to liberal democracy. A class analysis
and divided on others, and how those divisions may be objective or perceptual.

would expect in general terms that this will occur only when ruling class power is not threatened or where it simply lacks sufficient power to prevent those
developments. Consideration will also need to be given to understanding when and how forces such as nationalism, ethnicity, religion, or sect can be the

A guard must also be maintained against a

tendency often associated with historical materialist perspectives of
undervaluing liberal democracy and other often progressive aspects of
liberalism. Bringing class back in does not mean class reductionism:
terrorism is not all about class. The point being made here is the rejection of the implicit assumption that class has nothing
primary dynamic shaping resort or non-resort to terrorism.

to do with terrorism, including Northern state terrorism, or only plays a role in class rebellion from below. By Northern states, I mean industrial and postindustrial capitalist ones. They may be liberal democratic or authoritarian, although they are overwhelmingly in the former group. Hence, it is not a
geographical category, as such states can be located in the southern hemisphere (such as Australia). By Southern states, I mean those with low levels of
industrial and post-industrial capitalist development. The North is more or less a post-Cold War synonym for Western, though with the obvious
qualification that there is no non-capitalist East with which it is struggling for the political, military, and economic allegiance of a Third World. Instead, the

United States is trying to balance its own interests, with keeping the other Northern democratic states on board while engaging with the structural shift
associated with Chinas increasingly global version of authoritarian Northern capitalism. The North and the Global North are frequently used as
synonyms (the latter being the trendy version): the problem with this approach is that the phrase Global North is useful to encapsulate the fact that
within Northern states substantial elements of society are part of the Global South, defined as those which are marginal to advanced capitalism,
impoverished and policed, or just ignored. Their poverty, hunger, ill health, and shortened life spans can be witnessed across the world. Equally, within
Southern states there are substantial elements of society which are part of the Global North, defined as those which are deeply integrated into advanced
capitalism, wealthy, and on behalf of which the Global South is policed, securitised, and if necessary repressed. The people of the Global North and Global
South correspond roughly to Duffields (2007) categories of insured and uninsured or surplus life (for an application to post-invasion Iraq, see Herring,
forthcoming). As such, it is above all a class rather than a geographical distinction, or a distinction between types of state. Within this system, terrorism
can be a means of capital accumulation by violent and intimidatory dispossession, opposition to it, or part of a bid to take part in it. Nevertheless,

the

world is structured and stratified around multiple inequalities and critical

terrorism studies needs to be attentive to what they are and how they relate
to the use and non-use of terrorism. A particularly important inequality which
critical terrorism studies ought to challenge is the operation of the categories
of worthy and unworthy victims.

Link AT: Cuba

Their link is incorrect Cuba can be subject to globalization without
succumbing to neoliberalism. Even if industry investment increased,
anti-neoliberal resistance would not be doomed.

Shreve, Executive Articles Editor at the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, 2012 [Heather, .D.
Candidate, 2012, Indiana University Maurer School of Law, Harmonization, But Not Homogenization:
The Case for Cuban Autonomy in Globalizing Economic Reforms, Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, Volume
19, Issue 1, Winter 2012]

Globalization in today's world no longer requires homogenization; Cuba does not

need to either adopt a neoliberal or Maoist version of economics to globalize.
Instead, it can remain Marxist-Leninist while entering into the global economy.
Just as neoliberal policies are not the [End Page 386] only concept of globalization, as seen in China, so too Chinese
Maoism is not the only alternative form of globalization. The fundamental differences between China and Cuba are
vastfor example, the focus of the Cuban reform differs from that of the Chinese,131 the decision by Cuban
officials to shun Chinese "market socialism"132 in favor of limited Communist reforms,133 and the histories and

Cuba presents a different story of globalization

one of a nation, rather than making an ideological change without regard to
outside circumstances, instead shifting policies out of necessity and the need
to survive in a changed world. Moreover, Cuba's story of globalization is one of a nation attempting
to limit negative effects of globalization. Cuba, while symbolically isolated for the last sixty
years, was not immune from globalizationthe country's resistance wreaked havoc upon the
economic and social growth of the nation. Instead, Cuba, as a global actor, reconfigures
itself to retain power in its new model of global engagement. And yet, Cuba's
decision to gradually reform economic policies is not made in isolation ; while
cultures of the two countries differ.134

Ral Castro certainly makes the decisions, many of these decisions have already been made for Cuba by a
globalized world. Upon review,

Cuba will retain its ideological goals without completely

compromising or adhering to the other forms of governancethis is what
globalization means, the permeation of even the most historically uncompromising country and the harmonization
of certain key ideas and practices embraced by the rest of the world. Moreover, it shows that globalization does not
stop with market-based or neoliberal governance; instead, as Deng Xiaoping stated, "[ The]

[m]arket can

also serve socialism."135 Although Cuba certainly will stop [End Page 387] short of embracing market
socialism, it is engaging economic globalization as a global actor.136 The state can carve out niches for
globalization; however, the question remains how Cuba and other states can limit the undesirable aspects of
globalizationhere, the neoliberal partswhile benefitting from the harmonization of globalization.

And, removing Cuba from the list would not open it up to enough
trade to trigger the link

Burns, Adjunct Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, 13 [Clif, U.S. May Be Considering
Dropping Cuba from Terrorist Country List, Export Law Blog, Feb 21, http://www.exportlawblog.com/archives/4732]

If you think that the removal of Cuba from the list will permit unlicensed
exports of food, medicine and agricultural goods to Cuba, think again. Although section 7205 of
the Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act of 2000 (TSRA) does indeed impose a
license requirement on shipments of these goods to state sponsors of terrorism, it also
directly imposes that restriction on TSRA exports to Cuba. So a license will
still be required even if Cuba is removed from the list. Section 40 of the Arms
Export Control Act prohibits granting licenses for the export of items on the
United States Munitions List to state supporters of terrorism. So there is a

theoretical possibility, I suppose, that if Cuba is removed from the list, the arms
embargo against Cuba might also be lifted. Right. When pigs fly. Then we have
Section 6(j) of the now-defunct Export Administration Act as allegedly extended in force by various executive
orders. That provision requires that certain licenses for exports of goods on the
Commerce Control List to state sponsors of terrorism be notified to Congress.
Since licenses for CCL items are rarely granted in any event for Cuba, and
seem unlikely to be granted even if Cuba is removed from the list, this
doesnt seem to an area in which Cubas removal would have much impact. In
sum, removal of Cuba from the list seems largely symbolic and with little
practical effect. At most, it could presage a liberalization of the embargo down the road, particularly if the
current Cuban government gnaws on this bone a little rather than simply regarding it with disdain.

Link AT: Reformism Bad

Their links are a fantasy. Actual movements against neoliberalism
require pragmatic issues to organize around, not abstract
revolutions.

Harvey

David
, Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York,
(The Enigma of Capital, and the crises of capitalism 224-228)

2010

that there is no way that an anti

-capitalist social order can be constructed without seizing state power,
radically transforming it and reworking the constitutional and institutional
framework that currently supports private property, the market system and
endless capital accumulation. Inter-state competition and geoeconomic and geopolitical struggles
The co-revolutionary theory laid out earlier would suggest

over everything from trade and money to questions of hegemony are also either far too significant to be left to local
social movements or cast aside as too big to contemplate. How the architecture of the state-finance nexus is to be
reworked, along with the pressing question of the common measure of value given by money, cannot be ignored in
the quest to construct alternatives to capitalist political economy. To ignore the state and the dynamics of the interstate system is therefore a ridiculous idea for any anti-capitalist revolutionary movement to accept. The fourth

all the social movements that are not so much guided by

any particular political philosophy or leanings but by the pragmatic need to
resist displacement and dispossession (through gentrification, industrial
development, dam construction, water privatisation, the dismantling of social
services and public educational opportunities, or whatever). In this instance
the focus on daily life in the city, town, village or wherever provides a
material base for political organising against the threats that state policies
and capitalist interests invariably pose to vulnerable populations. Again, there is a
broad trend is constituted by

vast array of social movements of this sort, some of which can become radicalised over time as they come to
realise more and more that the problems are systemic rather than particular and local. The bringing-together of
such social movements into alliances on the land (like the landless movement in Brazil or peasants mobilising
against land and resource grabs by capitalist corporations in India) or in urban contexts (the right to the city
movements in Brazil and now the United States) suggest the way may be open to create broader alliances to
discuss and confront the systemic forces that underpin the particularities of gentrification, dam construction,

Driven by pragmatism rather than by ideological

preconceptions, these movements nevertheless can arrive at systemic
understandings out of their own experience. To the degree that many of
them exist in the same space, such as within the metropolis, they can (as
supposedly happened with the factory workers in the early stages of the
industrial revolution) make common cause and begin to forge, on the basis of
their own experience, a consciousness of how capitalism works and what it is
that might be done collectively. This is the terrain where the figure of the 'organic intellectual' leader, made so
privatisation or whatever.

much of in the early twentieth -century Marxist writer Antonio Gramsd's work, the autodidact who comes to understand the world
first hand through bitter experiences, but shapes his or her understanding of capitalism more generally, has a great deal to say. To
listen to the peasant leaders of the MST in Brazil or the leaders of the anticorporate land grab movement in India is a privileged

In this instance the task of the educated discontented is to magnify

the subaltern voice so that attention can be paid to the circumstances of
exploitation and repression and the answers that can be shaped into an anticapitalist programme.
education.

Impact AT: Root Cause

Challenging the politics and ontology of security outweighs anticapitalism. The hostile relationship to Otherness at the heart of the
War on Terror cannot be fully explained by capitalism.

Burke, Professor of Politics and International Relations in the University of New South Wales, 2006
[Anthony, Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence, pp. 129-134]

True, neo-liberal globalisation tends to deconstruct the boundaries of the

nation-state, but not its ontology. Consider the genesis of Empire after the
Second World War. Rigid, fear-soaked ontologies of Cold War anticommunism, combined with massive military expenditures, levels of
strategic confrontation and internal repression, were central to the vast movement of US, European and Asian accumulation from 1950 to 1989. A
rigid and coercive division between democracy and communism, between
Self and Other, was then fed into a Hegelian discourse of development and
progress where the Other ideally dissolved into the Same.34 Such ontologies continued in Southeast Asia beyond that, through to the Cambodian
settlement and the fall of Suharto, when they were partially dismantled through the (very limited) liberalisation of Indonesian politics and the
normalisation of relations with Vietnam (which did admittedly occur in tandem with new imperial movements of foreign capital into the socialist markets
of Vietnam and China). For a period, which we can date from the early 1990s until 11 September 2001, a global binary confrontation fractured into more

the Persian Gulf War, the Balkans, Chechnya, the first Intifada, civil war in
Cambodia and Burma, repression of the Kurds and Tibetans, East Timor and Aceh, the 1998 riots in Indonesia. Surely
these conflicts were proof that modern sovereignty and its vicious, securityobsessed ontology was not passing. Nor was modern sovereignty unrelated to the continuing reliance of capital on
strong states for stability, the control of labour, and the security of mines and oil fields. Now, the great binary
confrontation has returned between freedom and terror, civilisation and evil which
local and regional confrontations:

draws in wider and wider sections of the global polity and reinforces modern sovereignty in the worst way. Hardt and Negris analysis here rests, I suspect,
on having swallowed the democratic peace theory whole, refracted via Fukuyamas end of history: sovereign power, they assert, will no longer
confront its Other and no longer face its outside, but rather will progressively expand its boundaries to envelop the entire globe as its domain.35 Where
Fukuyama divided the world between the developed post-historical world (where democratic peace would reign) and the historical world (where war and
conflict continue), Hardt and Negri describe a world of minor and internal conflicts. The history of imperialist, inter-imperialist and anti-imperialist wars is
over they say; there are only civil wars, police actions, a proliferation of minor and indefinite crises . . . an omni-crisis.36 This tends to diminish the
destructive power of the minor and indefinite crises they cite, both in terms of scale, loss of life and political importance, and with them the theoretical
trajectories that are most able to challenge them. While they do briefly acknowledge the import of postmodern theorising in the discipline of IR, they still
(mistakenly) regard it as trapped in a death-struggle with modern sovereignty, despite their earlier admission that such scholarship strive[s] to challenge
the sovereignty of states by deconstructing the boundaries of the ruling powers, highlighting irregular and uncontrolled international movements and
flows, and thus fracturing stable unities and oppositions.37 National Deconstruction, David Campbells study of the interpenetration of sovereignty and
conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina, for example, starkly illustrates the dangers of assuming sovereigntys passage or irrelevance. There he shows how purist
discourses of sovereignty and territorial identity both drove ethnic cleansing and crippled international responses. In turn, his attempts to critically rethink
sovereignty and democracy, via Derridean deconstruction and Levinasian ethics, provide invaluable tools for preventing such a disaster from ever
reoccurring. Two-hundred thousand dead, UN humiliation, instability in Yugoslavia and the Kosovo war were the legacies of the very violent, and
thoroughly contemporary, perseverance of sovereignty in a crisis that was far from minor.38 The theoretical double-movement that asserts the
disappearance of modern sovereignty from reality, and the obsolescence of anti-modernist thought as a political guidepost, has two effects that must be
interrogated. First, it imagines a new kind of political subject, the multitude, which can hopefully mimic and subvert the same deterritorialising movement
of capital without succumbing to it; and, second, it enforces the new description of rule, Empire, as the most pressing political task. Yet we can
reasonably ask whether this subject is so ripe for fruition, or whether the continued operation of modern technologies of sovereignty and identity might

we can ask whether in order to liberate the

multitude we need to continue to critique and fight modern sovereignty, to fight its
not be in danger of crippling its emergence; likewise

hold on subjectivity, its violence, and its complex enabling relationship with global capital. Only then can we begin to grapple with the irony William

the more global capital becomes, the more aggressive the state is
with respect to citizen allegiances and actions.39 In short, the teleological
metaphor is the wrong one. We need instead to think in terms of a
strategic coexistence of imperial and modern ontology whose objectives are somatic and
Connolly identifies:

spatial: the control and production of bodies, land and space as a necessary (but not always umbilical) adjunct to the flow and exploitation of capital.
Tactical sovereignty: post-Suharto Indonesia Contemporary Indonesia certainly provides one of the most stark examples of the work of Empire, but it is
also an example of the contemporary perseverance of sovereignty. Pressed to open its capital markets during the 1990s, and long influenced by the liberal
development advice of the World Bank (which chaired the aid consortium the Consultative Group on Indonesia), tens of billions of short-term capital
flooded in during the 1990s, much of which was channelled into property and sharemarket speculation and the corrupt business practices of the Suharto
family and other cronies. Such capital account liberalisation, with its complex interrelationship with currency speculation, corruption and political crisis,
was a major factor in the terrible financial crash of 19978.40 In the wake of this Asian crisis, the IMF grossly infringed the sovereignty of the Indonesian
state with detailed programmes that amount to indirect control of its entire economic policy. We could be forgiven, in the face of this, for thinking
sovereignty was passing. The IMF simultaneously demanded and utilised that same sovereignty as it forced the Indonesian state to bail out insolvent
private banks assuming liability for their bad loans, the often worthless piles of assets and the crippling responsibilities of debt service. Such debts
incurred through IMF bail-out packages and the issue of bonds to insolvent banks now reached US$154 billion, and required 51 per cent of the national
budget in servicing amid forced reductions in subsidies and spending on health and education.41 The bailout also helped Indonesias corrupt elite by
socialising their burden of debt, and quarantining assets in the Indonesian Bank Restructuring Authority (IBRA) which has since been the subject of an

unseemly struggle to prevent assets being sold in the hope that they can be shifted minus the debt they originally secured back to their former
owners.42 Needless to say, this has caused enormous hardship and misery, and further disenfranchised an already marginalised population. We may
wonder whether sovereignty in such contexts is less a secure ontological container, or a stable site of political agency and authority, than a strategic
handhold for power abrogated here, incited there, deployed, evaded and reinvented within a struggle over who can seize and shape its myriad
administrative, economic, cultural, spatial and political potentials. Here is a symptom of the loss of economic autonomy and authority that was assumed to
attach to sovereignty, but also of its continuity as an enabling juridical structure for both domestic and transnational capital; sovereignty as a site of
tactical contest not only between classes and social groups, but between corporations and sectors of capital itself. The imperial sovereignty exercised by
the IMF on behalf of Western banks and investors depends on the modern sovereignty of states, which continues to perform a significant channelling,
policing and legalising function both of capital and labour. This has been recognised by scholars of international political economy, who emphasise the
enabling role of the state in the creation of that most profound symptom of Empire, the liberalisation of global finance. Susan Strange argues that markets
exist under the authority and permission of the state, while Jeffrey Frieden tellingly reminds us that political consent made the global financial integration
of the past thirty years possible.43 Indonesia is also an example of a central paradox of the contemporary crisis of sovereignty: the way in which the
(often wilful) loss of economic autonomy is matched by an insistence on repressive, territorial images of national integrity, security and identity. As
Connolly argues, while political movements, economic transactions, environmental dangers, security risks, cultural communications, tourist travel, and
disease transmission increasingly acquire global dimensions, the state retains a tight grip over public definitions of danger, security, collective
identification and democratic accountability.44 Even through its democratic transition, Indonesia still plays out a politics of security directed against a
variety of threatening Others who in the past have taken myriad forms: the Chinese victims of the 1998 riots, the ungrateful Catholics of East Timor, the
Christians of Maluku, the West Papuans or the Acehnese. While there have been, admittedly, laudable efforts to promote greater autonomy for some
regions, the harsh security approach of the Indonesian military (TNI) still perseveres. The TNIs sponsorship of militia violence in East Timor led to
massive destruction and international intervention; nearly 1,000 civilians have died in Aceh since 1999, and the military has even been implicated in the
religious violence in Maluku.45 This ironic situation was starkly demonstrated by two events in late 2001: within two weeks the Indonesian parliament
passed a new autonomy law for West Papua and the indigenous leader Theys Eluay was killed by the Indonesian special forces command, Kopassus. In
August 2002, repeating the political double-take of the year before, the Indonesian military issued an ultimatum for the Acehnese resistance movement to
accept an autonomy package and abandon independence or risk firmer military action. Their deadline? The 7 December anniversary of the invasion of
East Timor.46 Indonesia, the state that haemorrhages its sovereignty to the global market, simultaneously asserts its national integrity with increasing
harshness. As it does so it performs, more and more abjectly, its failure to imagine a different form of politics, a different form of coexistence, a different
model of identity than that which must always appropriate and grasp the otherness of the unknown. As Levinas asks: My being-in-theworld or my place
in the sun . . . have these not also been the usurpation of spaces belonging to the other man who I have already oppressed or starved . . . are they not
acts of repulsing, excluding, exiling, stripping, killing?47 This, for me, raises an issue of political priority. What is more dangerous, the fluid grasp of capital
or the violent ontology of modernity? Could they not form a common and intertwined danger? Neoliberal sovereignty: security and the refugee The
coercive reassertion of sovereignty amid its imperial corrosion is not confined to Third World national security states recently emerging from dictatorship;
it is visible, in not unconnected ways, in developed states as well. At the beginning of the twenty-first century this has most clearly emerged in the travail
of the asylum seeker. Attitudes and policies towards asylum seekers have been hardening for over a decade, in Britain, continental Europe and the United
States. Anxieties over the integrity of physical borders (when borders to capital have been all but removed) are increasing, and policy is moving to match
such anxieties in the face of a long-standing body of international law and new regional institutions like the European Convention on Human Rights.48 This
has been most pronounced in Australia, where a neo-liberal government has been championing economic globalisation while instituting ever more
repressive policies of mandatory detention, restrictions to legal process, and military operations to repel boats. Australias policy became world news in
August 2001 with the crisis over the Norwegian ship the Tampa, which CNN compared with the Voyage of the Damned; however, controversy over
beatings, protests, self-mutilation, suicide and psychological trauma in many detention centres had been developing for some time.49 At the general
election in November 2001, the Howard government also drew on historical and racial anxieties about fears of invasion and Anglo-Celtic cultural integrity
to retain office. Its policies drew on and developed those previously deployed by the United States against Cuban and Haitian refugees. Flows of asylum
seekers became militarised and securitised, transformed into a threat not only to the state but to the security and identity of the host society.50 The

demonisation of the Other, the Stranger, and their incarceration and punishment for simply being noncitizens, is part of the general apparatus of governmentality and biopower intrinsic to
modern sovereignty; but one deployed now as a way of managing resentful publics and controlling global flows. If, as McKenzie Wark argues, migration is

