Enemy of Our Own Creation
Yet one question has surely been settled — that to win the war on terror we must take the fight to the enemy. —George W. Bush, State of the Union, 2007
One question has not been settled: is he consciously misleading with such statements or is he too denial-dumb to tell?
According to Bush, we have taken the fight to the enemy twice since 9/11, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. Though there were some actual Al Qaeda enemies in Afghanistan, and though we managed to round up and kill many of them, we missed Bin Laden, and in the process of taking the fight to actual enemies we killed and imprisoned thousands of innocent Afghanis. Then, before we were finished and before all of the internationally promised aid to Afghanistan materialized, we shifted our focus to Iraq.
That war-addicted Americans consider Afghanistan a success returns us to the above question: are they all lying or are they just too denial-dumb to comprehend any facts that might unsettle their addiction? Current events in Afghanistan suggest that there are far more enemies of America in the country now than when we started. But at least there were enemies in Afghanistan, and taking the fight to them made some sense, even if it was badly botched.
The only enemy in Iraq was a single man, Saddam Hussein, a one-time friend of America who owed his rise to power to American military aid. Most of the Iraqi people thought positively of America, remarkably so, given the first Gulf War and the ensuing sanctions. But there were no American enemies in the country, no groups of evil men plotting our destruction, no Al Qaeda cells, and no weapons to attack us with even if somebody, such as Saddam, tried.
When we "took the fight to the enemy" in Iraq, there was no enemy there! Nor weapons of mass destruction, which is why the first stage of the fight went so easily.
But the war-think that sent us off to destroy evil doers assured that we treat all Iraqis as if they were the enemy. The Iraqis, being human, responded to the ensuing mistreatment — the destruction of vital infrastructure, the death of tens of thousands of civilians, the torture rooms, the theft of their oil — by becoming our enemy.
The war in Iraq has done more for the cause of Islamic terrorism than Bin Laden could have managed in a hundred years. Indeed, the War on Terror, as waged by war-addicted Americans, has vastly increased the ranks of America-hating terrorists.
In Iraq and Afghanistan there are tens of thousands of children who have lost family to American bombs and bullets. We can assume that some portion of these children will grow up with the same determination that caused so many Americans to join the military after 9/11: they will think it their duty to take the war to the enemy.
One question has surely been settled — to win the war on terror we must take the fight to the President and his war-addicted enablers.