The Day We Lost The War (In Case You Missed It)

By BlackJack

First let me clarify what I mean by 'war'. I'm referring to the so-called 'War On Terror'. War was never officially declared in Iraq and although there is a 'War on Drugs', as far as I can tell, that's not going so well either.

The War On Terror is already lost and it happened some time ago. It happened long before we invaded Iraq, before all the deaths and atrocities that go along with any war. It happened on October 24th, 2001 when, in a rush to 'do something' about terror the 107th Congress of the United States voted HR 3162 into law - the so-called Patriot Act.

To understand how and why we lost the war almost before it got started we have to understand what terrorism is. Websters defines terrorism as 'The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.'

We often wonder why people resort to terrorism as a tool. This leads me to question the desired outcome of terrorism. I've often heard conservative loudmouths screaming 'they hate us for our freedoms'. If that's true why did we so readily give them up in the Patriot Act? Wasn't that a declaration of surrender? Al Qaeda won when they scared us so badly we signed a whole bill into law taking away our own rights.

As we often do in America we found a way to solve a problem by ignoring it and creating new ones. Instead of finding ways to improve relations in the Middle East we declared war on them. It's like a turkey thermometer - instead of turning down the heat on the oven, when it gets too warm we just pull out the thermometer.