Language serves more than a strictly legal justification. The term “narco-terrorist” is meant to dehumanize and desensitize. Their conduct — murder, terrorism, and poisoning Americans’ bodies — morally disqualifies them and, therefore, justifies extraordinary punishment. The possibility that harmless fishermen are blown to pieces must not weaken our leaders’ resolve to defend the nation.
The boat strikes may be illegal and appalling, but the Trump administration’s conduct follows a long historical pattern, where America’s enemies operate outside the acceptable boundaries of civilization, and Washington's heavy-handed response can be justified by notions of national security, economic interests, racial superiority, or basic human decency — or all four simultaneously.
In his stimulating book, “Chasing Bandits: America’s Long War on Terror,” Nichols College historian Michael E. Neagle reveals the constancy of terms “connoting criminality, incivility, and illegitimacy of both causes and means,” such as bandits, savages, guerrillas, and terrorists. “I maintain that these pejorative descriptions have had two distinct utilities: one, to rally popular and political support in the United States by intimating cultural distinctions that suggested or reinforced a sense of American superiority, and two, to justify incursions abroad that provided the United States with more influence in places of strategic interest,” Neagle says.
The author’s framework compels us to question the necessity and costs of the Global War on Terrorism through an unfamiliar lens. Most readers probably have not considered comparisons between the hunt for Osama bin Laden (and “forever wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq) and mostly forgotten manhunts and guerrilla fighting a century or more ago. In the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century, Mexico during the First World War, and Nicaragua in the 1920s and ‘30s, U.S. invaders fought difficult campaigns against foes who were dismissed as savages or bandits motivated by greed or bloodlust rather than legitimate political aims, such as national independence.