Well, its quite obvious that the fear-mongering is in full swing. Afterall, there are only a scant few weeks until election day in November. There is a good read up over at TomPaine.com by Robert Dreyfuss entitled "There is no war on Terror". Let me give a few of the highlights:
I. The threat of terrorism is wildly exaggerated.
A strong and convincing case that the al-Qaida bogeyman is inflated far beyond the real but limited threat that it poses is made in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, in an article by political scientist John Mueller. He and others argue persuasively that the reason the United States has not been attacked since 9/11 is that terrorists are far less powerful than the White House claims. “If al Qaeda operatives are as determined and inventive as assumed, they should be here by now. If they are not yet here, they must not be trying very hard or must be far less dedicated, diabolical, and competent than the common image would suggest,” writes Mueller. Why haven’t the Democrats picked up this argument?
II. Al-Qaida barely exists at all as a threat.
The organization that attacked the United States on 9/11 has been shattered and pushed to the brink of extinction, despite claims to the contrary of the vast anti-terrorism industrial complex and its journalistic heavy-breathers. I interviewed Carl Ford, the former assistant secretary of state for intelligence, who told me:
“We’re overstating their capability, because we can’t believe that there isn’t a more nefarious explanation for the fact that we haven’t been attacked. There aren’t a lot of terrorists out there, and they’re not 10-feet tall. … One appealing hypothesis is: they’ve been damaged more than we know.”
The Democrats should stop ringing alarm bells about al-Qaida and explain calmly that the terrorist threat, which was small five years ago, has been greatly reduced since 9/11.
III. There is no Terrorist International.
President Bush lumps the remnants of al-Qaida together with states such as Iran and Syria, the resistance movement in Iraq, insurgent political parties such as Hezbollah and Hamas and other assorted entities into one, big “Islamofascist” enemy. Nothing could be more ill-informed or further from the truth. "That's an oversimplification of the task of dealing with the tactic [terrorism] that is used by many different groups, with many different ideologies," Paul R. Pillar, a former top CIA analyst and the author of a respected book on terrorism, told The Washington Post . "It leads to a misunderstanding of the need of what is in fact a different counterterrorist policy for each group and state we are dealing with. . . . Hamas is an entirely different entity than al-Qaeda. . . . Their objectives are very much different." Pillar said much the same thing to me. Bush claims that al-Qaida and its terrorist allies want to create an “empire than spans from Spain to Indonesia.” Not a chance. Larry Wilkerson, the former top aide to Colin Powell, told me: “I don’t think there’s a soul in the administration, except for Vice President Dick Cheney, who believes that crap about Islamofascism.” Why don’t Democrats ridicule this specific sort of fear-mongering?
And this final quote from the article: "After 9/11, the Bush administration launched an open-ended war on an ambiguous enemy ("terror") while offering the nation no definition of what victory would look like. Five years later, the nation has spent billions in taxpayer dollars and lost thousands of American lives fighting a threat that should be the province of law enforcement and intelligence services, not the military. And the White House tells us there is no end in sight."
He has 10 talking points on the issue of the "War on Terror" and how its REALLY going..go read the rest if your so inclined..hopefully the Democrats running will check them out...but I am not holding my breath on that, my dear reader.
Tags; Terrorism,Politics,War on Terror,Fuckwits at the Helm
