- The so-called war against terrorism is unwinnable. It
was designed to be unwinnable so that it can be carried on for an indefinite
duration and thus support the vast military-industrial-anti-terrorism complex.
The end of the Cold War scared this complex half to death. It can only
survive with an enemy at the gates.
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- Conventional wars can be won because they are fought
against governments. Either the enemy government can be destroyed or it
is made to pay such a high price in casualties and assets that it will
sue for peace. Either way, everybody knows the war is over. The Cold War
ended when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Russians ended their occupation
of Eastern Europe. We should have dismantled the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization, as they did the Warsaw Pact, and moved to a peacetime situation.
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- Too many people in this country, however, have a vested
interest in war, and they were in desperate need of a new enemy and some
dramatic event to get the people all riled up. Osama bin Laden obliged
on both counts.
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- The war against terrorism, however, is being waged against
individuals scattered around the world. When one is killed, he is replaced
by another. There is not, and there never will be, anyone who can say,
on behalf of all terrorists, "OK, we quit." Most of the terrorists
in the world don't even know each other.
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- The analogy of war is a false one. The proper analogy
is simply dealing with individual criminals and a few criminal gangs. To
do that, you don't have to put the nation on a war footing; you don't have
to destroy or injure civil liberties at home or spend billions of dollars.
You just doggedly pursue the criminals as they arise, knowing, as police
forces do, that this is steady work. You will never get them all because
they are replenishable.
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- I've often pointed to Israel as an example of the futility
of trying to shoot or bomb your way out of a terrorist problem. No nation
on Earth has been more ruthless, more determined and more effective in
fighting terrorists than Israel, yet after more than 50 years, the Israelis
are still plagued by it. That's because they have refused to solve the
political problem - occupation of Palestinian land - that gives rise to
it.
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- Now President Bush is following their bad example. He's
developed a habit of lying. He claims we were struck by terrorists because
they hate our freedom and prosperity. That's not what the terrorists said,
and they ought to know their own motives. They said they make war on us
because of our one-sided support of Israel, our military presence in the
Persian Gulf, and now our occupation of Iraq. They said that if we will
correct those policies, they will stop attacking us.
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- In his recent White House remarks about Iraq, on every
single occasion Bush used the word "terrorist" instead of "insurgent."
The majority of people fighting us in Iraq are not terrorists. There are
some, mainly the suicide bombers, but the majority of them just oppose
our occupation of their country. Attacks against an opposing army cannot
be called acts of terrorism. Only attacks against civilian targets qualify
as acts of terrorism, and that's true whether the civilians are killed
by a suicide bomber or an American airplane or an artillery piece.
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- The president and his band of pro-Israel neoconservatives
grossly misled the American people into a war that, even were we to win
it (and we won't), will not benefit the American people one iota. It's
good to see that more and more Americans are catching on to the fact that
our government was not honest with us.
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- It's too bad the Democratic Party is in such a sorry
shape, with spineless opportunists and left-wing ideologues, that there
is no good alternative party for the American people to turn to.
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