The US is losing the war on terror- security in US diminishing

A new push for change in the war on terror

National experts paint a bleak picture of progress and point to diminishing security for the US.
By Alexandra Marks | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the August 22, 2007 edition

New York - The US is losing the war on terror. That's the assessment of the nation's top foreign-policy, intelligence, and national-security leaders from across the ideological spectrum. In this year's Terrorism Index, a survey released Monday by Foreign Policy magazine, 84 percent of these experts believe the nation is losing the war on terror, while more than 90 percent say the world is growing more dangerous for Americans.

That's prompted a variety of leaders to call for a complete rethinking of the nation's strategy. And some are looking back to the cold war's battle against communism to find models for the ideological struggle against terrorism.

A key component is deterrence, the policy that, at the height of the cold war, kept the superpowers' nuclear warheads safely in their bunkers – the only way to avoid mutually assured destruction (MAD). Another is a call for a Middle East Marshall Plan to help develop the region's economies and confront the alienation of the young.

"We need a grand strategy to address not only the question of al Qaeda, but also, how do you put out the fires in the region?" says Fawaz Gerges, a Middle East expert at New York's Sarah Lawrence College. "How do you diffuse the crisis and help the Muslims in order to counterbalance the militant ideologies that are simmering above the surface and below the surface?"

The Terrorism Index was developed by Foreign Policy magazine and the Center for American Progress a year ago, as a way to gauge progress in the war on terror. The original idea was to determine whether the nation was deterring, capturing, or killing more terrorists each day than were being recruited, trained, and deployed. Such information proved nearly impossible to obtain. So the groups decided to survey top foreign-policy, intelligence, military, and academic experts on their sense of progress.

This is the third Terrorism Index they have issued. Among its findings are that foreign-policy experts "see a world that is growing more dangerous, a national security strategy in disrepair, and a war in Iraq that is alarmingly off course," according to the magazine.

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http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0822/p03s03-usmi.html

bush is losing the war on terror because of his ineptness and lack of leadership skills. And thanks to bush and his PNAC buddies the US is less safe today then when bush took office.

Rather wordy subject line, but there ya go.

So they advocate a return to the cold war and mutual-assured destruction? That's escalation. I thin the answer lies in the other direction - de-militarization and a return to police investigation and co-operation across borders. We attached Afgahnistan because there was no way that the Taliban were going to give up bin Laden (though do I remember they offered just before we invaded?), but even there sanctions, etc. would seem to have been the better course, and probably one that would have resulted in bin Laden in custody by now.

They say we are losing the "War on Terror", but it was never supposed to be won. The Neocons wanted the excuse to go back to cold war conditions- economy, secrecy, nukes...and now because they've started a worldwide firestorm and pissed off Putin, here we go again.

I'm very angry at the people that said we had to "give the dems time." Time to allow this to happen?

Everything * has touched has turned out BAD.

Where is that sheep poster I saw on Washington Journal this morning? I want to put it in my tagline.

pretty new, from the ACLU:

(yurbud) did:

and posted it here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=1628953&mesg_id=1628953

Thank you both!

We are screwn.