| Bush's foreign policy has made us less secure, not more secure. It has succeeded only in alienating our allies and enraging our detractors. |
| Four years after the collapse of the towers, evil is still with us and so is terrorism. Terrorists have staged spectacular attacks, killing thousands, in Tunisia, Bali, Mombasa, Riyadh, Istanbul, Casablanca, Jakarta, Madrid, Sharm el Sheik and London, to name only the best known. Last year, they mounted 651 "significant terrorist attacks," triple the year before and the highest since the State Department started gathering figures two decades ago. One hundred ninety-eight of these came in Iraq, Bush's "central front of the war on terror" - nine times the year before. And this does not include the hundreds of attacks on U.S. troops. It is in Iraq, which was to serve as the first step in the "democratization of the Middle East," that insurgents have taken terrorism to a new level, killing well over 4,000 people since April in Baghdad alone; in May, Iraq suffered 90 suicide-bombings. Perhaps the "shining example of democracy" that the administration promised will someday come, but for now Iraq has become a grotesque advertisement for the power and efficacy of terror.
Nearly two years ago, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, in a confidential memorandum, posed the central question about the war on terror: "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?" The answer is clearly no. "We have taken a ball of quicksilver," says the counterinsurgency specialist John Arquilla, "and hit it with a hammer." Source: "Taking Stock of the Forever War" By MARK DANNER - NY Times - September 11, 2005 There are a lot of good arguments for Congress to consider as to why involving the U.S. in yet another war, this one in Colombia, is a bad idea. In the midst of a War on Terror, the U.S. can little afford, in terms of either money, military aid, or troop strength, to get involved in yet another war. Colombia has nothing to do with the war on terror -- militarily. But it does have something to do with swaying hearts and minds in the Muslim world. Every time that the U.S. is caught acting like a bully in the world, especially among the world's poorest, that fact is noted by Muslims from Morocco to the Philippines.. In order to shift the catastrophic momentum in Iraq, the U.S. must first convince the Iraq people -- and the rest of the Muslim world -- that the U.S. is sincere in its protestations that it is a force for justice and good. That's a hard case to make if Congress is cozying up to paramilitary thugs in Colombia. Source: "Plan Colombia up for a vote" by Geov Parrish - WorkingForChange.com -6/23/05 [A]n American who has worked for Aramco [the oil company in Saudi Arabia] for many years…noted that while previous attacks against Western residential compounds came every few months, since May 1 [2004] there has been an attack on a project office in Yanbu that left six Western engineers dead; a residential compound breach in Khobar with 22 killed; two Americans gunned down in their driveways in Riyadh; and two other Westerners killed elsewhere around that city. The U.S. Embassy in Riyadh said the violence was evidently prompting all Americans to reconsider whether to stay in the kingdom. Source: "Saudis retaliate for beheading" by Neil MacFarquhar - New York Times via Dallas Morning News - 6/19/04 After September 11, 2001, the US received an outpouring of support from the world community. The ill conceived foreign policy of the Bush administration, particularly the unilateral invasion of Iraq, reversed world support for the US to skepticism and outright hostility. [The United States] will lead a coalition to disarm [Saddam Hussein]. George Bush - State Of The Union speech - January 28, 2003) In a practical sense, our "coalition" partners consisted only of Great Britain. In fact our "coalition" consisted only of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The British people were overwhelmingly against the invasion. The British filled the streets of London in record numbers to protest British participation in the invasion. That resounding opinion persists to this day, and Tony Blair is in deep trouble at home. "The United States is the fourth most likely of 186 countries to be the target of a terrorist attack within the next 12 months, ranked only after Colombia, Israel and Pakistan." according to World Markets Research Center, a company that provides research on the risk of terrorism for 500 public and private multinational clients. "U.S.-led military action in Afghanistan and Iraq has exacerbated anti-U.S. sentiment." Criteria used for the rankings: motivation of terrorist groups, the presence of terrorism cells, the scale and frequency of past attacks, the ability of terrorist groups to organize and obtain weapons, and the ability of the government to prevent the attacks. Source: New York Times - "U.S. Terror Risk Higher Than Most" - via Dallas Morning News 8/17/2003 Dropping 18,000 bombs on a sovereign nation does not constitute liberating it. |
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