For the past twelve years we've been told that we're at war. September the eleventh was this generation's Pearl Harbor, we were told, a military attack by an enemy power requiring a global military response, including the invasion and occupation of two countries and violations of the sovereignty of several others. We've also been asked to submit to strip searches at airports and other indignities including systematic eavesdropping on our private communications and arbitrary police intrusions into our lives, all in the name of "homeland security". I can't speculate as to why this is going on, but I have never accepted that September the eleventh was a military attack, as opposed to a senseless crimiinal act by nineteen suicidal lunatics. Nor do I believe the Tsarnayev brothers were soldiers in some secret army of Islam; I think they were merely self-serving jerks like Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber.
If we are at war, where is the enemy army? How many tanks do they have? How many airplanes? How many ships? You can't seriously argue that the security of the United States depends on keeping one band of ignorant medievals on the run in Afghanistan? Nor can you convince me that replacing a secular Iraqi dictator with a coalition of Kurds and Shi`a Islamists enhanced anyone's safety, whether in America or elsewhere. To even a casual student of global economic and military power, such claims are absurd on their face. Al Qaeda can hardly be anything but a minor nuisance; it has no industrial base, controls no territory, and lacks the resources to maintain effective control over most of its adherents, let alone mount a major military operation half way around the world. Moreover, its ideology is profoundly unappealing outside the Muslim world; there is no possibility of a mass movement in, say, Arkansas, demanding the establishment of Shari`a law.
This is no war. It's as bogus as the "Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center" that supposedly threatened to overthrow the Soviet Union in 1936, and in pursuit of which the Soviet state security apparatus arrested hundreds of thousands of people, including many of its own operatives. And I daresay the "war on terror" is ultimately just as dangerous; just three months ago we saw ten thousand heavily armed police shut down an entire metropolitan area in pursuit of the younger Tsarnayev, one man cowering in a boat. No less a person than Senator McCain, who might be President of the United States had the stock market waited two more months to tank, demanded Tsarnayev be submitted to military justice; I cringe to think of what life might be like in America today with someone with that attitude in the White House.
The current occupant has made mischief enough: bombed weddings, cold-blooded assassinations, secret prisons, and an internal spying program worthy of the Stasi. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, Afghans, and others have died at American hands, enough to put Mr. Obama (and his predecessor, Mr. Bush) in the same category as Pol Pot. As bogus as this war may be, it has had real casualties, among them thousands of American soldiers whose lives have been wasted fighting not in defense of their kith and kin but on a fool's errand.
And yet it continues. None dare question it; I'm sure I'd be labelled a traitor myself, if this little missive ever came to the attention of the great and powerful.
When will this madness end?