Sunday, January 17, 2010
There simply is no comparing al-Qaeda to the U.S. military, write Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch.com. At its potential mightiest, al-Qaeda numbers a few thousand fighters spread throughout the world—a force one-fifth the size of America’s troop total in Italy alone. With a numerical superiority of 666-1 (including reserves makes it 1,286-1), the U.S. has managed to wage “one of the most ineffective campaigns of modern times” to destroy al-Qaeda.
The problem lies in the approach. Washington is relying on “a massive global military force aided and abetted by allied troops, ‘native’ forces, and all sorts of corporate contractors facing off against something fluid and ‘homegrown’”—what is essentially a “fierce but strangely undefined, constantly morphing and shape-shifting” enemy. The U.S. can kill off every one of al-Qaeda’s “members” and the enemy would still exist, “because the enemy is a set of ideas, however extreme or strange to most Americans.”
Turse and Engelhardt argue that it’s time to put al-Qaeda back in perspective—“a human perspective, which would include its stunning successes, its dismal failures, and its monumental goof-ups, as well as its unrealizable dreams.” America needs to realize that al-Qaeda “is not an apocalyptic threat. Its partisans can cause damage, but only Americans can bring down this country.”
-Noel Brinkerhoff
666 to 1: The U.S. Military, al-Qaeda, and a War of Futility (by Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch.com)
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