Excerpts from \"The Thin Gray Line\" in The Wall Street Journal Europe, Oct. 30:
\"...In testimony to the U.S. Senate\'s Foreign Relations Committee, [U.S. Secretary of State Colin] Powell allowed that groups such as al Qaeda clearly qualified as terrorist organizations, as do Colombia\'s leftist FARC and Ulster\'s Real IRA. \"But then you start to run into areas where one man\'s terrorist is another man\'s freedom fighter and that\'s where you have to apply judgment.\" ... [T]he secretary asked would-be terrorist groups if there were better ways to \"express [their] grievances,\" \"change the political problem\" and \"gain [their] rights.\" Apparently, those groups that may truthfully answer \"no\" to all of the above cannot then be defined as terrorist.
\"But this is preposterous... The quest for definition, in other words, is an obfuscatory exercise, not a clarifying one. A person who finds it interesting to debate whether blowing up 20 teenagers in an Israeli discotheque is or is not an act of \"terrorism\" - as France\'s ambassador to Israel recently did - is not engaging in a serious intellectual enterprise. He is being obtuse.
\"Gen. Powell is clearly an intelligent man who has thought about these issues. And yet the Secretary of State is engaged in an apparent attempt to finesse the stark moral lines drawn by President Bush - \"either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists\" - in the service of political expediency: making tactical alliances with countries like Syria and Iran, maintaining diplomatic channels to Yasser Arafat and so on. Yet when the war in which one is engaged is, fundamentally, a moral struggle, subverting one\'s own moral sense by playing sophistical word games is the surest way to lose it.\"
\"...In testimony to the U.S. Senate\'s Foreign Relations Committee, [U.S. Secretary of State Colin] Powell allowed that groups such as al Qaeda clearly qualified as terrorist organizations, as do Colombia\'s leftist FARC and Ulster\'s Real IRA. \"But then you start to run into areas where one man\'s terrorist is another man\'s freedom fighter and that\'s where you have to apply judgment.\" ... [T]he secretary asked would-be terrorist groups if there were better ways to \"express [their] grievances,\" \"change the political problem\" and \"gain [their] rights.\" Apparently, those groups that may truthfully answer \"no\" to all of the above cannot then be defined as terrorist.
\"But this is preposterous... The quest for definition, in other words, is an obfuscatory exercise, not a clarifying one. A person who finds it interesting to debate whether blowing up 20 teenagers in an Israeli discotheque is or is not an act of \"terrorism\" - as France\'s ambassador to Israel recently did - is not engaging in a serious intellectual enterprise. He is being obtuse.
\"Gen. Powell is clearly an intelligent man who has thought about these issues. And yet the Secretary of State is engaged in an apparent attempt to finesse the stark moral lines drawn by President Bush - \"either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists\" - in the service of political expediency: making tactical alliances with countries like Syria and Iran, maintaining diplomatic channels to Yasser Arafat and so on. Yet when the war in which one is engaged is, fundamentally, a moral struggle, subverting one\'s own moral sense by playing sophistical word games is the surest way to lose it.\"