SPECIAL GUEST ESSAYIST!!!

Well, LOST's blog has achieved another milestone - a guest blogger has consented to post on this site, to toil in this vineyard of political analysis, sniping and sarcasm. To put down roots and perhaps give the ol'poster a run for his money. Without further adieu, please welcome, a published author who I'll quaintly refer to as the "X" of the 21st Century. "V" was taken already, earlier this year. Enjoy this piece, worthy of a Glass Onion or whatever prize may be handed out to the truly thought-provoking writers of our time:


Losing the War on Terror

The so-called “War on Terror” is over.
We lost.
Led by a grandstanding President and a Congress that left its collective brain in the top left-hand drawer of a filing cabinet in the basement of the Senate Office Building, the United States has embraced defeat by responding to radical Islamic extremism not with the mature confidence of a global superpower, but with a continuing four-year panic that is, if nothing else, a monument to the efficacy of politically motivated violence.
The “Global War on Terror” is a ridiculous overstatement that has paralyzed America and energized its opponents. George Bush’s self-appointment as a “War President” is ludicrous. The mere existence a “post-9/11 mindset” in America is evidence of our capitulation. Things have changed since 9/11 because we have allowed them to change. We have embraced terrorism as the successor to the Cold War: the ever-present danger of a never-ending threat. In this sense it is not inconceivable that the GWOT really is, as some have charged, a neo-conservative strategy, an Orwellian public relations campaign designed to mask the broader goals of American Imperialism and international corporatism. The reality is probably an evil-smelling broth of greed, flawed theory, delusions of grandeur and spectacular incompetence. But cause aside, the end result is the same: of all to paths to choose in the wake of 9/11, the Administration marched us down the one that led to institutionalized fear, and thus, inevitable failure.
Osama bin Laden is many things -- terrorist, political zealot, religious fanatic, mass-murderer -- but through its response to 9/11 the Bush Administration has elevated him and his movement to a position of undeserved influence, a force worthy of the almost undivided attention of the most powerful nation on earth, even to the exclusion of the long-term welfare of its own citizens.
Could bin Laden himself have envisioned a more optimistic scenario? In a single day of horror, he and his delusionary disciples transformed our nation, goading us into revealing the ugly underbelly of our culture, exposing to the world our deepest fears and insecurities, our callousness and cruelty, our internal divisions and divides. If bin Laden rejoiced at the collapse of the Twin Towers as a sign from Allah of the righteousness of his cause, he must have seen the mad-dog response of the Bush Administration as a gift of truly miraculous largess. Having survived our initial, ultimately half-hearted response in Afghanistan (and further elevating his own mythic status in the process), he laughs at us from hiding even now, secure in the knowledge that with four hijacked airplanes he was able to achieve what entire nations were unable to do in World War II, what the Soviet Union failed to accomplish during the Cold War and what not even Ho Chi Minh could fully claim in Vietnam. In just a few short hours and with the loss of just 19 of his own people, bin Laden turned America against itself, against the world, against its commitment to the basic rights and freedoms of its citizens. Every time a grandmother removes her orthopedic shoes in an airport, the specter of bin Laden looms. Every time an American soldier dies in Iraq bin Laden smiles. Abu Ghraib, GITMO, and The Patriot Act are monuments to his success. In the name of Al Qaeda (but certainly not in the names of Jefferson, Adams or Franklin) our leaders rationalize the need for domestic surveillance techniques that strike at the very core of our national ethic. For all of George Bush’s schoolyard bluster, and despite the courage and commitment of the men and women who are fighting and dying under his misguided command, we have turned into a nation of sheep, of scurrying mice, seeking safety in the shelter of strategic and tactical extremes that have made us less than we were on Sept. 10, 2001. Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda did not occupy our country, but they occupy our minds -- more completely than we now occupy Iraq, or even Afghanistan, where the Taliban are in resurgence and the American proxy and former oil industry executive Hamid Karzai huddles helplessly in his offices in Kabul, a symbol of American impotence. We allowed this to happen. We followed George Bush into a land of fear and reactionary intolerance. We dressed the terms of our submission in color-coded security alerts. We made bin Laden more than he is, more than he could ever be without our blundering, misguided assistance. We turned a megalomaniacal nutcase religious fanatic into America’s greatest enemy. Instead of rising above, we sunk below. We tortured, we lied, we bombed, we became what we abhorred.
How different was our response to 9/11 than to the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. In its targeting of children by an American citizen -- a former U.S. soldier no less -- the Oklahoma event was perhaps even more heinous than the horror of 9/11. But Oklahoma City spawned no frantic calls for a “War on Terror.” Nor did we launch preemptive strikes against the racist, ultra-right wing religious and political fringe that spawned and nurtured Timothy McVeigh. We mourned as a nation-- as a great nation -- memorializing the victims and their families with true sorrow and dignified restraint. We identified and hardened key potential targets against similar future attacks and quietly increased security within the scope of existing law. And we moved on. We moved on. We digested Oklahoma City in its proper context: a diabolical act of political terrorism by a deranged psychopath.
Al Qaeda is more than Timothy McVeigh, of course. He dreamed of jihad; Muslim extremists are living one. They hate us, and they have the will and resources to express that hatred with periodic violence. But they hate almost everyone -- and because they do, they can be (or might have been) marginalized as thugs and zealots, merely the latest iteration of a cyclic threat that over recent decades has included The Red Army Faction and the Red Brigades in Europe, the IRA in Ireland, the FLQ in Quebec, etc., etc. etc. Terrorism is born out of desperation and political impotence. It breeds on the rotting carcass of oppression. And we have become the oppressor.
In the best-case scenario, al Qaeda provided this country with the opportunity to prove our greatness and in the process confine them to historical insignificance. We could have mocked bin Laden’s characterization of the United States by rebuilding Afghanistan and eliminating the Taliban for good, but we chose instead to validate it by invading Iraq. We could have used 9/11 as a platform to unite the world in opposition to extremism of any kind, but we chose instead our own path of radical self-righteousness, adding the Bush Doctrine of Preemptive War to an unholy list of international horrors that in the future may come back to haunt us in ways far beyond the capabilities or even the vision of Al Qaeda.
What this country and the world needed in the wake of 9/11 was leadership. What it got was cynicism. What we needed was hope and confidence. What we got was Fear. Fear to be embraced. Fear as a policy. Fear as diplomacy. Fear as a tool to achieve political and diplomatic agendas. Fear as a way of life in a post 9-11 world -- a world and a life of our own creation. Fear. Our gift to Osama bin Laden: Fear as victory.