The Future War on Terror
Late Sunday evenings almost always feel the same way.
All the quality shows/games have already ended at this point and this slow feeling of dread starts to come over you as the start of the new work week slowly begins to kick in the closer bedtime comes.
But on this particular Sunday evening around 9:45PM something unusual came out of the blue.
“Breaking News: President to make unusual press conference at 10:30PM EST
I immediately thought to myself how strange that announcement was. Typically press conferences are announced several hours in advance in order to ensure all the White House press corps can plan their schedules accordingly and are almost never done so late on a Sunday evening as neither the press corps nor a large audience is usually on hand.
All the websites for all the different news organizations would not speculate on the purpose of the presidential press conference.
CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, all the broadcast channels, nothing…. Just repeating the same headline that appeared in the news…
But fortunately in the 21st century there’s a news that travels faster than cable news networks and the internet. And that is Twitter.
Suddenly one of the trending words became #obamaguesses. Searching the hashmark the only thing I was able to find was pure speculation from other twitter users who were merely guessing. Guesses ranged from Obama announcing marriage infidelity to announcing he would not run for a second term to terrible economic news. Guesses upon guesses but no one seemed to have any substantial leads.
A little after 10:15PM another update gets released. “President to speak on matters of National Security”
Suddenly… everyone felt a wave of panic almost… In our post 9/11 world “national security” is almost always has a negative connotation whether it comes to basically having to walk naked through airport terminals, the Patriot Act, and of course the horror of terrorist attacks.
“Was there another successful terrorist attack on American soil?”
More speculation abound all over twitter…
10:25PM comes around and suddenly one tweet continues to be retweeted. Keith Urbahn, a former chief of staff for Rumsfeld tweets, “So I’m told by a reputable person that they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn”
And just like that “Osama” became tweeted and updated on facebook several thousand times a minute. And several minutes later almost an hour before Obama would speak in front of the country all the major news organizations would report “Osama Bin Laden is Dead”
In the aftermath everyone is happier that the most hated man in America was successfully killed by America’s elite Special Operators.
But really? What really changed with the elimination of OBL?
Some talking heads on TV went on to make outlandish statements like the death of Osama meant the end of the War on Terror. While others were making assessments that his death would lead to an economic recovery.
The problem is while most people fear the physical attacks caused by Al Qaeda here in America and American assets across the world, many have forgotten that Bin Laden’s primary targets were America’s economic infrastructure.
Bin Laden, as crazy as he is portrayed throughout the media, is not delusional enough to think that he could physically overpower the world’s most dominant superpower, even with an asymmetric attack force such as terrorism.
And so in the late 1990s, Osama Bin Laden outline three major goals in order to take down the United States:
- Invade and occupy Islamic countries in the Middle East to enrage and rally several Islamic countries and factions
- Cause the US and its military to overextend itself on “counterterrorism” and its future military endeavors
- Continue to make asymmetric attacks on the US that lead to America spending more money on “national security”
Eg. Al Qaeda spends $5,000 on a mission that doesn’t matter whether it succeeds or fails, but the US spends another $4 billion in additional security measures as a response
Post OBL. It is horrifying to see how many of his goals have come to fruition.
We are now engaged in two major countries in the Middle East with questionable success and spend several trillions of dollars each year on an enemy that does not appear to be dwindling.
In the meantime the country has been struggling economically, China and Japan have been scaling back their purchases of US government debt leaving our own Federal Reserve to suddenly become the #1 purchaser of treasury bonds. The Treasury has effectively hit the debt ceiling and now is resorting to borrowing from federal employee pension funds until a resolution can be made… or else we default on our debt.
In the meantime, despite the absence of Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda continues to plan attacks on America’s economic infrastructure
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/05/23/…
So now in the aftermath of Osama Bin Laden? What should America do to restore itself?
For starters I think we are going to have to re-evaluate our battles in the Middle East. When our primary adversaries are organizations like Al-Qaeda. Fighting organizations like the Afghani Taliban don’t serve any purpose. Sure the argument is made that if we withdraw Al-Qaeda will manage to occupy parts of Afghanistan, but that’s already happening in other countries such as Somalia, Yemen, and the Pakistani Tribal Regions.
As for our debt, we must do everything in our power to reduce our debt load. Anyone who has worked in government knows well enough about the bureaucratic inefficiencies and waste. The projection that America will be spending $700 billion/ a year in interest payments is horrifying. This means that the US would spending as much money as it currently does on the military without any benefits from the spending. While the military creates jobs, benefits government contractors, and provides ourselves with national security; interest payments is literally money that disappears from the government’s books to the balance sheets of the Fed, China, and Japan.
What is everyone else’s thoughts?
Can't remember where I read this, but I recently read an article talking about what OBL's real goal was, and that was to bleed the US dry economically while we use a tremendous amount of resources to pursue and chase "terrorists" across the globe. It talked about how he actually learned this strategy when he saw what happened to Russia when they went into Afghanistan back in 79/80. They would never fully be able to defeat the "insurgents" since it was a battle on foreign ground, and they would end up wasting a shit load of resources and money for nothing. They left almost a decade later with nothing to show for it. I think some good has come out of being over there, but was the juice worth the squeeze?
Spot on. A great book to read is the Looming Tower. Its a greater primer on Jihad and Osama Bin Laden. Bin Laden thought that the Mujahdeen played a great role in destroying the USSR and wanted to drain the USA of funds likewise.