The repressive
reassertion of sovereignty against the refugee is utterly bound up with the dissolution of
sovereignty in neo-liberal economic restructuring, and its insistence on permanent mass unemployment;
globalisation from below, its repressive securitisation aims to preserve the privileges of globalisation from above.51

a perfect way for neo-liberal governments to evade responsibility for the palpable hardship and insecurity experienced by the losers of globalisation at
home and abroad. This is a wilful displacement of the permanent and irreducible postmodern uncertainty analysed by Zygmunt Bauman, for which neoliberalism bears so much responsibility: the troubled context for John Howards promises to provide Australians with a sense of security and home, a

This, to me, contradicts Hardt and Negris

insistence that the transcendence of modern sovereignty . . . conflicts with the immanence of capital, and questions their traditionally Marxian
insistence on capitalist power as the major focus for resistance and political
action. (Their insistence on the primacy of the terrain of production and the development of posthuman forms of labour power is a kind of
postmodern echo of the statement in the Communist Manifesto that the history of all society up to now is the history of class struggles.)53 Rather
I would insist on the historical interrelationship of modernity, bio-power,
sovereignty and capital (as Foucault suggested more than once); on their interrelationship as problems, and on modernitys
important status as a unique focus for critical politics. Modernity not as a time but as a political
formation which brings not just the repression and alienation of labour but detention centres, prisons, death camps, ethnic cleansing, counterrepressive and futile panacea for the globalisation-induced upheaval he deems so necessary.52

insurgency, nuclear weapons and killing at a distance.54 I write here from a disciplinary situation. For the critical international theorist, sovereignty as a
political problem occurs not merely through its abrogation or its passage towards Empire, but through the persistence of its central normative status in

in strategy and statecraft sovereignty remains

associated with inherently violent images of security and identity that draw
constant sustenance from the poisonous soil of modern ontology . Such facts underlie, for
international relations. This is not merely nostalgia

example, Jim Georges appeal for serious critical reflection upon the fundamental philosophical premises of western modernity.55 Just as neoliberal
states collude in the construction of Empire, they continue to insist on the ontological primacy of the state and its monopoly on the legitimate use of force,
a monopoly which variously imprisons and expels refugees, incarcerates African-Americans, dispossesses indigenous people and runs counterinsurgency operations against that most sinister threat to the nation the movement for secession. A malign contemporary force to Hobbess founding
conditions for the survival of the State: Concord, Health; Sedition, Sickness; and Civill war, Death.56 As I have argued throughout this book, in such a
context, security ironically rests on the necessity of the insecurity and suffering of the Other.

Warfare, killing and

conict are often driven less by the imperatives of capitalism

(present

though they often are)

than by the logic of an ontology that refuses to coexist

with otherness and seeks an absolute solution to the threat of its

existence . This is as true of the Howard governments deterrence of asylum seekers through detention and military expulsion, as it is of the
more openly violent strategy of the Israeli state when faced with Palestinian violence and demands for justice. Such images of
security weld together ontological necessity, positivist epistemology, realist
morality and an instrumental image of technology in the hope of realising the
modern dream of what Levinas called the absolute correlation between knowledge and
being.57 This time has not passed, it is not in twilight; it enables and
coexists with Empire, thwarts its temporal pull, and generates its own
political urgency that is both a part of and additional to the necessary work
against capitals global sovereignty.

Alt Fails Cede the Political

No alternative solvency challenging the construction of terrorism
requires the creative use of policy-relevant mechanisms. Blanket
condemnations fail.

Jackson et al., professors of International Politics at

2007

Aberystwyth University,
[Richard, The
Case for a Critical Terrorism Studies, paper delivered for 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science
Association, August 30 September 2, http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/handle/2160/1945/APSA-2007Paper-final2.pdf?sequence=1]

CTS cannot remain policyirrelevant without belying its emancipatory commitment. It has to move
beyond critique and deconstruction to reconstruction and policy-relevance .53
The challenge of CTS is to engage policy-makers as well as terrorists and their
communities and work towards the realization of new paradigms , new practices and the
transformation of political structures. That, after all, is the original meaning of the notion of
immanent critique. Striving to be policy-relevant does not mean that one
has to accept the validity of the term terrorism or stop investigating the
political interests behind it. Nor does it mean that all research must have policy-relevance
or that one has to limit ones research to what is relevant for the state, since the
critical turn implies a move beyond state-centric perspectives. End-users could, and should, include
both state and non-state actors, as long as the goal is to combat both the
use of political terror by actors and the political structures that encourage its use. However,
If emancipation is central to the critical project, we would argue that

engaging policy-makers raises the thorny issue of co-option. One of the fears of critical scholars is that by engaging

with policy-makers, either they or their research become co-opted , whether through governments (ab)using
independent research findings for their own ends, allowing ones research to be overly shaped by the agendas of
major grant-awarding bodies, or by gradually coming to uncritically adopt the perspectives and values of policymakers. A more intractable problem is the one highlighted by Rengger that the demand that theory must have a
praxial dimension itself runs the risk of collapsing critical theory back into traditional theory by making it dependent
on instrumental conceptions of rationality.54 A related problem is that by becoming embedded in existing power
structures, one risks reproducing existing knowledge structures or inadvertently contributing to counter-terrorism
policy that uncritically reifies the status quo. Such dilemmas have to be confronted and debated; non-engagement
is not an option. Engagement is facilitated by the fact that as counterterrorism projects flounder, advisors to policymakers are increasingly eager for advice, even when it is critical. For obvious reasons, embedded terrorism
scholars and traditional think-tanks have enjoyed a much closer relationship with policy-makers, allowing them both
more institutionalized and more direct access. This is partly structural, since critical studies have been seen as

Critical scholars have also at times

unnecessarily burned bridges by issuing blanket condemnations of all things
associated with the state, whilst failing to engage with the public safety
obligations of the authorities, and the challenges terrorism poses to such
safety. Critical scholars cannot indulge in the unilateral demonizing of all
state actors, at the same time as arguing against the comprehensive
demonizing of all terrorists. Simply because a piece of research originates within RAND does not
automatically invalidate it; conversely, a study emanating from a critical scholar is not inherently superior. Just
as Fred Halliday critiqued those who privileged voices from the South as
somehow more authentic, critical scholars must guard against either
privileging terrorist voices or uncritically dismissing state or state-related
actors.55
inherently adversarial towards existing power structures.

Alt Fails Pragmatism Key

The alternatives demand for political purity only helps capitalism.
Even if they win some risk of a link, we have to begin with the world
we have, not the one we wish we had.

Bryant 12professor of philosophy at Collin College (Levi, Well Never Do Better Than a Politician: Climate
Change and Purity, 5/11/12, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/05/11/well-never-do-better-than-a-politicianclimate-change-and-purity/)

However, pointing this out and deriding market based solutions doesnt get us very far . In fact,
such a response to proposed market-based solutions is downright
dangerous and irresponsible . The fact of the matter is that 1) we currently live in a market
based world, 2) there is not, in the foreseeable future an alternative system on the horizon, and 3),
above all, we need to do something now . We cant afford to reject interventions
simply because they dont meet our ideal conceptions of how things should be. We
have to work with the world that is here, not the one that we would like to be here . And here
its crucial to note that pointing this out does not entail that we shouldnt work for producing that
other world. It just means that we have to grapple with the world that is actually there
before us. It pains me to write this post because I remember, with great bitterness, the diatribes hardcore Obama supporters leveled against
legitimate leftist criticisms on the grounds that these critics were completely unrealistic idealists who, in their demand for purity, were asking
for ponies and unicorns. This rejoinder always seemed to ignore that words have power and that Obama,

through his
profound power of rhetoric, had, at least the power to shift public debates and frames,
opening a path to making new forms of policy and new priorities possible. The tragedy
was that he didnt use that power, though he has gotten better. I do not wish to denounce others and dismiss their claims on
these sorts of grounds. As a Marxist anarchists, I do believe that we should fight for the creation of an alternative
hominid ecology or social world. I think that the call to commit and fight, to put alternatives on the table, has been one of the most
powerful contributions of thinkers like Zizek and Badiou. If we dont commit and fight for alternatives those alternatives will never appear in the
world. Nonetheless,

we still have to grapple with the world we find ourselves in . And it is

here, in my encounters with some Militant Marxists, that I sometimes find it difficult to
avoid the conclusion that they are unintentionally aiding and abetting the very things they
claim to be fighting. In their refusal to become impure, to work with situations or
assemblages as we find them, to sully their hands, they end up reproducing the

very system they wish to topple and change. Narcissistically they get to sit there,
smug in their superiority and purity, while everything continues as it did before because
theyve refused to become politicians or engage in the difficult concrete work of
assembling human and nonhuman actors to render another world possible. As a consequence, they occupy
the position of Hegels beautiful soul that denounces the horrors of the world, celebrate the beauty of
their soul, while depending on those horrors of the world to sustain their
own position . To engage in politics is to engage in networks or ecologies of relations between humans and nonhumans. To
engage in ecologies is to descend into networks of causal relations and feedback loops that you cannot completely master and that will modify
your own commitments and actions. But theres no other way, theres no way around this, and we do need to act now.

Alt Fails Rejection Not Enough

Lack of specific action means the alt will fail

Jones 11Owen, Masters at Oxford, named one of the Daily Telegraph's 'Top 100 Most Influential People on the Left' for 2011,
author of "Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class", The Independent, UK, "Owen Jones: Protest without politics will change
nothing", 2011, www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/owen-jones-protest-without-politics-will-change-nothing-2373612.html

Today, as protesters in nearly a thousand cities across the world follow the example
set by the Occupy Wall Street protests, it's worth pondering what happened to the anti-globalisation
movement. Its activists did not lack passion or determination. But they did lack a
coherent alternative to the neo-liberal project. With no clear political direction,
the movement was easily swept away by the jingoism and turmoil that
followed 9/11, just two months after Genoa. Don't get me wrong: the Occupy movement is a glimmer of sanity amid today's economic madness. By descending on the
West's financial epicentres, it reminds us of how a crisis caused by the banks (a sentence that needs to be repeated until it becomes a clich) has been cynically transformed into a crisis of
public spending. The founding statement of Occupy London puts it succinctly: "We refuse to pay for the banks' crisis." The Occupiers direct their fire at the top 1 per cent, and rightly so
as US billionaire Warren Buffett confessed: "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." The Occupy movement has provoked
fury from senior US Republicans such as Presidential contender Herman Cain who predictably labelled it "anti-American". They're right to be worried: those camping outside banks

But a coherent alternative to the tottering

global economic order remains, it seems, as distant as ever. Neo-liberalism
crashes around, half-dead, with no-one to administer the killer blow. There's always a presumption that a
threaten to refocus attention on the real villains, and to act as a catalyst for wider dissent.

crisis of capitalism is good news for the left. Yet in the Great Depression, fascism consumed much of Europe. The economic crisis of the 1970s did lead to a resurgence of radicalism on

This time round, there

d oesn't even seem to be an alternative for the right to defeat . That's not
both left and right. But, spearheaded by Thatcherism and Reaganism, the New Right definitively crushed its opposition in the 1980s.

the fault of the protesters. In truth,

the left has never recovered from being virtually smothered out

of existence . It was the victim of a perfect storm: the rise of the New Right; neoliberal globalisation; and the repeated defeats suffered by the trade union movement. But, above
all, it was the aftermath of the collapse of Communism that did for the left . As US neo-conservative Midge Decter triumphantly
put it: "It's time to say: We've won. Goodbye." From the British Labour Party to the African National Congress, left-wing movements
across the world hurtled to the right in an almost synchronised fashion. It was as though the left wing of the global political
spectrum had been sliced off. That's why, although we live in an age of revolt, there
remains no left to give it direction and purpose.

Alt Fails Totalizing

Total rejection of capitalism fragments resistance the perm solves
best
J.K. Gibson-Graham, feminist economist, 96, End of Capitalism
One of our goals as Marxists has been to produce a knowledge of capitalism. Yet as that which is known,

Capitalism has become the intimate enemy. We have uncloaked the

ideologically-clothed, obscure monster, but we have installed a naked and
visible monster in its place. In return for our labors of creation, the monster
has robbed us of all force. We hear and find it easy to believe that the left is in disarray. Part of
what produces the disarray of the left is the vision of what the left is arrayed against. When capitalism is
represented as a unified system coextensive with the nation or even the
world, when it is portrayed as crowding out all other economic forms, when it
is allowed to define entire societies, it becomes something that can only be
defeated and replaced by a mass collective movement (or by a process of systemic
dissolution that such a movement might assist). The revolutionary task of replacing
capitalism now seems outmoded and unrealistic, yet we do not seem to have
an alternative conception of class transformation to take its place. The old political
economic systems and structures that call forth a vision of revolution as systemic replacement still seem to be
dominant in the Marxist political imagination. The New World Order is often represented as political fragmentation
founded upon economic unification. In this vision the economy appears as the last stronghold of unity and
singularity in a world of diversity and plurality. But why cant the economy be fragmented too? If we theorized it as
fragmented in the United States, we could being to see a huge state sector (incorporating a variety of forms of
appropriation of surplus labor), a very large sector of self-employed and family-based producers (most
noncapitalist), a huge household sector (again, quite various in terms of forms of exploitation, with some
households moving towards communal or collective appropriation and others operating in a traditional mode in

If capitalism
takes up the available social space, theres no room for anything else. If
capitalism cannot coexist, theres no possibility of anything else. If
capitalism functions as a unity, it cannot be partially or locally replaced. My
intent is to help create the discursive conception under which socialist or
other noncapitalist construction becomes realistic present activity rather
than a ludicrous or utopian goal. To achieve this I must smash Capitalism
and see it in a thousand pieces. I must make its unity a fantasy, visible as a denial of diversity and
which one adult appropriates surplus labor from another). None of these things is easy to see.

change.

Alt Fails Transition Wars

And, capitalist elites will resist, causing global war

Harris, Atlanta Writer, in 2

[Lee, Policy Review, December, p3(13) The intellectual origins of America-

Bashing]

if capitalism
produces no widespread misery, then it also produces no fatal internal
contradiction: If everyone is getting better off through capitalism, who will
dream of struggling to overthrow it? Only genuine misery on the part of the
workers would be sufficient to overturn the whole apparatus of the capitalist
state, simply because, as Marx insisted, the capitalist class could not be
realistically expected to relinquish control of the state apparatus and, with it,
the monopoly of force. In this, Marx was absolutely correct. No capitalist society
has ever willingly liquidated itself, and it is utopian to think that any ever
will. Therefore, in order to achieve the goal of socialism, nothing short of a
complete revolution would do; and this means, in point of fact, a full-fledged
civil war not just within one society, but across the globe.
This is the immiserization thesis of Marx. And it is central to revolutionary Marxism, since

Alt AT: Neolib Uniqueness

Neoliberalism is not declining in Latin America Its ourishing.

