langauge and proportions

My friends over at Foreign Policy Watch posted on how Gorden Brown's governing style might be much more effective than Blair's - which, in particular, includes the language he has chosen and the language he will not choose to describe 'global terrorism' inter alia.

I thought I might add some comments on the matter from Charles Townshend's article on "Terrorism: in search of the definite article".

He comes to the conclusion that:

"At root, all official definitions of terrorism boil down to "violence we condemn". All attempts to go beyond the fundamental concept of murder are political, and few states will forgo their prerogative of interpreting such concepts. To achieve agreement among states on this is a Sisyphean task - precisely because terrorism is not a war of evil against good, not a fantastic hydra-headed monster, nor a disease, but a real political strategy adopted in myriad circumstances with myriad intentions. A surprisingly large number of states simply do not accept that it is a major threat. This may be because they are simply blind to the truth, or it may - just - be that they are keeping a level head."

Having said this, I think Townsend might have a point about the threat of global terrorism as a whole in that the treat of terrorism is not in proportion to other more 'global' threats like global warming or disease and that the manifestation of the concept, in itself, adds more to the problem than it can solve.