From Clinton's Anti-“New Terrorism” Policy to Bush's “War on Terror”: Presidential Transition in the Anti-Terrorism Policy of the United States

This paper aims to tackle the question of why the United States came to launch the war against Afghanistan and Iraq under the name of "Global War on Terror." To clarify this problem, I examine the historical usage of the concept of "terrorism" by the two U. S. administrations surrounding the 9/11 attacks in 2001. It is notable that some terrorism scholars were able to "predict" the emerging threat of the religiously motivated terrorism as "New Terrorism" shortly before the 9/11th attack on the World Trade Center. Scholars such as Daniel Benjamin and Steve Simon argued in the paper published in Survival that more lethal and dangerous threat of the religious terrorism was increasing. This poses a serious puzzle; because even those scholars themselves admitted that there were no dramatic statistics or powerful evidence before the 9/11 attacks. To answer this question, I focus on the concept of the "religious motivation" in those scholar's arguments, and perform a conceptual analysis. By doing so, I argue that the advocates of the "new terrorism" did not insist the newness of the "new terrorism" based on the empirical data of the lethality of terrorist attacks at the time, but in fact they redefine the conceptual dichotomy of "religious / secular" based on the standard of negotiability, by which the "new terrorists" were characterized as non-negotiable and irrational jihadists. This new concept of "religious motivated terrorists" made possible the policy prescription of "war on terror" of the Bush Doctrine, which justifies the preemptive attack to those new terrorists and the "rogue states” which were supposed to harbor those terrorists.