Petras, professor of sociology at Binghamton University, 2010 [James, Latin America: Roads to 21st
Century Capitalist Development, http://www.lahaine.org/petras/b2-img/petras_roads.pdf]

Over the better part of the present decade, Latin American stock markets have boomed. Overseas investors
have reaped and repatriated billions in dividends, profits and interest payments. Multi-national
corporations have piled into mining, agro-business and related sectors,
unimpeded and with virtually no demands by local regions for technological
transfers and environmental constraints. Latin American regimes, have accumulated
unprecedented foreign currency reserves to ensure that foreign investors have unlimited access to hard currencies

The decade has witnessed unprecedented political and social

demobilization of radical social movements. Regimes have provided political
and social protection for foreign and national investors as well as long term
guarantees of private property rights. Nary a single regime in the region, with the unique
to remit profits.

exception of Venezuela, has reverted the large scale privatizations of strategic economic sectors implemented by

the concentration and centralization of

fertile lands has continued with no pretense of land or income redistribution
on the policy agenda. While bankers, and investors, overseas and nationals, celebrate the economic
previous neo-liberal regimes in the 1990s. In fact

boom and more importantly express their positive appreciation by investing billions in the region, leftist pundits
claim to find a resurgent left and write of one or another version of 21st century socialism. In particular many
prominent and widely published Euro-American progressives and leftists intellectuals and pundits have badly served

Commentaries based on jet flyovers provide glowing

reports of Latin Americas march to the left and national independence. Such
accounts lack any empirical, historical, analytical or statistical foundation.
their followers and readers.

Writers as diverse as Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Wallerstein, who have never conducted any field research below the Rio
Grande at any time or for that matter consulted major investors reaping billions in todays Latin America have
become instant experts on the social and political nature of the regimes, the state of the social movements and
current economic policies. It seems as if Latin America is fair game for any and all Western leftist writers who can
echo the political rhetoric of the incumbent regimes. No doubt this secures an occasional official invite but it hardly
serves to clarify the most striking socio-economic features of the current crop of regimes in Latin America and their
sharply defined development strategies. A wealth of data based on extensive field interviews, statistical studies
published by international development agencies, reports by economic consultancies and business and investment
houses, as well as discussions with independent social movement leaders provides ample documentation to argue
that Latin America has taken multiple roads to 21st century capitalism, not socialism or anything akin to it. In fact
one of the great success stories celebrated by the business press, is the marginalization of socialist politics, the
general acceptance of globalization by the leaders of the political class (from the center-left rightward) and the
de-radicalization of the intellectual/academic elite who wage battle against neo-liberal phantoms while providing
populist legitimization for the politicians of 21st century capitalism. Twenty-First Century Capitalism: Continuities
and Changes Investors, speculators, multinational corporations and trading companies from Asia, Europe, North
America and the Middle East have, in recent years found virtue and value in the economic development policies
pursued by recent Latin American leaders. In particular, they applaud the new found political stability and economic
opportunities for long term, high rates of profits. In fact Latin America is looked at as an outlet for profitable
investments surpassing those found in the unstable and volatile markets of the US and EU.

Twenty-first

century capitalism (21C) as we know its operations in Latin America overlaps in some of its major
features with the multiple variants of 20th century capitalism. 21C has embraced the open
market policies of the late 20th century neoliberal model; it has, promoted
agro-mineral exports and importation of finished goods similar to the early
20th century colonial division of labor. It has borrowed from the nationalist
developmental strategy, policies of state intervention to ameliorate poverty,
bailout banks, promote exporters and foreign investors. As in most late and later
developing capitalist countries, the state plays an important role in mediating between

agro-mineral exporters and industrial capitalists (national and foreign) in some of the larger
countries like Brazil and Argentina. Unlike earlier versions of liberal and neo-liberal capitalists which, in the first
instance dissolved pre-capitalist constraints on capital flows and later labor and welfare demands constraining
capitalist exploitation, current heterodox liberal (or post-neoliberal) regimes attempt to harness and co-opt labor
and the poor to the new export strategy. In part, 21st capitalism, can pursue free market and welfare/poverty
policiesbecause of the favorable world market conjuncture of high commodity prices and expanding markets in

Increased activity by the state in regulating capital flows and picking

winners and losers, promoting agro business over small farmers, exporters
and large retail importers over small and medium producers and retailers
highlights the compatibility, indeed the importance, of state interventionism in
sustaining the free market agromineral export model. While some sectors of capital
Asia.

complained about potential deficits and rising public debts resulting from increased state spending on poverty
programs and in raising the minimum wage, in general most capitalist view the current version of statism as
complementary and not in conflict with the larger goals of expanding investment opportunities and capital
accumulation.

AT: DAs

Predictions Fail
Their so-called expert predictions are no better than dart-throwing
monkeys give them zero probability

Gardner and Tetlock 2011

Dan, columnist and senior writer with the Ottawa Citizen, and Philip, Leonore Annenberg University Professor @
UPenn Overcoming Our Aversion to Acknowledging Our Ignorance Cato Unbound 7-11 http://www.catounbound.org/2011/07/11/dan-gardner-and-philip-tetlock/overcoming-our-aversion-to-acknowledging-our-ignorance
The editors may regret that short shelf-life some years, but surely not this one. Even now, only halfway through the year, The World

political turmoil in the Middle East

in 2011 bears little resemblance to the world in 2011. Of the

the
revolutionary movements in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syriawe find no hint in The Economists forecast. Nor do we

the earthquake/tsunami and consequent disasters in Japan or the spillover effects on the viability
Or the killing of Osama bin Laden and the spillover effects for al Qaeda and
Pakistani and Afghan politics. So each of the top three global events of the first half of 2011 were as unforeseen by The
Economist as the next great asteroid strike. This is not to mock The Economist, which has an unusually deep
bench of well-connected observers and analytical talent. A vast array of other individuals
find a word about

of nuclear power around the world.

and organizations issued forecasts for 2011 and none, to the best of our knowledge, correctly predicted the top three global events
of the first half of the year. None predicted two of the events. Or even one. No doubt, there are sporadic exceptions of which were

So many pundits make so many predictions that a few are bound to be

bulls eyes. But it is a fact that almost all the best and brightestin governments,
universities, corporations, and intelligence agencies were taken by surprise. Repeatedly. That is all too
typical. Despite massive investments of money, effort, and ingenuity, our ability
to predict human affairs is impressive only in its mediocrity. With metronomic regularity,
what is expected does not come to pass, while what isnt, does. In the most comprehensive analysis of
expert prediction ever conducted, Philip Tetlock assembled a group of some 280 anonymous volunteers
unaware.

economists, political scientists, intelligence analysts, journalistswhose work involved forecasting to some degree or other. These
experts were then asked about a wide array of subjects. Will inflation rise, fall, or stay the same? Will the presidential election be
won by a Republican or Democrat? Will there be open war on the Korean peninsula? Time frames varied. So did the relative

the experts
made some 28,000 predictions. Time passed, the veracity of the predictions
was determined, the data analyzed, and the average experts forecasts were
revealed to be only slightly more accurate than random guessingor, to put more
harshly, only a bit better than the proverbial dart-throwing chimpanzee. And the
turbulence of the moment when the questions were asked, as the experiment went on for years. In all,

average expert performed slightly worse than a still more mindless competition: simple extrapolation algorithms that automatically
predicted more of the same. Cynics resonate to these results and sometimes cite them to justify a stance of populist know-

Tetlock also discovered that the experts could

be divided roughly into two overlapping yet statistically distinguishable groups. One group would
actually have been beaten rather soundly even by the chimp, not to mention the more formidable extrapolation
algorithm. The other would have beaten the chimp and sometimes even the extrapolation algorithm, although not by a wide
margin. One could say that this latter cluster of experts had real predictive insight, however modest.
What distinguished the two groups was not political ideology, qualifications, access to classified information,
or any of the other factors one might think would make a difference. What mattered was the style of thinking. One group of
experts tended to use one analytical tool in many different domains; they
preferred keeping their analysis simple and elegant by minimizing
distractions. These experts zeroed in on only essential information, and
they were unusually confidentthey were far more likely to say something is
certain or impossible. In explaining their forecasts, they often built up a lot of intellectual momentum in favor of
nothingism. But we would be wrong to stop there, because

their preferred conclusions. For instance, they were more likely to say moreover than however. The other lot used a wide
assortment of analytical tools, sought out information from diverse sources, were comfortable with complexity and uncertainty, and
were much less sure of themselvesthey tended to talk in terms of possibilities and probabilities and were often happy to say
maybe. In explaining their forecasts, they frequently shifted intellectual gears, sprinkling their speech with transition markers such

as although, but, and however. Using terms drawn from a scrap of ancient Greek poetry, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin once
noted how, in the world of knowledge, the fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Drawing on this ancient
insight, Tetlock dubbed the two camps hedgehogs and foxes. The experts with modest but real predictive insight were the foxes. The
experts whose self-concepts of what they could deliver were out of alignment with reality were the hedgehogs. Its important to
acknowledge that this experiment involved individuals making subjective judgements in isolation, which is hardly the ideal
forecasting method. People can easily do better, as the Tetlock experiment demonstrated, by applying formal statistical models to
the prediction tasks. These models out-performed all comers: chimpanzees, extrapolation algorithms, hedgehogs, and foxes But as
we have surely learned by nowplease repeat the words Long Term Capital Managementeven the most sophisticated algorithms
have an unfortunate tendency to work well until they dont, which goes some way to explaining economists nearly perfect failure to
predict recessions, political scientists talent for being blindsided by revolutions, and fund managers prodigious ability to lose
spectacular quantities of cash with startling speed. It also helps explain why so many forecasters end the working day with a stiff
shot of humility. Is this really the best we can do? The honest answer is that nobody really knows how much room there is for
systematic improvement. And, given the magnitude of the stakes, the depth of our ignorance is surprising. Every year, corporations
and governments spend staggering amounts of money on forecasting and one might think they would be keenly interested in
determining the worth of their purchases and ensuring they are the very best available. But most arent. They spend little or nothing
analyzing the accuracy of forecasts and not much more on research to develop and compare forecasting methods. Some even
persist in using forecasts that are manifestly unreliable, an attitude encountered by the future Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow when
he was a young statistician during the Second World War. When Arrow discovered that month-long weather forecasts used by the
army were worthless, he warned his superiors against using them. He was rebuffed. The Commanding General is well aware the
forecasts are no good, he was told. However, he needs them for planning purposes. This widespread lack of curiositylack of
interest in thinking about how we think about possible futuresis a phenomenon worthy of investigation in its own right.
Fortunately, however, there are pockets of organizational open-mindedness. Consider a major new research project funded by the
Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, a branch of the intelligence community. In an unprecedented forecasting
tournament, five teams will compete to see who can most accurately predict future political and economic developments. One of
the five is Tetlocks Good Judgment Team, which will measure individual differences in thinking styles among 2,400 volunteers
(e.g., fox versus hedgehog) and then assign volunteers to experimental conditions designed to encourage alternative problemsolving approaches to forecasting problems. The volunteers will then make individual forecasts which statisticians will aggregate in
various ways in pursuit of optimal combinations of perspectives. Its hoped that combining superior styles of thinking with the
famous wisdom of crowds will significantly boost forecast accuracy beyond the untutored control groups of forecasters who are left
to fend for themselves. Other teams will use different methods, including prediction markets and Bayesian networks, but all the
results will be directly comparable, and so, with a little luck, we will learn more about which methods work better and under what
conditions. This sort of research holds out the promise of improving our ability to peer into the future. But only to some extent,

Natural science has discovered in the past half-century that the

dream of ever-growing predictive mastery of a deterministic universe may
well be just that, a dream. There increasingly appear to be fundamental
limits to what we can ever hope to predict. Take the earthquake in Japan. Once upon a time, scientists
unfortunately.

were confident that as their understanding of geology advanced, so would their ability to predict such disasters. No longer. As with
so many natural phenomena, earthquakes are the product of what scientists call complex systems, or systems which are more

Complex systems are often stable not because there is

nothing going on within them but because they contain many dynamic forces
pushing against each other in just the right combination to keep everything
in place. The stability produced by these interlocking forces can often withstand shocks but even a tiny change
in some internal conditional at just the right spot and just the right moment
can throw off the internal forces just enough to destabilize the systemand the
than the sum of their parts.

ground beneath our feet that has been so stable for so long suddenly buckles and heaves in the violent spasm we call an

Barring new insights that shatter existing paradigms, it will forever be

impossible to make time-and-place predictions in such complex systems. The
best we can hope to do is get a sense of the probabilities involved. And even that is
a tall order. Human systems like economies are complex systems, with all that entails. And bear in mind
earthquake.

that human systems are not made of sand, rock, snowflakes, and the other stuff that behaves so unpredictably in natural systems.

made of people: self-aware beings who see, think, talk, and attempt to
predict each others behaviorand who are continually adapting to each
others efforts to predict each others behavior, adding layer after layer of
new calculations and new complexity. All this adds new barriers to accurate
prediction.
Theyre

Try or Die Bad

Extremely low probabilities should count as zeroeven if theres
some risk, policy decisions cant be justified by vanishingly small
probabilities

RESCHER 3 (Nicholas, Prof of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, Sensible Decisions: Issues of Rational Decision in Personal Choice
and Public Policy, p. 49-50)

there is a systemic disagreement between probabilists working on

theory-oriented issues in mathematics or natural science and decision
theorists who work on practical decision-oriented issues relating to human
affairs. The former takes the line that small number are small numbers and
must be taken into account as suchthat is, the small quantities they actually are. The latter tend to take
the view that small probabilities represent extremely remote prospect and
can be written off. (De minimis non curat lex, as the old precept has it: in human affairs there is no need to bother with trifles.) When
something is about as probable as a thousand fair dice when tossed a thousand times coming up all sixes, then, so it is held, we can pretty well
forget about it as a worthy of concern. As a matter of practical policy, we operate
with probabilities on the principle that when x E, then x = 0. We take the line that in our human dealings
in real-life situations a sufficiently remote possibility canfor all sensible purposesbe
viewed as being of probability zero. Accordingly, such remote possibilities can
simply be dismissed, and the outcomes with which they are associated can
accordingly be set aside. And in the real world people do in fact seem to
be prepared to treat certain probabilities as effectively zero, taking certain
sufficiently improbable eventualities as no long representing real possibilities .
On this issue

Here an extremely improbable event is seen as something we can simply write off as being outside the range of appropriate concern, something we can

P]eoplerefuse to worry about losses

whose probability is below some threshold. Probabilities below the threshold
are treated as though they were zero. No doubt, remote-possibility events
having such a minute possibility can happen in some sense of the term, but
this can functions somewhat figurativelyit is no longer seen as something
that presents a realistic prospect.
dismiss for all practical purposes. As one writer on insurance puts it: [

Negative

Case Advantage 1NC

1 The status quo solves Obama is scaling back the War on Terror
and will prevent its worst excesses.

Bergen, director at the New America Foundation, 5-26-2013 [Peter, also CNN's national security analyst,
Bush's war on terror is over,
http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/24/opinion/bergen-end-of-terror-war]

the most significant aspect of the speech was the president's case that the
war on terror" that has permeated so much of American life
since 9/11 should come to an end. Obama argued that the time has come to redefine the kind of
But

"perpetual wartime footing" and "boundless

conflict that the United States is engaged in: "We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will
define us." This is why the president focused part of his speech on a discussion of the seemingly arcane
Authorization for the Use of Military Force that Congress passed days after 9/11 and that gave Bush the authority to
go to war in Afghanistan against al Qaeda and its Taliban allies. Few, if any, in Congress who voted for the
authorization understood at the time that they were voting for a virtual blank check that has provided the legal
basis for more than a decade of war. It is a war that has expanded in recent years to other countries in the Middle
East and Africa, such as Yemen and Somalia, where the U.S. has engaged in covert military operations against al
Qaeda-affiliated groups. Theoretically, when U.S. combat troops finally withdraw from Afghanistan in December
2014, the authorization should simply expire, and the nation will no longer be at war. After all, once combat
operations are over in Afghanistan, why would you want to keep in place an authorization for a permanent war?

some in Congress who would like to expand the scope of the

Authorization for the Use of Military Force beyond its present parameters to include military
However, there are now

operations against terrorist groups that were not involved in the 9/11 attacks, which could prolong America's wars
indefinitely and add additional terrorist groups to the United States' list of enemies it is at war with. U.S. Sen. Bob
Corker, R-Tennessee, ranking member of the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee, for instance, last

Obama made it quite clear in his

he would oppose such an expansion, saying he hopes instead to "ultimately
repeal the AUMF's mandate. And I will not sign laws designed to expand this mandate further." In short,
Obama intends to end a seemingly endless war. That's because, according to
Obama, "the core of al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan is on the path to
defeat. Their remaining operatives spend more time thinking about their own safety than plotting against us."
On Thursday, Obama asserted (in my view, correctly) that what remains of the
terrorist threat, while significant and persistent, is nothing on the scale of the al Qaeda
organization that launched the 9/11 operation and instead consists of "less capable al Qaeda affiliates, threats to
diplomatic facilities and businesses abroad, homegrown extremists." These threats, the president
further asserted, can be managed by carefully targeted drone strikes overseas and efforts to counter extremist
ideology at home and do not require some kind of broader war. Obama is also looking
to his legacy and the presidents who will follow him and is trying to begin to create the public
consensus and legal framework that will help to ensure that the United States isn't "drawn into
more wars we don't need to fight, or continue to grant presidents unbound powers more suited for
traditional armed conflicts between nation states." Obama clearly hopes to leave office in
2016 as the commander in chief who finally ended America's longest war.
month called for an expansion of the scope of the authorization.
Thursday speech that

2 Terrorist threat construction does not lead to war

Rodwell 5 [Jonathan, PhD Cand. @ Manchester Metropolitan University, Trendy But Empty: A Response to
Richard Jackson, 49th Parallel, Spring, www.49thparallel.bham.ac.uk/back/issue15/rodwell1.htm]

the consequences of the discursive othering are

not necessarily what Jackson would seem to identify. This is a problem consistent through David
On top of this there is the clear problem that

Campbells original work on which Jacksons approach is based[iii]. David Campbell argued for a linguistic process
that always results in an other being marginalized or has the potential for demonisation[iv]. At the same time

Jackson, building upon this, maintains without qualification that the systematic and
institutionalised abuse of Iraqi prisoners first exposed in April 2004 is a direct consequence
of the language used by senior administration officials: conceiving of terrorist
suspects as evil, inhuman and faceless enemies of freedom creates an
atmosphere where abuses become normalised and tolerated[v]. The only problem is that the process of
differentiation does not actually necessarily produce dislike or antagonism. In
the 1940s and 50s even subjected to the language of the Red Scare its
obvious not all Americans came to see the Soviets as an other of their
nightmares. And in Iraq the abuses of Iraqi prisoners are isolated cases, it is not
the case that the U.S. militarily summarily abuses prisoners as a result of language. Surely the massive
protest against the war, even in the U.S. itself, is also a self evident example that the
language of evil and inhumanity does not necessarily produce an outcome
that marginalises or demonises an other. Indeed one of the points of discourse
is that we are continually differentiating ourselves from all others around us
without this necessarily leading us to hate fear or abuse anyone.[vi]
Consequently, the clear fear of the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold
War, and the abuses at Abu Ghirab are unusual cases. To understand what is going on we
must ask how far can the process of inscripting identity really go towards explaining them? As a result at best all
discourse analysis provides us with is a set of universals and a heuristic model.

