Post-9/11 disasters

The massive mistakes made by the US administration have vastly increased terrorism. That was not planned that way, but incompetence ruled supreme since 9/11.
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A mountain of made-in-America post-9/11 disasters.
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Jul 29, 2007
Haroon Siddiqui
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Of the two monumental mistakes made in the post-9/11 era, one is by now universally recognized but the other remains mired in the misleading formulations of politicians and ideologues.
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The first has to do with the various facets of war on terrorism and the second with whether Muslims, because of their religion, or a perversion of it, are prone to terrorism.
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It is now widely acknowledged that the world has infinitely more terrorism than before George W. Bush started his war on it.
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Five years and $610 billion later, Al Qaeda is stronger than ever. So are Hamas and Hezbollah, the latter a threat to the U.S. as well, according to the administration's own National Intelligence Estimate, a précis of the best judgments of all intelligence services.
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Iraq, a monumental mistake, is a lost cause for the U.S. There's nothing Bush can do to "win" it.
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The only real debate in Washington is over an exit strategy: When and at what pace should the American troops be withdrawn and how many be left behind, if allowed by Iraq, at the mega-military bases built over the last five years?
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There are secondary arguments over whether the American departure would precipitate a civil war, a bloodbath, a dismemberment of Iraq and instability across the oil-rich region.
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This presumes that what's happening now is not a civil war and not a bloodbath.
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As for the division of Iraq, it's mostly the Americans who talk about it. As a Western diplomat based in Jordan, who regularly flies in and out of Iraq, told me recently in Amman: "I've never met an Iraqi who supports the idea. No country around here wants it either."
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He also noted that the chief reason why the Iraq conflict has not spilled over to Jordan, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc. is that they are all "surveillance societies," closely monitoring all unusual activities.
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It is, therefore, not surprising that we no longer hear much of Bush's democracy drive for Arabs.
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There's trepidation in the U.S. that Iraq may be headed toward a Saigon moment: a chopper lifting off the roof of the U.S. embassy with desperate Vietnamese clinging to it. ("Not likely," said the diplomat. "There'll be a slow bleed for years," the insurgency/resistance/civil war taking years to wind down.)
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Afghanistan, too, is now a prime, albeit smaller, showcase for military and political incompetence, with the additional complication of record opium production right under the noses of the occupiers, including, of course, Canadians.
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As in Iraq, there just aren't enough troops from NATO or elsewhere to do that one last job that would bring us victory over the terrorists and restore security to the locals, bringing them out of the killing fields into the fold of our beneficence.
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We are also told we'd have reached the Promised Land long ago had it not been for the non-cooperation of dastardly neighbours - Iran and Syria in the case of Iraq, and Pakistan in the case of Afghanistan.
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All this is widely seen for what it is: the guff that botched wars produce.
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There's also recognition of the lasting damage done to the global interests of the U.S., and to American democracy itself, by the Bush administration's wanton disregard of the rule of international and domestic law, including the Geneva Conventions, not just in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay but elsewhere; the illegal wiretapping of American citizens; and the shameless exercise of executive power, a.k.a. the imperial or authoritarian presidency, in contempt of Congress and the courts.
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http://www.thestar.com/article/240705