The War on Terror is "Utter drivel"

[Commie Girl]

:) Has anyone here read any of Gwynne Dyer's books on War? I had the pleasure of seeing him speak once, he is the leading "expert" worth reading! (C.V. to follow)

2 September 2004

Victory in the War on Terror

By Gwynne Dyer

"With the right policies, this is a war we can win, this is a war
we must win, and this is a war we will win," said Democratic presidential
candidate John Kerry in Tennessee on 31 August. "The war on terrorism is
absolutely winnable," repeated his vice-presidential running mate, Senator
John Edwards. That is utter drivel, and they must privately know it, but
truth generally loses to calculated lies in politics.

This outburst of bravado was prompted by President George W. Bush's
brief brush with the truth about terrorism the previous weekend, when he
told an interviewer that he did not really think you can win the war on
terror, but that conditions could be changed in ways that would make
terrorists less acceptable in certain parts of the world. For a moment
there, you glimpsed a functioning intellect at work. Such honesty rarely
goes unpunished in politics.

This heroic attempt to grapple with reality was a welcome departure
from Mr Bush's usual style -- "I have a clear vision of how to win the war
on terror and bring peace to the world," he was claiming as recently as 30
August -- and so his opponents pounced on it at once. "What if President
Reagan had said that it may be difficult to win the war against Communism?"
asked John Edwards, in one of the least credible displays of indignation in
American history.

Mr Bush promptly fled back to the safe terrain of hypocrisy and
patriotic lies. "We meet today in a time of war for our country, a war we
did not start, yet one that we will win," he told a veterans' conference in
Nashville on 1 September. But it is not "a time of war" for the United
States, and it cannot "win.".

Some 140,000 young American soldiers are trapped in a neo-colonial
war in Iraq (where there were no terrorists until the US invasion), but
their casualties are typical of colonial wars: fewer than one percent
killed a year. As for the three hundred million Americans at home, exactly
as many of them have been killed by terrorists since 9/11 as have been
killed by the Creature from the Black Lagoon in the same period. None.

The rhetoric of a "war on terror" have been useful to the Bush
administration, and terrorism now bulks inordinately large in any media
where the agenda is set by American perspectives. On the front page of the
International Herald Tribune that carried the story on Mr Bush's return to
political orthodoxy on terrorism, four of the other five stories were also
about terrorism: "Twin bus bombs kill 16 in Israel," "Blast leaves 8 dead
in Moscow subway," "12 Nepal hostages slain in Iraq," and "French hold
hectic talks on captives."

In other words, thirty-six of the quarter-million people who died
on this planet on the 31st of August were killed by terrorists: close to
one in eight thousand. No wonder the IHT headlined its front page "A
Deadly Day of Terror." Although it would have been on firmer statistical
ground if it had substituted the headline "A Deadly Day for Swimming" or
even "A Deadly Day for Falling Off Ladders."

Actually, more than 36 people were killed by "terrorists" on 31
August -- perhaps as many as fifty or sixty. The rest were just killed in
wars that the United States is not all that interested in: in Nepal, in
Peru, in Burundi, and in other out-of-the-way countries where the local
guerrillas are not Muslims and have no imaginable links with the terrorists
who attacked the United States.

Governments that are fighting Muslim rebels, like the Palestinians
in the Israeli-occupied territories or the Chechens in Russia, have had
more success in tying their local counter-insurgency struggles to the US
"war on terror," but that only means that Washington doesn't criticise
their human rights violations so much. The only terrorists that the United
States government really worries about -- and this would be equally true
under a Kerry administration -- are terrorists who attack Americans. There
aren't that many of them, and they aren't that dangerous.

George W. Bush spoke the truth, briefly, at the end of August, when
he said that the "war on terror" cannot be won. It cannot be won OR lost,
because it is only a metaphor, not an actual war. It is like the "war on
crime," another metaphor. Nobody ever expected that the "war on crime"
would one day end in a surrender ceremony where all the criminals come out
with their hands up, and afterwards there is no more crime. It is a
STATISTICAL operation, and success is measured by how successful you are in
getting the crime RATE down. Same goes for terrorism.

You could do worse than to listen to Stella Rimington, the former
director of MI5, Britain's intelligence agency for domestic operations:
"I'm afraid that terrorism didn't begin on 9/11 and it will be around for a
long time. I was very surprised by the announcement of a war on terrorism
because terrorism has been around for thirty-five years...[and it] will be
around while there are people with grievances. There are things we can to
improve the situation, but there will always be terrorism. One can be
misled by talking about a war, as though in some way you can defeat it."
As Mr Bush said before his handlers got the muzzle back on.


