Fred said, “It is truly bizarre to characterize a massive terrorist attack as NOT AN ACT OF WAR. All jihad actions are understood by the Ummah as a means of waging war.”
It is equally bizarre to respond to an even more massive attack (911) without going to war. Congress has the power to declare war. They declined to do so. They gave the President some vague resolution something similar to declaring National Chalk Appreciation Month. And the only way American’s knew what has happening was through cable news, which showed us edited video of “thunder runs” and the Jessica Lynch dramatization.
It sure wasn’t from seeing caskets. That was censored so that Americans wouldn’t get their feelings hurt, which, you know, sometimes happens in a war. And it sure wasn’t from paying more taxes like we used to do in wars, in fact, we were giving a big tax cut.
The Taliban regime in Afghanistan was routed by the Northern Alliance, with some special forces tagging along to call in airstrikess. It wasn’t a war.
Even when we put together something that could be called a war, it was aimed at a country that had absolutely nothing to do with 911, according to George Bush’s own words:
QUESTION: What did Iraq have to do with it?
BUSH: What did Iraq have to do with what?
QUESTION: The attack on the World Trade Center.
BUSH: Nothing. Except it’s part of — and nobody has suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack. Iraq was a — Iraq — the lesson of September 11th is take threats before they fully materialize, Ken. Nobody’s ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq.
But at least the war in Iraq was over by May 1, 2003 when Bush said, under that Mission Accomplished banner provided to the aircraft carrier by the White House, that major combat operations in Iraq were over. What followed was years of mismanaged occupation, including no-bid reconstruction contracts for American companies which excluded local Iraqi labor from working to rebuild their country after we blew it up.
So we could be forgiven for not treating more terror attacks as an act of war, because for seven years we haven’t been acting very much like we’re even at war.
