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BS ‘n’ About…
The War on Terror
America can’t win the War on Terror. But don’t fret. We were never supposed to win it because Wars on Terror can’t be won. But they sure do eat up a lot of bullets and bombs with minimal military risk in return.
You see, that was the ultimate problem behind the Cold War. It too ate up a lot of bullets and bombs, but did so at the risk of some yahoo on the other side pounding his shoe on the table and nuking the White House. And that would have been really, really bad for business.
Back during the height of the Cold War, J. S. Mill wrote The Power Elite, (which just happened to be the first book I, Bob Smith, was assigned to read at The University of Chicago). It postulated that, at the end of WWII, America found itself with unprecedented wealth, so the ‘power elite’ invented the Cold War because they didn’t trust that wealth in the hands of the American people. (A good case could be made that, from their perspective, the ‘60’s proved them right: A prosperous, well-educated populace is not a docile, easily-marched-off-to-war populace. It is a lesson we would do well to remember today.)
So what comes after the ‘60’s? Why, 1984 of course! A people stirred up about the boogeyman over the horizon and where their next mortgage payment is coming from is the very definition of a docile, easily-led populace that won’t be throwing another ‘60’s anytime soon.
When 9/11 happened, our leaders gave the cold shoulder to our allies and closed our borders. They enacted a Patriot Act, virtually overnight, that has done a lot more to destroy American civil liberties than it has to protect us from Muslim suicide bombers. The ‘power elite’ empowered a Department of Homeland Security with unprecedented powers to spy on the American people and ruthlessly quash any dissent from us should we dare to ever throw another ‘60’s. The only definition of “terrorist” in the Patriot Act is “one who incites others to violence against the government”. How different the ‘60’s would have looked if this travesty of a law had been in place back then! The Patriot Act has done more to destroy the American way of life than Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and all the terrorists in the world combined.
Which brings us back to the War on Terror, a war we can never win because every terrorist we kill plants seeds that might take twenty years to bloom into a suicide bomber. All the planes, tanks, ships, and hummers in the world can’t protect us from some suicidal nutjob willing to blow himself up in our local Starbucks. As a matter of fact, a very good case can be made that all that military hardware makes it even more likely that our grande cappuccino is going to explode in our face one of these days. The contractors get rich. The treasury gets bled dry. More terrorists are bred. The cycle repeats itself.
On 9/11 America was riding a wave of prosperity, the only superpower in the world. Today we are teetering on the brink of economic collapse and civil unrest. Our Constitution lies in tatters and we hate our government. Yet we are no safer from the suicide bombers than we were a decade ago. They attacked us once, and we’ve been destroying ourselves from within ever since.
Wars on Terror can’t be won, but they can be lost. The America we are proud of, the one we sing about in our patriotic songs, is no longer the America we are. It is no longer the America championed by those who lie their way to Washington. Washington is no longer us. It has become them.
Their world has been enriched by the War on Terror at the expense of us, the American people. We have entered a new Gilded Age that ought to shame all of us: We, the People for allowing it to happen and They, the Greedy for raping the economy, destroying the American way of life that they so hollowly champion.
When it gets right down to it, 9/11 wasn’t an attack on us, the American people. It was an attack on them: The politicians, the bankers, and the defense contractors. So, in our name, they declared a holy war of revenge. But wars imply sacrifice. Yet, since 9/11 it is only us who have sacrificed: We get stripped darn-near buck-naked every time we get on a plane while they limo to their private jets and corporate retreats. They wreck the economy so we lose our jobs and they get trillion-dollar bailouts. The Patriot Act has our prisons bulging while they are still diddling the interns and throwing ‘tickle parties’. We’re draining our kids’ college funds to pay them for our underwater mortgages while they’re foreclosing on our homes then re-selling them to our kids. We’ve sacrificed our jobs, our homes, our retirements, and our way of life. They can’t even sacrifice a tax cut. All they’ve sacrificed is us.
