dicksmith is a’skeered of the boogeyman

Our buddy dicksmith, the new senior editor of VetVoice, tells us how he’s been a’skeered of the boogeyman since George Bush was President. He begins his missive quoting John Brennan, Obama’s chief counter-terrorism advisor;

“But describing our efforts as a ‘global war’ only plays into the warped narrative that Al-Qaeda propagates,” Brennan said in comments prepared for delivery to a think tank here.

dicksmith applauds the Obama Administration’s name change;

This is an extremely smart policy move. For eight years, we have sent our finest men and women to fight a war against an undefined enemy. Shifting a way from the “GWOT” nomenclature will give service members what they deserve: a defined mission with a defined enemy. No doubt, we’ll still see the “terrorism” boogey-man thrown into the debate, but at least now it won’t be official policy.

An “extremely smart policy move”. Changing the name we call the war changes the whole mission, apparently. It gives us definition. Any of you guys fighting the old Global War On Terror remember needing the mission defined, or did you have any doubt who was the enemy? Well, dicksmith was a’skeered;

For the record, I’m not saying terrorists and terrorism doesn’t exist. They are, however, extremely broad terms that have been used in the fear-mongering process of the past. Anything and everything we didn’t like was chalked up to “terrorists” or “terrorism”, but usually only when it applied to actions perpetrated by foreigners.

Because we’re racists who only react negatively to terrorism committed by them ding-dang fur-ners. He’s upset that we didn’t call domestic crime “terrorism”. That’ll apparently all change now that we call it “The War Against Al Qaeda”.

Now, hopefully, we can move away from the previously flawed practice of boogey-man fear mongering and set clear definitions for who our enemies are.

Aside from the fact that the senior editor of VetsVoice ends his thought with a preposition, that sentence is the most bizarre that I’ve ever read. The Global War on Terror was supposed to be just that. It was a call to the world to pull together and stop the animals that were killing innocent people to make a political statement. We were fighting terrorists in the Middle East, Colombia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Africa, Europe – ya know – globally.

Now we’ve put Al Qaeda on a pedestal and given them the recognition that they’ve wanted since the mid-nineties. During the Bush Administration we were fighting injustice everywhere, now we’re chasing some guys in manjammies around the mountains trying to kill them all.

Not only is this a piss-poor policy decision, it’s playing right into the hands of Al Qaeda. So now we’re beefing up our forces in Colombia – do we have to give that war it’s own name, too? Fighting the Moros in the Phillipines will be a different war?

The thought that dicksmith put into his little Obama tongue bath was pretty superficial. All he needed to hear was that it was not a Bush idea and he was all for it.

Category: Antiwar crowd, Barack Obama/Joe Biden