Experts fear 'endless' terror war

From the AP via MSNBC courtesy of BuzzFlash:

What should be broken, he said, is the cycle of terrorist recruitment through the generations. “Here you come to the main challenge.”

He and most of the other half-dozen experts said the world’s richer powers must address “underlying causes” — lessen the appeal of radicalism by improving economies, political rights and education in Arab and Muslim countries.

Combs cited bin Laden’s use of Afghanistan as his 1990s headquarters. “If we hadn’t been ignoring Afghanistan and instead offered real assistance, would it have become a base for bin Laden?” she asked.

And

Scheuer, who headed the CIA’s bin Laden unit for nine years, sees a different way out — through U.S. foreign policy. He said he resigned last November to expose the U.S. leadership’s “willful blindness” to what needs to be done: withdraw the U.S. military from the Mideast, end “unqualified support” for Israel, sever close ties to Arab oil-state “tyrannies.”

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These ideas aren't new to anybody with half a brain, or anybody who's been following my rants here for the last three years. You can't fight terrorism as though it was a war: terrorism is a tactic, not an army. It's like declaring war on karate or something; it's a sick joke. The reality is that all these US military adventures have simply aggravated an already tense situation and made terrorism all the more likely. What needs to be done, of course, is to address that already tense situation, which means radically altering US foreign and economic policy, and that's not likely to happen anytime soon because the wealthy elites who essentially own the federal government have come to depend on war, repression, and economic exploitation as a way of life. The elites are largely immune to the terrorist threat themselves, so there's really no incentive for them to change anything. I'm not hopeful of the cycle of endless war ending anytime soon, but it's nice to hear some sane talk coming from establishment security experts published on a corporate news site. That, in itself, is a good sign.

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