Disastrous Iraq adventure is a sideshow to the long haul war on terror

[NNN0LHI]

http://news.scotsman.com/opinion.cfm?id=765912005

WHEN more than 50 people are killed and 700 injured by terrorist attacks on the London tube and bus system, it is time to take a long, hard look at the war on terror. On that same day, 26 people were killed by insurgents in Iraq; but to put things in a clearer perspective, over the week to last Thursday, fatalities in Iraq totalled 132 people.

Casualties decrease when a war is being won: in Iraq, on the contrary, they are increasing. The inference is obvious. snip

When Donald Rumsfeld redefines Vice-President Dick Cheney's "last throes" of the insurgency to imply as much as 12 years' more conflict, and US negotiators are said to be in discussions with "Sunni" spokesmen (coded language for middlemen to the insurgents), we do not need to tap the barometer to predict the weather. We have been here before. Geopolitical events move faster now than at the time of Vietnam. This was Dubya's war and he is a second-term President whose clock is running down. No successor, Republican or Democrat, will want ownership of the Iraqi quagmire. snip

The real war on terror, which we are not so much losing as sitting out, requires a totally different approach. The Americans have played into their enemies' hands by even coining the phrase "war on terror". It has a resonance within the Islamic world to which the automatic response is jihad: the infidels have declared war on Islam, so the faithful will respond. What we ought to be talking about is essentially a police operation. Our whole rhetoric is wrong because we have no understanding of what is confronting us.

Britain and Europe today are so secularised that we have lost even the capacity to comprehend the religious mind. People motivated by their faith are "nutters". Suicide bombers are routinely described as "cowardly". A suicide bomber may be evil, deluded or demented, but one thing he is not is a coward. Last Thursday, Tony Blair proclaimed that "our values will long outlast theirs". Our values? Precisely what values in our crime-ridden, uncivil, irreligious, drug-addicted and sex-obsessed society, where family life is being eradicated with government help, was Blair invoking?

[Bellamia]

1. Excellent Article

My favorite paragraph; Values, as in what values.? Recommended.

[Auntie Bush]

2. Kick because it's a good article...makes ya think!

:kick:

[txindy]

3. Recommended.

:kick:

[PATRICK]

4. the big "conversely"

Terror war is a sideshow to the PNAC or Bushco plan for world reorganization. NO ONE is getting to that yet. They just think Bush is making a mistake without asking why else Team Bush pre-planned the war before 911. And why more wars against more non-enemies are under way while peace treaties with terrorist havens flourish.

Waking up is hard to do but come on, really. This is not a failed war on terrorism but a continuing gambit for a different foreign policy entirely. How easy it would be to stop them here and explain it all away as "Gulf War II, Revenge of Junior". And incompetence. more than enough rotten meat to be sure, but it ignores a whole other pile of evidence.

I'd say rub the face in the entire mess for once and face it all down. Part way there and thousands have died while delusions linger, truths creep in past the stop signs.

[CantGetFooledAgain]

5. Can you elaborate on this?

What is the "different foreign policy entirely" that you feel is being pursued?

I'm interested in what you have to say, but your language is rather enigmatic. Oil? Financial control? Something else entirely?

What is the ultimate goal and who is calling the shots? Based on what you know and believe to be true.

[PATRICK]

6. That illustrates it exactly

The naive version is the PNAC documents which have little to with 'terror" either. They do not include the energy cartel shenanigans of Cheney and Halliburton. There is so much going on yet the great cover whenever a few street bombs go off is the mysterious war on terror which has little to do with the scale of global warfare being engaged in oil producing territories. A convenient and wonderful coincidence somewhat promoted in the first place BY the first Bush Iraq War alone not to mentioned the Israeli/Palestinian issue which suffers also as a neglected sideshow now.

What I mean exactly is that it is darkly clear that the Bush team has a fixed goal and all else on the edges serves that goal but is visibly shoved, disastrously so aside. They even tell you in moments of impatience that "Bin Laden is not a problem anymore".

While the world's view is played off on the single goal of the terror war and the Bush team's horrendous way of dealing with it they are looking at something shoved to the side and important to Bush ONLY as being instrumental to their agenda. It is complex and complicated because the world wants(or is pushed) to see things one way(as do loyal American public servants) and the Bush Empire merrily cruises on in the driver's seat to someplace else. Someplace advertised, admitted to and
emotionally, obviously more important than national security or anything else. Of course, peel away the Bush onion and nothing is there. PNAC is a glorious sham, the venal pursuit of revenge or money or lazy messianism are maybe only part of it at one time or the other.

What it is is the pursuit of total power justifying itself, and once winning and on the move with the goodies, insatiable. THEY must push beyond whatever mean goals they have if nothing more than to escape reality and fear, because they keep suffering real setbacks and crushing of the neat solidarity of all the various schemes. It is an upward spiral before a downward one. Just as the Dems search for "issues"(encouraged and pushed by the GOP into irrelevance) so too the world is not facing down the evil directly as an evil, as a crime, as a fatal usurpation of world history.

Some general presumed Bush was seeking personal revenge, others personal affirmation after his AWOL record, others a religious crusade, others the money, others the Cheney money and power scheme, others the Bush dynasty gambit. No wonder the terror war is a mess. We don't even know which Bush is fighting it and IF he is. In Texas he created a lot of separate dramas and issues also. On a larger scale we can become consumed by the deliberate messes he is strewing about the ruined landscape. Terror and democracy are no concern. They are words to use to obtain more of what he wants- which is never examined confrontationally by the mainstream(ALL the mainstream).

[snot]

7. The "values" invoked apparently do NOT include civil liberties nt

[Inland]

8. So many lives and money and prestige spent FOR A SIDESHOW.