‘Terror’ as Technique in American Policymaking

In a speech delivered in the autumn of 2002, as the United States moved inexorably toward war with Iraq, the late Joan Didion delivered an offhand remark that effectively summed up the flaw at the heart of the logic behind that coming war, and of the logic of a number of wars before it, and of a number of wars to come. Referring to “the ‘war on terror’ that the President had declared” of which the operation against Iraq was the centerpiece, Didion added a parenthetical critique: “…as if terror were a state and not a technique.”

Twenty-three and a half years later, we live in the detritus of a general lack of understanding of precisely that point. This detritus includes interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya, a proxy war in Syria, bombings in Somalia and Nigeria and Yemen, a war with Iran and a genocide in Palestine; as well as warrantless surveillance, extralegal deportations for speech, and trillions of dollars of public debt. Through all of this, up to the present, Americans have found ourselves unable to conceptualize much less debate the fact that we are in a war with no modern precedent.

Though we have been in a never-ending war before, from 1941 to 1991, against Nazism and Sovietism, that war was against states representing alternative systems of political economy to our own. Today we are not at war against a state or a system but against a technique; and, though the “terrorists” we label tend to be Muslims, they are not just Muslims, and they are not just foreigners. They are also white Americans identifying with the principles of small government; black Americans at the receiving end of a war on drugs and crime; and advocates for illegal immigrants without criminal offenses. The reason we do not conceptualize or debate this enveloping reality is because terror has become not just a “technique” of war but a technique of rhetoric: one employed by political operators to expand their power.

Tracing how this specter of terror has been created reveals a history of abuse and misuse at the hands of lawyers, policymakers, and politicians. The abuse and misuse turns on systematically misinforming the American people about actions by Washington DC carried out in their name, and it is predicated on the redefinition of the word terror. Investigating the history of this redefinition shows that terror’s real meaning was first narrowed and then conflated with crime to justify repression at home and war abroad, often at the hands of Jewish Zionists operating off a European lineage of colonialism.

To understand how the word “terror’s” application first became narrowed, Joan Didion is a promising place to start. In no way an expert on “terrorism,” she nonetheless was a writer who knew words’ meanings, and she accrued considerable experience seeing the uses of terror by people we have not been encouraged to think of in relation to that term. In 1982, Didion and her husband, the journalist John Gregory Dunne, traveled to El Salvador to report on the American-backed government there: a right-wing junta instrumental in 1980 in the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, who had spoken publicly against massacres and disappearances being carried out by the junta’s agents. The word “terror,” which according to the Cambridge Dictionary means “violent actions or threats designed to cause fear among ordinary people, in order to achieve political aims,” occurs five times in Didion’s book Salvador. Whether at an airport checkpoint or at a “body dump” or at an evening meal or outside of a mortuary, terror in Didion’s reporting occurs at government hands, an impression backed by statistics in El Salvador and from the State Department.

But this reality, “that government forces do most of the killing,” and that their “vocation for terror” was “the given of the place,” was not the word on El Salvador that filtered out from Washington DC, where President Ronald Reagan heralded the fight for “freedom” by “the people of El Salvador” against “Cuban-backed guerrillas” who “threatened death to any who voted.” Indeed, at the time Didion wrote on El Salvador, thirty-one years after the 1941 inception of American empire, her definition of terror as a “technique” sometimes practiced by western governments was outside-the-margins of public discourse. When “terror” was referenced in American public life, it tended to be in context of Nazi and Communist, or “totalitarian,” repression. These references, while accurate when it came to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, also served another purpose. They justified Washington’s prosecution of the Cold War which involved actions abroad, from the use of deadly chemicals on civilians in Vietnam to the sponsorship of death squads who slaughtered hundreds of women and children at a time in El Salvador, that could be construed as terroristic themselves.

