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January 27, 2006

The war against ourselves

The other day, Kevin wrote a post entitled When Is Terrorism Okay? The heart of Kevin's point? Terrorism means to instill terror in people..and the US government is guilty of this very thing with our alleged "war on terror".

Kinda tough to fight against terrorism when we're perpetuating it ourselves.

Another case in point: Documents Show Army Seized Wives As Tactic :

The U.S. Army in Iraq has at least twice seized and jailed the wives of suspected insurgents in hopes of "leveraging" their husbands into surrender, U.S. military documents show.

In one case, a secretive task force locked up the young mother of a nursing baby, a U.S. intelligence officer reported. In the case of a second detainee, one American colonel suggested to another that they catch her husband by tacking a note to the family's door telling him "to come get his wife."

Lest we forget, these task force people and this colonel are supposed to be the good guys.

Hostage taking is something that the former Saddam Hussein regime allegedly did to the Iraqis.

That "winning hearts and minds in Iraq" thing seems to be much less of a priority than sticking it to terrorist suspects.

Its my view that we have made a fundamental strategic error in treating terrorism as something we make war against. The "war on terror" has so far succeeded in creating more terrorists and getting a lot of Americans killed or injured. Its not working.

We didn't declare a war against Tim McVeigh when he blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. We didn't go to war against Eric Rudolph, who set off a bomb in the Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta during the Olympics and bombed abortion clinics. These men are terrorists. These men are criminals. They were brought to justice for their crimes.

Some might say that Hussein was "brought to justice" because of the "war on terror". I don't think so. At least some of the acts that Hussein is accused of perpetuating were done with the knowledge and backing of the Reagan and Bush 41 Administrations. That isn't justice. That's a fall guy.

We are not fighting a war against terrorism. Wars can't be fought over feelings. Attempting to wage war in this way has put our country in the untenable position of kidnapping, hostage taking and torture, at taxpayer expense.

The war we are fighting now is against ourselves. We are losing our ability to comprehend morality, ethics and reason. We're terrorizing groups of people in order to assuage fear of terrorism. It's creating a downward spiral such that will be very difficult to recover.

Posted by Carla at January 27, 2006 11:32 AM