Essay (http://www.gwynnedyer.net/articles/Gwynne%20Dyer%20article_%20%20Victory%20in%20War%2 0on%20Terror.txt)

CV (http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/skelton/dyer_bio-en.asp)

[Commie Girl]

Critique of his latest book, Future Tense: The Coming World Order


Gwynne Dyer isn’t exactly a wimp. Not many guys from Newfoundland are. Born during World War II, he has been fascinated by things military all his life, and has served in three navies — ours, Canada’s and Great Britain’s. He has university degrees from all three countries too, and a Ph.D. in military and Middle Eastern history. During the 1980s, he produced and narrated the best documentary series about the nature of war that I’ve ever seen.

And here’s what he says about what we are doing:

“The United States needs to lose the war in Iraq as soon as possible. Even more urgently, the whole world needs the United States to lose the war in Iraq. What is at stake now is the way we run the world for the next generation or more, and really bad things will happen if we get it wrong.” (Emphasis added)

Those are the opening lines of his latest and perhaps most important book, Future Tense: The Coming World Order (paperback, McClelland and Stewart, $12.95). If you plan on reading only one book this year, make this the one. In perfectly clear prose, with arguments as well-researched as they are compelling, this military expert explains why what we’re doing is mad.

He explains how we haven’t grasped that the world has changed, that we aren’t living in our old superpower world anymore, one in which we’re the leader of the forces of light against the evil dark powers of communism. Nor are we, in fact, even a military superpower in the way we like to think we are; in reality, our military machine can only be used against very weak countries. As he notes, “War with a serious opponent would lead to a level of American casualties that the U.S. public would not tolerate for long.”

What the world needs most in the long run (if there’s to be a long run), he reminds us, is a stable international order in which all nations gradually work on abandoning war as an acceptable way of settling any differences. Dyer isn’t starry-eyed about this; he thinks it will take a hundred years at least to get major countries to stop resorting to war, “for it is trying to change international habits that had at least 5,000 years to take root.”

That, he reminds us, is the whole purpose of the United Nations, which we played the major role in starting exactly 60 years ago this spring. Yes, we’ve resorted to war before, as have other countries, but we always at least pretended that what we were doing was legally justified by international standards.

Now, however, the current administration is essentially spitting on this, and openly proclaiming our right to intervene unilaterally anywhere we want. Why is that so bad? Because others will do it too, and, eventually, it will break down even the ideal of an international order, causing a general return to “the old world of alliances, arms races and all the other old baggage.”

Dyer writes, “No other major power wants to abandon the project to outlaw war … but if the world’s greatest power becomes a rogue state, they won’t have much choice.” Some days, it appears we’ve already crossed the line.

Interestingly, if that happens, we may not be able to afford to be a rogue state for very long. In what’s surely the most telling and terrifying part of this book, the author takes on the most frightening topic of all — the real condition of the American economy, which is now totally dependent on foreign investment.

You’d scarcely know it from the “mainstream media,” but we’re now the biggest debtor nation in history, owing far more to foreign countries than they do to us, and running up $500 billion more on our “credit card” every year.

Why does this go on? Dyer argues what other economists have told me in whispers: “The U.S. economy is a confidence trick based on everybody else’s perception that the United States is centrally important for the world’s security and that its economy is centrally important for the world economy.”

That was absolutely true in 1945, and largely true even in 1985. But not anymore. If you look at only those foreign investments that could be liquidated fairly quickly, the total, he estimates, would come to about $8 trillion. If those investments started to move elsewhere, the value of the dollar could be cut in half, Dyer estimates, overnight.

That would mean not only no more Lincoln Navigators, it more than likely would lead to the end of democracy as we know it. Which would be especially unfortunate since, as he notes, “global warming and other environmental problems are going to hit us very hard over the next 50 years.”

“How fast they hit and how great the resulting upheavals will be cannot be known in advance, but very few people apart from the usual suspects in the United States any longer doubt that climate change is a reality.”

Incidentally, if you’re tempted to tell me why Gwynne Dyer is all wrong, I’ll be willing to listen — but not if you haven’t read this book first.

Source (http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=7302)

[Andy Bowden]

The war on terrorism cannot be won - but then again the point is that the war is not meant be won. It will go on for as long as our leaders desire it to, and will be used to attack those who oppose American interests, regardless of their involvement in terrorism - and to increase control over us.

It is meant to be a decades long war, used to gain control of strategic resources and keep populations of the West under control, with ID cards and surveillance.

[bolshevik butcher]

Its like 1984. THe war is a constant to develop a feeling of patrionism and amke people loyal to their government.