A war that cannot be won

"Terrorism is a technique. It is not an ideology or a political philosophy, let alone an enemy state."

The Guardian's Jonathan Steele mocks the pretensions of George Bush and Tony Blair who want to be wartime leaders in a "war" that exists only as a metaphor, and says terrorism requires a political not a military response. He notes glib assertions by US and British political leaders that "the terrorists are responsible for terrorism" have been repeatedly contradicted by their own intelligence officials who understand that its spread and virulence have been the direct consequence of Western armed intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, and support for Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. As with the other metaphorical "war"on drugs, Steele says terrorism can only be contained rather than eradicated, and only through a combination of non-military measures, "primarily political" - the most urgent being the withdrawal of foreign forces from Iraq and pressure on Israel to accept a viable Palestinian state.
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A war that can never be won -- Jonathan Steele

The bombast has increased with the bombs. We saw two disturbing escalations this week. The explosions that devastated the British consulate and the HSBC bank in Istanbul mark a significant widening in the choice of targets by those Islamist radicals who use terror to express their hatred of British and US policy in Iraq and the Middle East. The Blair/Bush response reached an equally alarming new level of ferocity.

At their swaggering joint press conference on Thursday, the two men repeatedly made the risible claim that they could win their war on terror. The prime minister was the worse. While Bush gave himself a global carte blanche to intervene anywhere, by speaking of his "determination to fight and defeat this evil, wherever it is found", Blair put the issue in terms of a finite goal. He talked of defeating terrorism "utterly" and "ridding our world of this evil once and for all".


And the really sad part is, people believe that kind of simplistic, juvenile crap.

This reminds me of an attorney in whose offices I worked in San Francisco a number of years ago - John McGuinn. He used to tell the story of being in a bar when in walked an apparently homeless man, all tattered and scruffy. I don't know who struck up the conversation first, but when John asked the man about himself, the fellow replied, "I'm the last foot soldier in Johnson's war on poverty."