3 Theyre attacking a strawperson the study of terrorism is

already self-reexive and knowledge about the significance of state
terrorism has not been obscured or subjugated.

Horgan, Psychology Professor at Penn State University, and Boyle, International Relations Professor at
the University of St. Andrews, 2008 [John, also Director of the International Center for the Study of Terrorism at
Penn State, and Michael, also Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, A case
against Critical Terrorism Studies, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 1:1, 51-64]

Jackson (2007c) calls for the development of an explicitly CTS on the basis of
what he argues preceded it, dubbed Orthodox Terrorism Studies. The latter,
he suggests, is characterized by: (1) its poor methods and theories, (2) its state
centricity, (3) its problemsolving orientation, and (4) its institutional and
intellectual links to state security projects. Jackson argues that the major defining
characteristic of CTS, on the other hand, should be a skeptical attitude towards accepted terrorism knowledge.

An implicit presumption from this is that terrorism scholars have laboured for all of
these years without being aware that their area of study has an implicit bias,
as well as definitional and methodological problems. In fact, terrorism scholars are not only
well aware of these problems, but also have provided their own searching
critiques of the field at various points during the last few decades (e.g. Silke 1996, Crenshaw 1998, Gordon
1999, Horgan 2005, esp. ch. 2, Understanding Terrorism). Some of those scholars most associated with
the critique of empiricism implied in Orthodox Terrorism Studies have also engaged
in deeply critical examinations of the nature of sources, methods, and data in the study of terrorism.
For example, Jackson (2007a) regularly cites the handbook produced by Schmid and Jongman (1988) to support his
claims that theoretical progress has been limited. But this fact was well recognized by the authors; indeed, in the
introduction of the second edition they point out that they have not revised their chapter on theories of terrorism

from the first edition, because the failure to address persistent conceptual and data problems has undermined
progress in the field. The point of their handbook was to sharpen and make more comprehensive the result of
research on terrorism, not to glide over its methodological and definitional failings (Schmid and Jongman 1988, p.
xiv). Similarly, Silkes (2004) volume on the state of the field of terrorism research performed a similar function,
highlighting the shortcomings of the field, in particular the lack of rigorous primary data collection. A non-reflective
community of scholars does not produce such scathing indictments of its own work. One might counter that the
problem is in fact that scholars of terrorism are not sufficiently self-critical in the theoretically informed way that

there are certainly instances of scholars working in

terrorism studies who appear to be unaware or less than critical of their
theoretical foundations or who do not frame their criticisms in theoretically informed language. But it
is not the case that the critiques offered by CTS on this point are novel;
critics have attacked scholarship on terrorism for its bias and silences long
before critical theory was imported into its study, and further some of the
most trenchant criticisms of terrorism studies come without the language
and assumptions of critical theory (George 1991, Mueller 2006, respectively).3 Overstating the
CTS aims to be. And of course,

problem-solving dimension of terrorism studies Another critique of terrorism studies derives from the general
critique of the influence of problem-solving theory in terrorism studies (Gunning 2007b). The argument here, and
deriving from Cox, is that terrorism studies tends to take the world as it is, rather than challenging its foundations of
social and political order, and forsakes efforts to find ways of applying scholarly knowledge to relieving the burdens
of those oppressed by unjust social and political structures (Cox 1981, p. 129). In other words,

the charge is

that the study of terrorism has a predominant status quo bias, which leads it to focus
on how to solve problems for those in power, at the expense of emancipation. The mode of thinking of terrorism
studies is thus dominated by instrumental rationality, to the detriment of reflective approaches and interdisciplinary
research. We believe this is overstating the case. Like much of political science, the study of terrorism
has been influenced by the logic of problem-solving theory and includes a strong dose of instrumental rationality.

to imply that all those working within an empirical tradition of research in

terrorism studies do not challenge the status quo, or suggest uncomfortable
truths to those in power, is misleading. Many of the serious scholars who work in this field are
But

sympathetic to the normative goals that CTS scholars espouse, and are unafraid to speak truth to power when

terrorism scholars do not hesitate to tell governments

bluntly that unpopular certain foreign policy choices (such as the US invasion of Iraq or the
Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza) generate terrorism, and that addressing
pervasive economic and social inequalities is an essential part of counterterrorism.4 In fact, in a 2004 Open Letter to the American People, over 700 security studies scholars in the
needed. For example, many

USA and elsewhere signed their names to a case which included the following: We judge that the current American
policy centered around the war in Iraq is the most misguided one since the Vietnam period, one which harms the
cause of the struggle against extreme Islamist terrorists. One result has been a great distortion in the terms of
public debate on foreign and national security policy-an emphasis.

4 No Impact the War on Terror wont escalate because the public

eventually resists fear-mongering

Weinberg and Eubank, both Professors of Political Science at the University of Nevada Reno,
2008 [Leonard and William, Problems with the critical studies approach to the study of terrorism, Critical
Studies on Terrorism, 1:2, 185-195]
To be more specific about the intention of democratic governments to exaggerate the terrorist threat as a means of

Spanish examples. In the latter

instance, the 11 March 2004 commuter train bombings occurred four days before the countrys
national elections. The government of Jose Maria Aznar sought to manipulate Spanish
voters by blaming the Basque group ETA for the attacks, even though the government had evidence
that an Islamist group was responsible. Aznar and his Popular Party lost the elections when
news of its deliberate deceit reached the public (Jordan and Horsburgh 2007). In the US, the
Bush Administration raised its standing in the polls and helped the President achieve re-election in 2004
enhancing their popularity, we ought to consider the American, British, and

by stressing the threat of terrorism. But linking the war on terrorism to the invasion of
Iraq has proven to be a long-term disaster so far as Bushs popularity is
concerned. He is likely to leave office with the lowest standing in the polls of
recent US presidents. He may even help drag the Republican Party down to defeat in the coming
elections. In Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blairs unpopular decision to participate in the
Iraqi invasion, as part of the struggle against global terrorism, hardly enhanced
his popularity. In short, the deliberate exaggeration of the terrorist threat and the
stimulation of widespread fear in the public may bring short-term benefits to
incumbents, but the cases we have described suggest it is not likely to be sustainable in
the long-run.
5 Theyre simply romanticizing Cuba. The designation is not
arbitrary because Cuba has consistently supported terrorism
throughout its history no internal link.

Suarez, International Secretary for the Cuban Democratic Directorate, 10 [John, Why is Cuba on the state
sponsors of terrorism list?, Jan 5th, http://cubanexilequarter.blogspot.com/2010/01/why-cubas-dictatorialgovernment-is-on.html]

The University of Miami's Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies in 2004 published a
chronology of Cuban government involvement in terrorism covering between 1959 and
2003. For example, their report lists how in 1970 the Cuban government published
the "Mini Manual for Revolutionaries" in the official Latin American Solidarity Organization (LASO)
publication Tricontinental, written by Brazilian urban terrorist Carlos Marighella, which gives precise
instructions in terror tactics, kidnappings, etc. and translated into numerous
languages which were distributed worldwide by the Cuban dictatorship. There is a
chapter on terrorism: Terrorism is an action, usually involving the placement of an explosive or firebomb of great destructive power,
which is capable of effecting irreparable loss against the enemy. Terrorism requires that the urban guerrilla should have adequate
theoretical and practical knowledge of how to make explosives. The terrorist act, apart from the apparent ease with which it can be
carried out, is no different from other guerrilla acts and actions whose success depends on planning and determination. It is an
action which the urban guerrilla must execute with the greatest calmness and determination. Although terrorism generally involves
an explosion, there are cases in which it may be carried out through executions or the systematic burning of installations, properties,
plantations, etc. It is essential to point out the importance of fires and the construction of incendiary devices such as gasoline
bombs in the technique of guerrilla terrorism. Another thing is the importance of the material the urban guerrilla can persuade the
people to expropriate in the moments of hunger and scarcity brought about by the greed of the big commercial interests. Terrorism
is a weapon the revolutionary can never relinquish. Incidentally an online copy of the above mentioned text is displayed on the

State terrorism and

sponsorship of terrorism is not just an export but has also been used against
Cuban nationals. Government organized lynchings in the 1980 Mariel Crisis would become
known as Acts of Repudiation and used repeatedly up and until the present day with Rapid Response Brigades organized in
1991 to systematize the brutalization and intimidation of Cuban nationals who do not follow the
government line. When Cubans have tried to leave as in the case of the July 13, 1994 tugboat massacre in which
website of fugitive Assata Shakur who fled to Cuba in 1984 for the murder of a police officer.

37 where extrajudicially executed or the murder in international airspace of four members of Brothers to the Rescue, an organization
that provided humanitarian assistance to fleeing rafters blown to bits by Cuban MiGs on February 24, 1996. Both crimes

have

been documented

and reported on. The revolutionary values that inspired Carlos the Jackal continue on today and
have a popular icon, Che Guevara, who at that same 1966 Tricontinental conference made the following call to arms: "We must carry
the war into every corner the enemy happens to carry it: to his home, to his centers of entertainment; a total war. It is necessary to
prevent him from having a moment of peace, a quiet moment outside his barracks or even inside; we must attack him wherever he

The relationship between the Cuban

dictatorship and Middle Eastern groups and regimes organized at the Tricontinental are
profound. Cuba cooperated with Libya in the founding of the World Mathaba, a terrorist movement. This
relationship extended beyond terrorism when 500 Cuban tank commanders participated in the 1973
Yom Kippur war, a surprise attack on Israel, on the Syrian side. The Cuban dictatorship has
may be; make him feel like a cornered beast wherever he may move."

had close relations with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and others in the
Middle East. This led in the 1980s to PLO and Libyan support for the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and in 2010 it is
seen in the close network of alliances between Iran, the PLO, Cuba,
Nicaragua and most visibly with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. In the case of sub-Sahara

Africa the Tricontinental Conference had a major impact according to Sulayman S. Nyang, Professor of African Studies at Howard
University stated before a Congressional Subcommittee: Yet, until the Tricontinental Conference of 1966 in Havana, Cuba, sub-

until the
Havana conference, which declared the justifiability of violence in waging
wars of national liberation, the African liberation movements took the path of
nonviolence to fight for political independence. All this information is publicly
available, but you won't find it in threat assessments prepared by the US
government. Why? Because the author of the last threat assessment is Ana Belen
Montes who worked at the Defense Intelligence Agency but in reality had been working for the Cuban
intelligence service since 1985 until her arrest on September 21, 2001. Not to
Sahara Africa did not witness any major forms of political violence one can now, retrospectively, call terrorism. Up

mention the recent arrest and prosecution of Walter Kendall Meyers who had spied for the Cuban government from within the US
State Department for thirty years.

Case Advantage Extensions

XT: 1 Status Quo Solves

Obamas War on Terror is definitively milder than Bushs even if
its not perfect weve certainly pivoted away from escalating wars.

Corn, Washington bureau chief of Mother Jones magazine, 5-23-2013 [David, Obama's Counterterrorism
Speech: A Pivot Point on Drones and More?, http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/05/obama-speech-dronescivil-liberties]

in his first days in office,

Obama ended the use of torture (a.k.a. enhanced interrogation techniques) and declared his
intention to shut down Guantanamo. (Gitmo remains open, but that's mainly because congressional
White House aides rankle at any comparison to Bush and Cheney. They dutifully note that

Republicans and Democrats thwarted the White House effort to develop a high-security facility in the United States to house the

they have reformed some of the Bush-Cheney policies,

such as the use of military commissions, to justify maintaining these practices. Also, they are not
reluctant to add that Obama did end the war in Iraq and is downsizing the war in
Afghanistan (at a faster pace than then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then-CIA chief David Petraeus urged in 2011).
But much of this defense has tended to get lost as the administration has fired
off drone strikes without acknowledging the individual attacks and has, following in the path of previous administrations,
resisted certain congressional oversight efforts. So Obama's speech Thursday on counterterrorism
policieswhich follows his administration's acknowledgment yesterday that it had killed four Americans (including Anwar alAwlaki, an Al Qaeda leader in Yemen)is a big deal, for with this address, Obama is self-restricting his
use of drones and shifting control of them from the CIA to the military. And the
president has approved making public the rules governing drone strikes. The
New York Times received the customary pre-speech leak and reported: A new classified policy guidance signed by Mr. Obama
will sharply curtail the instances when unmanned aircraft can be used to
attack in places that are not overt war zones, countries like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. The rules
detainees.) And the Obama-ites contend

will impose the same standard for strikes on foreign enemies now used only for American citizens deemed to be terrorists. Lethal
force will be used only against targets who pose "a continuing, imminent threat to Americans" and cannot feasibly be captured,
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a letter to Congress, suggesting that threats to a partner like Afghanistan or Yemen alone
would not be enough to justify being targeted.

These moves may not satisfy civil-liberties-

minded critics on the right and the left. Obama is not declaring an end to indefinite detention or announcing the closing of
Gitmothough he is echoing his State of the Union vow to revive efforts to shut down that prison . Still, these moves
would be unimaginable in the Bush years. Bush and Cheney essentially
believed the commander in chief had unchallenged power during wartime, and
the United States, as they saw it, remained at war against terrorism . Yet here is Obama subjecting the
drone program to a more restrictive set of rulesand doing so publicly. This
is very un-Cheney-like. (How soon before the ex-veep arises from his undisclosed location to accuse Obama of
placing the nation at risk yet again?) Despite Obama's embrace of certain Bush-Cheney practices and his robust use of drones, the
president has tried since taking office to shift US foreign policy from a fixation on terrorism. During his first days in office, he shied
away from using the "war on terrorism" phrase. And his national security advisers have long talked of Obama's desire to reorient US
foreign policy toward challenges in the Pacific region. By handing responsibility for drone strikes to the military, Obama is helping
CIA chief John Brennan, who would like to see his agency move out of the paramilitary business and devote more resources to its
traditional tasks of intelligence gathering and analysis. With this speech, Obama is not renouncing his administration's claim that it
possesses the authority to kill an American overseas without full due process. The target, as Holder noted in that letter to Congress,
must be a senior operational leader of Al Qaeda or an associated group who poses an "imminent threat of violent attack against the
United States" and who cannot be captured, and Holder stated that foreign suspects now can only be targeted if they pose "a
continuing, imminent threat to Americans." (Certainly, there will be debates over the meaning of "imminent," especially given that
the Obama administration has previously used an elastic definition of imminence.) And Obama is not declaring an end to the dicey

But the speech may well mark a

pivot point. Not shockingly, Obama is attempting to find middle ground, where there is more
oversight and more restraint regarding activities that pose serious civil liberties and policy challenges . The McCainiacs
of the world are likely to howl about any effort to place the effort to counter
practice of indefinite detention or a conclusion to the fight against terrorism.

terrorism into a more balanced perspective. The civil libertarians will scoff at
half measures. But Obama, at the least, is showing that he does ponder
these difficult issues in a deliberative manner and is still attempting to steer
the nation into a post-9/11 period. That journey, though, may be a long one.

XT: 2 Threat Construction Wrong

Hostile images of enemies dont lead to the pre-emptive war their
impacts describe

Reiter 95 DAN REITER is a Professor of Political Science at Emory University and has been an Olin postdoctoral fellow in security studies at Harvard Exploring the Powder Keg Myth International Security v20 No2
Autumn 1995 pp 5-34 JSTOR
A criticism of assessing the frequency of preemptive wars by looking only at wars themselves is that this misses the non-events, that is, instances
in which preemption would be predicted but did not occur. However, excluding non-events should bias the results in favor of finding that
preemptive war is an important path to war, as the inclusion of non-events could only make it seem that the event was less frequent.

Therefore, if preemptive wars seem infrequent within the set of wars alone, then this
would have to be considered strong evidence in favor of the third, most skeptical

view of preemptive war , because even when the sample is rigged to make
preemptive wars seem frequent (by including only wars), they are still rare events. Below, a few cases in
which preemption did not occur are discussed to illustrate factors that constrain preemption. The rarity of preemptive wars
offers preliminary support for the third, most skeptical view, that the preemption scenario does
not tell us much about how war breaks out. Closer examination of the three cases of preemption, set forth
below, casts doubt on the validity of the two preemption hypotheses discussed earlier: that hostile
images of the enemy increase the chances of preemption, and that belief in the dominance of the
offense increases the chances of preemption. In each case there are motives for war aside from fear of an imminent attack, indicating that such
fears may not be sufficient to cause war . In addition, in these cases of war the two conditions
hypothesized to stimulate preemptionhostile images of the adversary and belief in the military
advantages of striking firstare present to a very high degree . This implies that these are
insubstantial causal forces , as they are associated with the outbreak of war only when they are present to a very
high degree.

This reduces even further the significance of these forces as

causes of war.

To illustrate this point, consider an analogy: say there is a hypothesis that saccharin causes cancer. Discovering

that rats who were fed a lot of saccharin and also received high levels of X-ray exposure, which we know causes cancer, had a higher risk for
cancer does not, however, set off alarm bells about the risks of saccharin. Though there might be a

relationship between saccharin

consumption and cancer, this is not demonstrated by the results of such a test.

