The recent uproar about the new airport security check method got me thinking about the war on terror and the success, or otherwise of it. Our politicians keep shouting from the rooftops about how the waste of trillions of dollars on this terror wars have kept us safe and prevented us from changing the way we live but everyday occurrences keep saying otherwise.
Therefore, my question is, who is actually winning in this war? A war we have spent so much, both financially and otherwise to wage for nearly a decade? We have destroyed Iraq waisting an inordinate amount of money and lives, both American and Iraqi. Now we are in the process of repeating the same thing in Afghanistan and what have we achieved?
In my opinion, we have only succeeded in spending ourselves into near bankruptcy while making more enemies than friends and we have neither become safer nor maintained our freedoms. Internally, our way of life has been turned upside down regardless of what our politicians keep telling us.
The freedoms we are supposed to be protecting with the terror wars have been the first to go. We give it up each time we have gone to the airport to fly anywhere since September 11, 2001. Recently, it has gotten worse with our most private of privacy now under attack all because of the fear of an enemy we claim to be on top of.
Furthermore, we have been turned into a paranoid country and every little thing that we would not have noticed before the start of our terror wars, now elicits the kind of reaction that can only result from paranoia. Every little bag in the street corner now has the ability to convene a huge gathering of our emergency services at great costs to cities that can hardly afford it. Yet we claim that our way of life has not been changed.
The fact is that Al-Qaeda has won this war already and all they need to do now is put out tapes and hints, from time to time, and they will keep us on this path to self destruction. That, really, has been Al-Qaeda's aim all along. I'm sure they must have known, coming in, that they can never destroy America with bombs or any weapons of conventional warfare.
Their fight has always been psychological and they are definitely doing great, even if not winning. They have aided, in very concrete ways, in our financial crisis, turning a very rich country into a country that now bickers over money. They have taken away a very crucial aspect of our individual freedoms forcing us to make laws and take actions which have, either taken away or limited those freedoms and that has led to these dehumanizing airport checks.
Finally, they have turned a once proud and confident nation into a group of paranoid people who now jump at every hint of our own shadows. What else could Al-Qaeda have asked for?
I think almost everyone would agree that our wars in the Middle East are draining our human and economic resources, and wasting our national prestige, without gaining on the 'enemy.' But I also think the TSA needs to be vigilant about people who fly. There's something almost prudish about an American public that won't submit to a bland, frankly insignificant body scan even at risk of a commercial aircraft being blown up in mid-air.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, George Bush was allowed to start the war in the Middle East, and Pres. Obama is stuck with cleaning up the mess. Actually, we're all stuck with the clean-up.
I agree with you that the TSA should do everything necessary to keep our planes safe in the air but my point is that Al Qaeda has already won this terror war by virtue of the fact that they have fundamentaly affected our freedoms in a negative way. We're virtually prisoners in our own home.
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