Muse – What is the Measure of Safety? (1/2)

It never fails. Turn on the TV or the radio and you’ll hear it eventually. Look in the paper or scan across the internet and you’re likely to hear it.

We’re safer!

The eternal refrain of the largely ‘hawkish’, ‘rightist’ segment of the US.

We’re safer!

Ok, lets say that I believe this for a moment(I don’t, but lets pretend). By what measure are we safer? Seriously. I hear it all the time, but no one ever provides a convincing measure of just how much safer we are.

Airline security? Bolstered to be certain, I’ve experienced it twice in two round trip flights across the country since 9/11. During one trip nearer the infamous date, I was treated to the sight of uniformed, armed military littering Dulles International, though in the now I’m more likely to see armed police roaming than the boys in green.

Yet people can still sneak things onto planes with enough effort made and leave things in airplane bathrooms, not located for weeks until they’re pointed out. I don’t feel safer considering that.

AlQueda hunted? Sure, to some degree that remains unspecified. We’re going after their resources and funding. Seeking out their hiding places. We’ve captured and killed a boatload of guys. I’ve heard a high percentage of known alQueda leaders have been captured and killed. We all saw and laughed our asses off at the scarily hairy Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Yet look at the phrase. Known leaders. What about the unknown ones? What about how terrorists groups are normally formed. Cells that are, by and large, interconnected in a vast network of roundabout links and invariable dead ends of honest ignorance when it comes to what the right, left and center hand are all up to. What about the action that we have going on around the world. The continued unrest, the potential of US action used as a boogeyman to further recruit new generations into alQurda, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and numerous other organizations? And though you kill the bodies, the ideals remain and seethe in the minds of those who are unknown. How many new leaders have strode forward to take up the fallen banners that others wave? Faster or slower than the rate at which we pick off the enemy? How deep do their resources go? How much has been squirreled away? Considering how many caches of weapons are found in Iraq, yet the insurgents continue to shot and blow up people with subtly diminished, but sustained pace there is obviously quite a bit more. And that’s but one country among how many in the Middle East? And perhaps beyond.

Iraq War? Yep, our troops rolled in and mopped the floor with Saddam’s forces. It was never doubtful that we would win that one. We’re in the country now, slowly getting some semblance of a real coalition in terms of troops after the fact. Seeking the UN to come in and help with getting elections going, with the impending election forcing bush to step up things and show some serious, take to the bank progress toward a pull out before time comes for the voters to drop their ballots. If he doesn’t, there may well be hell to pay. Saddam’s in custody, his two psychopathic boys six feet under and most of his elite captured, killed or scattered.

Yup. Though it seems part of the ease in our taking of Iraq was likely attributable to a planned scattering. Saddam’s forces faded away, only to return in an infuriatingly effective bout of hit and run attacks. Sure, they don’t kill US troops wholesale, but they show impressive intelligence in being able to slap at US officials when they come without anything but the utmost of paranoid secrecy and continue to stage a steady level of violence despite hundreds upon hundreds of raids and strikes, the majority of which we never hear about in a silent sequel to the war. Combine with this the initial lack of plan and it shows why the US stumbled in the initial attempts to win the peace. The Iraqis are ‘free’ to a point, but still under the general eye of the US with little of their country actually controlled by them. Only massive demonstrations have kept the US from imposing a government before elections are started up.

And we come to see that the claims of massive stockpiles of WMD were false. It has gone form Weapons of Mass Destruction to Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs, now Weapons of Mass Destruction Program Related Activates. Try saying that one three times fast. The Bush administration has no ideas, any possible WMD documentation lost in the brief orgy of destruction and looting that followed the fall of Baghdad, the Ministry of Oil being the only government building besides Saddam’s Palace(now an HQ) protected from the newly freed Iraqis. Whether or not the country was a haven for terrorists before, it is most certainly a terrorist playground now with loads of borders that couldn’t possibly be covered entirely and no shortage of targets from solders to diplomats to world leaders to ‘traitor’ collaborators. And now we have CIA folk warning of hints that civil war could be possible. The Shia are reveling in not being the oppressed majority, the Sunnis are smarting from being pushed off from the top and the Kurds are starting to get pissed at not getting their neat and tidy little state with Kirkuk as their personal oil town.