XT: 3 No Knowledge Distortion

The violence of state terrorism has been amply studied their
discursive criticism is too old-hat

Weinberg and Eubank, both Professors of Political Science at the University of Nevada Reno,
2008 [Leonard and William, Problems with the critical studies approach to the study of terrorism, Critical
Studies on Terrorism, 1:2, 185-195]

another critical studies

contention is that conventional terrorism research has tended to ignore or at
least minimise the study of state terrorism. By state terrorism, analysts typically have in mind the use of terror
In making this assertion, we are really taking the argument back a step, because

techniques by a government in order to terrorise its own citizens. This complaint is similar to many others in the social sciences,
where the critic claims a researcher is studying the wrong subject. Rather than study the subject in which the critic has an interest,
he or she is studying some other topic which the critic thinks warrants less attention. Here researchers who write explicitly they are

In fact, the subject

of state terrorism has been studied extensively. Michael Stohl notes that
there is now a considerable body of case study literature which has
documented the use of repression and terrorism by states against their own
populations (Stohl 2003, p. 28). For example, Stohl points out that there is now a considerable body
of work on the state terror of Latin Americas Southern Cone and Central
Americas right-wing regimes of the 1960s and 1970s. The bibliography of a recent book on
studying private groups and organisations are accused of ignoring the right subject: state terrorism.

confessions and efforts at reconciliation of those responsible for state terrorism in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and apartheid South

Even if we leave aside these

episodes in Latin America, we believe few subjects have been studied as
extensively as state terrorism in the 20th century. The Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union in the
Africa, contains by our count 170 entries (Payne 2008, pp. 343351).

1930s, the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in Maos China, Pol Pots Khmer Rouge regime in
Cambodia, and communist regimes in Eastern Europe during the late 1940s and early 1950s have all been the subjects of extensive
investigations (for example, Chaliand and Blin 2007, pp. 197207, Conquest 1968). And whole libraries have been devoted to the
terrorism of the Nazi dictatorship. In light of the vast literature involved, it seems hard to understand exactly what the critics have in
mind when they argue that state terrorism has not received sufficient attention. It obviously involves some guesswork on our part,
but two thoughts come to mind. We have already mentioned the first. The critics make the you are studying the wrong subject
argument. Investigators who say they intend to study terrorist activities of insurgent groups like al-Qaeda are accused of studying
the wrong subject state terrorism which the new critics consider far more important. The second, and by no means a mutually
exclusive possibility, involves the critics own political dispositions. Because of the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay scandals
involving the torture of prisoners, and the rendition of terrorism suspects to countries in the Middle East where they are likely to be
tortured, the US has been engaged in state terrorism on a systematic basis. For the critics, the state terrorism of the American
administration requires far more scrutiny than it has received. The critics level similar charges of state terrorism against other

The willingness of the American and other

democratic governments to employ terror tactics has hardly been ignored. If
we translate state terror to mean serious human rights abuses, such
practices have not gone unnoticed. To cite some examples, such long-time observers of terrorism as Laura
democratic governments (Britain and Israels especially).

Donohue, Paul Wilkinson, and David Cole have written in considerable detail about the abuses of power by American and British
governments (Donohue 2008, Wilkinson 2006, pp. 61102, Cole and Dempsey 2002, Heymann 2003, Holmes 2007, pp. 107127). It
is true their work rarely appears in such conventional terrorism journals as Terrorism and Political Violence and Studies in Conflict
and Terrorism. But the editors of these journals do not pretend them to be anything more than they appear to be journals devoted
to studies of insurgent terrorist groups, and from time to time, the states that provide them with support. Criticising these journals
for their lack of coverage of state terrorism is the equivalent of the you are studying the wrong subject argument. For example, in
the book review sections of professional journals, it is not uncommon to find critics who complain that authors wrote books about
subjects in which they are less interested than some other subjects which, given the critics outlook, merit greater attention. The
reviewers claim the books fail because they are about the wrong subjects.

XT: 4 No Escalation
No escalation studies show the public wont support military
intervention in the name of terrorism

Huddy et al 05(Leonie,DepartmentofPoliticalScienceSUNYatStonyBrookAmer.JournalPoli.Sci.,Vol49,
no3)

ThefindingsfromthisstudylendfurtherinsightintothefuturetrajectoryofsupportforantiterrorismmeasuresintheUnitedStateswhenwe
considerthepotentialeffectsofanxiety.Securitythreatsinthisandotherstudiesincreasesupportformilitaryaction(Jentleson1992;Jentleson
andBritton1998;Herrmann,Tetlock,andVisser1999).Butanxious

respondents were less supportive of

belligerent military action against terrorists, suggesting an important source
of opposition to military intervention. In the aftermath of 9/11, several
factors were consistently related to heightened levels of anxiety and related
psychological reactions,includinglivingclosetotheattacksites(Galeaetal.2002;PiotrkowskiandBrannen2002;Silveret
al.2002),andknowingsomeonewhowashurtorkilledintheattacks(inthisstudy).ItisdifficulttosaywhatmighthappeniftheUnitedStates
wereattackedagaininthenearfuture.Basedonourresults,itisplausiblethata

future threatoractualattackdirectedatadifferent
geographicregionwould broaden the number of individuals directly affected by
terrorism and concomitantly raise levels of anxiety. This could, in turn, lower
support for overseas military action.Incontrast,intheabsenceofanyadditionalattackslevelsofanxietyare
likelytodeclineslowlyovertime(weobservedaslowdeclineinthisstudy),weakeningoppositiontofutureoverseasmilitaryaction.Sinceour
conclusionsarebasedonanalysisofreactionstoasingleeventinacountrythathasrarelyfelttheeffectsofforeignterrorism, we

should
consider whether they can be generalized to reactions to other terrorist
incidents or to reactions under conditions of sustained terrorist action. Our
answer isatentativeyes,althoughthereisnoconclusiveevidenceonthispointasyet.Someofourfindingscorroborateevidence
fromIsrael,acountrythathasprolongedexperiencewithterrorism.Forexample,Israeliresearchersfindthatperceivedriskleadstoincreased
vilificationofathreateninggroupandsupportforbelligerentaction(Arian1989;BarTalandLabin2001).ThereisalsoevidencethatIsraelis
experiencedfearduringtheGulfWar,especiallyinTelAvivwherescudmissileswereaimed(ArianandGordon1993).Whatismissing,
however,isanyevidencethatanxietytendstoundercutsupportforbelligerentantiterrorismmeasuresunderconditionsofsustainedthreat.For
themostpart,Israeliresearchhasnotexaminedthedistinctpoliticaleffectsofanxiety.

XT: 5 Cuba List Justified

Flawed American policy is not a reason to trust a dictatorship.
Cubas history is rife with support for counter-productive terrorism.

Claver-Carone, director of the U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC, 13 [Mauricio, attorney, served as an

attorney-advisor with the U.S. Treasury Department, and was a member of the law faculty at the Catholic University
of America and George Washington University, Cuba Sees an Opening, April 2,
http://www.american.com/archive/2013/april/cuba-should-remain-designated-as-a-state-sponsor-of-terrorism]

It would be disingenuous for anyone to argue that there has been a

fundamental change when the Castros have ruled Cuba with an iron fist for
54 years. Option one does not pass the laugh test. Option two is to have the president decide to terminate the listing and submit, at least 45
days before doing so, a report to Congress that the Cuban government has not provided any support for international terrorism during the preceding six

t would be an insult to
the American people if Cuba were to be removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism
based solely on assurances of change by a dictatorship that brutally represses its
population, defies the rule of law, routinely foments anti-Americanism around
the world with provocative anti-democratic rhetoric, and is holding in its prisons an American aid
months and has made assurances to the United States that it will not support terrorist acts in the future. I

worker, Alan P. Gross. Arrested in December 2009, Grosss crime was helping members of Cubas Jewish community connect to the Internet. The last
time the United States relied on a dictators assurances to justify removing a country from the sponsors list was in 2008, when President George W. Bush
accepted the assurances of the Kim family that North Korea would not provide support for or engage in international terrorism. That obviously has not

Cuba should also be

disqualified because it continues to promote and support international terrorism. The State
worked out well. The Castro brothers lack of credibility alone is legally sufficient to prohibit changing Cuba's designation.

Departments 2011 Country Reports on Terrorism lays out a three-point rationale for Cubas designation as a sponsor of terrorism: First, current and
former members of Basque Fatherland and Liberty (ETA) continue to reside in Cuba Press reporting indicated that the Cuban government provided
medical care and political assistance to the FARC. There was no indication that the Cuban government provided weapons or paramilitary training for either

The United States designates ETA and the FARC as foreign terrorist
organizations and Cuba continues to provide support for both groups. The favorite
ETA or the FARC.

new argument of those seeking Cubas removal from the list is to note that peace negotiations between the Colombian government and the FARC are

the United States would need to rescind its designation of ETA and
the FARC as foreign terrorist organizations before it could remove Cuba from the terrorism
taking place in Havana. But

sponsor list. More importantly, there is no peace agreement or peace in Colombia and ETA continues to threaten Spain. Testifying on Colombia before the
House Armed Services Committee, General John F. Kelly, head of the U.S. Southern Command, provided some perspective: Terrorist groups represent a

FARC is the regions oldest, largest, most

capable, and best equipped insurgency. The government of Colombia is currently in peace negotiations with the
FARC, but the fight is far from over and a successful peace accord is not guaranteed. Although weakened, the FARC continues to
confront the Colombian state by employing improvised explosive devices and
attacking energy infrastructure and oil pipelines. Second, the State Department country report says that
persistent challenge that has plagued the region for decades. The

the Cuban government continued to permit fugitives wanted in the United States to reside in Cuba and also provided support such as housing, food ration

Cuba has provided safe

harbor to more than 70 fugitives from U.S. justice who live on the island under the protection of the
Castro regime. Some of these fugitives are charged with or have been convicted of murder, kidnapping,
and hijacking, and they include notorious killers of police officers in New Jersey and New Mexico. Warranting special mention are the
books, and medical care for these individuals. That has not changed either. The FBI estimates that

outstanding U.S. indictments against Cuban Air Force pilots Lorenzo Alberto Prez-Prez and Francisco Prez-Prez and General Rubn Martnez Puente,
the head of the Cuban Air Force, who in 1996 ordered the pilots to shoot down two civilian American aircraft over international waters in the Florida Straits.
That act of terrorism killed four men, three of them American citizens. Third, the State Department report says that the Financial Action Task Force has
identified Cuba as having deficiencies in combatting money laundering and terrorism financing. In February, the Castro regime made a high-level political

There has been no

discernible effort since to criminalize money laundering or to establish
procedures to identify and freeze the assets of terrorists. The State
Departments previous rationale for continuing to list Cuba as a state
sponsor of terrorism stands and now new justifications can be added:
Terrorism is defined in U.S. law as the unlawful use of force and violence
against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the
commitment to work with the FATF to address money laundering and the flow of money through Cuba to terrorists.

civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or

social objectives. The arrest and arbitrary imprisonment of Alan P. Gross for actions internationally protected
under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which Cuba is a signatory, is an act of terrorism. Moreover, the
Castro regime has now made it clear that Gross will be held hostage until the United States releases five Cuban spies convicted in U.S. federal courts. In

thousands of Cuban soldiers and intelligence officials are stationed in Venezuela.

Cubas presence and control over the highest levels of Venezuelas military, police, and
intelligence services not only threatens to subvert democracy in that nation,
but it allows those Venezuelan authorities to be Cubas proxies in trafficking
drugs and weapons, and in providing support to such extremist organizations
as Hezbollah and Irans al-Quds. Cubas close political ties with other state
sponsors of terrorism particularly Iran and Syria and its history of sharing
intelligence with rogue regimes are of serious concern and, according to
former U.S. intelligence officials, pose a risk to U.S. counterterrorism efforts
in the Middle East and elsewhere.
addition,

Cuba currently cooperates with terrorist activity

Suarez, International Secretary for the Cuban Democratic Directorate, 3-26-13 [John, Why the
government of Cuba belongs on the list of terror sponsors, http://cubanexilequarter.blogspot.com/2013/03/whygovernment-of-cuba-belongs-on-list.html]

the regime in Cuba has over a half century of not only sponsoring
terrorism but also engaging in acts of international state terrorism that led to the
loss of American lives and property. Secondly, the official press channels celebrated a terrorist
that the Cuban government had trained and prepared in the past to attack
targets on the United States mainland as recently as 2010: Radio Havana Cuba
First,

published an article online titled "Political Activist Marilyn Buck Dies at 62" in which it referred to Marilyn Buck as an
"activist and former political prisoner". In reality she was an American terrorist who bombed the U.S. Capitol in 1983
to protest the Grenada Invasion, and on October 20, 1981 as part of a group of Weather Underground and Black
Liberation Army members assaulted a Brinks armored car carrying $1.6 million in Nanuet, NY. Buck was a member
of the Black Liberation Army. Two police officers and a guard were murdered in the course of the armed robbery.
Buck also pleaded guilty to the bombing of the US Capitol in 1988. The international terrorist Carlos the Jackal

Finally, the Castro regime

has operational relations with other state sponsors of terror such as Iran and
Syria. It is important to recall that months prior to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks that Fidel Castro
speaking at the University of Tehran on May 10, 2001 said: "Iran and Cuba, in cooperation with
each other, can bring America to its knees." ... "The U.S. regime is very weak, and we are
witnessing this weakness from close up." Relations between Cuba and Iran have not cooled
over the past decade as can be gleaned from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,'s January 12, 2012 statement in
claimed to have killed less people then Fidel Castro, a man that he admires.

Havana, Cuba, "Our positions, versions, interpretations are alike, very close. We have been good friends, we are and

The same is true with regards to Syria.

The Cuban government has had close relations with both Assads and backed
their bloody crackdowns in the official media and at the United Nations Human Rights Council. The
will be, and we will be together forever. Long live Cuba!"

Obama Administration has been right to maintain Cuba on the list of terror sponsors in previous years and should

Wikileaks revelations have also offered further evidence for

keeping the Castro dictatorship on the terror sponsor list because the regime
has turned the island into a safe haven for terrorists.
do so again this year.

Case Solvency 1NC

1 No Solvency Cuba is only one instance of awed terrorism
policy, and the state sponsors list is only one tool in the war on
terror. Most of their evidence assumes Islamic fundamentalism,
which doesnt really apply to Cuba
2 Turn The plan strengthens the War on Terror removing Cuba
increases the lists credibility and frees up resources to take
harsher measures against other states

Lopez-Levy, Lecturer and Doctoral Candidate at the University of Denver, 5-7-2013 [Arturo, "It's Time to
Delist Cuba", http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arturo-lopez-levy/its-time-to-delist-cuba_b_3232766.html]

The misuse of an otherwise effective foreign policy tool should give pause to
responsible members of Congress and the Washington intelligence community. First, it dilutes America's
multilateral anti-terrorist efforts by taking eyes and dollars away from where
the real threats are. Second, it sends the wrong message to countries such
as Iran and Syria and the groups they sponsor by diminishing both the substantive and
political impact of being listed. Third, it weakens the case for monitoring
countries such as Iran, whose presence on the list is more easily justified. In
short, including Cuba undermines the credibility of the list itself, and has a
corrosive effect on U.S. leadership in world. Characterizing Cuba as a
terrorist state--and more generally implying that the island in any way poses any threat to U.S. security-hinders the United States' ability to develop a strategic vision for post-Fidel
Cuba. The list encourages hostile actions against Cuba in American courts, thereby aggravating conflicts and
blocking new exchanges. The island is a country in transition that is carrying out market-oriented economic reforms

This situation calls for policies of

engagement completely different from those required for dealing with a
terrorist threat.
without changing its centralized, one party system.

3 Their Method Fails The focus on epistemological resistance and

social construction distracts from real-world material problems

Jarvis, 2K Prof Philosophy @ U South Carolina (Darryl, Studies in International Relations, International
Relations and the Challenge of Postmodernism, pg. 2)

these days one can neither begin nor conclude

empirical research without first discussing epistemological orientations and
ontological assumptions. Like a vortex, metatheory has engulfed us all and the
question of "theory" which was once used as a guide to research is now the
object of research. Indeed, for a discipline whose purview is ostensibly outward looldng and international
in scope, and at a time of ever encroaching globalization and transnationalism,
International Relations has become increasingly provincial and inward looking.
While Hoffmann might well be correct,

Rather than grapple with the numerous issues that confront peoples around the world, since the early 1980s the

the politics of
famine, environmental degradation, underdevelopment, or ethnic cleansing,
let alone the cartographic machinations in Eastern Europe and the
discipline has tended more and more toward obsessive self-examination.3 These days

reconfiguration of the geo-global political-economy, seem scarcely to

concern theorists of international politics who define the urgent task of our
time to be one of metaphysical reflection and epistemological investigation.
Arguably, theory is no longer concerned with the study of international relations
so much as the "manner in which international relations as a discipline, and
international relations as a subject matter, have been constructed."4 To be
concerned with the latter is to be "on the cutting edge," where novelty has itself become "an appropriate form of
scholarship."5

4 The aff is just a one shot blow The critique of the War on Terror
has no long-term emancipatory value.

Horgan, Psychology Professor at Penn State University, and Boyle, International Relations Professor at
the University of St. Andrews, 2008 [John, also Director of the International Center for the Study of Terrorism at
Penn State, and Michael, also Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, A case
against Critical Terrorism Studies, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 1:1, 51-64]
NOTE: CTS = Critical Terrorism Studies
Serious and reflective scholars of terrorism also do not deny the observation that theory is often for some one, and
for some purpose. What they do not share is the explicit normative and ideological commitment to emancipation,

One of our chief concerns about CTS is that the precise meaning of
this commitment to emancipation has not been made clear, beyond the
basic point that emancipation would involve strengthening the voices of
moderation and increasing the political voice of some dissident groups
(McDonald 2007, p. 257). These are worthwhile goals, certainly, but not unique to CTS in any
respect. So the analytic value of this maddeningly vague notion of emancipation in this instance is not yet
obvious to us. How exactly does attacking the concept of terrorism generate
greater prospects for freedom in existing social relations, or produce a
broadly progressive outcome (McDonald 2007, p. 257)?6 In part due to the fact that
CTS advocates have not yet made their ontological and epistemological
commitments or their intellectual debts within critical theory clear, it remains unclear just
who has agency in their account, how emancipation would be achieved, and
to what substantive normative and political goals emancipation is directed.
however defined.

