more terror

We had another terror incident over the holiday. How many more will we need before people start seeing the obvious? The whole war on terror idea is hopelessly flawed. You can't fight wars on terror, or on drugs, or on cancer. It doesn't work. If anything, you will get the exact opposite results of what you are trying to achieve. All phony wars fail. That is what history shows.

Look at Mexico. The situation is a disaster. We won the drug war in Columbia and so it moved. Are there any less drugs? Ask any teen. And what is so bad about drugs anyways? It is not like we are drug free.

The solution to the war on drugs is quite simple. It consist of two steps that nobody wants to take: 1. make all drugs legal--that will save lives. 2. make access to weapons difficult--that will save even more lives. That is the solution. There is no drug problem, there is a gun problem in America today. Unfortunately, nobody wants to see it. Least of all the gun manufacturers.

As for Iraq, the only thing we are doing there apart from fighting a war over oil, is to enrage muslims and make it more likely people will try terror attacks against us and against US targets abroad. Afghanistan is pretty much the same idea. Here too the object is energy (gas pipelines), and unfortunately, here too we are on the wrong side of a civil war.

Once again the solutions are trivial. Get out of Iraq and get out of Afghanistan. There is no dependence on foreign oil. We don't need foreign oil. We can just cut back on our waste and the problem will be solved. If we all drove sensible cars we would not have to import oil. If the military stopped wasting 1 million gallons a day in Iraq and another million in Afghanistan, there would be less global warming.

The issue is not dependence on foreign oil. The issue is that some people want to control oil and gas. All oil and gas, anywhere, whether we need it or not. Why? Because they make money doing it.

And what about the terrorists? It does not take Al Qaeda or Osama or anyone else to blow up a plane. All you need is some high school chemistry and a cool head. It is easy and it is cheap. The ingredients can be found anywhere and they are dirt cheap too. You don't need training camps, or manuals. You don't need supporters. It is nothing new, people blow up stuff all the time. If Timothy McVeigh could do it, then anyone else can too.

We should get out of Iraq and Afghanistan because all we are doing is riling up tempers and creating more instability. Let's kill two birds with one stone. We could buy the opium from Afghanistan and sell it legally in America. How's that for a solution?

the lure of war

President Obama, the man who consistently voted against the Iraq war, is now going out on a venture of his own. Perhaps he tried to stay true to his word that the real war was in Afghanistan, but if so, he surely lost track of the context and timing. It was true that the 9/11 masterminds were, at one point, hiding in Afghanistan, and that the Bush administration could have found them there if they had been serious about their quest. At this point however, it matters very little.

It seems obvious that Bush was never interested in Bin Laden. Finding Bin Laden would have created nasty problems for the man who is close friends with the Saudi leadership. Dragging the lost son of a prominent Saudi family in front of blood thirsty revenge seeking crowds and eager news media was a scene George and Dick preferred to forgo. Angry as they may have been at the insult hurled at America, these men were first and foremost practical schemers, who were much more interested in using this great opportunity as a way to get control over Iraqi oil reserves. So after a token action in Afghanistan they quickly turned their attention to what they saw as the real prize, Iraq.

Obama may have been right trying to point this out to America, even at a time when doing so was distinctly unpopular. So unpopular in fact that veteran politician Hillary Clinton decided to go along with the majority and "fight the terrorists in Iraq." However right Obama may have been -or maybe he was just trying to distance himself from George and the Republicans- he is doubly wrong today. That is, if he is really in control, which I doubt very much.

Today's fight is, lest anyone forget, is not about Bin Laden, or 9/11, or terrorism, or any such eye catching headlines. The fight in Afghanistan is and has always been about TAP or some similar plan, or scheme to access the riches of the Caspian gas fields. In that sense it is no different from Iraq. Once again America feels it would be better to have more direct control over an important energy resource. Just as Bush would not trust Saddam after his invasion of Kuwait, so the current power mongers no longer trust the Taliban after their support for Al Qaeda.

In both cases, we are talking about a relationship gone sour. Cheney made many visits to Saddam and as long as the dictator was in our camp, we eagerly and anxiously supported his every move. That included "killing his own people." When he became a threat however we wanted to remove him as quickly as possible. Bush Sr. may have been smart to stay out of the Iraqi quagmire and stop short of Baghdad, but that never sat well with the real oilmen who wanted Saddam over with.

