Who's Winning This War?

I actually suspect that the organizer of the underwear bomb plot knew that the explosive would not work, and never intended for it to. Same with the shoe bomber. If these things had gone off and brought the planes down, we would never have known precisely what happened, and we would not be taking our shoes off and searching people’s underwear at airports today. Those plot originators have less interest in blowing up an airplane than they do in making us spend $2.4 billion on X-ray machines.

I think those guys are sitting in nice homes in the Middle East laughing their asses off at us. I think they are happy as hell that we think we are “thwarting their plans,” when all the time we are doing exactly what they want us to do. We are wasting our money on frantic over-reactions to plots that did not work.

I had already started writing this when I read an op-ed column by Roger Cohen in The New York Times this morning, and he summed up his thoughts thusly,

I don’t doubt the patriotism of the Americans involved in keeping the country safe, nor do I discount the threat, but I am sure of this: The unfettered growth of the Department of Homeland Security and the T.S.A. represent a greater long-term threat to the prosperity, character and wellbeing of the United States than a few madmen in the valleys of Waziristan or the voids of Yemen.

America is a nation of openness, boldness and risk-taking. Close this nation, cow it, constrict it and you unravel its magic.

I could not agree more. There is no need to defeat our military when you can change who we are.

Osama bin Laden makes no secret of his purpose; he wrote openly that
his purpose for attacking the U.S.S. Cole was to invoke an invasion of Afghanistan so that he could bleed us as he had bled the Soviets. Clinton was not that stupid, but guess who was. We have not been hit since 9/11 and the reason may very well be that it is because there is no need to; he accomplished his goal and is bleeding us both at home and abroad.

As of today we have been bleeding in Afghanistan for precisely as long as the Soviets did, and tomorrow will make our folly greater than theirs.