War on Terror a Losing Game

by Michael Harris by the Ottawa Sun (Canada)

June 25, 2006

What will it take to persuade this government that our military deployment in Afghanistan is a disaster for Canada? Stephen Harper bristles at the very notion of seriously debating this doomed mission. But the president of the country we are supposed to be "securing" sees it differently. Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, says that the recent deaths of 600 Afghans in the so-called war on terror is "unacceptable." He wants the international community to rethink its strategy of hunting down terrorists and collecting scalps and to start dealing with the roots of terrorism. No wonder. Far from discouraging terrorists, the mission in Afghanistan has inspired the Taliban and created a dangerous militancy in tribal Pakistan. That's why Karzai wants us to put down our guns and put on our thinking caps.

You would have thought that we might have come to that conclusion on our own. In fact, the 100 top foreign policy analysts in the United States have done so in spades. According to Foreign Affairs magazine, a blue ribbon group of bipartisan foreign affairs experts in the U. S. view the war on terror as a disaster measured against its own aims. The group, which includes a former secretary of state, ex-heads of both the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, and former military commanders believes that the war on terror has actually made terrorism much worse because President Bush and his advisers have adopted a totally unrealistic view of what they can accomplish with threats and force. They also conclude that with the utter failure of Homeland Security, the next 9/11 is virtually assured in America.

If the experts of both political stripes have it right is there any wonder that the global image of the U.S. has plummeted even in those countries closely allied with the Americans. Just consider the list compiled by the Pew Research Center: Spain, Russia, Indonesia and Turkey, where only 12% of those polled had a positive image of the U.S. And while George Bush tries to convince the world that Iran is the greatest threat to world peace, the citizens in 13 out of the 15 countries polled said the real threat to the globe was the war in Iraq. Here is what Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center had to say about that: "When you get more people saying that the U.S. presence in Iraq is a threat to world peace as say that about Iran, it's a measure of how much Iraq is sapping good will to the United States."

How could it be otherwise with the western values on display in this ugly war? The United States has replicated the old Soviet gulag system, with Abu Ghraib and various torture destinations around the world. Naked men tangled together like a heap of worms while some sadist took snaps for posterity. Murder charges against marines accused of executing a disabled man. Fake news stories put out by governments and occupying forces who do not enjoy the support of local populations. And now fresh allegations that marines may have executed 24 men, women and children out of battle rage. The record is not much better back in the United States. For the first time in history, an American president has resorted to the warrantless wiretapping of his own citizens, a major step towards a police state. Sapped by the trillion dollar misadventure in Iraq, the U.S. government could not mount an effective rescue operation of its own citizens after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, all the worse because the event was easily predicted.

President Bush now has Americans so worked up about security that many of them want to wall up the southern border with Mexico. Perhaps that is why Amnesty International recently reported that the relentless pursuit of security in the strongest nations has undermined human rights around the world: "Governments collectively and individually paralyzed international institutions and squandered public resources in pursuit of narrow security interests, sacrificed principles in the name of the 'war on terror' and turned a blind eye to massive human rights abuses."

The culprits, according to the Amnesty report, were the United States, China and Russia. I for one do not want to see my country added to that list