Iraq and Everything Else - Page 2

And the key strategy in fighting against terror seems to be to terrify citizens and use that fear as the reasoning for invading Iraq, or suspending various civil liberties. In their wildest, terror-filled dreams did the 9/11 planners ever think the United State's renounce freedom itself? While they succeeded in scaring us, the death of American values has been an unplanned terrorist victory. Today some people are so worked up we are expected to pay any price to fight terror. Perhaps this would explain a recent article which stated even if we loose 6,000 Americans or more in Iraq it will be worth it to avoid another 9/11. On such reasoning our contemporary society flows. President Bush recently painted the war as the "ideological struggle of our generation." We personify it to a level unimaginable by even the most zealous terrorist. We have currently committed over half a trillion dollars to fight it in Iraq, or about eight times our annual education budget. We fear terrorists much more than uneducated citizens. Sowing irrational concerns to an poorly educated public equals big returns at the polls but it also plays into the wrong hands.

Experts agree that the real threat is not another 9/11, but that a rogue organization will acquire a nuclear weapon and detonate it in a highly populated area. Along those lines how effective has Iraq been? Our own government releases reports saying we have increased the pool of potential candidates who would use WMDs against us. So, while our false sense of insecurity boiled over into the invasion of Iraq, we may not be concerned enough about how ineffective the invasion has been. Terrorism needs to be addressed in the right way, not in an overblown, hyperventilating paranoia. The price we have paid is enormous, not the least of which has been handing over our identity and ignoring the needs inside our country. We vowed we would never allow the terrorists to change us. But have we lost ourselves trying to change the terrorists?

Article Author: Fred Krone

Fred Krone's work has never appeared in Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, or Vanity Fair. And never will.

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