Once Again, the War on Terror

The entire War on Terror is founded upon an extremely dubious premise, namely, that you can kill an ideology with bombs and bullets. If anything, bombs and bullets help to keep an ideology alive, because they create martyrs for the cause.

The only weapon that has ever proved effective against an ideology is to show that the ideologue's interpretation of the world is fatally flawed. That requires constructive engagement with an ideology's proponents (where possible), but it also requires constructive engagement with the social and political conditions that make a given ideology attractive to potential recruits. If the pool of potential recruits evaporates, an ideology will eventually lose its influence and die a natural death.

In 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed what was then known as the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act, or Public Law 480. In 1961, the law got another name when President Kennedy expanded the program and renamed it "Food for Peace."

JFK set out the logic for the program saying, "Food is strength, and food is peace, and food is freedom, and food is a helping to people around the world whose good will and friendship we want."

Unfortunately, the sheer sanity of the Food for Peace program is no match for the greed of the corporate sponsors of the International Plutocratic War Party (IPWP). War is big business the world over and far more lucrative for weapons manufacturers than, say, wheat farming is for farmers or bread baking is for bakers. I fear that the wheat farmers and bread bakers do not have the ear of President-elect Obama. Worse, I fear that the weapons manufacturers and their allies in the Democan-Republicrat wing of the IPWP are already dug in deep among the President-elect's inner circle of advisors.

I voted for Barack, contributed to his campaign, and canvassed for him in Colorado. But I'll be damned if I'm going to spend the next four years waiting in vain for the promised "change" to come. I do realize, of course, that the Bush Administration is handing the Obama Administration an unmitigated disaster on almost every conceivable front (domestic and foreign). But surely the lesson of Mumbai is that more of the same on the terrorism front will simply yield...more of the same on the terrorism front.

The world deserves better than that, but we won't get it until we demand it.