We remain concerned with embracing such a project without having some better idea of what emancipation in this

the firmer ones basic confidence in

emancipation broadly defined, the greater the risk of slipping into
undemocratic and closed forms of instrumentalism (Rengger and Thirkell-White 2007, p.
15).7 We note with irony that terrorism studies is accused (rightly in some cases) of
having a clear ideological bias, but the same charge could be levelled at CTS,
instance would entail. This is all the more important because

especially when its advocates adopt language that calls on scholars to reclaim the term of terrorism and use it to

We do not believe that

terrorism studies should be reduced to a war of competing ideologies; the
last thing we would want is for our dialogue with CTS scholars to be reduced to a war of position.
show the abuses of Northern democracies (Blakeley 2007, pp. 233234).

We invite them in subsequent work to clarify their commitments within critical theory further and to specify what
their commitment to emancipation entails.

Case Solvency Extensions

XT: 2 Plan Strengthens WoT

Making the list more consistent by removing Cuba would strengthen
its credibility

Byman, Associate Professor at Georgetown Universitys Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, 5
[Daniel, Senior Fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. He is Director of the
Security Studies Program and the Center for Peace and Security Studies as well as and he holds a joint appointment
with the Georgetown Department of Government, Deadly Connections: States that Sponsor Terrorism, pp. 269-270]

inconsistency, in turn, has undermined the effectiveness of the list. When

countries like Cuba that have at best marginal involvement in terrorism in
recent years are included, while others that are extremely active such as
Pakistan are excluded, the "name and shame" power of the list itself suffers.
Not surprisingly, other states refuse to see the list itself as proof that the state is
involved in terrorism. US officials involved in counterterrorism tried unsuccessfully to change this:
This

Michael Sheehan, the former Special Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the State Department, told critics: "if you
have a problem with Cuba on human rights, get your own sanctions, don't use mine."" Such efforts were resisted
because politicians feared that removing a state from the terrorism list would confer legitimacy on it. Ironically,

because it is so hard to get off the list and because the various punishments
(intentionally) interfere with negotiations and bilateral relations, executive
branch officials are often reluctant to put states on the list in the first place.
Thus, though the Taliban hosted Bin Ladin and al-Qa'ida in 1996 and quickly emerged as the dominant power in the
country, the regime was not listed as a sponsor of terrorism. In part this was because sponsorship would require
recognition of the government, but it was also felt to tie the executive branch's hands with relatively little benefit.

the forms of pressure used can often be blunt, hindering the

segments of society that might be more pro-American, or otherwise failing to
affect the regime properly." Similarly, Pakistan was not designated a sponsor again in part because
Moreover,

this was seen as a measure that would do more harm than good. Getting on the list is often a contentious process,
but once on it is difficult to be removed. In theory, the state sponsor list is meant to be flexible. The State
Department notes that "The bar for a state or a group being removed from a US terrorism list is and must be high
it must end all involvement in any facet of terrorism, including passive support, and satisfy all US counterterrorism
concerns."" By including passive support, however, the criteria can easily become insurmountable. 1-or example,
many states in the Middle East including almost every US allylaud the Palestinian terrorist group HAMAS, seeing
it as a legitimate resistance movement. Forcing states to end any ties to HAMAS, even the most minimal such as
meeting with HAMAS leaders to show solidarity, would damage their legitimacy at home. Similarly, some groups
draw on fundraising among a state's citizens (as discussed in Chapter 8); halting this may require US government
assistance through financial monitoring training, not US government sanctions. Because the criteria are so
politicized, in reality a state has to go from an adversary of the United States to an ally to get off the list, a move
that would require many states to dramatically remake their foreign policy and at times their very government, not

The inability to get off the list in turn makes the list
even less effective. If states fear that a true change in their behavior will only
result in the bar regarding terrorism being raised or that other concerns such
as human rights will come into play, they have no incentive to reduce
support for terrorism.
just to end their links to terrorism.

XT: 3 Epistemology Fails

Their emphasis on the performative dimension of terrorism
overlooks material structure and hinders policy
Tuathail, 96 (Gearoid, Department of Georgraphy at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Political Geography, 15(6-7), p. 664, science
direct)

While theoretical debates at academic conferences are important to

academics, the discourse and concerns of foreign-policy decision- makers
are quite different, so different that they constitute a distinctive problem- solving,
theory-averse, policy-making subculture. There is a danger that academics
assume that the discourses they engage are more significant in the practice
of foreign policy and the exercise of power than they really are. This is not,
however, to minimize the obvious importance of academia as a general institutional structure among many that

Dalbys fourth
point about politics and discourse except to note that his statement-Precisely because reality
could be represented in particular ways political decisions could be taken, troops and material
moved and war fought-evades the important question of agency that I noted in my review
essay. The assumption that it is representations that make action possible is
inadequate by itself. Political, military and economic structures, institutions,
discursive networks and leadership are all crucial in explaining social action
and should be theorized together with representational practices. Both here and
sustain certain epistemic communities in particular states. In general, I do not disagree with

earlier, Dalbys reasoning inclines towards a form of idealism. In response to Dalbys fifth point (with its three
subpoints), it is worth noting, first, that his book is about the CPD, not the Reagan administration. He analyzes
certain CPD discourses, root the geographical reasoning practices of the Reagan administration nor its publicpolicy reasoning on national security. Dalbys book is narrowly textual; the general contextuality of the Reagan
administration is not dealt with. Second, let me simply note that I find that the distinction between critical theorists
and post- structuralists is a little too rigidly and heroically drawn by Dalby and others. Third, Dalbys interpretation
of the reconceptualization of national security in Moscow as heavily influenced by dissident peace researchers in
Europe is highly idealist, an interpretation that ignores the structural and ideological crises facing the Soviet elite at
that time. Gorbachevs reforms and his new security discourse were also strongly self- interested, an ultimately
futile attempt to save the Communist Party and a discredited regime of power from disintegration. The issues
raised by Simon Dalby in his comment are important ones for all those interested in the practice of critical
geopolitics. While I agree with Dalby that questions of discourse are extremely important ones for political

there is a danger of fetishizing this concern with discourse

so that we neglect the institutional and the sociological, the materialist and
the cultural, the political and the geographical contexts within which
particular discursive strategies become significant. Critical geopolitics, in other words,
geographers to engage,

should not be a prisoner of the sweeping ahistorical cant that sometimes accompanies poststructuralism nor
convenient reading strategies like the identity politics narrative; it needs to always be open to the patterned mess
that is human history.

XT: 4 Terror Critique Fails

Their method of criticism only goes down a post-structuralist rabbit
hole. Material context outweighs discursive criticism for terrorism.

Rodwell 5 [Jonathan, PhD Cand. @ Manchester Metropolitan University, Trendy But Empty: A Response to
Richard Jackson, 49th Parallel, Spring, www.49thparallel.bham.ac.uk/back/issue15/rodwell1.htm]
The issue of the material real world, or evidence is actually the issue at the heart of the weakness of post-structural discourse analysis, though it does

the only way Jackson or any

post-structuralist can operationalise their argument is with an appeal to
material evidence. But by the logic of discourse analysis there is no such
thing as neutral evidence. To square this circle many post-struturalist writers do seem to hint at complexity and what posthold the potential to at least rescue some of its usefulness. The problem is simple, in that

structural culturalists might call intertextuality, arguing for favouring a complexity of interactions rather than linear causality[viii]. The implication is
that language is just one of an endless web of factors and surely this prompts one to pursue an understanding of these links. However, to do so would
dangerously undermine the entire post-structural project as again, if there are discoverable links between factors, then there are material facts that are
identifiable regardless of language. Consequently, rather than seeking to understand the links between factors what seems to happen is hands are thrown
up in despair as the search for complexity is dropped as quickly as it is picked up.

arguments that again can say little.

The result is one-dimensional

This is evident in Jacksons approach as he details how words have histories and

we do not
then see any discussion of whether, therefore, it is not discourse that is the
powerful tool but the effect of the history and the social structure itself.
Throughout Jacksons argument it is a top down process in which discourse
disciplines society to follow the desire of the dominant, but here is an
instance of a dialectic process where society may actually be the originating
force, allowing the discourse in turn to actually to be more powerful. However we simply see no exploration of this potential dialectic process, merely
the suggestion it exists. Consequently because there is no interaction between the language the culture and the material then there
is not much that can actually be done. All that is done is to repeatedly detail
the instances where the same tropes occur time and time again and suggest they have an
impact.[x] What cannot be explained however is why those tropes exist or how
they have an influence. So, for example, Jackson is unable to explain how the idea that the members of the emergency services
moreover are part of a dialectic process in which they not only shape social structures but are also shaped by them.[ix] However

attending the scene at the World Trade Centre on 9/11 were heroes is a useful trope disciplining the populace via the tool of Hollywood blockbusters and
popular entertainments heroes. All he is able to claim is that lots of films have heroes, lots of stories have heroes and people like heroes. All might be true
but what exactly is the point? And how do we actually know the language has the prescribed effect? Indeed how do we know people dont support the
villain in films instead of heroes? The reason it there is no attempt to explore the complexity of causation is that this would clearly automatically
undermine the concentration on discourse. Moreover it would require the admittance of identifiable evidence about the real world to be able to say
anything about it! For if something historical changed the meaning of a word, or if something about society gave the word a different meaning and impact,
then it would be an identifiable something. Moreover if the word is tied to and altered by an historical event or social impact, would it not be a case of
assessing the effect of original event itself as well as the language? The larger problem is that without clear causal links between materially identifiable

if we have no
traditional causational discussion how can we know what is happening? For
example, Jackson details how the rhetoric of anti-terrorism and fear is obfuscating the
real problems. It is proposed that the real world killers are not terrorism, but
disease or illegal drugs or environmental issues. The problem is how do we know
this? It seems we know this because there is evidence that illustrates as much Jackson himself quoting to Dr David King who argued global warming
is a greater that than terrorism. The only problem of course is that discourse analysis has established (as argued by Jackson) that
Kings argument would just be self-contained discourse designed to
naturalise another arguments for his own reasons. Ultimately it would be no
more valid than the argument that excessive consumption of Sugar Puffs is
the real global threat. It is worth repeating that I dont personally believe global terrorism is the worlds primary threat, nor do I
believe that Sugar Puffs are a global killer. But without the ability to identify real facts about the
world we can simply say anything, or we can say nothing.
events and factors any assessment within the argument actually becomes nonsensical. Mirroring the early inability to criticise,

Framework

1NC
A. Interpretation: Affirmatives must defend only the implementation
of plan by the federal government.
1. Resolved before a colon reects a legislative forum

Army Officer School 04 (5-12, # 12, Punctuation The Colon and Semicolon,
http://usawocc.army.mil/IMI/wg12.htm)

The colon introduces the following: a. A list, but only after "as follows," "the following," or a noun for
which the list is an appositive: Each scout will carry the following: (colon) meals for three days, a survival knife, and
his sleeping bag. The company had four new officers: (colon) Bill Smith, Frank Tucker, Peter Fillmore, and Oliver
Lewis. b. A long quotation (one or more paragraphs): In The Killer Angels Michael Shaara wrote: (colon) You may find
it a different story from the one you learned in school. There have been many versions of that battle [Gettysburg]
and that war [the Civil War]. (The quote continues for two more paragraphs.) c. A formal quotation or question: The
President declared: (colon) "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." The question is: (colon) what can we do
about it? d. A second independent clause which explains the first: Potter's motive is clear: (colon) he wants the
assignment. e. After the introduction of a business letter: Dear Sirs: (colon) Dear Madam: (colon) f. The details

A formal resolution, after

the word "resolved:" Resolved: (colon) That this council petition the mayor.
following an announcement For sale: (colon) large lakeside cabin with dock g.

2. United States federal government only refers to the national

government

Blacks Law Dictionary, 8th Edition, June 1, 2004, pg.716.

Federal government. 1. A national government that exercises some degree of
control over smaller political units that have surrendered some degree of
power in exchange for the right to participate in national politics matters
Also termed (in federal states) central government. 2. the U.S. government
Also termed national government. [Cases: United States -1 C.J.S. United States - - 2-3]

B. Violation: They claim solvency off of their discursive critique of

terrorism policy.
C. Standards
1. Ground: Government action is key to disadvantages, kritik links,
and counterplan competition. Advocating extra-governmental action
gives the affirmative an unfair ground advantage, as well as
destroys clash, which is the key internal link to in-round education.
2. Education: Fiat is key to being informed citizens, without it we
never learn about the political process and dont take responsibility
for the possible bad outcomes of our actions. Simulating policy
solves all their offense, allowing people a safe space to test new
ideas

Joyner, Professor of International Law at Georgetown, 1999 [Christopher C., Teaching International Law,
5 ILSA J Int'l & Comp L 377, l/n]

Debates, like
other role-playing simulations, help students understand different
perspectives on a policy issue by adopting a perspective as their own. But, unlike
Use of the debate can be an effective pedagogical tool for education in the social sciences.

other simulation games, debates do not require that a student participate directly in order to realize the benefit of
the game. Instead of developing policy alternatives and experiencing the consequences of different choices in a

traditional role-playing game, debates present the alternatives and consequences in a formal, rhetorical fashion
before a judgmental audience. Having the class audience serve as jury helps each student develop a well-thoughtout opinion on the issue by providing contrasting facts and views and enabling audience members to pose

debates ask undergraduate students to examine the

international legal implications of various United States foreign policy actions. Their chief
challenges to each debating team. These

tasks are to assess the aims of the policy in question, determine their relevance to United States national interests,
ascertain what legal principles are involved, and conclude how the United States policy in question squares with
relevant principles of international law. Debate questions are formulated as resolutions ,
along the lines of: "Resolved: The United States should deny most-favored-nation status to China on human rights
grounds;" or "Resolved: The United States should resort to military force to ensure inspection of Iraq's possible
nuclear, chemical and biological weapons facilities;" or "Resolved: The United States' invasion of Grenada in 1983

In addressing
both sides of these legal propositions, the student debaters must consult the
vast literature of international law, especially the nearly 100 professional law-school-sponsored international
was a lawful use of force;" or "Resolved: The United States should kill Saddam Hussein."

law journals now being published in the United States. This literature furnishes an incredibly rich body of legal
analysis that often treats topics affecting United States foreign policy, as well as other more esoteric international
legal subjects. Although most of these journals are accessible in good law schools, they are largely unknown to the
political science community specializing in international relations, much less to the average undergraduate. By
assessing the role of international law in United States foreign policy- making, students realize that United States
actions do not always measure up to international legal expectations; that at times, international legal strictures get
compromised for the sake of perceived national interests, and that concepts and principles of international law, like
domestic law, can be interpreted and twisted in order to justify United States policy in various international
circumstances. In this way, the debate format gives students the benefits ascribed to simulations and other action
learning techniques, in that it makes them become actively engaged with their subjects, and not be mere passive
consumers. Rather than spectators, students become legal advocates, observing, reacting to, and structuring

debate exercises carry several

specific educational objectives. First, students on each team must work together to refine a
political and legal perceptions to fit the merits of their case. The

cogent argument that compellingly asserts their legal position on a foreign policy issue confronting the United

gain greater insight into the real-world legal dilemmas faced

by policy makers. Second, as they work with other members of their team, they realize
the complexities of applying and implementing international law, and the difficulty of bridging the
States. In this way, they

gaps between United States policy and international legal principles, either by reworking the former or creatively

research for the debates forces students to become

familiarized with contemporary issues on the United States foreign policy agenda and the role
that international law plays in formulating and executing these policies. n8 The debate thus becomes an
excellent vehicle for pushing students beyond stale arguments over
principles into the real world of policy analysis, political critique, and legal
defense.
reinterpreting the latter. Finally,

3. Extra-Topicality: Allowing them to claim solvency or advantages

off of personal discourse is extra topical and a voting issue for
fairness: it allows them to shift their advocacy in the 2AC and moot
predictable 1NC ground.
D. Framework is a voting issue for fairness and education.

2NC Framework First

This is a prior question that must be resolved first it is a precondition for debate to occur

Shively, 2000 Assistant Prof Political Science at Texas A&M (Ruth Lessl, Partisan Politics and Political
Theory, p. 181-2)
The requirements given thus far are primarily negative. The

ambiguists must say "no" to-they must

reject and limit-some ideas and actions. In what follows, we will also find that they must say "yes" to
some things. In particular, they must say "yes" to the idea of rational persuasion. This means, first, that they must
recognize the role of agreement in political contest, or the basic accord that is necessary to discord. The mistake

The mistake is in thinking that agreement marks

consensus kills debate. But this is true only if the agreement is perfect-if there is
nothing at all left to question or contest. In most cases, however, our agreements are highly imperfect.
We agree on some matters but not on others, on generalities but not on specifics, on
that the ambiguists make here is a common one.
the end of contest-that

principles but not on their applications, and so on. And this kind of limited agreement is the starting condition of
contest and debate. As John Courtney Murray writes:

We hold certain truths; therefore we can

argue about them. It seems to have been one of the corruptions of intelligence by positivism to assume
that argument ends when agreement is reached. In a basic sense, the reverse is true. There can be no
argument except on the premise, and within a context, of agreement. (Murray
1960, 10) In other words, we cannot argue about something if we are not
communicating: if we cannot agree on the topic and terms of argument or if
we have utterly different ideas about what counts as evidence or good
argument. At the very least, we must agree about what it is that is being
debated before we can debate it. For instance, one cannot have an argument
about euthanasia with someone who thinks euthanasia is a musical group.
One cannot successfully stage a sit-in if one's target audience simply thinks everyone is resting or if those doing the
sitting have no complaints. Nor can one demonstrate resistance to a policy if no one knows that it is a policy.

