The Baffling War against Terror

When I view the world today from this vantage, I can only shake my head in dismay and ask, What the hell is going on?

The world is at war; no doubt about it. But it is a peculiar war.

We have a conventional army, armed with multimillion dollar armaments, fighting small bands of insurgents armed with off  the shelf hand-held weapons.

The conventional aspects of the war have been declared to be won, but the war goes on nevertheless.

Allies of late are now our enemies, totalitarians are now are friends.

We claim that we shall never be intimidated by force, while we attempt to intimidate others by force.

Ask yourselves some simple questions:

If we will never yield to intimidation by force, or never change our policies under the threat of terrorism, why should we expect Middle Eastern militants to not resist when we invade their countries with military forces to change their governments and ways of life? If we will “maintain our resolve,” why shouldn’t they?

We routed the Taliban in Afghanistan and installed an elected government. Why are we still there? How was it possible for a few men armed with a hand-held grenade launcher that probably cost less than 100 dollars to destroy a 13.5 million dollar helicopter gunship with 16 Americans on board?  Is it because there’s a vast difference between routing an unconventional army and defeating it?

We have been in a decades-long war on drugs, but to rout the Taliban we teemed up with the world’s most notorious opium pushers. Now the flow of heroin into Western Europe has become a torrential river.

We toppled Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and installed a newly elected government there too. That government is now dominated by the Shia Moslem sect—the very sect that installed a theocratic Moslem government in Iran, our chief enemy in the area. Our friendly Shia dominated government in Iraq recently signed a military alliance with the Shia dominated government of Iran. And regarding possible US opposition to any Iran-Iraq military cooperation, the negotiators asserted that no one can prevent them from reaching an agreement.

We claim that we are hated by Middle Easterners because of our freedoms and way of life, a claim for which no evidence exists. The Middle Easterners claim that we are disliked because of our foreign policies that have subjugated them for many decades; yet we ignore their claims, neatly ignoring the history of Western adventures in the area.

At the end of the First World War, the British and French carved up the Middle East to their own advantages, neglecting completely how their actions would affect the Middle Easterners who lived there. At the end of the Second World war, the victorious powers carved up Palestine to suit their own purposes rather than those of the Palestinians who lived there. And we have diplomatically, financially, and militarily supported that wrenching change in Palestine. How do you think Americans will react if after some future war, the victors decided to carve up America and settle some Mongolians here?

The Western financed and armed Israeli conventional army had no trouble defeating the conventional armies of Syria and Egypt. Six day war, remember? Yet after 40 years of killing, sometimes using multimillion dollar helicopter gunships, the Israelis have been unable to quell the infatada. What makes us think we can? After spending billions of dollars in this war on terror and on domestic security, the world was taken by complete surprise yesterday when the bombs went off in London.

Judged by its effectiveness, our military strategy in this was does not exhibit many results.

How any of this war can be expected to yield a happy result is beyond me, and I cannot help but wonder if the people in the White House and at Ten Downing Street are all really this stupid.

©2005 John Kozy, Jr.