Collegiate Times

To have a "war on terror" is impossible. Reasonable people should immediately discount it, as the United States is the world's leading terrorist state. It would be akin to a rapist declaring a war on rape — and then raping people in the name of the war on rape.

What most people don't know is that the U.S already declared a "war on terror" over two decades ago, by the Reagan administration. This fact has been wiped clean from the national discourse, as the results from that "war on terror" would quickly lead one to conclude certain things about the current war, something those in office do not want people to know — and those people in office today are roughly the same as those who were in office during the first "war on terror," or their mentors. Reagan declared that he would confront "the evil scourge of terrorism," and Secretary of State George Schultz explained that terrorism was spread by "depraved opponents of civilization itself" and they wished for a return to "barbarism in the modern age."

The U.S. Army Manual defines terrorism as the "calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate fear. It is intended to coerce or intimidate governments or societies…(to attain) political, religious or ideological goals." This is a reasonable definition when talking about terrorism, but the trouble is that we don't apply it to ourselves, violating the basic moral idea of not being hypocrite.

During the first "war on terror," Nicaragua was a prime target. After the people of Nicaragua overthrew their U.S.-backed dictator Somoza in 1979, the country made incredible progress. The Sandinistas established a democratic state, abolished the death penalty, and hundreds of thousands of peasants and families were given land and welfare for the first time. Thousands of schools were built. The illiteracy rate was reduced to less than one seventh. Free education and free healthcare were established for all. Polio was wiped clean from the country. Infant mortality was reduced by a third.

Due to the establishment of democracy, Reagan described Nicaragua as a "totalitarian dungeon." Funding and training for terrorists, described by Reagan as "the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers," commenced in order to carry out atrocities against Nicaraguans — atrocities carried out in the name of the American people. Whole villages were destroyed, schools were obliterated and health centers were attacked. Death squads roamed the country, raping and killing women, slaughtering religious leaders and doctors. They destroyed bridges, power stations, and farms, along with much of the rest of the country's infrastructure.

The death toll of those killed in Nicaragua in our terrorist war "in per capita terms was significantly higher than the number of U.S. persons killed in the U.S. Civil War and all the wars of the twentieth century combined" — over 2.25 million people, according to Thomas Carothers, a Reagan State Department official and historian. Nicaragua brought the U.S. to the World Court, who then ordered the U.S. to desist in its "unlawful use of force" and pay reparations to the Nicaraguan people. The U.S. responded by increasing its funding to the terrorist contras, revealing its contempt for international law.

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