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The death of distinctions: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2016

John Ellis van Courtland Moon
John Ellis van Courtland Moon*
Affiliation:
Fitchburg State College, 160 Pearl Street, Fitchburg, MA 01420-2697, USA [email protected]
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Abstract

War, the great simplifier, is the inevitable enemy of distinctions, especially when conflicts evoke survival fears, sounding echoes from humanity's environment of evolutionary adaptation. Throughout the twentieth century, attackers and targets grew more distant, weaponry grew more destructive, and distinctions — between combatants and civilians, between legitimate and protected targets, between defensive and offensive strategies, between the innocent and the guilty — faded. In the twenty-first century's first major conflict, “the war against terror,” distinctions have faded still further, making nearly indistinguishable the frontier between preemption and prevention and between interrogation and torture. Proclaimed a “new type of war” in which old rules and customary safeguards would often be inapplicable, this conflict quickly came to be characterized by political embarrassment and operational scandal.

Type
View Point
Information
Politics and the Life Sciences , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , September 2004 , pp. 2 - 12
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Politics and the Life Sciences 

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