There's just something about this country and wars--wars on ideas. We've had the war on poverty, the war on drugs, and the war on terror.
The funny thing about these wars is, we never seem to win them. Granted, some progress has been made in the war on poverty, but we still have millions of Americans living in poverty. This administration has made sure that we still have plenty of targets for this war. Their refusal to raise the minimum wage to a decent level, their failure to pass a universal health plan, the absurd Medicare drug plan, their cuts in aid to college students, all these pretty much guarantee that we'll be fighting this one for a long time.
The war on drugs will also be with us for some time. For every drug bust that takes pushers off the street it seems four more pushers take their places. If we spent as much on drug rehab and re-education as we do on incarceration, we might see some progress on this one.
Now the war on terror! If we had kept this a war on terrorists, as it was in Afghanistan, then we might have a chance, if not in winning it, perhaps in containing it. Instead, we bring the war to people who aren't (or at least weren't) terrorists, destroy their families, their homes, their livelihoods, their infrastructure, and we just about guarantee that for every one we kill, ten more will rise up. We fight a war by proxy in Lebanon and we turn the world even more against us.
I think almost everyone will agree that some wars are necessary evils. The Revolutionary War and WWII are good examples. But they were wars against an identifiable enemy that was made up of people and not against an idea.
I propose that we declare a war on WAR, at least until we are really committed to fighting a real war on a real enemy that actually threatens our nation, as terrorists do. But this war on the idea of terror will never be won because we keep creating more enemy soldiers.
Maybe that has been the idea all along. In a war that never ends we can be kept in a constant state of fear and be more easily led by our Dear Leader.