What's good about the "war on terrorism" (for America) is that it's a war we can't lose. Those foreign terrorists, no matter how you add them up, cannot become an existential threat to the United States. They don't have the numbers or the resources.
So why does the U.S. pursue fundamentally impotent enemies with such implacable ferocity? Especially, why does the U.S. pursue terrorists in ways that create more terrorists than we kill?
Or is that the point?
What if the Point of
the War on Terror is to Sustain the War on Terror?
Since 9/11 our government, with the consent of all too many of the governed, has taken us down the road of permanent war against an abstraction -- terrorism -- rooted in a racist premise, that the terrorists are mostly Arabs or Muslims or some sort of poor, brown people.
They envy us our freedoms, as some like to say, with apparently unintended irony, since the course of permanent war abroad has been accompanied by a permanent state of security at home that looks more and more like the latest incarnation of a police state.
That enlarged authoritarian presence in our lives likely contributes to concern about the constitution and the rule of law -- even when those concerned ignore the rule of lawlessness in places like Yemen. Taking this situation as a whole, the constitution looks more and more like collateral damage.
On its face, American anti-terrorism terrorism is insanely stupid in its ineffectual circularity. Or is it fiendishly clever, however planned or unplanned, in its seemingly infinite self-perpetuation?
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