We ARE winning the war on terrorism!

Originally posted by undecided2
I realize many of you are doubters out there, but I honestly believe we are winning. The latest victory can be seen in the thwarted NYC tunnel bombing plot.

abcnews.go.com...

There have been several plots discovered and stopped since 9/11. I think the Bush administration deserves some credit here. I know many of you will say this is how they planned it (9/11 conspiracy, Iraq war, etc.), but there will always be those who think everything that happens is due to some shady conspiracy.

Well, the NYC tunnel bombing plot was never a serious threat to begin with. Otherwise, what's the FBI doing, using precogs to stop precrime, like in "Minority Report?" The thing is, there are always plots cooking away. And they're easy enough to stop when you need the extra publicity (like just before a big patriotic holiday). Stopping terrorist plots have become the equivalent of shutting down the brothels just before elections.

This Nation has become a land of sheep, following a paranoid leader over the cliff.

Originally posted by joshai2334
Since the Administration has nothing but contempt for international law, Geneva conventions and Constitutional law, what is apparent to me is that there is a CABAL within the State whose purpose is to take this nation DOWN.

Nothing less.

They took the USSR down; they're taking the USSA down.

Simple as that.

It's good to see that others know what is going on. It looks like a lot of diversions are taking place while terrorist cells continue to grow. The diversions are aimed at the everyday citizen. I'm sure we are winning some fronts since we do swat a few flies once in a while to keep the fear up and the money flowing into The Bug H's caughers. I believe we have more security on a single oil refinery than we have on 50,000 fans in a stadium. Don't get me wrong, protecting the petro supply is important but we know where the interest is. The word strategery comes to mind but it means differnent that war strategy. You have CABAL as you called it planning for years on several key objectives.
1) How to get rid the Tiled Mozaix of the Bush name at a hotel in downtown Baghdad.
2) Get control of a large oil supply.
3) A place to park some planes to keep control of land in that region.
Along comes the largest attack of huge perpotions, 911 and a reason to start miliary action which was needed and fully UN supported. This opened their opertunity to carry out a redicoulous mission that could have been handled by tightening the reigns cause Saddam was not going anywhere. Now our military is stuck in a situation where they don't have much to fight but are walking/riding into street warfare, IEDs, rockets and snipers. I have a lot of respect for the military, they are just being misused and being diverted from fighting the real war on terror.

Let's just call a spade, a spade.

The people who are now being prosecuted as terrorists are the political partisans that our Gubmint favored all along, in the 70s, 80s and 90s, with deals and weapons and cash.

Now an official reign of terror being run by the same covert ops going after their former friends, and in the process they are terrorizing us and the entire rest of the world.

So, now Black and covert and psych-ops as well as the Administration ARE the same LEADERS of terrorism that they say they are going after.

The absurdity of it is over the top.

Before going into the thread topic, I want to correct an earlier factual error. Dr. Strangecraft, please check out this link on the Ku Klux Klan:

The Klan's first incarnation was in 1866. Founded by veterans of the Confederate Army, its main purpose was to resist Reconstruction, and it focused as much on intimidating "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags" as on putting down the freed slaves. It quickly adopted violent methods. A rapid reaction set in, with the Klan's leadership disowning it, and Southern elites seeing the Klan as an excuse for federal troops to continue their activities in the South. The organization was in decline from 1868 to 1870, and was destroyed in the early 1870s by President Ulysses S. Grant's vigorous action under the Civil Rights Act of 1871 (also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act).

Note that the purpose of the KKK was not, as you suggested, to "promote a second secession," but rather to resist Reconstruction. Its goals were to have the occupation of the former confederacy by U.S. troops ended, to return to local political control rather than dominance by "carpetbaggers," and to resist the movement towards racial equality. The failure of the secession and the end of slavery were dead issues and the KKK did not attempt to reverse them.

Although the KKK as an organization was suppressed by the Grant administration, its goals were substantially achieved. U.S. troops ceased occupying the South in 1875, the Democratic Party returned to political dominance in the South, and the former slaves were settled into a condition more or less equivalent to serfdom. They remained non-slaves, but had not achieved genuine freedom nor social, political, or economic equality with whites.

