Who are the terrorists?

“If it looks like a terrorist, if it walks like a terrorist, if it acts like a terrorist, if it fights like a terrorist, it’s a terrorist.” Thus spoke Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at a UN General Assembly press conference. 

Several questions come to mind when one listens to or reads Lavrov’s words: What is a terrorist?

How do the Russians decide that one is a terrorist?

What are the criteria for designating the label terrorist to a person or a group?

Lavrov does not answer such questions.

When pressed to answer questions about whether the Russian air strikes targeted civilians or Daesh, Lavrov elaborated on his earlier vague statement with an equally vague declaration.

He claimed that the Russian air strikes targeted Daesh and Daesh-affiliated groups.

Again a question crosses one’s mind. How do the Russians decide that a certain group is affiliated with Daesh?

Instead of clarifying the situation, the Russian foreign minister made it even murkier and more confusing.

That confusion is intentional, for Lavrov’s eloquence in English is undeniable. The added confusion, that is the vagueness, is intended not only to show a noncommittal position but also to leave one unable to clearly think about the parties involved and the whole “situation”.

One forgets who the victim is, and the victim and the victimiser become interchangeable.

Russia has a vested interest in this language game, to use a euphemistic phrase.

It started its bombing campaign on September 30, and it is reportedly on the verge of deploying boots on the Syrian ground, a deployment that indicates the imminence of a ground offensive.

It is in the interest of Russia and its allies to market this move as a deterrent or defensive act. This way nobody can blame Russia, simply because the Syrian conflict is so confusing that one can easily say that everybody is equally to blame.

If everybody is to blame, then approaching these questions will be even more difficult.

Is what is happening in Syria a revolution or a civil war? Who are the rebels or the revolutionaries? Who are the victims? Who are the terrorists? What does the Syrian regime want?

The Russians want these questions to go unanswered as they raise the level of their intervention. 

They want the situation to be as unclear as possible so that one’s knowledge of what is happening is very limited.

That lack of clarity prevents one from noticing Russia’s explicit expansionist policies.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar Al Abbadi already asked Russia to launch similar strikes in Iraq.

That lack of clarity further makes one unable to connect the dots, as Russia’s grand policies become unobtrusive. Unnoticed, then, goes the fact that Russia is now smoothly spreading its tentacles to the entire region.

Read in that context, Lavrov’s words cannot be but misleading and a ruse that disguises those grand policies.

Of course, he is not the first to do that; his statement falls within a spate of similarly vague and misleading statements by politicians from different countries, especially hegemonic ones.

His statement reminds one of former American secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld prior to the occupation of Iraq: “There are no ‘knowns’. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don’t know.”

Rumsfeld’s words are the epitome of the fogginess that we are forced to live with.

They were said before the launch of an operation called, tellingly, “Shock and Awe” under the Bush administration.

In his forthcoming book “Redeemer Nation”, William Spanos cogently argues that that phrase “shock and awe” is meant to strike the spectators of American violence dumb and deprive them of the ability to think of terrorism critically, that is in a larger context.

That larger context includes state terrorism, the main players of which in the region are Israel, the US, Iran and Russia.

The writer, a Fulbright scholar, is professor of English literature at the University of Jordan. He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.