War on Bush's anti-terror tactics
asiatimes: If US President George W Bush is counting on Sunday's "Freedom Walk" and country music festival at the Pentagon to revive the patriotic spirit (and rally his sagging approval ratings) that followed the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, he is likely to be very disappointed.
And it won't be just because of his administration's fatal bungling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, which will certainly overshadow the Pentagon's fourth-anniversary commemoration of September 11, nor even due to the growing popular discontent over the way things have been going in Iraq.
Although both developments pose potentially lethal threats to Bush's continued effectiveness, the president's management of his "global war on terrorism", which he declared in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, is increasingly under siege.
Public approval of his handling of that war, which, in contrast to steadily declining confidence in Iraq policy, had remained remarkably solid over most of the past four years, has fallen sharply in recent months to a razor-thin majority. Recent polls have also shown that US citizens see themselves as increasingly vulnerable to terrorist attack as a result of the administration's actions. Read more
db: Bush the hammer - everything is a nail. America will figure it out sooner or later - you can't kill all the 'terrorists' - because the depths of depravity necessitated by such an attempted course of action - the lawlessness, the racism, the injustice and the plain horror of this single-minded excuse for a strategy - serves to replenish the ranks of those groups America seeks to destroy. Hence, unless a change of course is implemented, it will be 'a war without end' - logically reaching it's conclusion only when the terrorists obtain WMD [the real thing - not the bullshit WMD's of neocon lore].
Nobody is suggesting that there is no place for bombs and guns and killing - but if you have nothing else in the toolbox - and there is little evidence that Bush's toolbox contains anything more - then it's not just a 'war on terror' but a war on humanity itself.
In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the enemy of the state is personified in Emmanuel Goldstein. Goldstein is the Osama bin Laden figure of the novel, an elusive figure who is never seen, never captured but believed by all patriotic citizens of Oceania (Orwell's fictitious state, an amalgamation of North America and Europe) to be an evil genius bent on their destruction.
Since Goldstein is never captured, Oceania's battle against him must never cease. Sometime it wages war on one country said to be aiding the nefarious Goldstein, sometimes on another. The battleground may change but the war never ends. It cannot. The government's very existence depends upon it.
And it won't be just because of his administration's fatal bungling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, which will certainly overshadow the Pentagon's fourth-anniversary commemoration of September 11, nor even due to the growing popular discontent over the way things have been going in Iraq.
Although both developments pose potentially lethal threats to Bush's continued effectiveness, the president's management of his "global war on terrorism", which he declared in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, is increasingly under siege.
Public approval of his handling of that war, which, in contrast to steadily declining confidence in Iraq policy, had remained remarkably solid over most of the past four years, has fallen sharply in recent months to a razor-thin majority. Recent polls have also shown that US citizens see themselves as increasingly vulnerable to terrorist attack as a result of the administration's actions. Read more
db: Bush the hammer - everything is a nail. America will figure it out sooner or later - you can't kill all the 'terrorists' - because the depths of depravity necessitated by such an attempted course of action - the lawlessness, the racism, the injustice and the plain horror of this single-minded excuse for a strategy - serves to replenish the ranks of those groups America seeks to destroy. Hence, unless a change of course is implemented, it will be 'a war without end' - logically reaching it's conclusion only when the terrorists obtain WMD [the real thing - not the bullshit WMD's of neocon lore].
Nobody is suggesting that there is no place for bombs and guns and killing - but if you have nothing else in the toolbox - and there is little evidence that Bush's toolbox contains anything more - then it's not just a 'war on terror' but a war on humanity itself.
In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the enemy of the state is personified in Emmanuel Goldstein. Goldstein is the Osama bin Laden figure of the novel, an elusive figure who is never seen, never captured but believed by all patriotic citizens of Oceania (Orwell's fictitious state, an amalgamation of North America and Europe) to be an evil genius bent on their destruction.
Since Goldstein is never captured, Oceania's battle against him must never cease. Sometime it wages war on one country said to be aiding the nefarious Goldstein, sometimes on another. The battleground may change but the war never ends. It cannot. The government's very existence depends upon it.
posted by exoplanet at 9:59 AM
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