Getting a sense of perspective on the terror “war”: Pete Hammill's eloquent Memorial Day column from The New York Daily News.
And Geov Parrish
asks,
“Let's say that sometime next month [...] in Chicago [...] a fanatic of indeterminate national origin sets off a small, dirty nuclear weapon. Let's say he immolates himself and thousands of others, and blows a gaping new hole in some city's central business district.
“What then?
“What will, or can, George W. Bush and his team do? They may or may not know who executed the plot. Initially, let's blame Al-Qaeda– they probably would.
“Do you then attack Iraq, because even though Saddam is too worried about his own skin to be dabbling in Chicago, he's a 'threat to civilization?'
“[...] Do you use ordinary Americans' fear and anger as a pretext for striking out with deadly force somewhere, anywhere, just to make it look like you're doing something effective?
“[...] Almost immediately after September 11, Dubya declared “war,” not against an enemy country, but against a tactic [...]
“Such a war is necessarily without limits and unwinnable, as is the language gradually adopted later– that we were to fight not just war but evil itself. That's a much bigger involvement than the 50 years Dick Cheney is giving it. (Ask Jesus of Nazareth.)
“[...] Aside from the futility of cycles of violence, there's a simple reason why Bush and his team are in a bind over future responses to terror events. The attacks of September 11 should never have been called an act of war. Finding the perpetrators and preventing future attacks should never have been called a war, either. The hijackings and mass murders of September 11 were crimes– international in scope and heinous beyond imagination, but crimes nonetheless. It needed to be investigated as a crime, and the groups associated with the hijack/bombing needed to be investigated and disrupted in the way the organizations of drug lord or Mafia dons are disrupted– not in the way that an enemy country's military is attacked.
“[...] This past week, media coverage took the White House warnings of an inevitable attack at face value [...]. But nobody seemed to be asking why we don't think we can prevent the next one[...]. In the end, that sort of prevention can only be successful if America stops making enemies– that is, if America changes the way it conducts itself in the world.”
The george hates you: it’s a crime, not a war by Lee Salazar, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at leesalazar.com.