I know many of you check Juan Cole's Site -- Informed Comment daily, but I think his superb, lucid response to Bush's State of the Union Address deserves some extra attention. I, like most of you, have read countless responses to the SOTU within the last day or so. I have to put Professor Cole's right up there with Senator Webb's.
I'll give a couple of quotes, but you're better off just reading the whole thing -- here
Yet one question has surely been settled - that to win the war on terror we must take the fight to the enemy.
Actually, it is unclear what "taking the fight to the enemy" means in Bush's ill-conceived "war on terror." He is probably still trying to sneak Iraq into the struggle against al-Qaeda through the back door. If so, that dog won't hunt. By launching an unprovoked and illegal war of aggression on a major Arab Muslim country, Bush hasn't "carried the fight to the enemy" but has rather dishonored the 9/11 dead by using their killings as a pretext to carry out his own preconceived and Ahab-like plans to "take out" Saddam Hussein. Nothing could be better calculated to increase the threat of terrorism against the United States than an attempt militarily to occupy Iraq, with all the repression and torture it has entailed. And, if Bush was so good at taking the fight to the enemy, why is Ayman al-Zawahiri still free to taunt him by videotape. Al-Zawahiri was a major force behind the September 11 attacks. Why is he at large?
Cole takes several of Bush's statements regarding teh terrorsts and not only deconstructs them, he demolishes them, step by step, as only someone with his knowledge of the Middle East can.
Every success against the terrorists is a reminder of the shoreless ambitions of this enemy. The evil that inspired and rejoiced in Nine-Eleven is still at work in the world. And so long as that is the case, America is still a Nation at war.
Do we have to be at war? Couldn't we just be vigilant and do good counter-terrorism. Isn't "war" a distraction from the latter?
Out of the box thinking that makes you wish our Congress could climb out of that War On Terror box too.