No American Under 12 Has Lived In A Country
At Peace
OK,
so what does that mean? "Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated
forces"?
Al
Qaeda is a brand name, but there's little public evidence that it's actually a
significant corporate entity. Al Qaeda may or may not be one thing or many
things, and American actions may or may not be killing Al Qaeda members faster
than it creates them. Whatever the
U.S. government knows, or thinks it knows, is not widely shared with most of
its citizens.
The
Taliban appears to be a real, regional entity with real regional goals that
mostly have never had anything much to do with the United States except when
the U.S. came into the region. If
the Taliban has ever posed a serious threat to the United States, the evidence
for that remains secret.
America's Main Enemy Is Nameless, Shapeless,
"Associated Forces"
That
leaves "their associated forces," in the President's phrase, that exercises
presumably purposeful threat inflation by using "forces" to refer to what we
have no reason to believe are more than assorted gangs of malcontents with a
range of grievances, many of which are legitimate and long-standing.
And
who are these "associated forces"?
The government won't say.
The country may be at war, but most of the names of our enemies are
classified, and subject to change without notice.
At
a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on May 16, a week before the
President's speech, the committee chairman, Sen. Carl Levin, a Democrat from
Michigan, questioned Michael Sheehan, Assistant Secretary of Defense for
Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, about designating enemies
with no more Congressional authority than the Authorization for Use of Military
Force (AUMF) passed by Congress three days after the 9/11 attacks and giving
the President effectively unlimited discretion to wage the war on terrorism, wherever
he might imagine it to be.
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