A long-delayed editorial: Now There Really IS a "War on Terror"

Though this subject is probably beyond my abilities or resources to do justice to, the facts of international events in the past decade and the emerging reality of a multi-front, global war waged by the United States and the other European and predominantly white, formerly Christian nations against a network of terror-friendly organizations in majority Muslim countries cry out for an acknowledgment the "War on Terror," though imaginary in its inception, is now a reality.

A recent New York Times Article on the international funding sources for the Taliban crystalized, for me, the fact that what the George W. Bush Administration decided to bill as a "War on Terror," and which consisted of a tissue-paper erection of easy-to-hate enemies, has become a real conflict with no end in sight. Our "Axis of Evil" goons, friendly and familiar faces like "Saddam Insane" who looked in pictures like the "evil dictators" we have been taught we need to send our troops to dethrone, have been replaced by a real enemy that is not so easy to depict in straw dummy form.

So desperate was the Bush Administration to heroize itself that it deluded itself into believing that this was World War II America, an America beset with powerful, freedom-hating fascistic foes, that it set up a puppet-theater of its own, a stage on which the United States was always right.

We may have, in conducting an endless, faceless, edited-for-internet-video war whose casualties, in Muslim countries, now number in the hundreds of thousands, created the very thing which we once deluded ourselves into believing existed: an alliance of America-hating international terrorists strengthened and funded and perpetuated by terror-friendly or weak governments.

Americans believed we had to destroy a network of determined foes propped up by  political regimes. In practice, by toppling those regimes and destroying regional stability, we have created a radical Islamist alliance even extensive and determined.