Why the War on Terror Endures: Spawning Terror Over There

http://opednews.com/articles/Why-the-War-on-Terror-Endu-by-Steve-Breyman-130212-311.html



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Why the War on Terror Endures: Spawning Terror Over There
By Steve Breyman
OpEdNews Op Eds 2/12/2013 at 09:20:39

Believe the War on Terror has been an unmitigated disaster? Find it difficult to wrap your head around the Long War's long list of horrors? Think the Obama administration and Congress's willingness to wage the War indefinitely is murderous myopia? Think again: the War on Terror is good at any number of things. It shifts yet more war-making power from the legislative to the executive branch. It bolsters the size and power of the US military. It creates the largest and most expensive intelligence complex in human history. It enriches government contractors, new firms and legacy suppliers alike. It justifies unprecedented assaults on civil liberties. It enrolls both major political parties and all prominent national politicians. It furthers the militarization of American society. Above all, it reproduces itself. The War on Terror spawns terror where it belongs: far from America's shores.

It's not supposed to, of course, contrary to a frequent claim on the Left. The War on Terror is not a vast conspiracy perpetrated by those constituencies favored by it. It is, instead, a complex and confused assemblage of interlocking, overlapping, and contradictory policies, foreign and domestic. It's a sputtering, jerry-rigged contraption with layers, scaffolding, tweaks and adjustments worthy of Rube Goldberg. Yes, we have secret memos, secret actions and secret courts. But the lion's share of the War's undercarriage and infrastructure grew out in the open. And thanks to Wikileaks, whistleblowers, and witnesses, we eventually come to know the secrets.

The War on Terror is a piquant stew of ideas and ideology that underwrites the vast, global deployment of American men, money, and machines. The War's authors and enablers truly hope that Afghanistan will "stabilize' sufficiently by 2014 to permit the withdrawal of most US troops. They hope that the mess they left behind in Iraq sorts itself out. They hope that air power is enough to "safeguard US interests' in Libya and Mali. They believe what they say about "terrorist groups' Hamas and Hezbollah. They genuinely hope that drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia make the world safer for the United States and its allies.

The problem before us then is not one of sincerity or intent but of results. Opportunities occasionally arise to confront the hopes, fears and beliefs of the architects and supporters of the War on Terror with facts. A recent report from the Institute of Economics and Peace (IEP) provides such an opportunity. IEP is "a non-profit research organization dedicated to shifting the world's focus to peace as a positive, achievable, and tangible measure of human well-being and progress. It achieves its goals by developing new conceptual frameworks to define peacefulness; providing metrics for measurement; uncovering the relationship between peace, business and prosperity, and by promoting a better understanding of the cultural, economic and political factors that drive peacefulness."