The same applied to the Taliban. While we were never so intimate and cozy with those wild natives, Bush did invite the Taliban leadership to his Texas spread to show them our goodwill and support. Although Afghanistan does not have its own oil, it is an important transit point. Its support for a key American venture, the Trans-Afghan Pipeline or TAP is worth the effort. When the Taliban leadership openly defied Bush after 9/11, he had to teach them a lesson and he quickly did. But as soon as Karzai was installed, Bush and Cheney turned their attention to more important unfinished business. George and Dick quickly forgot about the Afghan natives and focused on Saddam instead.

Now Obama is left to clean up after George Jr. just like George Jr. was left to clean up after George Sr. The Taliban have regrouped and they are threatening the frail Afghan puppet government of our buddy Karzai so something needs to be done to ensure TAP will fly. The energy hawks are fuming and Obama may well be president, but he isn't the one calling the shots here.

So it is that America is once again getting mired in a civil war with no clear outcome. This one, unlike Iraq, has all the trappings of a second Vietnam. In the end, there is no other solution for Afghanistan than the Taliban. The irony however, is that this time around the infamous domino theory may well apply. If we are not careful, Pakistan could fall as a result of our Afghan venture. But that will be something for the next administration to worry about.

armistice for phony wars?

On Veteran's Day it is perhaps appropriate to take some time to think about all the phony wars we are fighting. A phony war is any conflict that does not involve two opposing armies. Calling such a conflict a war is more than just a misnomer. It is an intentional semantical ploy with very serious consequences. We all remember how the Bush administration used to insist we were fighting a war on terror. This was not a police matter they said, it was a war. Unfortunately, the Obama administration has persisted in this folly.

The war on terror is just the latest incarnation of a long series of phony wars. The war on cancer comes to mind. It is a prime example of a condition where declaring war has led to much waste and ill-directed effort. Like all phony wars -and I am not the only one, or even the first one to point this out- it has not produced results.

Calling something that isn't, war is always counterproductive. It leads to misdirected efforts, unrealistic expectations, and an avoidance of the real problem. Not surprisingly that means we keep turning corners until we go around like a dog chasing its tail.

The "other" popular phony war, the war on drugs is a case in point. It has not solved any problems, has led to prison overcrowding, a lost generation of minority youth, and more crime. America does not have a drug problem, it has a gun problem. But nobody wants to see it. Guns are a sensitive issue in America, like sex. That should tell you something!

The war on terror is a phony war too. You can't fight wars with terrorists. The reason why people resort to terror is often because they want something but they are not capable of mounting an outright war to get it. So they resort to terror.

These days terror is a much abused term. Basically we call anything we don't like terror, and anyone perpetrating it a terrorist. It is a very broad and very unilateral view that is not conducive to a solution. Terror should be redefined to its original meaning: the use of fear to accomplish a goal. Sometimes the goal is real and people strongly believe in it, but at other times the goal is delusional. That is why psychotic individuals often become de facto terrorists.

A terrorist causes physical damage but always far less than a regular army attack would. The greatest damage is psychological. A terrorist chooses his or her targets to inflict damage but also a maximal amount of fear. That is why civilians are often targets. In regular warfare, civilians are not or should not be the primary target -although every war has had many instances of deliberate attacks on civilians and we Americans are certainly no better than anyone else here.

In any case, the true reason for the war in Iraq is control over massive oil reserves. To do so, we destroyed a well established dictatorship that maintained peace and a relative calm over an ethnic and religious fire pit. We are now left with the consequences, i.e. a very bloody civil war that will last for years to come. Maybe Bush believed he could bring freedom and democracy but then again, Bush runs around with a bible too. A little too gullible I am afraid.

It seems clear that the war in Afghanistan is no different. Although it was said to be the hiding place of Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of 9-11, the true reason for the war was to get rid of the fickle and untrustworthy Taliban rulers and to protect gas pipelines to the Caspian Sea. I am not sure we were ever serious about Bin Laden, certainly not serious enough to put boots on the ground. However, we have now dug ourselves into the quagmire of a civil war whose roots are no less deep than the Iraqi civil war. We are also on track to destabilize Pakistan.

All the while we "are fighting the terrorists over there so we won't have to fight them here." That is the mantra at least. If you believe that you may as well believe in Santa Claus and I guess a lot of people do. Because the terrorists (the real ones that is) are here as the Ft Hood massacre shows. Nobody in Afghanistan is a threat to us. Nobody there would stand a chance if they came over here to blow things up. These Afghan war lords would stick out like sore thumb and be arrested before they could board a flight. Leave that level of sophistication to Westernized Arabs from Saudi Arabia.

Does anyone remember 9-11? It wasn't the Afghan Pashtuns that came over here.

It would therefore be good if we, on this day of armistice, declared an armistice on all phony wars. There are better ways to spend our energies and our money.