this is an opinion piece:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,212081,00.html

Fighting Terror Five Years Later
By Radley Balko

The fatal flaw in the "war on terror" has always been its open-endedness. The president of the United States is never going to sit down on a battleship to sign a peace treaty with terrorism. So when we give the government special, allegedly temporary powers to fight terrorism, we're essentially handing over that power permanently.

And of course, it's likely that even if we were to defeat Al Qaeda for good, there will be more terrorists attacks, be it from other Islamic fundamentalist groups or from homegrown terrorists like Timothy McVeigh.

But as we approach the five-year anniversary of Sept. 11, it's worth noting that we haven't see another attack of anywhere near he same scope and magnitude of that awful day. Even the bombings in London, Madrid, and Bali, while certainly horrifying and tragic, caused nowhere near the panic, devastation, and sense of doom that gripped the world five years ago.

An emerging group of thinkers, scholars, and security experts have begun to take the provocative position that it's time for America to declare victory over terrorism. I think they make a convincing case.

James Fallows begins in the cover story of this month's Atlantic Monthly, with what I think is the single most important article written since Sept. 11. Fallows spoke with 60 experts in foreign policy, security, national defense, and terrorism, from all political ideologies.

We should take heart in what he found: Al Qaeda is a shadow of what it once was. The group's central organization has been dismantled. Its main sources of funding have been castrated. Its leaders are on the run, and their ability to organize and communicate severely disrupted. Yes, the loose-knit groups of cells that remain can still pull off attacks, and can still kill significant numbers of people. But so can just about any nut in America with a cause and some determination.

The only real threat Al Qaeda still poses, Fallows concludes, is how it can provoke us. "[Al Qaeda's] hopes for fundamentally harming the United States now rest less on what it can do itself than on what it can trick, tempt, or goad us into doing," Fallows writes. "Its destiny is no longer in its own hands."

This is the one thing — the most important thing — our elected leaders and public officials need to learn. Because it's the only cache the terrorists still have. Americans need to realize that we, Americans, determine the success of failure of future terrorists attacks and attempted attacks. If the goal of terrorists, by definition, is to induce panic, fear, and to disrupt our way of life, the best way to defuse them is to refuse to panic, to resist irrational fears, and to retain the open society and civil liberties that make us who we are.

Unfortunately, we aren't doing that. Take airport security. The security experts Fallows spoke with agree that the rigmarole we go through at the airport before boarding a flight is mostly theater. It does little to actually make us safer. It only makes some of us feel safer. Though I'm not even sure it does that. After all, we're reminded of the possibility of terrorism each time we're asked to take off our shoes in a security line.

When a sociopath with Islamic fundamentalist sympathies recently opened fire at a Jewish center in Seattle, the first reaction among many opinion leaders was to maximize fear and paranoia by attempting to tie the gunman to global jihad. A more appropriate response would have been to give due deference and reverence to the loss of life and the horror of the incident, but to pay no more attention to the gunman's schizophrenic philosophy than we might have if he'd been a white supremacist or environmentalist militant. His motivation only matters when we make it matter.

We saw the same thing with the recently foiled plot to blow up planes bound to the U.S. from Britain. One Scotland Yard official panicked, "We cannot stress too highly the severity that this plot represented. Put simply, this was intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale."

Britain responded by banning carry-on bags. America banned bottled water and hairspray. Since then, diverted flights and security incidents on airlines has become a daily occurrence. Never mind that the accused terrorists had yet to buy plane tickets, that many had yet to get passports, and that chemists say it would be extremely difficult to bring down a plane with liquid explosives, as the plotters imagined.

Writing for Wired magazine, security expert Bruce Schneier cautions, "Regardless of the threat, from the would-be bombers' perspective, the explosives and planes were merely tactics. Their goal was to cause terror, and in that they've succeeded."

He continues, "Our politicians help the terrorists every time they use fear as a campaign tactic. The press helps every time it writes scare stories about the plot and the threat. And if we're terrified, and we share that fear, we help. All of these actions intensify and repeat the terrorists' actions, and increase the effects of their terror."

It's likely that we'll respond to future plots the same way. It wouldn't be difficult to imagine Homeland Security officials responding to a foiled plot using explosives implanted in electronic devices, for example, by then banning cell phones and iPods on planes. It's a reaction that effectively allows the terrorists to dictate our security policy.

