Posted: May 12, 2005
by Doug Casey
(excerpted)
the term "War on Terror" itself makes no logical sense in the first place. "Terror" isn't an enemy – it's a method of fighting. Fighting a war against terror is as nonsensical as fighting a war against cavalry charges, or artillery barrages, or carpet bombing, or flanking movements – they're all just methods. The simple fact that the Bushies can't even seem to define what they're fighting against almost foredooms the "War on Terror" to defeat.
Let me help them. What they're really doing is trying to fight a war, not against a nation-state, but against a religious ideology called fundamentalist Islam, or Islamism. There's a long history of conflict between Islam and the West, with both sides having attacked each other. In recent decades, Muslims have been very much on the defensive, with generally backward economies. Muslim countries have been – almost without exception – colonized by European settlers and occupied by Western troops, and they resent it just as much as we would have if the shoe was on the other foot. The Islamists are a military/political/religious reaction to this state of affairs.
It's quite true that Islamists are threatened by, and dislike, Western culture, but that has little to do with why this has turned into a shooting war. And they're absolutely not striking out because "they hate freedom," as Bush and the neocons have – idiotically, but without challenge from Boobus Americanus – said so many times. They're striking out because of the U.S. constantly meddling in their part of the world – everything from installing and propping up the hated shah for decades, to sending Marines to Lebanon, to stationing troops in Arabia, the Prophet's homeland, to shooting down an innocent Iranian airliner, to bombing an aspirin factory in the Sudan.
They're using terror tactics against the West (mainly America) for two reasons:
1. On a fundamental level, they want the Americans to stop meddling in their affairs; and
2. On a practical level, terror provides by far the most cost-effective method of fighting the Americans, in order to make them go away and stop meddling.
Although it's possible, I suppose, for the United States, at some indeterminate cost, to extirpate the Islamists worldwide, creating a Pax Americanus for a few years, my bet is the U.S. government is in over its head and is doing no more than counterproductively sowing dragons' teeth. There are well over a billion Muslims in the world, and the vast majority of them see the "War on Terror" as a war on Islam. The situation is immensely aggravated by the U.S. government's completely one-sided support of the state of Israel.
Further, in addition to misidentifying the enemy, the Americans are using the wrong weapons to fight. High-tech weapons were in order to fight the old Soviet empire, but they're completely inappropriate for a guerrilla war, where the fighters are immersed into the population. Using high-tech weapons to fight this war is like using battleships in World War II, or cavalry in World War 1. I'm not sure there has ever been a modern war the generals didn't think they'd win by using the best weapons from the last conflict.
The most likely consequence of using these immensely expensive weapons is to accelerate the inevitable bankruptcy of the U.S. government.
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
