Five for fighting

Today marks the fifth anniversary of the worst terrorist attacks in the history of the United States. In the midst of all of the television specials and commemorations in New York, Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania, I think it is worth taking an inventory of where we've come as a country in the intervening five years.

There's still no sign of Usama bin Laden.

Does this matter that much? Probably not. In five years Usama has gone from enemy number one to a mere token target. The figurehead of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network has been on the run since the inception of the American war against the Taliban in Afghanistan--and, for this reason, is no longer a real threat.

Even so, we are not too far removed from a statement in which President Bush compared (if not equated) Usama bin Laden to Adolf Hitler. This was surprising to me because I could recall the President saying last year that he was not all too concerned with Bin Laden--since, of course, he was only a symbolic figurehead and nothing more. Zarquawi, Zawahari, Omar, and al-Sadr were the guys doing the dirty work.

You can't have it both ways.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks the country was united in anger against the men who perpetrated the attacks. It was a time in which the United States government and our security forces were given a mandate by the people to fight an unwinnable war on terrorism by nearly any means necessary. Democrats and Republicans lined up behind the President because they were too cowardly to stand for their principles (liberty, privacy, isolationism, etc.) because their principles would not be popular for another year or two.

Ain't democracy grand? There's nothing that can make you forget your principles faster than the fear of unemployment.

Dissent doesn't pay unless your Tom Paine or the editor of The Nation.

"If you are not with us, you are with the terrorists" was the President's way of characterizing dissent in this country after 9/11; and we bought it because we were scared.

Five years after 9/11 little has changed. We've killed tens of thousands of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, and lost over 2000 American and Coalition soliders.

And for what?

The Sunni Triangle is as violent now as it ever has been. There has been a resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan--Mullah Omar is still at-large, along with Ayman al-Zawahari.

The Iraq war has been a complete and utter disaster of micro-management. Rumsfield and Wolfowitz believed that common Iraqis would celebrate the United States' liberation of Iraq and that, by-and-large, did not happen. In fact, since the United States military did not secure Iraq's borders, Iranian (Shi'a) militants poured over the border to fight the "crusaders" on their turf.

Rumsfield and Wolfowitz believed that Iraq could be rebuilt with revenue from the country's oil reserves--the same reserves that stood unprotected during the invasion and subsequent occupation. Those oil fields were set on fire and the factories bombed by insurgents fighting against the occupation.

Since the United States is, ostensibly, unwilling to fight a war of attrition in the middle east, the only alternative would be a scorched-earth policy that would further destroy the reputation of the United States in the world.

That's not going to happen and the status quo will reign.

Five years later it's official: Q-U-A-G-M-I-R-E

There were very few dissenters to the war in Afghanistan. Many notable "doves" fell in line behind the president to wage war against the regime that gave sanctuary to the hero of Jihadism. Even as we were gearing up for war against Iraq there was very little in the way of dissent in this country, for better or worse.

Like so many people, I believed the President (who himself believed George Tenet), the American CIA and Britain's MI-6. Tenet was wrong and whether or not he was instructed to fabricate a case for war against Iraq--one that included hanging the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, out to dry--is unclear.

What is clear, however, is that this country is in a real pickle in the middle east. This will have devastating consequences for the future of our country and for democracy itself. Any application of American military power in the middle east has the effect of creating new terrorists. It always has, it always will. (This, obviously, doesn't happen in a vacuum--there are certainly more grievances at work than just intervention.)

U.S. support for Israel will always have the effect of making us vulnerable to terrorism. Death and destruction play their roles, too--purposeful death and destruction.

Is war truly full of "accidents"? I am not so sure.

The killing of civilians should not be considered accidental because it is not an accident. Bombing cities from 30,000 feet has forseeable consequences--dead civilians. It's not an accident.

This war will only beget more war.

And, in the absence of a swift and categorically inhumane blitz on the Sunni Triangle and pockets of resistance in Afghanistan, we will have another five years just like the last.