Why do Democrats Let Bush Define the Terror Issue?

Why do Democrats continue to accept Bush's ludicrous assertion that the Iraq war has anything to do with fighting terrorism? They should be pointing out that far from aiding that fight, it's a distraction from it, wasting resources that could be better spent finding and deterring terrorists all over the world.

Bush is like a dull rat, continually running his old route in a new maze, and winding up in the same dead end. His approach to terrorism is based on the obsolete nation-state paradigm. Terrorist networks are international. Corporations are international. Laws are increasingly international. National boundaries are becoming meaningless on our shrunken, interdependent planet. Yet the Bush administration is busy putting up fences and pretending that terrorism is a war between nations. We all know this--why don't the Democrats?

War is obsolete. An aircraft carrier won't stop a single terrorist from bombing a mall or releasing poison gas in a subway. Nor will a tank. Nor will a missile, nor a bomber, nor any of the other horrendously costly and often ineffective Pentagon weapons systems. It's like trying to get rid of a cloud of wasps by firing cannons at them. Our entire military budget is devoted to irrelevant preparations.

But the Pentagon is only equipped to fight old-fashioned wars. It is not equipped to cope with terrorism. So the Bush administration came up with the gimmick that there are "rogue" states that "sponsor" terrorism (despite the fact that most terrorists seem to be citizens of our "allies"). Then you make war on these "rogue" states and use all your military toys; and by bombing their cities and killing their children and destroying their infrastructure and looting their culture they won't be motivated to be terrorists anymore, but will become businessmen and open Walmarts.

Terrorism is not a conflict between nations. It's an international crime problem. An international network can only be destroyed through international cooperation. Terrorists express political grievances through acts of murder. To define them as 'enemy warriors' is to dignify their crimes. But Bush has a 19th century brain. 'International' is a dirty word to him. So he has to define terrorism as war--maybe because he likes dressing up as a soldier better than dressing up as a cop.

Of course there are side benefits to defining a police problem as a war. You can commit human rights violations with impunity. We're holding Saudis as "prisoners of war" when Saudi Arabia is an ally. It's almost fun to hear Bush's toady lawyers twist themselves into verbal knots over this one.

The result of operating on an obsolete paradigm is, predictably, disaster. Like a newly-commissioned cavalry officer blithely leading his sabre-wielding men into a barrage of machine-gun fire, Bush proclaimed the Iraq war a "slam dunk". As a result, thousands of Americans are dead or maimed, our nation is, by one estimate, two trillion dollars poorer, and most Iraqis--those that haven't been killed--are worse off than they were under Saddam. Iraqi children can't go to school because it isn't safe. Iraqi women, who lived Westernized lives under Saddam's secular regime, are being beaten or killed for doing things like driving a car or wearing makeup. No one in a city is safe at night.

And of course, when you're stuck in an obsolete paradigm you can't learn from your mistakes. When he talks about not being willing to "cut and run" he's stuck in the same macho box that got the United States into Vietnam. If Lyndon Johnson hadn't been so afraid to "cut and run" in 1964, the whole world, including us, would have benefited enormously. "Cut and run" is just a negative spin on "learning from your mistakes". But in Bush's paradigm, if you admit you made a mistake your testicles will fall off.

So why are we making war instead of catching terrorists? Because we can. It's what we know how to do. As the old saying goes, if your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But why aren't the Democrats pointing this out, and making the terrorism issue theirs?