We are into the second decade of the "war on terror." It now ranges from the mountains of Afghanistan to the jungles of Colombia. It has dominated our lives since 9/11. Yet there is no measure of success to gauge progress or to say when it may end. So it is time to take stock of where we are and where we are going.
One thing we can state with certainty: its prosecution on all fronts at home and abroad is relentless. And the costs have been enormous. The payment has been in lives lost or crippled, in trillions of dollars, in prestige and authority dissipated, and in a latent menace to our well-being that the "war" supposedly aimed at eliminating. This endless crusade has achieved a state of perpetual motion generated by a confluence of dogmatic ideology, intellectual obstinacy, cynical political calculation and the exertions of powerful financial and professional interests. Today, the enterprise -- or at least 90% of it -- looks to be divorced from reality.
What is the threat that justifies these expenditures? Americans' collective image of the "war on terror" project is of hordes of fanatical Muslims scaling the outer walls of the Republic with turbans, scimitars between their teeth and terrifying cries of "Allah Akbar" on their lips. They are legion. Heroic Americans clad in the colors of the CIA, FBI and Homeland Security man the battlements -- repelling the jihadis with arrows, stones and hot pitch. Some join the uniformed military to sally forth in punitive raids to smite the enemy before he can muster his forces for the next, inevitable onslaught.
All this is sheer nonsense inspired more by scary TV shows and films than deliberate thinking. Yes, there once was a serious terrorist organization that had the United States in its sights. Al-Qaeda succeeded a few times; once on American soil with horrific effect that traumatized the country. That success resulted in large part from the incompetence of the CIA and FBI (especially the latter) and a national leadership that was asleep at the switch.
The military action to root the leadership out of their Afghan base was necessary (although 9/11 was organized from Hamburg). The follow-up intelligence and police operations to degrade the remnants of al-Qaeda, too, were a logical and appropriate response to the danger. Circa 2002-2003, no significant threat to the United States still existed. Over the ensuing decade, the sole attempts at terror in the U.S. have been amateurish forays that were ill-planned and on a very small scale. If all we have to worry about is some kid with a Rube Goldberg explosive device concealed in has underpants every ten years or so, we should thank our lucky stars. Instead, our leaders and the terrorism industry work overtime to persuade us that the people who couldn't get their hands on fire retardant shorts are still out there scheming to plant a nuclear fizzle bomb in Michael Bloomberg's City Hall.
Al-Qaeda is a franchise name -- as Rome was for a thousand years after it fell, like Caesar was for two millennia until the Bulgarian Tsar was ousted by the Red Army. The name means little if anything in concrete terms. Al-Qaeda in North Africa? Its Algerian components are serious but concerned exclusively with Algeria. The rest are nests of bandits, desert buccaneers and pseudo jihadis whose ability to harm us is limited to kidnapping wayward tourists who wander off the caravan routes. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula? Here, too, the Saudi component has its sights on the House of Saud. The Yemeni component is preoccupied with its own local agenda and exploiting the opportunities opened by the post-Saleh chaos.
Of course, there was the American Anwar al-Awlaki whom we honored by declaring the indispensable man of AQAP. Whether his assassination was warranted or not, it hardly has changed the threat equation. Al-Sabah in Somalia? An impoverished outfit in every respect with its own local political dynamics and ambitions. A refuge for more serious al-Qaeda types? Who exactly? Anyway, far less useful than any major city in Europe. This has not stopped Washington from mobilizing Ethiopia (again), Kenya, the African Union and our own drone squadrons in a massive effort to crush them.
The Taliban? No less a personage than Joe Biden declared a few weeks back that, "Look, the Taliban per se are not our enemy." Their fading ties with the enfeebled ghost of al-Qaeda past in the Hindu Kush are insignificant since the focus is on Afghanistan's political future -- as it always has been. (One wonders whether killing thousands of Taliban non-per se enemies, along with thousands of collaterals, does not create thousands of per se enemies).
The number of those "out there" who constitute some danger to the United States? If we follow the logic of the Obama administration as manifest in justification for the draconian measures of the Patriot Act II and in our geographically growing deployments in Central Asia, South Asia, Yemen, Somalia, the Sahel, West Africa, East Africa, and now even Latin America -- then the number of enemies is in the hundreds of millions. That is to say, counting all Muslims who harbor hostile thoughts towards the United States and, therefore, are declared legitimate targets in the "war on terror." How many people actually would participate in a venture to do physical harm to the United States? They probably number in the three digits. How many might have the capability of acting and the will to try and do so? A handful. Other 9/11s in the works? Not a scintilla of evidence of that.
The tragic irony is that our flailing about may fill with quiet rage and a thirst for revenge a few competent people who indeed could do us serious harm. It may already have. Iraq and Afghanistan were signal achievements in this regard.
The chances of this less than terrifying reality braking the momentum of the "war on terror" juggernaut? Zero. It has become a fixture of our foreign policy, of our politics, of our budgetary arithmetic and -- above all -- it is burned into our national psyche.
Tom Engelhardt: The Obama Contradiction
The US is so overwhelmingly powerful compared to all the countries in the world put together, that if the US did not manufacture threats and so-called enemies, it will never have to fight a single war.
