Adam's blogbox: The imaginary "war on terror"

The war on terror reminds me of the war on drugs: ill-conceived, unnecessary, and ineffective -- rhetoric rather than action with actual results. What is Bush's so-called "war on terror" (which he pathetically explains as something "we fight over there so we don't have to fight it here")?

It's a war in Iraq against Iraqi nationalists who don't want us to be occupying their country. It's got nothing to do with any war on terror (mind you, a couple of thousand terrorists have joined the nationalist insurgency after the fact: so it's a war that creates terrorists, a "war FOR terror"). It's got everything to do with us wanting to get Iraq's oilfields back into US corporate hands, and planting military bases there to have more control in the Middle East.

There can be no war on terror. What there can be are police actions. Terrorists will commit acts of terror, like they did in Madrid and London, and the cops will catch them, like they have. Bin Laden, for example, committed an act of terror in New York. Funny, in this case we haven't caught the criminal. We actually gave up on that police action after overthrowing the Taliban. Instead of doing the actual job of catching an actual terrorist (an act of gross negligence for which Bush should be impeached), Bush started a war with Iraq, and called it part of his imaginary "war on terror," which is little more than a cry of hysteria, the shriek of an old maid, scaredycat sissy fear-mongering.

Why do many Americans believe him, and take his hysteria seriously? Because there's something paranoid in our souls, very well exploited in another war, the so-called Cold War against Russia, which didn't do much for us except make our arms manufacturers stupendously rich (not that there's anything wrong with that). The hot war we got out of it, against Vietnam, brought us nothing but 55,000 dead Americans (plenty wrong with that), like the imaginary "war on terror" in Iraq is bringing us nothing but over 2,000 Americans dead so far, and maybe over 100,000 dead Iraqis -- and a Shiite theocracy in Iraq in cahoots with Iran's Shiite theocracy, to boot.

It would've been a better use of our 160,000 troops in the Middle East to let them comb the Afghanistan-Pakistan border for Bin-Laden in a police dragnet -- they would've caught him by now. But apparently Bush doesn't give a shit about the fact that Bin-Laden burned 3,000 New Yorkers to death on 9/11. He appears to care more about Iraq's oil -- being a Texan and not a New Yorker. In fact, he has used the deaths of 3,000 Americans as an excuse for his oil-and-military-bases grab. What kind of a man calls a war to enrich his oil cronies a "war on terror"? Either a complete fool or a shameless, evil bastard; and Bush may be a fool, but not a complete one. (Not that he's objectively evil: he certainly thinks he's "good", and I think, subjectively, that he's "evil"; my only evidence being over 2,000 dead Americans and 100,000 dead Iraqis, and his only evidence ... well, you tell me, W, bring it on.)

It's time we stopped going along with Bush's tomfoolery, and refrained from buying empty "war on whatever" rhetoric, especially the "war on terror" variety. Don't declare a war on terror, for chrissake: just do the job. Investigate the crime, go catch the criminals and lock them up -- the way they do it everywhere else except in America, where instead of catching the terrorists, we let them go scot-free in favor of a war for terror. Like the "war on drugs" from many administrations, the "war on terror" of this administration is taking place in their imaginations. It's BS, and every American who buys it is a first-class dope.