It's Not a War on Terror

[kalian]

http://www.thenation.com/edcut/index.mhtml?pid=1473

It's time to stop calling the post 9/11 struggle against terrorism a "war." Iraq is a (disastrous) war; Afghanistan was a brief one. But the struggle against stateless terrorists is not the same thing. And framing it as a war, as columnist Matt Miller argued earlier this year, "was a conscious decision made by Bush and Karl Rove and others in the first days after 9/11."



Rove understood that if the indefinite struggle against terror was generally framed as a "war," it would become the master narrative of American politics giving the GOP the chance to achieve "a structural advantage, perhaps in perpetuity" over Democrats.



The "war" metaphor, as retired American ambassador Ronald Spiers wrote in a provocative piece last March in the Vermont Rutland Herald, "is neither accurate nor innocuous, implying as it does that there is an end point of either victory or defeat.... A 'war on terrorism' is a war without an end in sight, without an exit strategy, with enemies specified not by their aims but by their tactics.... The President has found this 'war' useful as an all-purpose justification for almost anything he wants or doesn't want to do; fuzziness serves the administration politically. It brings to mind Big Brother's vague and never-ending war in Orwell's 1984. A war on terrorism is a permanent engagement against an always-available tool."



It's easy to see how this Administration has used the "war" as justification for almost anything. Just last week, Amnesty International's annual report exposed how the US has been flouting international human rights standards, "resulting in thousands of women and men suffering unlawful detention, unfair trial and torture--often solely because of their ethnic or religious background"--and all in the name of the "war on terrorism."

...more...
If only more people would come to the same realization...

[NMDemDist2]

1. agreed eom

[Disturbed]

2. Terrorism is a tactic.

The Bush Admin. is as phony as a $3 bill.

Correction: "Afghanistan was a brief one."

There are 17,000 US Troops occupying Afghanistan and after two years the war on Afghanistan is far from over.

[ixion]

3. I'm really encouraged by this thought making it to the mainstream

I've been arguing against wars on abstractions for years, and FINALLY the press is getting the point.

Wars on abstractions are unwinnable, and are simply not wars by defintion.

The War on Drugs, and the War on Terrorism, are the two most ill-conceived ventures ever created by the US government (with the possible exception of prohibition), and are primarily about destroying civil liberties and the Bill of Rights, IMHO.

[PATRICK]

4. Rumsfeld is saying

we definitely are losing the "war against Al Qaeda" so the cute abstractions are senseless. we took Iraq, but so what? Will we own it by the end of the day? Unlikely. The war for oil that had reached and passed peak production?

A web of unsatisfying slogans and lies and defeats and untouched enemies(NK, Saudis). Degeneration of even the common political game of war to unsustainable absurdity? Empire? An impossible joke, a draining doom on what we have already. perpetual war? No one except degraded brutalized countries burning out has them. No rational human being wants them. The human race cannot survive them and yet Cheney envisions war as long as there are people(like him, yes I suppose there could be nothing but misery selfishness and war, but he is a sick minority).

There is a visceral global revolt in the core of all of humanity directed against Bush.

God, ditto.

[teryang]

5. It doesn't warrant the phrase "struggle against terrorism"

It is something our CIA created, supported and trained for our Machiavellian goals and is now manipulated as a national defense and ideological buggaboo.

All manifestations of anarchy and terror are lumped together in a meaningless stew of unsupported and confused political messages to mobilize mass hysteria. If not sufficient to mobilize the desired emotions and conduct, further "scary" events are orchestrated off the black ops menu.

The attack on the WTC and the Pentagon have gone uninvestigated and unexplained because the enablers would be uncovered in their traitorous cynicism. The obstruction of justice and suppression of truth is evidence of the organic bond of our corrupt system to unlawful violence against targets of political convenience. The alleged international terrorist threat is little more than the bastard offspring of BCCI.

The Iraq war is defined ad nauseum as "the central front in the war on terrorism" so as to maintain the big lie that Iraq had something to do with 911. The boogey man is going to get you, but who is it? It's us. We kill them and we kill our own so we can go on killing them and ripping everyone off while this murderous side show distracts everyone.

As Sibel Edmonds says there's big money in it and you'd be suprised at the VIPs who would have to be imprisoned if our institutions ever investigated and acknowledged the facts.