Winning the Un-War: A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism (review)

The radical Islamic strike against the United States on 11 September 2001 was an affront that demanded an appropriate response. Destroying the Taliban regime of Afghanistan that harbored the Muslim fanatics was part of that response. But George W. Bush did not stop there. He and Vice-President Dick Cheney, doing the bidding of the oil industry, took advantage of the 9/11 attack and launched America into the heart of the Middle East, invading and conquering Mesopotamia. They said to Americans that Iraq had to be punished because, under the tyrant Saddam Hussein, Iraq, like Afghanistan, had become a base for al Qaeda, a conspiratorial organization of Muslim fanatics dedicated to the killing of Americans. Besides, they argued, Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

None of the war claims of Bush were true. However, the American elite is so cowed by Bush's "war on terror," a deceptive term covering up America's global aggression, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq, that it has tried to use fig leaves for hiding the country's slide into a tyrannylike state. When Congress was under Republican hands, Bush was like a king. He violated the Constitution, spying on Americans and ignoring the law. American troops and the "intelligence" services defied international law by torturing prisoners, kidnapping "enemy combatants," and outsourcing degradation and torture. And in addition to some 150,000 "volunteer" troops, the Bush administration hired 180,000 mercenaries to be its Praetorian Guard in Iraq.

When the Democrats became a majority in Congress in 2006, they raised their voices against Bush and the Iraq War but failed to impeach him or in any way demote him from acting tyrant to president. In fact, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi took the impeachment of Bush off the table.

A precarious situation becomes palpable whenever congressmen and senators hold hearings, desperately trying to restore their "oversight" over what is a very sophisticated national security state funded largely by secret budgets, having the trappings of democracy but no accountability, least of all to Congress. The discussion in these hearings sheds light on nothing that matters—the lawlessness of the Bush administration at home and abroad and the chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan, the vast spending for a private petroleum war, and the decline of well-being and civility at home, including doing nothing about global warming, a calamity threatening life on earth.

Even C-SPAN, by far the best television network in the United States, is now flooded by meaningless discourse on Iraq, broadcasting meetings of experts funded mostly by the Pentagon and speaking out of Washington's think tanks, nearly all parroting the patriotic rhetoric of the White House. What is also outrageous is the near universal assumption that American troops in Iraq are on a noble mission, bringing democracy to the Middle East.

Meanwhile, the Republicans in Congress keep insisting on victory against the "terrorists," and the Democrats keep decrying being in the midst of a civil war. Yet they leave unsaid that America is the cause of that civil war.

These political issues find little if any place in the Winning of the Un-War: A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism by Charles Pena, an expert on "national security problems." Pena, like Bush, asserts that al Qaeda deserves the ranking of a real national enemy of the United States, equating al Qaeda to Bush's "war on terror." He disagrees with Bush "lumping all terrorist groups" together. He would rather have Bush's "war on terror," which he describes as the "un-war," zero in on al Qaeda. He also questions fighting a war on terrorism when terrorism is millennia old and, at best, a nebulous enemy. Yet despite his skepticism, Pena offers more of the same, becoming obsessed by al Qaeda, which he would like to see "painstakingly dismantled piece by piece." His "strategy for the war on...