The closest thing to a war on terror  

Re Richard Perle's comment about Seymour Hersh being "the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist"; it occurs to me that this tells us as much about what Mr Perle thinks of terrorists as it tells us about what he thinks of Hersh. Why is Hersh a terrorist?

Because he sets out to do damage and he will do it by whatever innuendo, whatever distortion he can - look, he hasn't written a serious piece since My Lai.

Note that Perle doesn't bother with Hersh's arguments. Instead he goes right for the jugular - Hersh's tactics. By declaring innuendo and distortion out-of-bounds, he relieves himself from any responsibility for what Hersh actually says. And of course, the same goes for real-world terrorists. Rather than acknowledge their ideologies and causes, Perle places them - al Qaeda, the Palestinians, the Chechans, even Saddam Hussein - in the evil category.

It's true that not everybody plays fair, but in at least some of these cases, our enemies are rational actors. Why not deal with them as such? I guess it's easier to just call them terrorists and leave it at that.