Despite this fixed focus in the public arena, Didion’s apprehension that terror could also exist at the hands of the United States government was shared inside American by another group: Black Americans at the receiving end of a “War on Crime” waged by the Reagan administration. This War on Crime was in many senses an actual war for those on its receiving end. Helicopters, SWAT teams, military-grade weapons, surveillance, stop-and-frisk, beatings, death threats—this became the reality of law enforcement inside American cities. Nearly two million people, disproportionally black men, were incarcerated from the 1970s to the 2000s in what was described by those affected by it as a “campaign of terror” and “a reign of terror upon honest citizens of the black community.” Nonetheless, as in El Salvador, this action was framed by its backers in a very different way, in this case using the metaphor of foreign relations. According to then-Senator Joe Biden, “Crime is a national defense problem. You’re in as much jeopardy in the streets as you are from a Soviet missile.” According to Oklahoma Congressman Glenn English, “We in the Democratic Party realize that the war on drugs has to be fought like World War II—a complete and thorough effort, one dedicated to victory at any cost.” For the Reagan administration, in an America “under siege” from its “inner cities,” militarizing law enforcement gave police “just the weapons they need to fight an effective war.”

But, as the 1980s ended and so did the Cold War, comparisons to Nazism and Communism and traditional wars were no longer adequate justifications for the War on Crime, or for other domestic operations. Increasingly, the word “terror” took their place, applied by the government to what in the past would have been thought of as instances of criminality. In 1985, in a speech on what he called the intersection between terrorism and crime, Director of the FBI William H. Webster said that “another serious crime problem facing our cities [is]…the cold, stark, fear-producing word ‘terrorism.’” In 1989, George H.W. Bush’s Attorney General justified a major escalation of militarized policing by citing “the escalation in drug-connected violence and urban terrorism in many of our major cities.”

In 1995, The Weekly Standard published what became the most influential political diagnosis, by future Bush White House advisor John J. Dilulio, of “the rash of youth crime and violence that has begun to sweep…big cities.” This article put flesh on the rhetorical bone that was “urban terrorism.” In just its first three paragraphs it described “super-predators,” apparently young and violent black men, as people “who have absolutely no respect for human life and no sense of the future” and “who…‘kill or maim on impulse, without any intelligible motive.’” In the words of Hillary Clinton in 1996, borrowing from DiIulio’s article to justify the heightened War on Crime crackdown of her husband’s Administration: “[super-predators have] no conscience, no empathy, we can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.”

But, in the schema of terror developed in the 1980s and 1990s, black men were not the only purveyors of terror; so were whites. According to FBI Director Webster, from the same speech, “Here in the United States, right-wing terrorist groups espousing racial hatred have waged a war of arson, robbery, and murder.” In 1995, Clinton Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, speaking in the aftermath of the deadly siege of the Branch Davidians at their Waco compound, said that legislators pushing to investigate the siege were engaging in a “diversion” and opposed to “the Administration’s effort…to fight domestic terrorism.” According to John J. DiIulio, writing in the same article, “other places are also certain to have burgeoning youth-crime problems…even the rural heartland,” where, according to DiIulio, members of the “white working-class” who have “fallen on hard times” testified that “they’re becoming afraid of their own children.”

Within a quarter-century, this “prognosis” of Webster’s and Panetta’s and DiIulio’s was the agenda in Washington DC. Speaking to Politico in 2021, Frances Fragos Townsend, former deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism and White House homeland security adviser under President George W. Bush, said that “far too little attention has been paid to…white supremacists [causing] things like…Jan. 6…we now find ourselves having to fight almost equally on two fronts.” Speaking that same year, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas “told senators…that the greatest domestic threat facing the United States came from…‘those who advocate for the superiority of the white race.’” Four years later, in the Trump White House, the wheel had again turned, this time against nonviolent illegal immigrants and Americans opposed to their deportation. Indeed, the three Americans shot by ICE and Border Patrol at the end of 2025 and the beginning of 2026, Marimar Martinez and Renee Goode and Alex Pretti, were all labeled domestic terrorists.

The relentless promotion of this narrative of terror has involved a certain amount of factual desynchrony.

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