I propose all who find this idea valuable take this draft resolution to their organizations for review, amendment, and hopefully, eventual passage. I then recommend individuals and their organizations send their resolutions to their Congressmen and the President. We need to help Americans find the courage to face some awful truths.
(Please read the excerpts from the books in the footnotes. You will conclude the Bush Administration's failure at Tora Bora was intentional.)
The Resolution - The "war on terror is a lie.
WHEREAS: Injustice in American foreign policy is a primary cause of the terror against us. We will not end terror without justice and a return to American ideals. (1)
WHEREAS: Terror must be fought with law enforcement. It is not primarily a military problem (2). A million men-at-arms are required to fight conventional wars and insurgencies as in Afghanistan and Iraq. The FBI, CIA, other intelligence services, and the military's Special Forces are required to fight terror. The deployment of hundreds of thousands of our troops indicates we are fighting for some purpose other than stopping terror.
We cannot now bring many Guantanamo detainees to trial because we did not build the legal cases necessary to prosecute them.
WHEREAS: Torture was used to build the lie. It is unreliable, counter-productive, and not a means to the truth. Torture was used to get Guantanamo detainees to confess and implicate others whether or not they and those they implicated were guilty. Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi's torture in Egypt produced the lie that Saddam Hussein trained al Qaeda in biological and chemical weapons (3). This lie stopped his torture and helped rationalize the Iraq war.
WHEREAS: The Bush administration refused to fight and win the war on terror. They allowed al-Qaeda and bin Laden to escape Afghanistan in December 2001 and subsequently refused to take the actions necessary to capture or destroy them. The Administration, after being clearly briefed that "the back door was open, refused to send 1,200 marines to Tora Bora (4), refused to authorize 800 Rangers or alternately mines to block the passes at Tora Bora, and then fired the CIA station chief in the middle of the operation. (5,6) If al-Qaeda and bin Laden had been captured or destroyed in December 2001, the war on terror would have come to a premature end, leaving no quasi-rationalization for perpetual war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and less quasi-rationalization for a possible future attack on Iran.
THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED: We condemn the "war on terror as a lie. It was used as cover for other purposes in a gross contravention of American ideals. America is existentially threatened by our domestic enemies not by foreign terrorists.
Additional background and sources:
(1) Author's notes: Stopping Terror with Justice
The "Big Truth is that the war on terror is a lie; we are fighting for other purposes in a gross contravention of American ideals. Justice in American foreign policy would eliminate 90% of the terror against us. The Muslim world dislikes America for many substantive reasons, including the following:
Our aid to Egypt's Mubarak and petrodollars to the Arab monarchies enable them to oppress their people.
We have done grave harm to the people and state of Iran, while they have done little harm to us. We overthrew the popular prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddeq, in 1953 and replaced him with the Shah who with his Savak secret police oppressed his people for a generation. We supported Iraq, the clear aggressor, in the 1980s Iran/Iraq war, and 400,000 Iranians died. In 1979, Iran took Americans hostage. One of their primary demands was that we not interfere in their internal affairs. Their actions were not unreasonable given our actions in 1953, and all hostages came home.
We supported an arms embargo of Bosnia that left Serbs well armed and Muslims less able to defend themselves against genocide, systematic rape, and ethnic cleansing. In addition, we allowed Karadzic and Mladic, the President and General of the Bosnian Serb Republic, to live in NATO controlled areas with impunity for years even though they were two of the most egregious, genocidal terrorists on the planet.
We have helped pay for Israel's aggression in the Occupied Territories for a generation. The settlement of nearly 500,000 Israelis east of the green line is aggression and/or conquest. These terms apply.
We committed unprovoked aggression against Iraq, and John Hopkins University Reports estimate hundreds of thousand of Iraqis have died.
Actions such as these have combined to create the hatred against us. But, we can eliminate this hatred and its resultant terror with justice. Where America has been in error, we must recognize those errors and make amends. We don't need to spend the additional hundreds of billions we have been spending since 9/11 on defense, security, and intelligence. We don't need to be occupiers and torturers. We don't need an empire to be secure " quite the opposite. We're creating more terrorists than we are eliminating. We don't need to give up our privacy and our freedom. We don't need a strong defense more than we need to be strong in the defense of truth and justice.
(2) Rand Study " "How Terrorist Groups End http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG741-1/
The (Study's) authors conclude that policing and intelligence, rather than military force, should form the backbone of U.S. efforts against al Qa'ida. And U.S. policymakers should end the use of the phrase "war on terrorism since there is no battlefield solution to defeating al Qa'ida.
Resolution author's notes - The destruction of al Qaeda camps and sanctuaries in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other countries has and will require military action. For example, the battle of Tora Bora was a military operation against up to 1,000 primarily al-Qaeda fighters including terrorists and insurgents.
Al-Qaeda is both a terrorist and an insurgent organization. Terrorism by itself cannot be an existential threat to a government. Terrorism supporting an insurgency can be such a threat. The (al-Qaeda) training camps, though they turned out a few thousand terrorists, they turned out a hundred thousand or more insurgents. The graduates, in turn, trained tens of thousands more insurgents after returning home. (Imperial Hubris by Michael Scheuer, Potomac Books - Paperback edition p. 222)
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