In October the “War on Terror” will have been going on for
16 years. It is now a bi-partisan war in that it has been fought by both
Republican and Democratic administrations. "The world is a battlefield and
we are at war; therefore the military can go wherever they please and do
whatever it is that they want to do, in order to achieve the national security
objectives of whichever administration happens to be in power." That's the
logic which reportedly drives the Joint Special Operation Command known for
directing SEAL Team Six among other special operations forces.
“The world is a battlefield” isn't just a vaguely aggressive
point of view; it's the legal underpinning of the use of military force in
today's War on Terror. This legal definition comes from the Authorization for
Use of Military Force, which Congress passed on Sept. 14, 2001 which gave the
President of the United
States broad power to fight terrorism around
the world.
Al-Qaeda is now a shadow of its former self but other groups
have taken up the call so terrorists still strike anywhere in the world
including here. The United
States continues to send troops, drop bombs,
and fire missiles in more than a dozen countries today. ISIS is now the focus
of much of our attention and while it has inspired many terror attacks
including the recent Manchester ,
England
Terror is not an ideology regardless of Trump’s recent assertion
on Twitter. Terror is a tactic and you can’t fight a war against a tactic. The followers
of ISIS and other similar groups aren’t fighting because they believe in terror
they’re fighting because they believe that their people are oppressed. They
attack us and European countries because we prop up and in the case of the Shah
of Iran install and support their oppressors. Regardless of that they have
committed many more attacks on their own people and killed many more of them.
Some of the ISIS fighters
are religiously motivated and some aren’t. While the leadership may claim
religious they’re creating a religious state as called for in their view of their
religious text it’s clear to most people of the world, including those of the
same faith, that ISIS and groups like it aren’t inspired by their holy book so
much as they use selected passages from it to defend their baser instincts.
The War on Terror isn’t winnable in the sense that there is capital
or leader to capture, no one to accept peace terms, no country to conquer and
rule. All we can accomplish by continuing to spend blood and treasure is insure
that there will be other mothers losing their sons and more young people angry
over lost family members killed by American bombs.
We would do well to reconsider who our friends are around
the world. Instead of supporting oppressive regimes just because they allow
American companies to plunder their natural resources as we have done in
Central America, Africa and the Middle East perhaps we should show support for
governments that are truly democratic regardless of whether they are capitalist
or socialist or somewhere in between. After all many of the European nations we’re
allied with are social welfare states to one degree or another. Standing up for
human rights would put us on the moral high ground. Of course that might mean
rescinding the $110 billion arms deal Trump just approved with one of the most
oppressive governments in the Middle East .
Published in the Seguin Gazette, June 2, 2017
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment