Calling It Terrorism

According to local and federal officials, Thursday’s bloody assault in Chattanooga, Tennessee, was ruthless and deranged. The U.S. attorney says investigators are treating the attacks, committed by a lone gunman at a military recruiting station and a Navy and Marine Corps Reserve center, as a possible “act of terrorism.” Defense Secretary Ashton Carter calls it a “senseless act of violence.” Navy Secretary Ray Mabus says the attacks were out of bounds: “While we expect our Sailors and Marines to go into harm's way, and they do so without hesitation, an attack at home, in our community, is insidious and unfathomable.”

Senseless? Unfathomable? Terrorism? I doubt it. If this incident was inspired by Islamic jihad, as many investigators suspect, then it probably wasn’t senseless. Nor was it terrorism. It was a rational, horrific act of war.

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According to the Pentagon’s latest published data, our coalition in Syria and Iraq has struck more than 2,000 enemy “buildings” and nearly 500 “staging areas.” A “staging area” can be almost anything—according to the U.S. military glossary, it’s “a general locality established for the concentration of troop units.” Scan the Pentagon’s daily reports on the campaign, and you’ll see accounts of strikes against “barracks,” “compounds,” “structures,” “manufacturing workshops,” and “logistics hubs.” If you’re an ISIS foot soldier, it hardly matters where you are or what you’re doing. You’re a target.

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Recruiters are standard fare. In February, we sent a drone to kill an ISIS recruiter in Afghanistan .

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Training facilities aren’t just fair game. They’re prized targets. President Obama has repeatedly bragged about hitting them. In February, White House spokesman Josh Earnest proudly informed reporters that coalition airstrikes had “succeeded in taking out at least 20 training camps.”

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Last month in the Daily Beast, David Axe reported that according to U.S. military officials, during the past year, drones have conducted nearly 900 airstrikes in Iraq and Syria—and even when they’re not firing the missiles, they’re “involved in pretty much every engagement.” The drones are being piloted from Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, with help from other stateside bases. If you want to kill the people who are firing those missiles in Iraq, you have to come here.

  Wm Saletan @ Slate