America’s perpetual war on terror by any other name
If you embark on something with your eyes half-open, you are likely to lose sight of reality
Financial Times, 14 September 2014
EXTRACT
The reality is the US war on terror has succeeded where it was supposed to. Mr Bush’s biggest innovation was to set up the Department of Homeland Security. If you chart domestic terror attempts in the US since September 11 2001, they have become increasingly low-tech and ineffectual. From the foiled Detroit airliner attack in Mr Obama’s first year to the Boston marathon bombings in his fifth, each attempt has been more amateur than the last. The same is true of America’s allies. There has been no significant attack in Europe since London’s July 7 bombings nine years ago. Western publics have acclimatised to an era of tighter security.
If this is the balance sheet of the US war on terror, why lose sleep? Chiefly because it understates the costs. The biggest of these is the damage an undeclared war is doing to the west’s grasp on reality. Myopic thinking leads to bad decisions. Mr Obama pointedly avoided using the word “war” last week. Although there are more than 1,000 US military personnel in Iraq, and more than 160 US air strikes in the past month, he insisted on calling his plan to destroy Isis a “campaign”. Likewise, the US uniforms are those of “advisers” and “trainers”. These kinds of euphemism lead to mission creep. If you embark on something with your eyes half-open, you are likelier to lose your way.
Phi Beta Iota: What the author does not address is the fact that the President of the United States of America does not have leaders within the US Intelligence Community that he can trust to a) find the truth and b) tell him the truth. Obama is a prisoner of state and a captive of vested financial interests feeding him lies to promote their agenda — they are led by the neoconservatives, Texas energy, New York money, and the ever stranger combination of Zionists and the official sponsor of radical Islam, Saudi Arabia (along with UAE and Qatar and portions of the Turkish government). Sending legions of infidels back into the Middle East is criminally insane and totally unwarranted by the facts that are available to the rest of us, but evidently withheld from the President.
See Also:
