William Pfaff: A 'long war' designed to perpetuate itself

[realFedUp]

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/02/10/news/edpfaff.php

William Pfaff: A 'long war' designed to perpetuate itself
TMSI

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2006

PARIS The U.S. Defense Department and the White House have decided that the United States is now conducting "the Long War" rather than what previously was known as the War against Terror, then as the Global Struggle against Violent Extremism, and briefly - as one revealing Pentagon study described it - a war against "the Universal Adversary."

President George W. Bush said in his State of the Union address last month that the aim of his administration is to defeat radical Islam. This was a preposterous statement. Shortly afterward, radical Islam began burning embassies from Afghanistan and Indonesia to Damascus and Beirut.
The United States is not going to defeat that.

There are a great many dismaying aspects of Bush's Washington, but nothing more so than this combination of the unachievable with the hortatory in giving a name and purpose to the military campaigns that already have the U.S. Army and Marine Corps near exhaustion, and a major part of the world in turmoil.

It is customary, politically desirable and morally indispensable to say seriously what a war is about, if only so that the public will know when it is over; when the declared and undeclared measures of exception that have accompani ed it, justifying suspension of civil liberties, illegal practices and defiance of international law and convention, will be lifted; and when the killing may be expected to stop.

continued

[gristy]

1. very good

[yurbud]

5. Is that a real Cheney headline? I could see him visiting that HOSTEL in

Slovakia.

[CJCRANE]

2. The Unitary Executive vs the Universal Adversary nt

[EVDebs]

3. "Flialing In The Persian Gulf" is a more appropriate moniker

for the War For Oil, don't you think ?

[realFedUp]

4. or The Very Long Hose....nt