The War On Terror...
should be declared won. six years ago.
i cannot understand why we as a nation allow our leadership to use those four words as a method for fear-mongering, grand-standing, and especially for the justification of questionable decision-making.
are we truly a nation at war? when i consider a nation at war, i envision a state whose populace in some very tangible way suffers the effects of that war--for example, the rationing of critical supplies such as fuel, or the concern for a beloved friend or family member placed in harm's way. are there lines outside our gas stations twice a week? do we drive more economic vehicles, encouraged to do our part? are we suffering a shortage of rubber or steel? how many of our citizens are actually related to a servicemember in this age of an all-volunteer force? [now, don't misunderstand me here; i'm not denigrating our populace for not caring about our soldiers and sailors, because that certainly isn't the case... on the way back to the 'raq, my group in the atlanta airport was met with a spontaneous and sustained round of applause and "welcome home!"s (we didn't have the heart to tell the crowd we were actually returning to theatre, and that our flight had simply been cancelled for the night). i'm just saying that of all conflicts in our nation's history, this in particular has the least tangible impact upon the average american.]
indeed, the only aspect of this "war" that our country truly experiences is the propaganda machine.
let's also take a moment to define war on the real front, as opposed to the home front. to my understanding, there exist two main theatres in which we are engaged in some action or other, tied somehow to this war on terror: iraq and afghanistan. i will not pretend to know anything about the latter, and will instead confine myself to a discussion of the former. what are we doing in iraq? we are providing security, and doing so by establishing viable border control teams, national police, and army units--all an effort to solidify porous borders, and quiet disquieted streets. what weapons are at our soldiers' disposal? the rules of engagement dictate the circumstances, which are few, under which they are free to engage the ambiguous enemy (largely because the enemy is so ambiguous). instead, we attempt to employ the rule of law, combating the all too ill-defined "terrorist" with crime scene investigations and biometric evidence, and processing the detained in the iraqi judicial system.
and there we have it. terrorism is not an act of war; it is a crime, and we are combating it as such. what does that make our involvement? a police action.
it was probably a mistake to watch the senate foreign relations committee while i tried to gather my thoughts for this tirade--now, seethingly infuriated by those [insert epithets of choice here], i'm sure this is one of my least well-constructed posts. oh, hell, while we're here, another thing that pisses me off: i'm disgusted with the constant sports analogies, as if foreign relations can be boiled down to the vagaries of little league. but, hey! the [bleep]ers just illustrated my point for me: here we are, "referee[ing]."
so, it's not a frakking war! and, to our nation's leadership, this is all a game! we, as a whole people, should be ashamed of ourselves for so happily snorting this line of white they prepare for us; instead, we should look down, into the mirror on which the drug is powdered and aligned, and ask ourselves if we truly want to experience the paranoia it brings.
i don't.
so i say, chalk the damn thing up as a win and call our actions what they are: police actions augmented by policy decisions as to how we shall conduct foreign relations and national security in the future. it will take the unilateral card out of our hand, and force us to play nicely with our fellows and allies, improving our position at the global table.
and i justify that analogy because poker is not a sport.
4 comments:
I think your post is as well organized as a rant can be. (Mine have been far worse.)
The media, unfortunately, bows to the propaganda being vomited out of the government. (Granted, they come up with a lot of it on their own.) What's worse is that the media and government play off each other, and the effect snowballs.
Unfortunately, this whole debacle of the US acting as international police didn't start in the past six years. I am not sure whether that makes me more or less disgusted by the state of our foreign relations.
Anyhow, nice post.
I agree wholeheartedly with you, Spanks -- Even in the heady reactionary days after 9/11, I felt that the knee-jerk reaction of declaring "war" (only without an actual declaration of course, as those are out of vogue) on terror, or terrorism, or terrorists, or what-have-you was a mistake, and we would have been better to do what had proven effective against terrorism in the past: treat it as a crime, just like any other violent act in violation of the rule of law. My elevating these common criminals to the status of "enemies," we really just legitimized them in the minds of their supporters, and complicated our own legal, operational and strategic situation. Punching the tar-baby, so to speak.
And I should point out that while Afghanisan and Iraq are the two "major" theaters in this police action, there are others (I have operated in some of them) and the dynamic is much the same: training, equipping and supporting local forces, while attempting to uphold the rule of law (not always complimentary aims) while SOF guys collect ears in the background...
