There is no War on Terror

First of all let me say that you cannot win a war unless it is against a proper noun. Terrorism, poverty, drugs are just regular nouns and are too ill-defined and unorganized to fight with. You can, of course, announce that you are going to fight against anything, but unless you have a concrete enemy (such as German in the early 1940s) you cannot win.

So that begs the question, why is our president constantly touting this War on Terror as a real war? To being with we must realize that any time that the country is at war, the President and Executive Branch as tremendous powers. So when we are in a state of constant war, the powers of the Executive Branch and its President will slowly and naturally expand to allow for more and more powers so that the President has more and more weapons at his disposal to win the war. Stay at war long enough and the Executive Branch will have amassed enough power control the other branches of government unchecked.

Or to quote from Orwell’s 1984 - "The very word 'war', therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous, war has ceased to exist. ... therefore War is Peace."

This comes in contrast to how it is being sold in reference to 9-11. What the Executive Branch has done is attempt to draw a line from 9-11 to all terror, as if all terror is connected with 9-11. Unfortunately, the world is not that simple. One small group of radical Islamic extremists named al-Qaeda, and headed by Osama bin Laden, attacked us. We retaliated by invading Afghanistan because that is where they were hiding and the government in control of that country was not able to give them to us. Failing to capture bin Laden, and failing to really damage the internal structure or power of al-Qaeda, and with other factors best known only to the Executive Branch, we then invaded Iraq under bad pretenses and extremely faulty intelligence.

In order to invaded Iraq, the pretense that Iraq held weapons of mass destruction was used and Congress declared an Authorized Use of Force against Iraq. This Authorized Use of Force is the same declaration that we used in both the Korean War and the Vietnam War, yet the Administration of the Executive is working very hard to not to call this current conflict the Iraq War -- even though all previous conflicts declared under the Authorized Use of Force were called a War with the country that it was declared upon.

What will history call this War? More than likely, we will all one day call it the Iraq War and not the War on Terror. So I encourage all of you to step ahead of the curve and refer to this war in its future tense. Maybe once we admit that we are at war with a particular country, we can work towards an actual concrete goal in Iraq and bring our troops home. I think that all of us prefer solid objectives based in reality to the current indefinite goal of just continuous war against an enemy that cannot be beat.