In

other words, contest is meaningless if there is a lack of agreement or

communication about what is being contested. Resisters, demonstrators, and
debaters must have some shared ideas about the subject and/or the terms of
their disagreements. The participants and the target of a sit-in must share an understanding of the
complaint at hand. And a demonstrator's audience must know what is being resisted.
In short, the contesting of an idea presumes some agreement about what that
idea is and how one might go about intelligibly contesting it. In other words,
contestation rests on some basic agreement or harmony.

2NC Policymaking Good

Focusing on the details and inner-workings of government policymaking is productive critical approaches cant resolve real world
problems like poverty, racism and war

McClean, 01 Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, Molloy College, New York (David E., The Cultural Left and
the Limits of Social Hope, Presented at the 2001 Annual Conference of the Society for the Advancement of
American Philosophy, www.american-philosophy.org/archives/past_conference_programs/pc2001/Discussion
%20papers/david_mcclean.htm)
Yet for some reason, at least partially explicated in Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country, a book that I think is long

leftist critics continue to cite and refer to the eccentric and often a
priori ruminations of people like those just mentioned, and a litany of others
including Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Jameson, and Lacan, who are to me hugely more irrelevant
than Habermas in their narrative attempts to suggest policy prescriptions
(when they actually do suggest them) aimed at curing the ills of homelessness, poverty,
market greed, national belligerence and racism. I would like to suggest that it is time
for American social critics who are enamored with this group, those who actually want to
be relevant, to recognize that they have a disease, and a disease regarding which I myself
must remember to stay faithful to my own twelve step program of recovery. The disease is the need
for elaborate theoretical "remedies" wrapped in neological and multi-syllabic
jargon. These elaborate theoretical remedies are more "interesting," to be
sure, than the pragmatically settled questions about what shape democracy
should take in various contexts, or whether private property should be
protected by the state, or regarding our basic human nature (described, if not defined
(heaven forbid!), in such statements as "We don't like to starve" and "We like to
speak our minds without fear of death" and "We like to keep our children safe
from poverty"). As Rorty puts it, "When one of today's academic leftists says that some topic has been
overdue,

'inadequately theorized,' you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language,

futile
attempts to philosophize one's way into political relevance are a symptom of
what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial
approach to the problems of its country. Disengagement from practice
produces theoretical hallucinations"(italics mine).(1) Or as John Dewey put it in his The
Need for a Recovery of Philosophy, "I believe that philosophy in America will be lost
between chewing a historical cud long since reduced to woody fiber, or an
apologetics for lost causes, . . . . or a scholastic, schematic formalism, unless it can somehow bring to
or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. . . . These

consciousness America's own needs and its own implicit principle of successful action." Those who suffer or have
suffered from this disease Rorty refers to as the Cultural Left, which left is juxtaposed to the Political Left that Rorty

Another attribute of the Cultural Left is that its

members fancy themselves pure culture critics who view the successes of
America and the West, rather than some of the barbarous methods for achieving those successes, as
mostly evil, and who view anything like national pride as equally evil even when that pride is tempered with
the knowledge and admission of the nation's shortcomings. In other words, the Cultural Left, in this country,
too often dismiss American society as beyond reform and redemption. And Rorty
correctly argues that this is a disastrous conclusion, i.e. disastrous for the Cultural Left. I think it may also be
disastrous for our social hopes, as I will explain. Leftist American culture critics
might put their considerable talents to better use if they bury some of their
prefers and prefers for good reason.

cynicism about America's social and political prospects and help forge public
and political possibilities in a spirit of determination to, indeed, achieve our
country - the country of Jefferson and King; the country of John Dewey and Malcom X; the country of Franklin
Roosevelt and Bayard Rustin, and of the later George Wallace and the later Barry Goldwater. To invoke the words of
King, and with reference to the American society, the time is always ripe to seize the opportunity to help create the
"beloved community," one woven with the thread of agape into a conceptually single yet diverse tapestry that
shoots for nothing less than a true intra-American cosmopolitan ethos, one wherein both same sex unions and faithbased initiatives will be able to be part of the same social reality, one wherein business interests and the university
are not seen as belonging to two separate galaxies but as part of the same answer to the threat of social and

We who fancy ourselves philosophers would do well to create from

within ourselves and from within our ranks a new kind of public intellectual who has
both a hungry theoretical mind and who is yet capable of seeing the need to
move past high theory to other important questions that are less bedazzling
and "interesting" but more important to the prospect of our flourishing - questions
ethical nihilism.

such as "How is it possible to develop a citizenry that cherishes a certain hexis, one which prizes the character of the Samaritan on
the road to Jericho almost more than any other?" or "How can we square the political dogma that undergirds the fantasy of a missile

The
new public philosopher might seek to understand labor law and military and
trade theory and doctrine as much as theories of surplus value; the logic of
international markets and trade agreements as much as critiques of
commodification, and the politics of complexity as much as the politics of
power (all of which can still be done from our arm chairs.) This means going down deep into the
guts of our quotidian social institutions, into the grimy pragmatic details
where intellectuals are loathe to dwell but where the officers and bureaucrats
of those institutions take difficult and often unpleasant, imperfect decisions
that affect other peoples' lives, and it means making honest attempts to
truly understand how those institutions actually function in the actual world
before howling for their overthrow commences. This might help keep us from
being slapped down in debates by true policy pros who actually know what
they are talking about but who lack awareness of the dogmatic assumptions
from which they proceed, and who have not yet found a good reason to
listen to jargon-riddled lectures from philosophers and culture critics with
their snobish disrespect for the so-called "managerial class."
defense system with the need to treat America as but one member in a community of nations under a "law of peoples?"

2NC Policymaking Good Terrorism Specific

Their critiques of policy relevance and accusations of bias are too
simple directing our research towards the details of terrorism
policy is a moral responsibility that minimizes violence

Horgan, Psychology Professor at Penn State University, and Boyle, International Relations Professor at
the University of St. Andrews, 2008 [John, also Director of the International Center for the Study of Terrorism at
Penn State, and Michael, also Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, A case
against Critical Terrorism Studies, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 1:1, 51-64]
Gunning (2007a) also argues that research should be assessed on its own merits, for just because a piece of
research comes from RAND does not invalidate it; conversely, a critical study is not inherently good (p. 240). We

much of the
work coming out of official government agencies or affiliated government
agencies has little agenda and can be analytically useful. The task of the scholar is to
retain ones sense of critical judgment and integrity, and we believe that there is no prima facie
reason to assume that this cannot be done in sponsored research projects.
What matters here are the details of the research what is the purpose of the
work, how will it be done, how might the work be used in policy and for these questions the
scholar must be self-critical and insistent on their intellectual autonomy. The scholar must also be
mindful of the responsibility they bear for shaping a governments response
to the problem of terrorism. Nothing not the source of the funding, purpose of the research or prior
agree entirely with this. Not all sponsored or contract research is made to toe a party line, and

empirical or theoretical commitment obviates the need of the scholar to consider his or her own conscience

simply engaging with governments

on discrete projects does not make one an embedded expert nor does it
imply sanction to their actions. But we also believe that the study of political violence
lends itself to policy relevance and that those who seek to produce research
that might help policy-makers reduce the rates of terrorist attack are
committing no sin, provided that they retain their independent judgment and report their findings candidly
and honestly. In the case of terrorism, we would go further to argue that being policy relevant
is in some instances an entirely justifiable moral choice. For example, neither of us has any
carefully when engaging in work with any external actor. But

problem producing research with a morally defensible but policy relevant goal (for example, helping the British
government to prevent suicide bombers from attacking the London Underground) and we do not believe that

Implicit in the CTS literature

is a deep suspicion about the state and those who engage with it. Such a suspicion
engaging in such work tarnishes ones stature as an independent scholar.

may blind some CTS scholars to good work done by those

associated with the state. But to assume that being embedded in an
institution linked to the establishment consists of being captured by a state
hegemonic project is too simple. We do not believe that scholars studying terrorism must all be
policy-relevant, but equally we do not believe that being policy relevant should always
be interpreted as writing a blank cheque for governments or as necessarily implicating
the scholar in the behaviour of that government on issues unrelated to ones work. Working for the US government,

The
assumption that those who do not practice CTS are all embedded with the
establishment and that this somehow gives the green light for states to
engage in illegal activity is in our view unwarranted, to say the very least. The limits of
this moral responsibility are overlooked in current CTS work; indeed, if anything there
for instance, does not imply that the scholar sanctions or approves of the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison.

is an attempt to inflate the policy relevance that terrorism scholars have. Jackson (2007c) alleges that the direction
of domestic counter-terrorism policies are to a large degree based on orthodox terrorism studies research (p.
225). Yet he provides no examples, let alone evidence for this claim. Jackson further alleges terrorism studies
actually provides an authoritative judgment about who may legitimately be killed, tortured, rendered or

Jackson
conjures an image of terrorism studies which no matter its conceptual and
empirical flaws is somehow able to influence governments to the point of
constructing who is and is not a legitimate target. This implies that not only is
there a secret cabal of terrorism researchers quietly pulling the strings of
government, but also that those engaged in terrorism research sanction abuse of human rights and
incarcerated by the state in the name of counter-terrorism (p. 249). Again, there is a tension here:

statedirected violence. This implies a measure of bad faith on the part of some terrorism researchers, and we
believe that CTS advocates should offer a more nuanced portrayal of those engaged in policy relevant search than
this assessment allows.

2NC Roleplaying Good

Role playing overcomes polarization and teaches students political
jargon necessary to form critical opinions

SCHAAP 2005 (Andrew, University of Melbourne, Politics, Vol 25 Iss 1, February)

While every subject has its jargon, the object of study in political theory is
the jargon itself. Perhaps because of its abstract nature, political theory often
polarises politics students: it either alienates or inspires them. Role playing
offers one valuable technique to overcome this divide by demonstrating in
practice why we cannot do without theories of politics. By participating in
this role play, students experienced at first hand how arguments made from within
five traditions of political philosophy come into conflict in relation to the issue of human rights. Even selfavowed pragmatists have their own theories only they are implicitly assumed rather than explicitly articulated. In
role playing the pragmatists' self-deception is exposed: they are forced to
declare their (imagined) hands and hold their (assigned) theories open to
scrutiny. Once drawn into the game, in this way, they are on their way to
becoming political theorists.

2NC Fairness Good

The preservation of equal ground and compliance with
democratically agreed upon topic norms is crucial to instill an ethic
of tolerance and respect for alterity the idea that the 1AC is more
important than giving the other side a chance to talk is the root of
bigotry and intolerance

Muir, 93 Department of Communications at George Mason (Star A., A Defense of the Ethics of
Contemporary Debate, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 26, No. 4. Gale Academic Onefile)
Values clarification, Stewart is correct in pointing out, does not mean that no values are developed. Two very

tolerance and fairnessinhere to a significant degree in the

ethics of switch-side debate. A second point about the charge of relativism is that tolerance is related
to the development of reasoned moral viewpoints. The willingness to recognize the
important values

existence of other views , and to grant alternative positions a degree of

credibility, is a value fostered by switch-side debate: Alternately debating both
sides of the same question . . . inculcates a deep-seated attitude of tolerance
toward differing points of view. To be forced to debate only one side leads to
an ego-identification with that side. , . . The other side in contrast is seen only
as something to be discredited. Arguing as persuasively as one can for completely opposing views is
one way of giving recognition to the idea that a strong case can generally be made for the views of earnest and
intelligent men, however such views may clash with one's own. . . . Promoting this kind of

tolerance is
perhaps one of the greatest benefits debating both sides has to offer. 5' The
activity should encourage debating both sides of a topic, reasons Thompson,
because debaters are "more likely to realize that propositions are bilateral. It
is those who fail to recognize this fact who become intolerant, dogmatic,
and bigoted. ""* While Theodore Roosevelt can hardly be said to be advocating bigotry, his efforts to turn
out advocates convinced of their rightness is not a position imbued with tolerance. At a societal level,
the value of tolerance is more conducive to a fair and open assessment of
competing ideas. John Stuart Mill eloquently states the case this way: Complete liberty of contradicting and
disproving our opinion is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no
other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right. . . . the peculiar evil of
silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race. . . . If the opinion is right, they are
deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the

At an individual
level, tolerance is related to moral identity via empathic and critical
assessments of differing perspectives. Paul posits a strong relationship between tolerance,
empathy, and critical thought. Discussing the function of argument in everyday life, he observes that i n order
to overcome natural tendencies to reason egocentrically and sociocentrically,
individuals must gain the capacity to engage in self-refiective questioning, to
reason dialogically and dialectically, and to "reconstruct alien and opposing belief systems
clearer perception and livelier impression of the truth, produced by its collision with error."*'

empathically."*- Our system of beliefs is, by definition, irrational when we are incapable of abandoning a belief for
rational reasons; that is, when we egocentrically associate our beliefs with our own integrity. Paul describes an
intimate relationship between private inferential habits, moral practices, and the nature of argumentation.

Critical thought and moral identity, he urges, must be predicated on discovering

the insights of opposing views and the weaknesses of our own beliefs. Role
playing, he reasons, is a central element of any effort to gain such insight. Only

an activity that requires the defense of both sides of an issue, moving

beyond acknowledgement to exploration and advocacy, can engender such
powerful role playing. Redding explains that "debating both sides is a special instance of role-playing,"""
where debaters are forced to empathize on a constant basis with a position contrary to their own. This role
playing, Baird agrees, is an exercise in reflective thinking, an engagement in
problem solving that exposes weaknesses and strengths,** Motivated by the knowledge
that they may debate against their own case, debaters constantly pose arguments and
counter-arguments for discussion, erecting defenses and then challenging
these defenses with a different tact."*' Such conceptual flexibility, Paul argues, is
essential for effective critical thinking, and in turn for the development of a
reasoned moral identity. A final point about relativism is that switch-side debate
encourages fairness and equality of opportunity in evaluating competing
values. Initially, it is apparent that a priori fairness is a fundamental
aspect of games and gamesmanship."* Players in the game should start out with
equal advantage, and the rules should be construed throughout to provide
no undue advantage to one side or the other. Both sides, notes Thompson, should have an
equal amount of time and a fair chance to present their arguments. Of critical importance, he insists, is an equality

Equality of opportunity is manifest throughout many debate

procedures and norms. On the question of topicalitywhether the affirmative plan is an
example of the stated topicthe issue of "fair ground" for debate is explicitly
developed as a criterion for decision. Likewise, when a counterplan is offered against an
of opportunity."*^

affirmative plan, the issue of coexistence, or of the "competitiveness" of the plans, frequently turns on the fairness
of the affirmative team's suggested "permutation" of the plans. In these and other issues, the value of fairness, and

The point is simply

that debate does teach values, and that these values are instrumental in
providing a hearing for alternative points of view. Paying explicit attention to
decision criteria, and to the division of ground arguments (a function of competition),
effectively renders the value structure pluralistic, rather than relativistic.
of equality of opportunity, is highlighted and clarified through constant disputation.

2NC Reps dont Matter

Representations are irrelevantthey still default to objectivity and
dont change how we conceive IR, they just recognize past changes.

Mearsheimer, 95.

John (International Relations professor at the University of Chicago), The False

Promise of International Institutions in International Security Vol 19 Number 3 Winter, pp 43-44.
The main goal of critical theorists is to change state behavior in fundamental ways, to move beyond a
world of security competition and war and establish a pluralistic security community. However, their

explanation of how change occurs is at best incomplete, and at worst,

internally contradictory.155 Critical theory maintains that state behavior changes when discourse
changes. But that argument leaves open the obvious and crucially important question: what deter- mines
why some discourses become dominant and others lose out in the
marketplace of ideas? What is the mechanism that governs the rise and fall
of discourses? This general question, in turn, leads to three more specific questions: 1) Why has realism
been the hegemonic discourse in world politics for so long? 2) Why is the time ripe for its unseating? 3) Why is

Critical theory provides

few insights on why discourses rise and fall. Thomas Risse- Kappen writes, "Research on. . .
realism likely to be replaced by a more peaceful communitarian discourse?

'epistemic communities' of knowledge-based transna- tional networks has failed so far to specify the conditions
under which specific ideas are selfected and influence policies while others fall by the wayside." 156 Not
surprisingly, critical theorists say little about why realism has been the dominant discourse, and why its
foundations are now so shaky. They certainly do not offer a well-defined argument that deals with this important
issue. Therefore,

it is difficult to judge the fate of realism through the lens of

critical theory. Nevertheless, critical theorists occasionally point to particular factors that might lead

to
changes in international relations discourse. In such cases, however, they usually end up arguing that changes in
the material world drive changes in discourse. For example, when Ashley makes surmises about the future of
realism, he claims that "a crucial issue is whether or not changing historical conditions have disabled longstanding
realist rituals of power." Specifically, he asks whether "developments in late capitalist society;" like the "fiscal
crisis of the state," and the "internationalization of capital," coupled with "the presence of vastly destructive and
highly automated nuclear arsenals [has] de- prived statesmen of the latitude for competent performance of realist

Cox argues that fundamental change occurs when there

is a "disjuncture" between "the stock of ideas people have about the nature
of the world and the practical problems that challenge them." He then writes, "Some
rituals of power?" 157 Similarly,

of us think the erstwhile dominant mental construct of neorealism is inadequate to confront the chal- lenges of
global politics today."158 It would be understandable if realists made such arguments, since they believe there is
an objective reality that largely determines which discourse will be dominant. Critical theorists, however,
emphasize that the world is socially constructed, and not shaped in fundamental ways by objective factors.

when critical theorists attempt to explain why

realism may be losing its hegemonic position, they too point to objective
factors as the ultimate cause of change. Discourse, so it appears, turns out
not to be determinative, but mainly a reflection of developments in the
objective world. In short, it seems that when critical theorists who study
inter- national politics offer glimpses of their thinking about the causes of
change in the real world, they make arguments that directly contradict their
own theory, but which appear to be compatible with the theory they are
challenging.159 There is another problem with the application of critical theory to international relations.
Anarchy, after all, is what we make of it. Yet

Although critical theorists hope to replace realism with a discourse that emphasizes harmony and peace, critical

Critical theory, according to its

own logic, can be used to undermine realism and produce change, but it
cannot serve as the basis for predicting which discourse will replace realism,
because the theory says little about the direction change takes. In fact, Cox argues
theory per se emphasizes that it is impossible to know the future.

that although "utopian expectations may be an element in stimulating people to act ... such expectations are
almost never realized in practice."