Oh, and the only organization I can think of that is encouraging the American people to conserve fuel, plant victory gardens, ride victory bikes, avoid purchasing products and materials extracted by corrupt corporations working in league with terrorists in areas of the world where governtments don't have territorial control, etc, in support of the "war" effort is actually the Sierra Club. Go figure.
(Preface: I really have no inside knowledge (outside of your insights) of these events and spend little time listening to debate about the different sides of these events, but I will put forth here my fairly uninformed take on this ‘War on Terror’. Please school my errant ideas if any abound here.)
“War on Terror”: the phrase itself is actually fine with me—along the lines of the “War on Drugs”. I say this because the “War on Drugs” is (was?) also a concerted, multifaceted effort to combat the criminal efforts of loose networks of a nebulous ‘enemy’. The term ‘war’ here refers to the idea of an all-out effort, an attempt at complete rejection and prosecution of the ‘enemy’. Of course, an issue like terrorism (as we know it today) is far more threatening, even, than that of the cultivating, trafficking, and use of drugs, as well as crimes associated with drug use, and so demands a larger, more serious response.
I guess things do change a bit when this more symbolic use of the term ‘war’ comes to look more and more like a traditional war, with the deployment of large numbers of our nation’s armed forces to foreign soil. But I suppose that at the onset of these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was indeed more like a traditional war, with the exception being that the opposing nations’ militaries were either non-existent or just completely dissolved. I think this is a huge difference—when you have an old-fashioned war, often some form of government is left behind, and this government can capitulate to terms, and while ‘conquered’, some form of order can be restored. Here, the ‘enemy’ dissolved and interspersed throughout the common populace. The forces that occupied with the goal of stabilizing the ‘invaded and conquered’ land became targets and catalysts for the rallying cries of a more hidden subversive insurgency.
But in my mind, the War on Terror is not the same thing as the war in Iraq or Afghanistan (if you still deem them wars)— in a Venn diagram (see http://indexed.blogspot.com), the War on Terror, a much broader, larger circle, would overlap just slightly with both the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, but these smaller circles would not be contained completely in the circle for the War on Terror, nor vice-versa. This is where perhaps the “propaganda machine” that you refer to comes in, one that would seemingly have us forget that the two are not inexorably linked, that the War on Terror is not a traditional war, but more a symbolic war involving many more agencies and the utilization of the courts, and that Iraq, in fact, at the onset of the war, had not much to do with terrorism DIRECTLY threatening our national security.
Clearly, acts of terrorism are criminal, as you state, but the case could be made for acts of terrorism being acts of war when the terrorism is state-sponsored (a la the USS Maine? [note—not suggesting any similar conspiracy theories here]). This, in a way, was the claim being made by the U.S.—that the Taliban was promoting/harboring terrorists and that Saddam Hussein was gearing up to produce or had produced terroristic weapons and may have been supporting training for terrorists.
The only problem is that the events of September 11th were (likely) completely independent from the goings-on in Iraq. Any potential proverbial ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq would not have been a DIRECT threat to our national security, but rather meant to terrorize and bully Iraq’s neighbors. Is it important to confront and control this? Absolutely, but this is where the administration of that time used the feelings of vulnerability among the U.S. populace to suggest, or rather demand, that the situation in Iraq was so dire and of eminent and imminent importance that we had to plunge ahead without broad international support, that because our very safety was directly threatened, we couldn’t wait to persuade other nations to be more stern with Saddam Hussein. It came at a time when, because of the ‘fear-mongering’, as you put it, the U.S. could not have the patience to deal with a UN that seemed too easily disobeyed, and the administration felt that they had to do something, anything, to show with bravado that they were in control.
I should also point out that the ongoing operations in Iraq were not precipitated by the events of September 11th. Accelerated, yes, but precipitated, no. The situation in Iraq had been slowly boiling for quite some time (as a very loose reference [and here I’m giving away ALL my credibility] see the movie Three Kings). Back during the 2000 presidential debates between Gore and Bush [transcript excerpt below], the subject of Iraq came up several times, and it was fairly clear that even by then, Bush had a strong desire to do something to remove Saddam Hussein from power (and it should be noted that Gore largely agreed with Bush's thoughts here).
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http://www.debates.org/pages/trans2000b.html
MODERATOR: People watching here tonight are very interested in Middle East policy, and they are so interested they want to base their vote on differences between the two of you as president how you would handle Middle East policy. Is there any difference?
GORE: I haven't heard a big difference in the last few exchanges.