And what of the actual loss in life? The Muslim terrorists killed a couple thousand Americans on 9/11 while the two wars we’ve been dragged into under false pretenses have taken xxxx American lives as of xx/xx. That doesn’t even take into account the collateral lives lost in the financial meltdown, nor the fact that more servicemen committed suicide in 2009 than were killed in battle. (You read that right.) We, the People will be paying with our lives for the mistakes made after 9/11 for decades to come. We, the People would have been better off doing nothing.
Not so, however for the bankers, the politicians, and the defense contractors: Mill’s so-called ‘Power Elite’, Eisenhower’s ‘military-industrial complex’. They have amassed Gilded Age fortunes, unprecedented police powers, and insulting tax cuts as a direct result of the War on Terror. Why would they ever want it to end? The scary answer is: They don’t.
Our leaders will never willingly declare an end to the War on Terror any more than 1984’s Big Brother would have declared an end to the war against the forces from the East. And for the same reason: A fearful people is a docile people.
The 21st Century has been a dark time for humanity in general and the United States in particular. Our every perception of ourselves has been shaken to the core. 9/11 marked the end of the American Century and the beginning of the Ameri-can’t Century. We can’t protect our borders. We can’t protect our economy. We can’t protect our way of life. We can’t even get along with each other, much less the rest of the world. Ameri-can’t!
America’s 21st Century, though far from perfect, saw us come together to solve the problems confronting our nation, our people, and the world. We came together to solve labor strife, then dug our way out of a major depression and a handful of recessions. We came together to win two world wars and a cold one. We replaced fire with the electric lightbulb and the Steam Age with an industrial one that morphed into the Information Age. We entered the Twentieth Century on horseback and left it in a spaceship.
The War on Terror threatens everything America is, stands for, and hopes to become. We’ve already lost so much. We used to be the no-doubt-about-it, undisputed Good Guys of the world. Now half the world sees us as the Great Satan and the other half is doing everything in its power to distance itself from our excesses. We used to come in second at the Olympics. Now we cheat our way to victory. We used to be an economic powerhouse. Now we teeter on the brink of financial collapse.
So how do we fix the bridges we’ve burned due to ten years worth of Wall Street driven foreign policy? How do we, the American people disassociate ourselves from the wrongs that have been committed in our name? It won’t be easy. We can assume that the swath of destruction we’ve cut across the Middle East has left behind hatreds that will fester for generations. If you think that time heals all wounds, just dare to bring up General Sherman’s name down Atlanta way and see what reaction you get.
But, as Colin Powell so aptly put it: ‘We broke it. Now we gotta fix it’. But, to do so, we need to go back to the beginning and start from scratch. We need to redefine our goals, define what ‘winning’ would look like, and develop an exit strategy.
Let us start by asking ourselves what the answers to these are as formulated in the hysterical aftermath of 9/11: Weapons of Mass Destruction! Al Quaeda! The Axis of Evil! Freedom Fries! “Bin Laden: Dead or Alive!”
Just what were our goals as we set out to make the world safe from terror? Since we didn’t go after Saudi Arabia, which bred almost all of the 9/11 terrorists, nor Israel, whose very existence, not to mention its treatment of the Palestinian people, is at the root of Muslim violence, it is safe to assume that our goal wasn’t the eradication of radical Muslim breeding grounds and the policies that spawn them.
What did Bush’s “Axis of Evil” have in common? They were some of the few nations on Earth not littered with Coke machines, multiplexes, and Hummer salesmen: Some of the few nations left on Earth not yet brought into the capitalist fold. We abuse the word democracy a lot, but our track record shows a lot more interest in freeing a country’s markets than in freeing its people. Based on past results, it is a safe assumption that our ultimate goal in the War on Terror was not to establish democracies in the Middle East, but rather to open the Muslim world to Coke machines, multiplexes, and Hummer salesmen.
And, as for winning the war on Terror, have any of us taxpayers who are actually footing the bill for it gotten a satisfactory explanation of just what ‘victory’ would look like? Would it end when we killed or captured Osama bin Laden? Would it end when we killed or spirited off to Guantanamo every human being in the world willing to strap on a bomb to get his seventy virgins? Would it end when Homeland Security managed to monitor every footstep, utterance, keystroke, and transaction in the world? Will a ‘victory’ for our government be a ‘victory’ for us, its citizens? Will they ever repeal the Patriot Act voluntarily?