Yeah, back when I was 17 in 2002 I saw the benefit of launching the global war on terrorism and nation building. Almost a decade later it's become clear to me that nation building in Islamic countries is a lost cause--even Turkey, an ally of the United States against Soviet Russia and a model of republicanism, is collapsing to radical Islam (it goes without saying that the EU was smart to not let Turkey into the union).
As far as the war on terrorism, we've spent about $2 trillion in response to 9/11 and created a new bureaucracy (Homeland Security). The war on terrorism itself is not bankrupting the nation ($200 billion per year is not an enormous drain on resources), but neither is a single $500 toilet seat. The point it, these expenses add up and every penny spent is a penny that must be repaid at a later date and in the interim is serviced by interest payments to foreigners.
The main source of America's struggles today, however, cannot be scapegoated to the military, or the war on terrorism, or to healthcare costs. The fact is, the U.S. seems to be in a continued and vicious cycle of boom and bust, from the savings and loans collapse in the 1980s to the irrational exuberance of the 1990s to the housing bubble in the 2000s. Bin Laden's strategy would be fruitless if America's commercial banking system were more similar to Canada's where the United States' banking system is highly regulated for the purpose of social engineering while Canada's is not. Google it. I promise you the facts will bear out that America's own federal government is more responsible for our debt, financial boom and collapse, and for America's potential collapse than Al qaeda could ever imagine in its wildest dreams.
We barely spend anything on the War on Terror. Virtually all of the entire increase in defense spending was on Iraq, new equipment and new domestic military spending. None of which have anything to do with the drone strikes in Pakistan or Yemen.
So what is the future war on terror then? I wouldn't exactly compare the following with terror, but the threat remains (and most of which we are doing to ourselves):
Is it the massive amount of debt the federal government is dumbing on us and future generations?
Is it the faux "democracy movement" in the middle east leading to the muslim brotherhood in control of former allies to the us?
Is is the continuing encirclement of China in all aspects of foreign affairs?
ANSWER: YES YES and... YES
Get this president outta office...
Yeah, but Iraq is under the guise of "War on Terror" (create allies to help fight the war) I think Iraq and even Afghanistan were major errors. Not that I didn't support the efforts--I did--but I see them now as fruitless efforts to try to institute democracy in nations that are literally Jurassic in their approaches to civilization. Similar to what the Bible says, "don't cast your pearls at swine." Why should we spend our gold on the fantastical?
One estimate of the cost of going after Osama Bin Laden is about $3 trillion...
http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/the-cost-of-bin-laden-3-trillio…
Is the OP suggesting then a isolationist/protectionist state?
We have no business being in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya. We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars and risking American lives with no beneficial outcome.
Iraq has been a disaster from the get-go, besides the fact that the State Department's own intelligence agency (INR), who is very much non-politicized, had concluded several times over that much of the evidence claiming Saddam Hussein's WMD program was faulty.
So while the previous administration was busy setting up photo ops of toppling Saddam Hussein's statue... many insurgent factions took advantage of the US's negligence to secure military weapons that wound up in the hands of many insurgents in a region now known as "The Triangle of Death"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/07/iraq-weapons-factory-al-qai…
Going after Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan is a reasonable response post 9/11. But less than 100 Al-Qaeda fighters remain in Afghanistan as many have fled to the Pakistani tribal lands, Yemen, Somalia, and other various countries protected by the country's sovreignity. (Aka the US cannot just deploy it's forces there) If we are going to be successful we will have to continue investing more in human intelligence and deployment of special forces and predator drones versus having tens of thousands of troops who are fighting an insurgency that poses no actual threat to US security (the Taliban are not capable of attacking the US or US interests abroad)
Libya. As long as we cannot put "boots on the ground" we have no chance of winning. Qadaffi has wisened up and dresses his soldiers similarly to how the rebels dress and also is known to house his forces near mosques, schools, and other civilian centers intentionally because he knows NATO does not want civilian collateral damage.
So with that, taxpayers are on the hook for several hundreds of billions of dollars each year on these efforts that don't improve our national security, don't provide us any benefit even to our foreign policy really, and really only seem to benefit defense contractors and private military companies (eg. Xe/Blackwater, Triple Canopy, KBR, Lockheed Martin, etc.)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240527023036548045763455908578181…
In the meantime....
We have breached our debt ceiling and continue to borrow from government pension accounts until the ceiling can be raised.... but Congress continues to show its partisan, ideological ways... meanwhile we continue to offer tens of billions of dollars of bond issues each month that are bought by the primary dealers and promptly flipped to the Fed.
US defense contractors need gov contracts to make money. US gov supplies/falsely justifies "terrorist"preventative spending through propaganda. US companies make money/debt has been shifted to public(taxpayer)
it doesnt take a genius to figure it out. I would certainly hope some WSO frequenters would be smart enough to get it....
Osama was successful in so many ways. Think about how 9/11 affected yourself and us as a country.
Going through airports, one is put through a process that would be illegal and unconstitutional anywhere else. A grandmother or a small child can be groped, stripped, or searched "for their own safety".
Our government is permitted to spy and eavesdrop on us at will.
Hundreds of billions of dollars that could have been spent to pay off the debt, fund social security, build roads, et cetera, have been funneled to the war on terrorism.
Were actively encouraged to spy on each other while politicians use war rhetoric to coax people into giving up their natural and civil rights.
Do you honestly feel any safer after nearly 10 years?
I never really felt unsafe. Dying in a terrorist attack on American soil is like winning the statistical lottery.
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