Taking Stock of the Forever War
is a bleak assessment of the situation in Iraq and the war on terror by
Mark Danner, a professor, author, and expert on the region. The basic
gist: Democracy in Iraq is an unattainable fantasy and Osama is getting
exactly what he wants.
Iraq has become a grotesque
advertisement for the power and efficacy of terror…Nearly two years
ago, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, in a confidential
memorandum, posed the central question about the war on terror: “Are we
capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every
day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training
and deploying against us?” The answer is clearly no. “We have taken a
ball of quicksilver,” says the counterinsurgency specialist John
Arquilla, “and hit it with a hammer.”…Iraq has become a
training ground that will temper and prepare the next generation of
jihadist terrorists and a televised stage from which the struggle of
radical Islam against the “crusader forces” can be broadcast throughout
the Islamic world…Americans confront a stark choice: whether to
go on indefinitely fighting a politically self-destructive
counterinsurgency war that keeps the jihadists increasingly well
supplied with volunteers or to withdraw from a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq
that remains chaotic and unstable and beset with civil strife and
thereby hand Al Qaeda and its allies a major victory in the war on
terror’s “central front.”