The delicacy of the new Secretary for Homeland Security is now causing her to refrain from using the word “terrorism.”

This is, of course, sophistry.

Terrorism is not the invention of Al-Qaeda, nor is it a defining characteristic of radical Islam.

It has a meaning that is fairly simple to understand. An act of terrorism is one that seeks to cause an adversary to experience fear. Its intent is to demoralize and move the opponent to alter his behavior and conform to the will of the terrorist. just as War is Politics, carried on by other means (Clausewitz), so terrorism is War carried on by other means. The object of all three (Politics, War, Terrorism) is to impose one’s will on the adversary.

The Persians practiced terrorism. So did the ancient Greeks. So did the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and on occasion, the Egyptians. The Romans practiced terrorism. But the targeting of non-combatants was condemned by Christianity, and so terrorism was only sparingly employed through 1000 years of Christendom, and when it was used it almost always provoked horror and condemnation.

The classic terrorist tactic is the massacre of prisoners, or the sacking of a city which has refused to negotiate, surrender, or consider paying tribute. The execution of a conquered garrison or the sacking of a city has no immediate tactical advantage. But the act is intended to serve as a warning to other cities of the terrible consequences of resistance.

Genghis Khan was famous for his use of terror. During the Mongol conquest of China, his forces would arrive at a Chinese city and erect a large white tent for Genghis. If the city submitted to his rule, it might be looted, but the lives of the inhabitants would be spared. if there was no response to the white tent, then a red tent was erected in its place. If the city now fell the soldiers and male inhabitants of the city would be executed, but the women and children would be spared. If the city continued to resist, a black tent would be put up – signifying that when the city fell, all of it’s inhabitants would be executed. And they were. It’s difficult to calculate numbers 800 years after the fact, but rough estimates indicate that 30 million people were killed in China by Genghis and the Mongols. Terrorism worked.

Genghis’s grandson, Hulagu Khan (brother to Kublai Khan) used precisely these tactics in his conquest of the Middle East in 1258. He besieged Baghdad, and when it fell after a one-month siege, the Mongols executed almost the entire population of the city. Estimates range from 100,000 to one million. In 1260, Damascus surrendered to the Mongols rather than suffer the same fate.

The notion that individual human lives have immense value is a western ideal. It is not exclusively Christian, but the notion is certainly central to Christianity. It is historically true that the influence of Christianity had the effect of setting limits in warfare. It is a western, Christian, notion that civilian, non-combatants should not be targetted or deliberately killed.

As the Christian consensus has evaporated in the west, the less likely the culture has become to value or protect individual human life. Pragmatism is antithetical to natural law.

Terrorists are quite prepared to take innocent human life, because in their calculation this helps to achieve their ultimate objective (though this probably ascribes more rational analysis to terrorists than they deserve).

It is not just Islamic terrorists who think this way. Beginning in the Enlightenment, exemplified in the “Reign of Terror” of the French Revolution, an ever-increasing percentage of the west (and many of its intellectual elites) have been rejecting any notion of innocent human life. It is a short step from the “Reign of Terror” to the Anarchists’ “Propaganda of the Deed” to the social Darwinism of the German, Italian, Russian, and Chinese despotic Utopians.

Radical Islam is only the latest millenarian movement to reject the value of human life and adopt pragmatism and terrorism as their tools.

You cannot reason with them. You cannot persuade them to abandon terror. You can only defeat them.

Peace is never achieved by negotiation – only temporary cease-fires. Peace is achieved when one side is victorious over the other.