How Do We Know If We're Winning?

There was a poll taken by Gallup a few weeks ago asking the question, "Do you think we are winning the War On Terrorism?". I don't remember the results of the poll mainly because I thought it was a stupid question to ask. When you think about it, you can't really even have a war on terrorism, because as one really smart US Army general, William Odom, told C-SPAN viewers: "Terrorism is not an enemy. It cannot be defeated. It's a tactic. It's about as sensible to say we declare war on night attacks and expect we're going to win that war. " None the less, we are smack in the middle of a very costly and bloody battle against an enemy that does not exist. How can we possibly know if we are winning?

Maybe we can make an attempt to keep score. Okay terrorists got New York and DC, and we got Afghanistan and Iraq. But then the terrorists got Bali, Turkey, Madrid, and now London? Is the score now 6-2 in favor of the bad guys? I'm afraid to think about what we will have to do to even the score. We certainly can't afford to open another front in this war against an invisible enemy, where will we find the money and the soldiers to fight it? What we should have done was declare war on Al Qaida, since they were the tangible enemy, and we could have won easily with good police work, and international cooperation. Now, with our military bogged down in the mess in Iraq, if there were an immediate need to defend our cities, many of our National Guard forces are living in the Green Zone, where they do us no good. Our military fights an insurgency in Iraq, while Al Qaida roams the world deciding where and when to pick their battles.

The war in Iraq has nothing to do with our enemy, it is a waste of precious young lives and vital resources.

Now that we know that we are not any safer, where do we go from here? There have been many arrests in the US by the Justice Department on charges of terrorism, but only 39 convictions. This number does not include any of the prisoners held Guantanamo Bay. We have detained many prisoners who remain in a sort of legal limbo, they are not prisoners of war, they are not soldiers. We keep them either because they have valuable intelligence that we need, or because they are a threat to our security. If there is intelligence that can still be obtained from these prisoners, I think we could have gotten it already. And even though our military claims that they are well treated, we will not allow even the Red Cross to confirm that we are treating them in a humane manner. Does that suggest to the world that we have something to hide? And although we imprison these non-prisoners on an island where no rule of law can disturb the process with inconvenient hints of legality and justice, we still know that our safety is a fragile thing.

It is unfortunate, that any doubt that is voiced about the wisdom of our battle is shouted down with scorn, and the doubters are labeled as traitors or sissies, or even, God forbid, liberals. Yet still the fact remains that we are not any safer, we are not winning, and our enemy remains an abstract shadow that we can't even see or hope to defeat.

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