Our Indian Wars Are Not Over Yet": Ten Ways to Interpret the War on Terror as a Frontier Conflict

The Global War on Terror (GWOT) is, like all historical events, unique. But both its supporters and opponents compare it to past U.S. military conflicts. The Bush administration and the neocons have drawn parallels between GWOT and World War II as well as GWOT and the Cold War.

Joshua E. London, writing in the National Review, sees the War on Terror as a modern form of the struggle against the Barbary pirates. Vietnam and the Spanish-American War have been preferred analogies for other commentators.

A Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, Anne Applebaum, says that the war in Iraq might be like that in Korea, because of "the ambivalence of their conclusions." For others, the War on Terror, with its loose rhetoric, brings to mind the "war on poverty" or the "war on drugs."

I'd like to suggest another way of looking at the War on Terror: as a twenty-first century continuation of, or replication of, the American Indian wars, on a global scale.   more »

In the past week, the Bush and Clinton camps have traded nasty words and asides in a series of exchanges that had the faint echoes of their open warfare during the 1992 presidential campaign.

On the surface, the skirmishing seemed to stem from Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's assertion that Republicans are running Congress like a plantation, and that the Bush administration is one of the "worst in history."

But strategists in both parties say the hostilities were more likely the opening shots of the 2008 presidential campaign season.

Frank Luntz, a Republican consultant, said he thought national Republicans felt the need to engage Mrs. Clinton now that she faces no major challenge for her Senate seat and is free to lay the groundwork for a national candidacy.

"She is the leading candidate for 2008, and you can't give her a clear run," he said. "There is no one holding her accountable, and so the national party figured it had to."   more »

Al-Qaeda inevitably has to move beyond surprise, stealth and heavy symbolism (how can you top September 11?) So for a high-impact, multi-layered message like bin Laden's, you don't need video. You have to force people to listen to what the voice is saying. Enter bin Laden the politician.

Politically, addressing US public opinion, bin Laden clearly identifies the Bush administration - and its "war on terror", a military response to a concept - as the problem. Overwhelmed by media noise, Americans once again won't listen.

Dealing with the Muslim masses is much more complicated. They will listen - but they won't necessarily agree.

Support for al-Qaeda may consist of scattered Muslim intellectuals, clerics, Islamic bankers and a small army of young, disgruntled, desperate suicide bombers.

To succeed, al-Qaeda would have to unify poor urban youth (not only in Muslim lands but all over Western Europe), Muslim middle classes everywhere, and the Islamist intelligentsia.

Borrowing a concept from liberal democracy, al-Qaeda, to succeed, needs a broad coalition. To attract, for instance, sectors of the anti-globalization movement, it needs to be less Islamic. To conquer moderate Muslims, it needs to be less radical.   more »

The Iran warmongering that’s become so popular of late has the exact same basis. If there only was democracy in Tehran, cries the Washington Establishment, Israel could sleep better at night.

Or so they want us to believe. But anyone with the slightest knowledge of Iran’s history would know that even a democratic Tehran is not likely to befriend Israel’s policies.

President Bush declared on January 13 that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose “a grave threat to the security of the world,” and in particular, Israel.

This exact same rhetoric was invoked prior to the Iraq invasion. But it’s not the world community that really feels threatened. It’s allegedly Israel.

So a war on Iran would be a war for Israel’s security, not necessarily the United States’ -- and certainly an invasion would lead to democratization.

Never mind that Israel already harbors a nuclear arsenal and has violated Security Council resolutions.   more »

The bombed village lies in the semi-autonomous Bajur tribal region around 120 miles northwest of Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.

It is a rugged and desperately poor region, until recently a centre of opium cultivation, where local men habitually go armed and government authority is limited to main roads.

Thousands of local men marched in a series of protests yesterday, one crowd attacking the office of a US-funded aid group.

In another incident, police were forced to fire tear gas to disperse as many as 400 protesters chanting anti-American slogans and waving banners condemning the Pakistan President, General Pervez Musharraf.

Musharraf, who came to power in 1999, has maintained a difficult and domestically unpopular alliance with Washington since 2001 and has deployed unprecedented numbers of troops on bloody operations to capture senior al-Qaeda figures.

However, to the Americans' intense annoyance, he has not granted US forces in Afghanistan the right to cross the border into Pakistan, even in pursuit of militants.   more »

The argument for social control goes like this: if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear from a national data bank of identity/the terrorism act/the tapping of MPs' phones/the use of the public-order act to control protest and limit free expression/the new powers of arrest/the retention of DNA samples taken from innocent juveniles.

Over the past few months, I have listened to five people airily make this pitch. Not one of them was a complete fool; it's just that they haven't been paying attention to the Prime Minister's unflagging mission to increase the power of the state over the individual, to the shoal of anti-libertarian laws which have slipped through a mesmerised parliament.

If they have noticed anything, they tend, without much thought, to interpret it as a government doing its best to make us safer from terrorists and criminals. They conclude that if you are neither a terrorist nor a criminal, you have nothing to worry about. Wrong.

They have only to consider the 24,000 juveniles who have not been cautioned, charged or convicted with any crime, yet whose DNA has been retained by the police, to wonder if some extra-parliamentary commission should be set up to examine the state of liberty in Britain and the motives of this odious regime of sinister mediocrities.   more »

22 JANUARY

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