Winning the war on terror

I think we've lost it already. I say "lost" not in any military sense, that our troops have somehow lost control of the battlefield. I say "lost" in the sense that we have let the fear of terrorism goad us into sacrificing rights and liberties without a fight. We have let the fear of terrorism push us into creating a whole string of programs for homeland security that leave huge gaps for opportunitic attacks. We have let color coded terror alerts send us into paroxysms of fear with no clear sense of what we are fearing.

We just surrendered to terror and cower in fear. We take the flimsiest rumor of a threat to wallow in dread and hysteria at the same time we take the flimsiest security program as a shield to protect us from that threat.

Maybe I'm overdoing this a bit, but I'm pretty tired of hearing about "the war on terror" and all the weeping and wailing that goes along with it. It seems like a bunch of scare talk to me with very little action to back it up.

It's not that I don't realize that the world is a dangerous place. I've never had to wield a gun to protect myself or my family, but I do very much know what it is like to hide from gunfire. I know that there are threats of all kinds, and not merely the kinds that come from bullets or bugs. And I know that there are a whole heap of folks out there who really, really don't like Americans and/or U.S. foreign policy.

But we aren't fighting a war. Not a war on terror anyway.

How can I say that? For one thing, there's nothing that the American people are doing to fight this war--other than being afraid pretty much on demand. If it were a real war, we'd be looking at where our defenses were weak and producing some serious weaponry, and every American would be involved in the effort to defeat the enemy.

Consider this. Most (but not all) of those who use terrorism as a tactic against the U.S. and its allies are based in the Middle East, which sits on a largish pool of oil. We place our economy in jeopardy when we depend on the Middle East for this resource. Yet there has been no serious call for Americans to begin the serious work of reducing dependence on foreign oil. Ours is a petroleum-based economy, so doing that would certainly begin to create some dislocations among those with interests in petroleum-based products. Nonetheless, it is in the interest of national security that we start making the changes that will allow us more energy self-sufficiency. Our leaders do not ask us to conserve. Our leaders do not insist on more fuel efficient vehicles. Our leaders are not scouring the statutes and regulations that encourage wastefulness to reverse that trend. And the progress toward alternative fuels is all too slow.

Consider this. When the U.S. has been attacked, there has been a lack of intelligence to provide adequate warning of impending attack. Even now, there are thousands of pages of documents and computer records that cannot be analyzed. Whatever the failures in communication between the various intelligence agencies, there is still the central fact that too few people in these agencies have the foreign language skills to be of any use in providing intelligence. And yet none of our leaders have said that foreign language education needs a major boost in this country. Way back in the bad old days of the Cold War, we had a better idea of what was needed, and several educational programs were specifically labelled national defense programs. These included grants for people to study obscure and not-so-popular languages. If we were building those language skills, we'd have a better chance of having people who could get closer to the source of some of those threats. (And it's not as if learning a foreign language is really going to hurt someone in this very small world of ours.)

If this were really a war on terror, we'd be looking at where the terrorists get their weapons and try to cut them off at the source. We would be scrambling pretty damned fast to corral the nuclear materials--and personnel--in Russia and make sure that everything was locked down but good. We'd go back to all those ammo dumps in Iraq that we searched for weapons of mass destruction, and this time we'd blow the damned things up instead of leaving them open for one and all to pilfer--and use against us. We'd be looking really hard at the nations that manufacture weapons and sell them to terrorists and do some serious jawboning about how (a) that's not such a good idea and (b) there are some real consequences for doing it.

If this were really a war on terror, we'd be looking at where the terrorists are getting their recruits and work really hard to counter with our own propaganda. We'd look at what motivates the recruits and try not to be the motivation. We'd look at what the recruits really need and see if we couldn't offer them a better deal.

If this really were a war on terror--and our leaders really were afraid--there'd be some real concern that business as usual is not cutting it. Zero tolerance for turf battles among agencies. Careful use of the weapon of terror (fear!) against our own people. A serious look at priorities and risks for security while developing security consciousness in the populace.

Nah. This isn't a war. But we've lost it anyway. Pleasure and greed and comfort are more important than the nation's security, except on those occasions when we are really afraid. Then, we surrender all over again. Anything but fight. Let someone else do that.