Jonah Goldberg And Glenn Greenwald Are Thinking Similarly?

I'm almost writing this post just to record this moment in intertubes history. Here's Glenn Greenwald on whether the Fort Hood shootings were terrorism:

But if one accepts that broadened definition of "terrorism" -- that it includes violence that targets not only civilians but also combatants who are unarmed or not engaged in combat at the time of the attack -- it seems impossible to exclude from that term many of the acts in which the U.S. and our allies routinely engage. Indeed, a large part of our "war" strategy is to kill people we deem to be "terrorists" or "combatants" without regard to whether they're armed or engaged in hostilities at the moment we kill them.

But I think the reader's definition of terrorism might move us into dangerous territory. In Pakistan, we launch missiles at people's homes with civilians in or around them to take out al-Qaeda leadership. The attacks are — hopefully — always intended to be something of a surprise. But I wouldn't call that terrorism. I'm just uncomfortable with the word terrorism metastasizing into "anything the bad guys do to us." Why not call what Hasan did a war crime? Terrorism is a war crime but not all war crimes are terrorism.

In other news of the weird, I'm apparently to the right of both Goldberg and Cliff May in arguing that the soldiers at Fort Hood -- who weren't in an active theater of combat -- can't be considered combatants in the sense that soldiers deployed to Afghanistan are.

However, I reject the idea that the shootings allegedly perpetrated by Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan can be construed as an act of war. Contrary to what Goldberg says, terrorism isn't a "war crime": It's a regular old crime crime. Whether Hasan's motivations were political or whether he was driven to a rampage by his own fear and anger, what he allegedly did was a crime. It was murder. To describe it as anything else buys into the "war on terror" framework in which the entire globe is the battlefield and the distinction between combatants and noncombatants is blurred beyond recognition. This suits both Al Qaeda, who imagines itself in a global clash with Western civilization, and the Obama administration, which is committed to defeating Al Qaeda sometimes even at the expense the rule of law. The "global battlefield" concept is central to this, and viewing Hasan's behavior either as an attack on uniformed combatants or as a "war crime" accepts this premise. It also elevates Hasan, and his alleged behavior, to a status that I don't believe is deserved.

That said, I'm not sure it's possible to reconcile the argument that Fort Hood was "terrorism" because a "state of military hostilities" did not exist there with the idea that it isn't an act of terrorism for the U.S. to kill its enemies while they're sitting at home with their loved ones--even if they really are the bad guys. Maybe intent is what matters here, coupled with the reality that those the U.S. is fighting often use civilians as human shields -- but I think that's far too simple, and I think we've done ourselves a disservice as a nation by not grappling with these questions.

Ultimately, I think, Greenwald gets to the core problem:

Is there any legitimate definition of "terrorism" that allows the Fort Hood attack to qualify but not those above-referenced attacks? The U.S., of course, maintains that it is incapable of engaging in "terrorism," by definition, because "terrorism" is something only "subnational groups or clandestine agents" can do, but leaving that absurdly self-serving and incoherent exclusion aside, how can the Fort Hood attacks targeted at soldiers be "terrorism" but not our own acts?