And, as for an exit strategy, there is no exit strategy. There never was. There can be no exit strategy since the very conduct of a War on Terror, a war on civilians, creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of perpetual war: When every Muslim in the world is a suspected enemy, that ‘army’ can never be defeated.
We have squandered trillions to destabilize half of the Middle East, throw a handful of illiterate Stone Age “haters” into concentration camps and CIA torture facilities, and make a mockery of the Constitution. Yet we are still only as safe as the next moron willing to pack his tighty-whities with plastic explosives.
Our goals and conduct in the War on Terror have benefited Washington and Wall Street, not us, the American people. We are in a lot more personal danger than when this war started, both from the terrorists and from the self-serving hysteria propagated by those who propose to lead us.
Since victory has never been adequately defined, we find ourselves mired in a shadow war that will only end when either the economy is decimated or We, the People rise up against it. Tragically, the seeds of both are defining the America we live in today. In less than a decade we went from a rich people in support of our government to an impoverished people one mortgage payment away from revolt.
We are one overblown incident away from a violent future that would have seemed like science fiction just a few short years ago.
Since we broke it, we gotta fix it. But where do we start? We need to start by being honest with ourselves for a change. We need to establish some well-defined, attainable goals, define ‘victory’ in terms of something actually achievable, then figure out a way of extricating ourselves from the mess that has become Muslim extremism once that victory has been achieved.
Our first goal needs to be rebuilding the bridges we’ve burned with our old Cold War allies and building new diplomatic bridges with the powers that have emerged in its aftermath. On 9/12 we had the world’s sympathy and an unprecedented opportunity to unite mankind. Muslim terrorism is a medieval dagger pointed at the heart of every civilized nation on Earth. It is not America’s problem. It is the world’s problem.
What makes it America’s problem is that the Muslim world’s perception of us is inextricably linked to Israel and its latest human rights excesses against the Palestinian people. Regardless of what side one falls on in Israel’s battles, it can’t be disputed that they ruthlessly defend their right to exist as a nation while ruthlessly suppressing the Palestinian people’s right to the same. Until this changes, there can be no end to the War on Terror.
There was a time when Israel’s very existence as a nation required our wholehearted support. That is obviously no longer the case. Israel, as a nation, was founded and conducts itself like no other country on Earth. It is in a unique position that is cause for a vastly disproportionate amount of the hatreds and dangers we face as a species. If humanity doesn’t find a way of diffusing the situation, Israel and its neighbors will dominate the first few lines of mankind’s obituary.
Like a child that has left the nest, America needs to find a way of providing Israel support without being held accountable for its every action. How can we ever hope to arbitrate any kind of peace in the Middle East when we are viewed as the Great Satan to their Little Satan? The War on Terror will drag on until Armageddon ends it.
Another necessary step in ending the War on Terror will be weaning ourselves off the Middle East’s oil and arms contracts. If it weren’t for our greed for these things, we wouldn’t be over there and they wouldn’t be over here. We can never regain the upper hand as long as they hold us hostage to our own greed.
Victory in the War on Terror is going to look a whole lot like the industrialized, arms-producing nations of the world making a stand and saying they’ve finally had enough. If the Middle East wants to destroy itself over its Stone Age hatreds, lets put a wall around the whole damn area and supply them with plenty of rocks. Nothing in. Nothing out. No arms in. No oil out.
If they can find a way to live in peace, they can rejoin the rest of the civilized world. If not, they can eat sand, drink oil, and throw rocks at each other until the End of Days: Their days, not ours.
When it gets right down to it, there isn’t a single significant Muslim country in the entire Western Hemisphere. We could survive very well if we never issued another visa or green card to someone from a Muslim country. Force them to police themselves if they want to avail themselves of what we have to offer.
Let us learn to live within our means and tend to our own little piece of this rock. Let Europe, Russia, and China take the lead on a problem that is in their back yard, not ours.
Bring our boys and girls home. That is victory in any war. It is the only victory we will ever know in the War on Terror. Bring our boys and girls home.
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