Fri 8 July 2005 - The war on terror goes on… or does it?
Reaction to the London bombings: US President George Bush told reporters at the G8 Summit in Gleneagles that “the war on terror goes on.”
It occurs to me that if one is to wage a war on terror, it could do with not playing second fiddle to the war in Iraq. While Saddam was a ruthless tyrant, and eventually the Iraqi people might maybe be left with a peaceful democracy, I think we all know now that all that Coalition Of the Willing muscle-flexing had very little impact on terrorist activity, because the Iraqi regime was not a threat to western countries. The WMD thing was quite clearly a crock.
So, what the Iraq war has done is stirred up anti-western sentiment amongst the extremists — who really are a threat to western countries — while burning up huge amounts of military resources and billions of dollars in not finding and aprehending them.
And unfortunately it doesn’t yet seem to have occurred to our leaders that spending a fraction of that military money in aid instead might keep the impoverished peoples of the world looking more kindly towards us, rather than joining the extremists to take up arms.