The Late Triumph of the Bush-Bin Laden Dance

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The Late Triumph of the Bush-Bin Laden Dance

Monday, 06 October 2014 09:37
By Pierre Guerlain, Truthout | Op-Ed


The terrorist group known as ISIS or ISIL has committed some atrocious acts, beheadings or throat slittings of innocent Westerners from the United States, Britain and France. This suddenly prompted a change in public opinion in these three countries, which now support air strikes on the facilities or oil rigs controlled by this spin-off of al-Qaeda. In the United States, a strong majority of Americans opposed strikes on Syria in 2013 and now supports them - even though they are illegal and will prove ineffective.

The politics of emotion have won and abolished the lessons that the failure of the war on terror should have taught leaders, citizens and all kinds of political decision makers. France, which famously opposed the war in Iraq in 2003, is now in the forefront, at least the rhetorical forefront, of this new misguided war. This war could push the whole world into a Huntington corner and ignite a "clash of civilizations" which did not exist before the Soviet and American forays into Afghanistan.

With these air strikes, the West is playing into the hands of the very terrorist groups it wants to "degrade and destroy" as Obama put it at the UN. Bin Laden explicitly described his terror tactics as drawing the United States, and the West generally, into an endless war which, he thought, would rally Muslims to his cause - in other words, his terror tactics and the vicious attack on the World Trade Center and a few other targets within the United States aimed at sucking the United States into war. Bush complied with this wish, for his own domestic and international reasons, but he agreed with his worst enemy in thinking that the war would be endless. Although Bush and Bin Laden were total enemies, they cooperated in the creation of a Huntingtonian monster. Afghanistan was attacked and occupied, but the war is not over; terrorism is flourishing, and Obama’s drones have not resolved the problem, but rather led to more terrorism and more innocent deaths.

[font size="5"]"Quick fixes" are long-term disasters."[/font]

A small band of terrorists managed to trick the only remaining superpower in the world into an endless asymmetrical war that cannot be won. Not winning a war when you are militarily and economically so much more powerful than your enemy means losing it. Bush lost the war on terror he started and Obama got trapped in Afghanistan and could not extricate the United States from Iraq. He then resorted to military attacks to deal with never-ending terror threats. His kill list and use of drones alienate a majority in the Muslim world, and, with Guantanamo, serve as recruiting agents for the many groups making up the terrorist hydra. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/26619-the-late-triumph-of-the-bush-bin-laden-dance

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