BUSH: That's hard to tell. I think that, you know, I would hope to be able to convince people I could handle the Iraqi situation better.
MODERATOR: Saddam Hussein, you mean, get him out of there?
BUSH: I would like to, of course, and I presume this administration would as well. We don't know -- there are no inspectors now in Iraq, the coalition that was in place isn't as strong as it used to be. He is a danger. We don't want him fishing in troubled waters in the Middle East. And it's going to be hard, it's going to be important to rebuild that coalition to keep the pressure on him.
************************************************************************ Still, somehow this course of action worked its way into existence as the perceived logical response to the attacks of September 11th. Somewhere along the lines, even after the failure to find the ‘weapons of mass destruction’, the war in Iraq has been permanently yoked to the ‘War on Terror’, and even included as the centerpiece of said war. While it may now be true that Al-Qaeda (or a group taking up the Al-Qaeda banner) is operating in Iraq and that terrorism against coalition forces, civilian contractors, Iraqi police, army, and government members, as well as ordinary Iraqis takes place daily, this does not represent a threat to our national security beyond the safety of our troops and civilian contractors over there. This threat, as seen in this light, could be removed simply by removing those in harm’s way (although this is far from what I think should be done), and so, this threat is nothing like that posed by attacks of the kind that occurred on September 11th, yet the war in Iraq is viewed as preventing such. In order to illustrate the extent to which this mindset has infiltrated the public, I present the following example… This past September 11th (last Tuesday) at least a few ballparks that I know of had discounted rates for members of the military as a way to honor our nation’s troops. Of course I am not saying that this wasn’t deserved, but why not a discount for members of our police force, firefighters, EMTs, pentagon employees, etc? These are also some of the people that risk their lives daily (more so the first three groups), and bore a large proportion of the casualties of September 11th.
Sadly, we may not be able to completely blame the “propaganda machine” of our government, but rather our own national intellect and to some extent the sometimes inflammatory manner in which our news coverage presents the ‘facts’ to us in order to up ratings (?) (You made a nice comment in a previous post about our ‘entertainment media’— I’m sure many people know much more about the lives of celebrities than about those who make the decisions to send their neighbors, friends, or family members off to war.) After reading about several Harris Polls (http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=544), it is quite evident that many people believe claims that no-one in the current administration has ever made—that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the September 11th attacks, that some of the hijackers were Iraqis, etc. (There are also other more recent polls that are interesting if you click on ‘2007’ toward the side of the browser).
Moving on…
You go on to define war as that which tangibly and drastically affects the populace of the nation at war, via major drains on resources and the threatened safety of a larger proportion of the citizenry. By this definition, though, the country of Iraq is very much at war, right? ‘War-torn’ and all of the images the phrase conjures, would seem to be an apt description. Who then, are they at war with? Is it a civil war? I guess a ‘state of lawlessness’ would better describe it then a ‘state of war’. This is where our troops are needed and where they are now, in an enhanced policing and training role, as you submit, trying to restore stability and build a system and infrastructure (particularly the personnel) among the Iraqis that will allow for stable development.
Could someone have foreseen the resistance to our occupation instead of entering in unprepared to fully counter (or even gauge) an insurgency? Perhaps. Should more time have been spent planning the follow-through versus the initial ‘Shock and Awe’?
We could be irked at the short-sightedness of those in charge (here it seems the administration and the Pentagon under Rumsfeld—I guess they were the ones calling the shots), but much of the public (myself included) was and is ill-equipped to judge the successes of the war, so it is hard for us to know when failure is occurring in the present. Unfortunately, that leaves us in the arena of hindsight and second-guessing, which is all too easy to do, but do we have any other choice? Clearly, things have not gone as well as they should have, and someone in charge must be accountable for this.
In closing, as something other than just hindsight criticism, I would like to see more done to bring other nations and international organizations back into the fold. If the cause is just, shouldn’t we be able to persuade non-coalition nations to join? Can it be too late? Also, without broad support, the U.S. becomes a larger target—it is probably easier to engender hatred against an occupation by largely one nation than it would be to engender the same hatred against, well, the rest of the world.
Still, it is true that extremism will exist at all times and violence and terrorism in some form will not be eradicated. This is one dangerous thing about linking the War on Terror so closely to military occupation— much like the War on Drugs, it is unlikely to have an end.
On a less serious note, I would like to commend you for substituting sports analogies with drug analogies — well done.
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