DA Helpers

Predictions Good
Predictions are reasonably possible even if they arent perfect,
their sweeping rejection is worse. Decisionmakers will just rely on
preconceived conceptions rather than qualified expert predictions.
Fitzsimmons, 07 (Michael, Washington DC defense analyst, The Problem of Uncertainty in Strategic Planning, Survival, Winter
06-07, online)

If not sufficiently bounded, a

high degree of variability in planning factors can exact a significant price on
planning. The complexity presented by great variability strains the cognitive
abilities of even the most sophisticated decision- makers. And even a robust decisionBut handling even this weaker form of uncertainty is still quite challeng- ing.

15

making process sensitive to cognitive limitations necessarily sacrifices depth of analysis for breadth as variability and complexity

in planning under conditions of risk, variability in

strategic calculation should be carefully tailored to available analytic and
decision processes. Why is this important? What harm can an imbalance between complexity and cognitive or
analytic capacity in strategic planning bring? Stated simply, where analysis is silent or inadequate,
the personal beliefs of decision-makers fill the void . As political scientist Richard
Betts found in a study of strategic sur- prise, in an environment that lacks clarity, abounds with
conflicting data, and allows no time for rigorous assessment of sources and
validity, ambiguity allows intuition or wishfulness to drive interpretation ...
The greater the ambiguity, the greater the impact of preconceptions. The
decision-making environment that Betts describes here is one of political-military crisis, not long-term strategic planning. But a
strategist who sees uncertainty as the central fact of his environ- ment brings upon
himself some of the pathologies of crisis decision-making . He invites ambiguity,
takes conflicting data for granted and substitutes a priori scepticism
grows. It should follow, then, that

16

about the validity of prediction for time pressure as a rationale for discounting
the importance of analytic rigour. It is important not to exaggerate the extent to which data and rigorous
assessment can illuminate strategic choices. Ambiguity is a fact of life, and scepticism of analysis is necessary. Accordingly, the
intuition and judgement of decision-makers will always be vital to strategy, and attempting to subordinate those factors to some
formulaic, deterministic decision-making model would be both undesirable and unrealistic. All the same, there is danger in the

Without careful analysis of what is relatively likely and what

is relatively unlikely, what will be the possible bases for strategic choices? A
decision-maker with no faith in prediction is left with little more than a set of worstcase scenarios and his existing beliefs about the world to confront the choices before him. Those
beliefs may be more or less well founded, but if they are not made explicit
and subject to analysis and debate regarding their application to particular
strategic contexts, they remain only beliefs and premises, rather than
rational judgements. Even at their best, such decisions are likely to be
poorly understood by the organisations charged with their implementation. At
opposite extreme as well.

their worst, such decisions may be poorly understood by the decision-makers themselves.

Extinction Outweighs
Extinction outweighs its irreversible and we have an obligation to
future generations

Bostrom

Nick
, PhD and Professor at Oxford University, March,
vol 9] http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html]

2002 [Journal of Evolution and Technology,

not all risks are equally serious. For present purposes we

can use three dimensions to describe the magnitude of a risk: scope,
intensity, and probability. By scope I mean the size of the group of people that are at risk. By intensity I mean how badly each
Its dangerous to be alive and risks are everywhere. Luckily,

individual in the group would be affected. And by probability I mean the best current subjective estimate of the probability of the adverse outcome.[1]
1.1
A typology of risk We can distinguish six qualitatively distinct types of risks based on their scope and intensity (figure 1). The third dimension,
probability, can be superimposed on the two dimensions plotted in the figure. Other things equal, a risk is more serious if it has a substantial probability
and if our actions can make that probability significantly greater or smaller.
Personal, local, or global refer to the size of the population that is

; a global risk is one that affects the whole of humankind (and our
successors). Endurable vs. terminal indicates how intensely the target population would be affected. An endurable risk
may cause great destruction, but one can either recover from the damage or find
ways of coping with the fallout. In contrast, a terminal risk is one where the targets are
either annihilated or irreversibly crippled in ways that radically reduce their potential to live the sort of life they
directly affected

aspire to. In the case of personal risks, for instance, a terminal outcome could for example be death, permanent severe brain injury, or a lifetime prison
sentence. An example of a local terminal risk would be genocide leading to the annihilation of a people (this happened to several Indian nations).
Permanent enslavement is another example. 1.2
Existential risks In this paper we shall discuss risks of the sixth category, the one marked with an X.

global, terminal risks. I shall call these existential risks. Existential

risks are distinct from global endurable risks. Examples of the latter kind include:
threats to the biodiversity of Earths ecosphere, moderate global warming, global economic
recessions (even major ones), and possibly stifling cultural or religious eras such as the dark ages, even if they
encompass the whole global community, provided they are transitory (though see the section on Shrieks below). To say that a
particular global risk is endurable is evidently not to say that it is acceptable
or not very serious. A world war fought with conventional weapons or a Nazi-style Reich lasting for a decade would be extremely
This is the category of

horrible events even though they would fall under the rubric of endurable global risks since humanity could eventually recover. (On the other hand, they
could be a local terminal risk for many individuals and for persecuted ethnic groups.) I shall use the following definition of existential risks: Existential risk
One where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential. An existential
risk is one where humankind as a whole is imperiled. Existential disasters have major adverse consequences for the course of human civilization for all
time to come. 2 The unique challenge of existential risks Risks in this sixth category are a recent phenomenon. This is part of the reason why it is useful to
distinguish them from other risks. We have not evolved mechanisms, either biologically or culturally, for managing such risks. Our intuitions and coping
strategies have been shaped by our long experience with risks such as dangerous animals, hostile individuals or tribes, poisonous foods, automobile
accidents, Chernobyl, Bhopal, volcano eruptions, earthquakes, draughts, World War I, World War II, epidemics of influenza, smallpox, black plague, and
AIDS. These types of disasters have occurred many times and our cultural attitudes towards risk have been shaped by trial-and-error in managing such
hazards. But tragic as such events are to the people immediately affected, in the big picture of things from the perspective of humankind as a whole
even the worst of these catastrophes are mere ripples on the surface of the great sea of life. They havent significantly affected the total amount of human
suffering or happiness or determined the long-term fate of our species. With the exception of a species-destroying comet or asteroid impact (an extremely
rare occurrence), there were probably no significant existential risks in human history until the mid-twentieth century, and certainly none that it was within
our power to do something about. The first manmade existential risk was the inaugural detonation of an atomic bomb. At the time, there was some
concern that the explosion might start a runaway chain-reaction by igniting the atmosphere. Although we now know that such an outcome was
physically impossible, it qualifies as an existential risk that was present at the time. For there to be a risk, given the knowledge and understanding
available, it suffices that there is some subjective probability of an adverse outcome, even if it later turns out that objectively there was no chance of
something bad happening. If we dont know whether something is objectively risky or not, then it is risky in the subjective sense. The subjective sense is of
course what we must base our decisions on.[2] At any given time we must use our best current subjective estimate of what the objective risk factors are.
[3] A much greater existential risk emerged with the build-up of nuclear arsenals in the US and the USSR. An all-out nuclear war was a possibility with both
a substantial probability and with consequences that might have been persistent enough to qualify as global and terminal. There was a real worry among
those best acquainted with the information available at the time that a nuclear Armageddon would occur and that it might annihilate our species or
permanently destroy human civilization.[4] Russia and the US retain large nuclear arsenals that could be used in a future confrontation, either accidentally
or deliberately. There is also a risk that other states may one day build up large nuclear arsenals. Note however that a smaller nuclear exchange, between
India and Pakistan for instance, is not an existential risk, since it would not destroy or thwart humankinds potential permanently. Such a war might
however be a local terminal risk for the cities most likely to be targeted. Unfortunately, we shall see that nuclear Armageddon and comet or asteroid
strikes are mere preludes to the existential risks that we will encounter in the 21st century. The special nature of the challenges posed by existential risks

Our approach to existential risks cannot be one of trial-anderror. There is no opportunity to learn from errors. The reactive approach see what happens, limit
damages, and learn from experience is unworkable. Rather, we must take a proactive approach. This requires foresight to anticipate
new types of threats and a willingness to take decisive preventive action and to bear the costs (moral and
economic) of such actions. * We cannot necessarily rely on the institutions, moral norms, social attitudes or national security
policies that developed from our experience with managing other sorts of risks. Existential risks are a
is illustrated by the following points: *

different kind of beast. We might find it hard to take them as seriously as we should simply because we have never yet witnessed such disasters.[5] Our

collective fear-response is likely ill calibrated to the magnitude of threat. * Reductions in existential risks are global public goods [13] and may therefore be
undersupplied by the market [14]. Existential risks are a menace for everybody and may require acting on the international plane. Respect for national

If we take into account

risk is multiplied

sovereignty is not a legitimate excuse for failing to take countermeasures against a major existential risk. *

future generations, the

the welfare of
harm done by existential
s
by another factor, the size of
which depends on whether and how much we discount future benefits [15,16]. In view of its undeniable importance, it is surprising how little systematic
work has been done in this area. Part of the explanation may be that many of the gravest risks stem (as we shall see) from anticipated future technologies
that we have only recently begun to understand. Another part of the explanation may be the unavoidably interdisciplinary and speculative nature of the
subject. And in part the neglect may also be attributable to an aversion against thinking seriously about a depressing topic. The point, however, is not to
wallow in gloom and doom but simply to take a sober look at what could go wrong so we can create responsible strategies for improving our chances of
survival. In order to do that, we need to know where to focus our efforts.

Any decrease in existential risk outweighs other impacts

BOSTROM 11 (Nick, Prof. of Philosophy at Oxford, The Concept

of Existential Risk (Draft),

http://www.existentialrisk.com/concept.html)
Holding probability constant, risks become more serious as we move toward the upper-right region of figure 2. For
any fixed probability, existential risks are thus more serious than other risk categories. But just how much more
serious might not be intuitively obvious. One might think we could get a grip on how bad an existential catastrophe
would be by considering some of the worst historical disasters we can think ofsuch as the two world wars, the

Yet if we look at
global population statistics over time, we find that these horrible events of the past
century fail to register (figure 3). But even this reflection fails to bring out the seriousness of existential risk.
What makes existential catastrophes especially bad is not that they would show up robustly on a plot
Spanish flu pandemic, or the Holocaustand then imagining something just a bit worse.

like the one in figure 3, causing a precipitous drop in world population or average quality of life. Instead, their

significance lies primarily in the fact that they would destroy the future. The philosopher Derek Parfit
made a similar point with the following thought experiment: I believe that if we destroy mankind, as we now can,

Compare three outcomes: (1) Peace.

(2) A nuclear war that kills 99% of the worlds existing population. (3) A
nuclear war that kills 100%. (2) would be worse than (1), and (3) would be worse than (2). Which is
this outcome will be much worse than most people think.

the greater of these two differences? Most people believe that the greater difference is between (1) and (2). I

the difference between (2) and (3) is very much greater. The Earth
will remain habitable for at least another billion years. Civilization began only a few
believe that

thousand years ago. If we do not destroy mankind, these few thousand years may be only a tiny fraction of the
whole of civilized human history. The difference between (2) and (3) may thus be the difference between this tiny
fraction and all of the rest of this history. If we compare this possible history to a day, what has occurred so far is
only a fraction of a second. (10: 453-454) To calculate the loss associated with an existential catastrophe, we must

the ultimate potential for

Earth-originating intelligent life is literally astronomical. One gets a large
number even if one confines ones consideration to the potential for
biological human beings living on Earth. If we suppose with Parfit that our planet will remain
consider how much value would come to exist in its absence. It turns out that

habitable for at least another billion years, and we assume that at least one billion people could live on it
sustainably, then the potential exist for at least 1018 human lives. These lives could also be
considerably better than the average contemporary human life, which is so often marred by disease, poverty,
injustice, and various biological limitations that could be partly overcome through continuing technological and
moral progress. However, the relevant figure is not how many people could live on Earth but how many

One lower bound of the number of biological human

life-years in the future accessible universe (based on current cosmological estimates) is 10
descendants we could have in total.

34

years.[10] Another estimate, which assumes that future minds will be mainly implemented in computational
hardware instead of biological neuronal wetware,

produces a lower bound of 10

54

human-brain-

emulation subjective life-years (or 10 basic computational operations).(4)[11] If we make the less
conservative assumption that future civilizations could eventually press close to the absolute bounds of known
physics (using some as yet unimagined technology), we get radically higher estimates of the amount of
computation and memory storage that is achievable and thus of the number of years of subjective experience that
71

Even if we use the most conservative of these estimates, which

entirely ignores the possibility of space colonization and software minds, we find that the expected loss of
an existential catastrophe is greater than the value of 10 human lives. This
could be realized.[12]

18

implies that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one
millionth of one percentage point is at least ten times the value of a billion
human lives. The more technologically comprehensive estimate of 1054 human-brain-emulation subjective
life-years (or 1052 lives of ordinary length) makes the same point even more starkly . Even if we give this allegedly
lower bound on the cumulative output potential of a technologically mature civilization a mere 1% chance of being
correct, we find that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one
percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives. One might consequently argue

even the tiniest reduction of existential risk has an expected value

greater than that of the definite provision of any ordinary good, such as the
direct benefit of saving 1 billion lives. And, further, that the absolute value of the indirect effect of
that

saving 1 billion lives on the total cumulative amount of existential riskpositive or negativeis almost certainly
larger than the positive value of the direct benefit of such an action.

Consequentialism
Ethical policymaking requires calculation of feasibility and timesensitive consequencesrefusing consequentialism allows atrocity
in the name of ethical purity

Gvosdev,

executive editor of The National Interest,

2005 [Nikolas, The Value(s) of Realism, SAIS Review

25.1]

the morality of a
policy action is judged by its results, not by the intentions of its framers. A foreign
policymaker must weigh the consequences of any course of action and assess
the resources at hand to carry out the proposed task. As Lippmann warned, Without the controlling principle that the
As the name implies, realists focus on promoting policies that are achievable and sustainable. In turn,
foreign

nation must maintain its objectives and its power in equilibrium, its purposes within its means and its means equal to its purposes,
its commitments related to its resources and its resources adequate to its commitments, it is impossible to think at all about foreign
affairs.8 Commenting on this maxim, Owen Harries, founding editor of The National Interest, noted, "This is a truth of which
Americansmore apt to focus on ends rather than means when it comes to dealing with the rest of the worldneed always to be
reminded."9 In fact, Morgenthau noted that "there can be no political morality without prudence."10 This virtue of prudencewhich
Morgenthau identified as the cornerstone of realismshould not be confused with expediency. Rather, it takes as its starting point

it is more moral to fulfill one's commitments than to make "empty" promises, and to seek solutions
that minimize harm and produce sustainable results. Morgenthau concluded: [End Page 18]
that

Political realism does not require, nor does it condone, indifference to political ideals and moral principles, but it requires indeed a
sharp distinction between the desirable and the possible, between what is desirable everywhere and at all times and what is

under the concrete circumstances of time and place

possible
.11 This is why, prior to the
outbreak of fighting in the former Yugoslavia, U.S. and European realists urged that Bosnia be decentralized and partitioned into
ethnically based cantons as a way to head off a destructive civil war. Realists felt this would be the best course of action, especially
after the country's first free and fair elections had brought nationalist candidates to power at the expense of those calling for interethnic cooperation. They had concludedcorrectly, as it turned outthat the United States and Western Europe would be unwilling
to invest the blood and treasure that would be required to craft a unitary Bosnian state and give it the wherewithal to function.
Indeed, at a diplomatic conference in Lisbon in March 1992, the various factions in Bosnia had, reluctantly, endorsed the broad
outlines of such a settlement. For the purveyors of moralpolitik, this was unacceptable. After all, for this plan to work, populations on
the "wrong side" of the line would have to be transferred and resettled. Such a plan struck directly at the heart of the concept of
multi-ethnicitythat different ethnic and religious groups could find a common political identity and work in common institutions.
When the United States signaled it would not accept such a settlement, the fragile consensus collapsed. The United States, of
course, cannot be held responsible for the war; this lies squarely on the shoulders of Bosnia's political leaders. Yet Washington fell

the belief that "high-flown words matter more

than rational calculation" in formulating effective policy, which led U.S. policymakers to
dispense with the equation of "balancing commitments and resources."12 Indeed, as he notes,
the Clinton administration had criticized peace plans calling for decentralized partition in
Bosnia "with lofty rhetoric without proposing a practical alternative." The
subsequent war led to the deaths of tens of thousands and left more than a million people
victim to what Jonathan Clarke called "faux Wilsonianism,"

homeless. After three years of war, the Dayton Accordshailed as a triumph of American diplomacycreated a complicated
arrangement by which the federal union of two ethnic units, the Muslim-Croat Federation, was itself federated to a Bosnian Serb
republic. Today, Bosnia requires thousands of foreign troops to patrol its internal borders and billions of dollars in foreign aid to keep
its government and economy functioning. Was the aim of U.S. policymakers, academics and journalistscreating a multi-ethnic
democracy in Bosnianot worth pursuing? No, not at all, and this is not what the argument suggests. But aspirations were not

As a result of holding out for the "most moral" outcome and

encouraging the Muslim-led government in Sarajevo to pursue maximalist aims rather than finding a workable
compromise that could have avoided bloodshed and produced more stable conditions, the peoples
of Bosnia suffered greatly. In the end, the final settlement was very close [End Page 19]
to the one that realists had initially proposedand the one that had also been roundly condemned on
moral grounds.
matched with capabilities.