Leopold Stotch, blogging at Outside The Beltway, hits one of my pet-peeves:

What Americans need to realize is that there really is no such thing as terrorism; there are revolutions you support (freedom fighters) and those that you don’t (terrorists). But to label a person or a group “terrorist” is to say nothing more than that you disagree with their claims and their cause.

I wholly disagree with the whole “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” line of thinking. For one thing, not all who fight for freedom use terrorism, and certainly it would seem that most who employ terror aren’t fighting for freedom. I see, for example, no freedom fighting in what al Qaeda has done, and certainly the PLO’s utilization of terror has hardly resulted in much freedom for anybody.

Terrorism is largely a tactic, and a group is defined by the degree to which that tactic accurately describes its basic operation. I see terrorism (and I defined it online here) as the specific targetting of civilians in order to foment fear, which, is created in hopes of changing the policies of governments. I do not see all collective political violence as terrorism–I certainly don’t see guerrilla movements as terrorists, per se (although they may engage in terroristic tactics at times, which, granted, blurs the lines a bit). However, if one takes a group like al Zarqawi’s that detonates car bombs in markets and kidnaps workers and beheads them on camera, one is dealing with something quite different than, say, the FSLN in Nicaragua prior to the revolution (or the Contras after the revolution) or the FMLN in El Salvador during its civil war. In one case you have a very small group that is trying to create terror in the population, in another you have an army that emerges to attempt to confront the state militarily.

I had a piece along these lines at TCS a while back (What’s an Insurgent? What’s a Terrorist?).

Further, I disagree with Stotch’s oversimplification of all groups which utilize violence as being part of a revolutionary movement. Not all collective political violence is necessarily revolutionary in nature–certainly I am not certain that I would want to term al qaeda’s aims as “revolutionary” in the normal usage of the term (at least as a term of art in political science/sociology).

Of course, I don’t consider the American Revolution a true “revolution” (in the French, Russian, Chinese, Cuban, Iranian or Nicaraguan sense), but rather a war of independence. That, however, is perhaps a discussion for another time.

Update: This is from a comment I left below, which may help illustrate my position further:

Pablo Escobar, of the Medellin Cartel, used car bombs in places like shopping mall garages in Bogota in the 1990s to scare the upper class so that they would force the government to capitulate to certain demands by the cartels. This was clearly terrorism, but was there was no freedom fighting involved and no revolutionary aims were present, yet it empirically was terrorism. No need to be normative in my definition, either: quite straight-forwardly a group of persons who could not militarily challenge the state used the fomentation of fear in the population in the hopes that that fear would lead to governmental action–in this case, the cessation of extraditions to the US of Colombian nationals. It worked, by the way.