As the incumbent US President, George W. Bush has a tangible record in respect of his handling of the "war on terror". According to most polls - and rightly so - terrorism and security are the leading issues in voters' minds in advance of the November 2004 election. But there does come a point of over-saturation: Can anyone recall a single speech during the last three years when Mr. Bush did not invoke some level of sensorial reflection of 9/11? Making and keeping this issue as his incessant mantra presents Mr. Bush some prickly problems in the realm of factual analysis.
No war ever evolves according to initial plans, and no victory ever is won as cleanly as the civilian Defense Department agency directors would like. That said, there can be very little denial that Mr. Bush drastically squandered alliances and mishandled the situation in Iraq. Yes, it is wonderful the dictator is gone; he should have been removed twelve years before he was, and the US was very wrong to betray the Kurdish and Shia insurgents as they did in 1991. It is entirely accurate that many of those Kurds and Shia who were executed and whose remains were uncovered last year in mass graves lost their lives because the US fomented rebellion and did not keep its word to the insurgents. Therein lie the origins of the current problem. That said, those errors and faults are beyond correction. Now we have the problem of multiple insurgent groups, and what is the Bush/Rumsfeld response? The sound byte response is "stay the course", but details of what Mr. Bush will do in term two to confront the problem are very lacking. Yes, the ultimate authority on such matters is with the interim Iraqi government, and the US officially must follow their lead, but there must be some plan with at least a semblance of an exit strategy.
Another problem with making the "war on terror" topic number one is the apparent lack of progress in finding leading terrorists and identifying and freezing their assets. The facts suggest that those US allies who disagreed with US intervention in Iraq actually are making the most substantive efforts to track and try Al-Qaeda operatives. Question: What country was the first (and to date the only) state to charge and try a known terrorist on three thousand counts of murder (one count for each person killed in the 9/11 attacks)? Answer: Germany - not the US. Strangely enough, the US repeatedly refused to provide the trial court in Hamburg information the court and prosecutors requested regarding evidence of the accused's Al-Qaeda links. Because of that, the accused now is in his second trial on the charges and likely will be exonerated due to lack of evidence although sufficient evidence exists which the US refuses to provide. Question: What country allowed a battlefield detainee to accept a plea bargain of a twenty year sentence in federal prison although the accused was captured while engaged in active combat against his country of citizenship and is responsible for the deaths of agents of the government that gave him the opportunity to regain his full rights of citizenship when the accused is approximately forty years old? Answer: The US. Note: If the incident at issue which occurred in Afghanistan occurred during a war declared by Congress, the accused could be tried for treason in accordance with the definition of that term in the US Constitution. The underlying message of these two examples should disturb anyone who believes the US is vigorous in in pursuing and prosecuting terrorists.
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