Six Wasted Years of War on Terror

Sometimes it's helpful to go back and recall what it's all about. Okay, it's 11 September, 2001. Four teams of al-Qaeda terrorists, mainly Saudis, all in the US legally and trained at US flight schools, hijack four airliners. Two bring down the World Trade Centre towers, one flies into the Pentagon. The fourth crashes into a field.

There it is - al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden even came right out and took responsibility for the attacks. He brazenly attacked the world's most powerful nation, the planet's sole superpower. Obviously he was going to pay, or was he?

At first it was likely that al-Qaeda would be crushed. The US jumped into Afghanistan's exhausted civil war, boosted the Northern Alliance, and rolled up the Taliban government sending the Talibs and al-Qaeda fleeing into the mountains.

The US sent powerful teams of special forces to hunt down al-Qaeda, particularly bin Laden and his top aides. They even had them cornered in Tora Bora but then paid locals to finish them off and somehow they slipped away. Then Bush, in a fit of War on Terror A.D.D., forgot about Afghanistan and chose to attack Iraq instead. The special forces tracking down bin Laden were pulled out to prepare for Iraq.

The rest is history, just not good history. The fight against al-Qaeda has now turned global ranging from Indonesia to South Asia to the Middle East to West Africa to Europe, even North America. The evil has metastasized. The infidels in Afghanistan and Iraq have drawn hordes of recruits to the ranks of al-Qaeda and similar groups. All the while Bush's army is tied down in Iraq and deployed to the point of exhaustion.

NATO has become drawn into the whirlpool of Bush/Cheney megalomania. We're now stuck in Afghanistan almost as securely as the Americans in Iraq. Despite the assurances of our military genius, Rick Hillier, we can't maintain another operation elsewhere should the need arise (and it has, again and again).

Now the latest US intelligence assessment is that al-Qaeda has used the respite and all Washington's considerable help to recover to pre-9/11 levels. They've restored their organization, its leadership, numbers and communications and once again they're flush with cash. al-Qaeda is ready to rock'n roll.

Just what have we accomplished over the past six years? Not very much. The guy driving this bus, George w. hisself, keeps running us into a ditch and we keep getting back on that bus each time he does it. Are we so afraid of this guy that we can't tell him, as far as we're concerned, he's fired?

It's time to get off the bus because the only place it's going is straight into the nearest ditch. If this joker wants to keep spinning his wheels in Iraq that should be his business, not ours.