Ohio State University's John Mueller has been arguing for some time that the terrorist threat is wildly exaggerated. Sept. 11 was a horrible anomaly, he argues, but the government perpetuates the damage done that day by constructing phantom demons for the public to fear.

In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, Mueller writes, "Although it remains heretical to say so, the evidence so far suggests that fears of the omnipotent terrorist . . . may have been overblown, the threat presented within the United States by Al Qaeda greatly exaggerated. The massive and expensive homeland security apparatus erected since 9/11 may be persecuting some, spying on many, inconveniencing most, and taxing all to defend the United States against an enemy that scarcely exists."

Mueller goes farther than I would, but his point general point makes sense. Certainly, our government should continue to seek out and thwart those who would do us harm. But short of a stray nuclear weapon — a real but unlikely threat, and a threat the objectionable parts of the government's war on terror do nothing to diminish — there's little Al Qaeda or other Islamic fundamentalist groups can do to us that any other individual or group with violent ambitions could. Making them anything larger than that is exactly what they want.

As the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11 approaches, Schneier offers sound advice as to where we should go from here. He writes, "It's time we calm down and fight terror with antiterror . . . The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that."

Radley Balko is a policy analyst for the Cato Institute specializing in "nanny state" and consumer choice issues, including alcohol and tobacco control, drug prohibition, obesity and civil liberties. Separately, he maintains the The Agitator weblog. The opinions expressed in his column for FOXNews.com are his own and are not to be associated with Cato unless otherwise indicated.

i could have really bolded it all, it's a good read. balko is one of my favorite opinion writers.

That's excellent, in my opinion. I think I agree with every bolded point.

Does that sum up the point of the article well?

Good read, c_b.

Took him five years to figure that out, eh? Genius.

Each of these below were printed in the first year following Sept. 11, that first one a WEEK after Sept. 11.

i suppose the large question here is this:

if the war on terror is never going to end...are we handling it the correct way?

Wow, that first one is probably in the top five political cartoons I have ever seen.

LOST LOVE
Issue of 2006-09-11
Posted 2006-09-04

After the calamity that glided down upon us out of a clear blue sky on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001—five short years ago, five long years ago—a single source of solace emerged amid the dread and grief: a great upwelling of simple solidarity. Here in New York, and in similarly bereaved Washington, that solidarity took homely forms. Strangers connected as friends; volunteers appeared from everywhere; political and civic leaders of all parties and persuasions stood together, united in sorrow and defiance. In certain regions of the country, New York had been regarded (and resented) as somehow not quite part of America; that conceit, not shared by the terrorists, vanished in the fire and dust of the Twin Towers. The reconciliation was mutual. In SoHo and the Upper West Side, in the Village and the Bronx, sidewalk crowds cheered every flag-bedecked fire engine, and the Stars and Stripes sprouted from apartment windows all over town. New York, always suspect as the nation’s polyglot-plutocratic portal, was now its battered, bloody shield.

The wider counterpart to our traumatized togetherness at home was an astonishing burst abroad of what can only be called pro-Americanism. Messages of solidarity and indignation came from Libya and Syria as well as from Germany and Israel; flowers and funeral wreaths piled up in front of American Embassies from London to Beijing; flags flew at half-staff across Europe; in Iran, a candlelight vigil expressed sympathy. “Any remnants of neutrality thinking, of our traditional balancing act, have gone out of the window now,” a Swedish political scientist told Reuters. “There has not been the faintest shadow of doubt, not a trace of hesitation of where we stand, nowhere in Sweden.” Le Monde’s front-page editorial was headlined NOUS SOMMES TOUS AMÉRICAINS, and Italy’s Corriere della Sera echoed, “We are all Americans. The distance from the United States no longer exists because we, our values, are also in the crosshairs of evil minds.” In Brussels, the ambassadors of the nineteen members of NATO invoked, for the first time in the alliance’s fifty-two-year history, Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, affirming that “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all” and pledging action, “including the use of armed force.”

No one realistically expected that the mood of fellow-feeling and coöperation would long persist in the extraordinarily powerful form it took in the immediate wake of September 11th. The normal divisions of American politics and society were bound to make themselves felt again, and whatever the United States did in response to the attacks would provoke the tensions and misunderstandings that inevitably accompany the actions of a superpower in distress, no matter how deft its diplomacy or thorough its consultations. But it was natural to hope that domestic divisions would prove less rancorous in the face of the common danger, and that international frictions could be minimized in a struggle against what almost every responsible leader in the world recognized, or claimed to recognize, as an assault on civilization itself.

