How are we doing on the " war on terror"?

The 7th anniversary of 9/11 is right around the corner. Nobody can contest that the tragedy was the defining moment of the Bush administration, it was at the very core of most decisions made from the wars in Afghanistan & Iraq to the Patriot Act and the massive spying on American people.

One would argue that it made the Bush administration into a horse with blinders, narrowly focused on only one goal: Make sure an event like 9/11 would never happened again.


The fact that we did not have a terrorist attack will become the key argument for McCain in November. You can count on his campaign, the GOP, FOX news and all the usual suspects in the art of spinning fiction into reality to make it the corner stone of his presidential bid. They will build up on fear and paranoia to convince American people that only " McCain can keep America safe".


However, what Americans should keep in mind, before they cast their ballots in November, is the dramatic increase of terrorism world wide. Today a bomb exploded in Istanbul, yesterday it was a few in India.....people barely pay attention to it unless it is very deadly or completely original in its technical execution. It has sadly become a way of life in most countries on the planet. Some governments in Europe are considering terrorism more a policing issue as opposed to a problem that can be handled by military force alone.

It is also very hard to fight a " war " against an enemy that is not clearly identified. In our case of the so called " war on terror ", we are dealing with threats that are polymorphic and shift constantly from one part of the globe to another. The Bush administration has being claiming for years that " Iraq is the center of the war on terror"; of course it wasn't the case before the US invasion but did become one for a while. It appears that, right now, the real " hot spot " is again Afghanistan and could become sooner than later Pakistan.

The critical question here is this: Assuming that the " war on terror" can have an end-game , are we winning it? The goal of the attack of 9/11 by Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organization was to set up the 1st phase in an elaborate psychological warfare. It seems likely that Bin Laden knew a swift retaliation would come from the US and NATO in the form of an invasion of Afghanistan. Bin Laden couldn't predict the invasion of Iraq, but it became quickly an opportunity for him to get America trapped in a very costly quagmire.

The real objective of Bin Laden and his associates was an attack on America' s economy....this is probably why he picked the World Trade Center towers to be the first targets, for the symbolic aspect of it. The current crisis of the US and Europe's economy can be linked to two wars with a price tag of 1 trillion. We have our " war on terror ", the global terror originated by Al Qaeda is a war on the world's economy and prosperity. At this juncture, it is hard to tell who is winning.