America's Al Qaida obsession

[The Northerner]

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The Unites States’ obsession with the threat from Al Qaida urgently needs debunking. It has led national security chiefs and politicians dangerously astray — including President Barack Obama himself.

Traumatised by the terrorist attacks on the American heartland of September 11, 2001, the US launched two catastrophic and unnecessary wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, at great cost to its armed services, its finances and its reputation. That was by no means the full extent of the damage.

The war on terror also caused the US to create a monstrously-inflated national security-industrial complex, that today employs nearly a million people with high security clearances, seriously eroding America’s precious civil liberties; it caused the CIA to become a para-military organisation as concerned with extra-judicial assassinations as with its traditional intelligence-gathering; and it has driven Obama to rely on missile strikes from unmanned drones which, as well as killing the occasional Islamic fighter, slaughter large numbers of innocent civilians, arousing fierce hostility to the US.

The drone strikes are widely thought to create far more militants than they kill. Barbara Bodine, who served as US ambassador to Yemen from 1997 to 2011, says that drone attacks ‘most assuredly do far more harm than good.’

Read more: http://gulfnews.com/opinions/columnists/america-s-al-qaida-obsession-1.928024

[gratuitous]

1. Sure the drone strikes do far more harm than good

But they make some people feel better about the projection of U.S. power, and that's really what counts. And since it's a Democrat in the White House rather than a Republican, trimming one's ethics to fit this year's fashion becomes a very easy thing to do. Those of us who insist on quaint concepts and old documents are admonished to get with the program, or maybe the next missile from a drone will be visiting a neighborhood near you.