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.
Underpinning all of this was a fear by the U.S. establishment that Nicaragua's development might "infect others" by giving people in other countries in the region the same ideas about social and economic justice. U.S. control of the region in "our backyard" would erode. So, standard propaganda lines were invented about how the Soviets are going to come and get us if we don't destroy Nicaragua. According to Noam Chomsky, the preeminent foreign policy expert and the eighth most cited scholar of all time, the U.S. purposefully pressured all allies to refuse requests for military aid from Nicaragua for defense of our attacks, in the hopes that Nicaragua would turn to the Soviet Union for aid and thus be able to portray Nicaragua as a tool of the Soviets in their vast conspiracy to destroy America and rule the world forever. The Nicaraguan government did not comply, but the propaganda line was invented anyway.
So, the people in office in the 1980s and many in office today, in carrying out the "war on terror" were committing some of the worst and abominable terrorist acts in history. Nicaragua is just the tip of the iceberg. The Reagan administration practically destroyed the rest of Central America, killing innocent people in the hundreds of thousands. It's possible the region may never recover because there has been too widespread devastation.
Elsewhere in the world, in Angola and Mozambique, the U.S. financed the deaths of a million and a half people, 850,000 of them infants and young children, according to UNICEF. Angola and Mozambique had recently cast off the remaining vestiges of the Portuguese empire in their countries, but apartheid South Africa, with our blessing and backing, would not permit independence. South Africa invaded Angola to crush the recent independence movement, but failed thanks to the selfless help of Cuba. The U.S. and South Africa then began a terrorist campaign, primarily through the Savimbi movement, against the people of Angola, resulting in the aforementioned deaths. It also resulted in about $60 billion worth of damage. At the same time, the U.S. was supporting South Africa's racist regime against "notorious terrorist groups" (according to the Pentagon in 1988) like the African National Congress, led by Nelson Mandela. Valuable support and increased trade flowed to South Africa in their effort to crush evil terrorists like Mandela. Then-Representative Dick Cheney voted against a resolution calling for the release of Mandela from prison, demonstrating his great commitment to freedom.
The "war on terror" of the 1980s provides valuable lessons about how such a war would be conducted by the world's leading terrorist state — namely, the "war on terror" is a brutal terrorist war. The current "war on terror" has nothing to do with stopping terrorism; it's about dominating the globe and ensuring U.S. geopolitical hegemony, and American citizens are responsible for letting their government continue these illegal actions.