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The Long War — George Bush’s War Without End
By David Martin
02/17/06"ICH"
-- -- Now that the cakewalk that was to be our
invasion of Iraq is nearing its third anniversary and the roses
that were to be thrown at us have turned into improvised
explosive devices, it has become official — we are engaged in a
long war. Make that “The Long War.”
Donald Rumsfeld, in a statement before House’s Armed Services
Committee, acknowledged the re-branding of the conflict
previously known as The Global War on Terror. He told the
assembled committee members that we are “nation engaged in what
will be a ‘long war.’” It’s a war that will be the central
security issue of our time and will transform the way we defend
our nation, he said.
The SecDef’s comments underlined a theme sounded by his
Commander-in-Chief in the recent State of the Union speech.
George Bush, insinuating himself into a pantheon of former
presidents that included Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Reagan,
said, “our own generation is in a long war against a determined
enemy.”
So much for setting a timetable for an American withdrawal from
Iraq, or Afghanistan for that matter. When other recent remarks
from multi-starred generals referring to a long war that could
last ten to twenty years are taken in to account, it’s clear
that we have achieved George Orwell’s state of perpetual war.
The administration’s depiction of our conflict in Iraq as an
open-ended struggle with ever-shifting enemies is another of its
deviously brilliant bits of PR chicanery. The adoption of a
simple phrase — The Long War — eliminates expectations that
there will be an end to the needless deaths of Americans,
Iraqis, and Afghanis any time soon. War in distant, dusty places
will become a mundane feature of American life just like higher
gas prices, warrant less electronic surveillance, and curtailed
civil liberties.
Five, ten, twenty years from now when the last American soldier
has long been airlifted out of Iraq and someone says, “Tell me
again, why are we fighting in Uzbekistan (or Kazakhstan or name
your own favorite ‘stan),” the answer will come back, “Don’t you
remember? We’re in a Long War against the terrorists who
attacked us on Nine-Eleven.”
It is a particular stroke of genius to characterize this Long
War as one waged against the nebulous foe of terrorism. With
Communism, the last big bogeyman to feed our national
nightmares, there was a well-defined dogma to identify who was a
Communist and who was not. The problem, however, was that after
the fall of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Eastern
Europe, there weren’t a lot of Communists left over to get
hysterical about. Sure, there was still Castro in Cuba and the
Chinese. But Castro alone is hardly worth $400 billion in
defense spending, and we’ve come to rely on the Chinese to make
all the consumer goods Americans used to make.
Terrorism makes a much better bête noire because it’s a vaguer
appellation. The terrorist label can be hung on, well, just
about anyone. Terrorists can be desperate men armed with box
cutters who fly airplanes into tall buildings. Or they can be
radical Moslems who live in caves in Afghanistan. Or they can be
Quaker peace groups who conspire to conduct candlelight vigils
on village greens or nuns who attack ICBMs with ball peen
hammers to demonstrate opposition to an illegal war or VA nurses
so upset at the federal government they are moved to write angry
letters to newspaper editors.
Soon, thanks to the creative wordsmiths in Boy George’s lawyer
pool, terrorism will come to mean any expression against the
established order, whether that expression is a car bomb or
outraged e-mail to a like-minded friend.
This concept of terrorism is a self-fulfilling one. Wherever we
go in search of terrorists, we are sure to find them. If they’re
not present when we arrive, they will inevitably appear once
American soldiers, in the name of advancing freedom, have kicked
in enough doors, recklessly shot enough innocent civilians, and
hauled away enough fathers and cousins and friends for
questioning (read torturing). When outraged locals begin
retaliating with roadside bombs, our leaders will tell us, “See
we told you there were terrorists in (insert name of country
here). It just took us some time to create them.”
“A Long War” and “Global Terrorism” are malleable phrases that
can be applied to any situation in which a local populace seeks
redress against the international organizations and
multi-national corporations that control the levers of the world
economy. They are equally applicable to turban wearing tribesman
living in regions known only to readers of National Geographic
or a neighbor who checked out the wrong book from the library.
As this “Long War” progresses and the definition of terrorist
becomes stretched far enough, who knows whom the FBI thugs will
come for next.
Hold on a sec, I think I hear a knock at the door.
Copyright David Martin -
damrtn48@ntplx.net
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