America Defeated: How Terrorists Turned a Superpower's Strengths Against Itself

[marmar]

from TomDispatch, via AlterNet:



America Defeated: How Terrorists Turned a Superpower's Strengths Against Itself

By Mark Danner, Tomdispatch.com. Posted March 26, 2008.

America's enemies have used an evangelical, redemptive regime, hell-bent on remaking a fallen world, to lay the seeds of their success.



This essay was adapted from an address first delivered in February at the Tenth Asia Security Conference at the Institute for Security and Defense Analysis in New Delhi.

To contemplate a prewar map of Baghdad -- as I do the one before me, with sectarian neighborhoods traced out in blue and red and yellow -- is to look back on a lost Baghdad, a Baghdad of our dreams. My map of 2003 is colored mostly a rather neutral yellow, indicating the "mixed" neighborhoods of the city, predominant just five years ago. To take up a contemporary map after this is to be confronted by a riot of bright color: Shia blue has moved in irrevocably from the East of the Tigris; Sunni red has fled before it, as Shia militias pushed the Sunnis inexorably west toward Abu Ghraib and Anbar province, and nearly out of the capital itself. And everywhere, it seems, the pale yellow of those mixed neighborhoods is gone, obliterated in the months and years of sectarian war.

I start with those maps out of a lust for something concrete, as I grope about in the abstract, struggling to quantify the unquantifiable. How indeed to "take stock" of the War on Terror? Such a strange beast it is, like one of those mythological creatures that is part goat, part lion, part man. Let us take a moment and identify each of these parts. For if we look closely at its misshapen contours, we can see in the War on Terror:

Part anti-guerrilla mountain struggle, as in Afghanistan;

Part shooting-war-cum-occupation-cum-counterinsurgency, as in Iraq;

Part intelligence, spy v. spy covert struggle, fought quietly -- "on the dark side," as Vice President Dick Cheney put it shortly after 9/11 -- in a vast territory stretching from the southern Philippines to the Maghreb and the Straits of Gibraltar;

And finally the War on Terror is part, perhaps its largest part, Virtual War -- an ongoing, permanent struggle, and in its ongoing political utility not wholly unlike Orwell's famous world war between Eurasia, East Asia, and Oceania that is unbounded in space and in time, never ending, always expanding.

Snowflakes Drifting Down on the War on Terror

President Bush announced this virtual war three days after September 11, 2001, in the National Cathedral in Washington, appropriately enough, when he told Americans that "our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil." ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/80547/

[Demeter]

1. True ONLY If By Terrorists, You Mean BFEE and Cronies and NeoCons

[Doctor_J]

2. Amen to that

It wasn't AlQaeda that turned America against itself, it was the right wing in this country. They lit the fuse in the 90's by trying to destroy the president. Then after 9/11 (LIHOP), turned it into an all-out war between the fascists and the real Americans. Bush and his cronies, not UBL, are responsible for the death of America

[zonmoy]

3. one flaw in your post.

9/11(mihop) not (lihop)