I would also like to point out that your analysis of the Vietnamese resistance to the U.S. does not take into account the fact that, while North Vietnam certainly did possess regular military units, these units never achieved a military victory against the U.S. forces. The victory was political: the U.S. was not willing to go on paying the price to prevent the Communist victory. That victory could have been prevented indefinitely, but this would have required an unending stream of U.S. casualties until Doomsday, and the nation decided that the game wasn't worth the candle.

That essentially is the strategy of terrorism, which is a tactic used against a stronger enemy, an enemy that one cannot defeat on the battlefield. The goal is to raise the price of not meeting one's demands high enough that the enemy gives in, because it does not care about the issue as much as you do.

I will have some things to say about whether we are "winning" the war on terrorism in another post.

The problem with the "war on terror" is that it is a nebulous, ill-defined, poorly-conceived affair. The question of whether we are "winning" or not cannot be answered until we can first answer the following:

1. Who is the enemy?

2. What do we want from the enemy?

3. At what point will we be willing to make peace with the enemy?

4. With whom will we negotiate in order to end the war on favorable terms to ourselves?

We can perform this analysis with any war that really was a war in our history. For example, in the European theater of World war II, the answers would have been:

1. The enemy was Nazi Germany.

2. We wanted unconditional surrender.

3. We would be willing to make peace once the enemy surrendered unconditionally.

4. While he was alive, we would have negotiated with Adolf Hitler. Once he was dead, we negotiated with surviving government and military officials.

Or, in Vietnam:

1. The enemy was North Vietnam and the Viet Cong.

2. We wanted the enemy to accept the partition of the country and cease attempting to reunify it, especially by force.

3. We would have been willing to make peace once the Viet Cong laid down their arms and North Vietnam agreed to recognize South Vietnam.

4. We negotiated with the government of North Vietnam.

Now, in reality, we lost the Vietnam War, so let's look at it from the enemy's perspective.

1. The enemy was the United States.

2. They wanted us to pull our troops out of the country and let them settle their affairs internally.

3. They were willing to make peace with us as soon as we agreed to do this.

4. They negotiated with the U.S. government.

And of course, eventually we did agree to do this, and we've been at peace with North Vietnam ever since. That's part of what wars are about. They come to an end as soon as one party is ready to give the other what it wants, or as soon as one party is willing to settle for something the other party is willing to give it.

Can someone do a similar analysis with respect to the "war on terror"? If not, then what we have here is not a war, and we should stop calling it one, or at least recognize that we are speaking metaphorically.

While I'm on this subject, let me also correct two common misimpressions.

First: Muslim fanatics do not hate the U.S. for our "beliefs and way of life." Yes, they do see us as irreligious libertines, but they see a lot of other countries as irreligious libertines, too. Yet we, not those other countries, are their prime target. Why? Because we interfere in Muslim countries for our own profit to their loss. We support tyrants. We support Israel. We provoke wars between Muslim nations. We pay off ruling elites to sell us their country's oil to no gain of the ordinary people. These are the reasons we are hated. That we are irreligious libertines just adds insult to injury, and would not be sufficient reason by itself.

Second: What Osama bin Ladin thinks of us is irrelevant. What his followers think of us is what counts. We do not need to do what would be needed to make him like us. We need to do what is needed to make ordinary Muslims like us, or at least not hate us enough to let bin Ladin manipulate them into dying to do us harm. Luckily, that is a much easier task. I think bin Ladin's opposition is probably incurable. That of ordinary Muslims, however, is not.

The problem with the "war on terror" is that it is a nebulous, ill-defined, poorly-conceived affair.

It is based on lies and deceit about the intentions of the United States Government.

The Govt is now run by and for corporatists and fascist elements--men who care not for law or order or peace or security or trust or prospering the people of this nation.

Traitors. Everything they say is wrong. Everything they do is for their own personal and financial interest.

There are no principled operations at work, only the gutter ethics of Leo Strauss and Machiavelli.

It's got to come down, the whole reeking mess. No problem ever got solved that was buried in lies and made-up stories.

Yes, this whole situation is repulsive. And the media are complicit, right in there.