Since the creation of the US no country or organization has ever attacked America on it's soil and yet the US has been in war after war, to the present day.
And since 1945, every war The US has fought has been overseas or far away from America's border. The US is the only country on the planet earth that manages to find so-called enemies and see threats to itself, in every part of the world? No other country has so-called enemies and perceives threats in every part of the world?
- http://www.prisonplanet.com/experts-agree-war-on-terror-is-a-racket-cia-and-wall-street-are-financed-by-global-drug-trade.html
- http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30566
He warned us that this new and unprecedented thing had no legitimate military purpose. That it would perpetuate War for War's Own Sake. That it would usher in War that Never Ends. And he was exactly right.
In 2001, a second attack was mounted on New York's tallest buildings, this time complete with the amazing .. distraction .. of an airliner being used as a (not particularly effective) missile to steer attention away from what =did= bring not two but three tall buildings dropping down straight into their own footprints. The cover story was plausible but the truth, whatever it is, is far more horrifying. (The parking garages underneath tall buildings have been sealed every night ever since.) But... we have to sternly ask ourselves... did our various "reactions" actually do any good? Having spent literally Trillions of dollars on "this thing" by now, did we get anything of what we paid for?
I think that you have said the answer quite well, Michael: "No." We've gotten another chapter, another dimension, of "endless war for war's own sake," to go along with an ever increasing number of non-declared Wars (since and including Korea...) =none= of which have ever actually ended. And the price paid has been: "everything else."
Street crime can not be eliminated
Disease can not be eliminated
Drug addiction can not be eliminated
Fatal accidents in the street, in the air and at sea can not be eliminated.
You have to do the best you can without bringing the normal life of a free society to a standstill, and without bankrupting the nation.
Then you accept the level of risk that's left.
Unfortunately this paranoia is too profitable for the 1% who really count. Wisdom doesn't stand a chance.
* The U.S. formally expanded its drone attacks in Somalia, “reopening a base for the unmanned aircraft on the island nation of Seychelles.”
* A U.S. drone killed 16-year-old Pakistani Tariq Aziz, along with his 12-year-old cousin, Waheed, three days after the older boy attended a meeting to protest civilian deaths from U.S. drones (another of Tariq’s cousins had been killed in 2010).
* NATO airstrikes continued to extinguish the lives of Afghan children; in just the last 24 hours, 5 more Afghan children were killed by the ongoing war.
* The FBI increased its aggressive attempts to recruit young Muslim-American males into Terror plots which the FBI concocts, funds, encourages, directs and enables, while prosecuting more and more Muslims in the U.S. for crimes grounded in their political views and speech.
Welcome all my friends to the war without an end...
"...he will give the people what they want...he will give them death and they will love him for it."
Obama is a tool of the elite with a Nobel Peace Prize as a punch line.
In the wake of Osama bin Laden’s summary execution one year ago, many predicted that War on Terror would finally begin to recede. Here’s what happened since then:
*With large bipartisan majorities, Congress renewed the once-controversial Patriot Act without single reform, and it was signed into law by President Obama; Harry Reid accused those urging reforms of putting the country at risk of a Terrorist attack.
* For the first time, perhaps ever, a U.S. citizen was assassinated by the CIA, on orders from the President, without a shred of due process and far from any battlefield; two weeks later, his 16-year-old American son was also killed by his own government; the U.S. Attorney General then gave a speech claiming the President has the power to target U.S. citizens for death based on unproven, secret accusations of Terrorism.
* With large bipartisan majorities, Congress enacted, and the President signed, a new law codifying presidential powers of worldwide indefinite detention and an expanded statutory defintion of the War on Terror.
* Construction neared completion for a sprawling new site in Utah for the National Security Agency to enable massive domestic surveillance and to achieve “the realization of the ‘total information awareness’ program created during the first term of the Bush administration.”
* President Obama authorized the use of “signature” drone strikes in Yemen, whereby the CIA can target people for death “even when the identity of those who could be killed is not known.”
The "war on terror" has nothing to do with terrorists, and everything to do with the MIC and the people who profit from it.
"Success", can therefore be measured by:
- The increase in defense spending
- The increase in combat zones globally
- The increase in the number of families with one or more parents over seas
- The increase in the number of cases of PTSD
- The increase in suicides by returning soldiers
- The increase in pressure on all other parts of the budget to support the never ending war
- The stability and growth in the MIC sector in the face of a crumbling domestic economy
See? It's MASSIVELY successful... when you realize its true purpose.
Pretend it's about anything else
And watch it keep going and going....
This is a well thought essay, what's lacking is why the Middle East wants to hurt Middle America. The Crusades ended nine hundred years ago. We need oil they sell oil. Pres. Eisenhower was on the side of the natives when he told the British and French that stealing the Suez Canal was not OK. He was on the side of shareholders when he told Kermit Roosevelt that democracy was expendable in Iran 1953.
We went wrong when we put the Bible ahead of the Constitution. And that's why we're here today. Our President knows that his God Blesses his America and that Israel is special.
It's sad that even when we elect a black, Hussein, Peace Prize lover, we find the same old story; imperialism and racism. We are reverb particulate.