What few expected was how comprehensively that initial spirit would be ruined by the policies and the behavior of our government, culminating in, though hardly limited to, the disastrous occupation of Iraq. This shouldn’t have been so surprising. George W. Bush campaigned in 2000 as a “compassionate conservative,” one who recognized that government was not the enemy, praised bipartisanship, proclaimed his intention to “change the tone in Washington,” and advocated a foreign policy of humility and respect. None of that happened. Nine months into his Presidency, an economic policy of transferring the budget surplus to the wealthy, a social policy hewing to the demands of the Christianist far right, and a foreign policy marked by contempt for international instruments (the Kyoto protocol, the anti-ballistic-missile treaty) and the abandonment of diplomatic responsibilities (the negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear activities, the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate) had pushed Bush’s job ratings lower than those of any of his predecessors at a like point in their tenures. September 11th offered him a chance for a new beginning, and at first he seemed willing to seize it. Although the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan was not as widely backed at first as is often assumed (particularly among many on the European left and some on the American), it is now almost universally supported in the Western world, with some forty countries involved and NATO troops carrying an increasing share of the military burden. But then came a reversion to form, and Iraq.

In “America Against the World: How We Are Different and Why We Are Disliked,” based on ninety-one thousand interviews conducted in fifty nations from 2002 to 2005 by the Pew Research Center, Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes write that while “the first hints that the world was becoming troubled by America came soon after the election of George W. Bush,” and that “whatever global goodwill the United States had in the wake of the September 11 attacks appears to have quickly dissipated,” after the Iraq invasion “favorable opinions had more than slipped. They had plummeted.” It’s grown worse since May, when the book was published. The most recent Pew findings show that “favorable opinions of the U.S.” have gone from eighty-three per cent in 2000 to fifty-six per cent in 2006 in Britain, seventy-eight to thirty-seven in Germany, and sixty-two to thirty-nine in France. The majorities saying that the Iraq war has made the world more dangerous are equally impressive: sixty per cent in Britain, sixty-six in Germany, and seventy-six in France. On this point, the United States is catching up. The most recent CNN poll, taken in late August, found fifty-five per cent of Americans saying that the Iraq war has made them less safe from terrorism.

Last week, the Administration launched a new public-relations campaign aimed at marketing the war in Iraq as the indispensable key to the struggle against terrorism. The Vice-President and the Secretary of Defense gave speeches attacking the war’s opponents (a category that includes, if that same CNN poll is to be believed, sixty-one per cent of the American public) as the contemporary counterparts of the appeasers of Nazism. President Bush, as one of his contributions to the P.R. campaign, granted an interview to Brian Williams, of NBC. As the two men, shirtsleeved in the sun, strolled together down a bleak New Orleans street, Williams wondered if the President shouldn’t “have asked for some sort of sacrifice after 9/11.” Bush’s reply:

Americans are sacrificing. I mean, we are. You know, we pay a lot of taxes. America sacrificed when they, you know, when the economy went into the tank. Americans sacrificed when, you know, air travel was disrupted. American taxpayers have paid a lot to help this nation recover. I think Americans have sacrificed.

And so we have. Not by paying “a lot of taxes,” of course; we pay less of those than we did before, and the very, very richest among us pay much, much less. But we have sacrificed, God knows. “The military occupation in Iraq is consuming practically the entire defense budget and stretching the Army to its operational limits,” John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan Administration and a member of the 9/11 Commission, wrote in the Washington Post a couple of days after Bush’s interview. “This is understood quite clearly by both our friends and our enemies, and as a result, our ability to deter enemies around the world is disintegrating.” That’s a sacrifice. And here’s another: our country’s reputation.

— Hendrik Hertzberg

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/a ... _hertzberg

How do you handle a war that doesnt end?

Not just terror , but WAR has never ended since it started , ever.

I think there are enough questions asked..lets see who answers them.

Maybe a question should be ,what can we do to survive ?

This is NOT a war....it IS a way of life.

Those opposed to us do not believe we are living the correct way.....

We MUST tell them to FUCK OFF!

I know that diplomacy is not that easy....but they ARE NOT right....WE ARE!