Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

COLUMN: Politics plague war on terror
By Patrick Callahan
The Breeze (James Madison U.)
01/10/2007

(U-WIRE) HARRISONBURG, Va. — Top Pentagon brass and some of the best American generals on the ground in the Gulf region have called for changes in our tactics — but have vehemently resisted a mere surge in troop numbers with no demonstrable successes arising from such action in the foreseeable future.

Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki has urged U.S. leaders to allow Iraqis to take the lead in quelling violent insurrections while ceasing to give insurgent leaders the advantage of raising recruits behind images of the "U.S. occupiers" whose presence is felt on their streets and in their cities. The American people, for the first time in more a decade, handed over complete control of Congress to a different party largely because of its conduction of our current war in Iraq which has brought with it no decisive victories — only revamped political rhetoric and more fallen patriots. Yet last night President Bush — putting his and his allies' political interests above the interests of Americans — called for yet another surge of 20,000 U.S. troops to be put on the streets of Baghdad.

In one of many fruitless attempts to sell back books for anything more than chump change at our beloved institution last month, I noticed a book on the shelves that I'd been working my way through whenever time or my curriculum permitted. I don't remember the class to which the book was assigned, but its mere presence in our bookstore raised my spirits. The book, "Imperial Hubris," is written by a senior U.S. intelligence official in the CIA who writes anonymously for obvious reasons. The author provides many crucial insights on our current conflict that have all too often failed to reach the public. His most profound contention is that the war is being handcuffed by politics and career-motivated interests of our highest military and elected officials.

Politics and the desire to move up the ladder, he says, have caused countless intelligence officials to cover up mistakes within their own agencies while censoring what they report to higher-ups. An example of this lies in framing the war in terms of single acts of terror rather than broad revolutionary wars of insurgency. This sort of depiction leads to an emphasis on judicial procedure in "bringing our enemies to justice." The author believes this has severely handicapped the CIA by forcing it to work closely with the Department of Justice and the FBI — something it has traditionally refrained from. Furthermore, he says that our leaders' insistence on bringing democracy to a people whose entire view of society is connected to religion is a serious misconception. Upper-level intelligence officials recognized the futility of this and many other "checkable" factors, but they gave political leaders their encouragement because they sought their own advancement.

President Bush has said our goal in this war is "to defend freedom and all that is good and just in the world." Simple intelligence analysis proves that this is just plain wrong. Those in the Middle East who dislike us for who we are and what we represent do not dislike us enough to take up jihad. The people we fight continue to do so because of our policies in that region. We have occupied holy Muslim sites within and around Iraq — an action any Muslim sees as unjust intrusion — and we have supported ruthlessly oppressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia because of our ties to their oil resources. Most irrationally, we have supported anti-Muslim movements across the world in places like China, India, and Russia-nations who have given nothing but empty promises to help the United States in its particular conflict.

We must either change these policies or support them and prepare the American public for the brutal reality of unbridled war. War and the consistent moral and humane treatment of enemies on the battlefield cannot co-exist (though off the battlefield, treatment is a different story). It is this very avoidance of risks — both political and military — that caused the United States to wait so long in its invasion of Afghanistan. Our leaders were too busy building needless alliances in order to shore up political support and wasted crucial time in which we could have utilized our superior military capabilities.

We must come together as a nation to discuss the true realities of this conflict instead of allowing the elites within our elected branches to set the tone of debate and frame the dialogue of our involvement. The greatest threat to our nation in the coming century lies in the spread of anti-American sentiments by organizations such as al-Qaeda. This is unlike any war we have ever fought — but it is still a war. Americans have proven in the past our ability to destroy those who rise against us and we must do that once again, but doing so requires reliance on our own clandestine warriors and our superior military forces. These selfless patriots are the backbone of our defense networks, and their sacrifice must be applauded while the self interests of our top leaders have never been in more need of abhorrence.

[ Back to Student Voices ]