NEW BATTLE, OLD PATTERN THE WAR ON TERRORISM TAKES THE SHAPE OF THE DRUG WAR

by A.C. Thompson- San Francisco Bay Guardian

Sat, 06 Apr 2002

The war on terrorism - despite what you've heard from lefty critics such as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn - isn't simply the latest American military adventure, another Vietnam, Iraq, or Kosovo.

In contrast to earlier armed conflicts, our new enemy is everywhere - in the deserts of Afghanistan, the supermarket down the street, hiding out in any country on the map - and the villains include both secret terror cells and the nation states that tolerate them. Combating terror involves not just soldiers and spooks sent abroad to shoot and snoop but also new laws and legions of cops keeping tabs on us here at home.

Most important, we'll never achieve a definitive victory. In a purely geopolitical war, victory, at least in the eyes of the Pentagon, is cemented when the bad-guy government is toppled and replaced with a new, Washington-friendly regime. In this war, we'll always be searching for the jihadist under the bed.

Really, the war on terrorism is more akin to the war on drugs than anything else.

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