Where is the War on Terror heading?
By Bita Ghaffari, Press TV, Tehran

Recent remarks by the US presidential hopeful Tom Tancredo have shed more light on the absolute chaos governing American politics.

The Republican long shot said last week the best way to ward off a nuclear assault on American soil is to threaten to bomb Islam’s holiest sites in Mecca and Medina.

The brash assertion even sparked a reaction from the US State Department which described it as ‘absolutely crazy’.

The American political leaders’ loud-mouthed rhetoric has seemingly reached a zenith. Earlier Democrat candidate Barack Obama suggested he would order military strikes against terrorists holed up in Pakistani territory.

The US gunboat diplomacy replete with belligerent comments makes one wonder where this country is heading. Evidently, the US is moving in a gravely dangerous direction.

Less than a month after the September 2001 attacks in New York, the US launched massive aerial bombing and ground assaults against Afghanistan in search of Osama bin Laden whom it alleged had masterminded the 9/11 attacks.

Six years on, the US has evidently fallen short of meeting its stated goals of capturing bin Laden and destroying al-Qaeda. Although the Taliban government was toppled initially, there has been an extraordinary Taliban resurgence lately.

Afghanistan has turned into a land with fragile stability and growing violence, and a war that has taken the lives of thousands of civilians. To add insult to injury, there has been a surge in illegal poppy cultivation turning the country into the world’s number one producer of opium poppy.

In March 2003, the US troops supported by UK military forces launched an invasion of Iraq in search of Weapons of Mass Destruction which never existed in the first place. What’s more, the stated purpose of restoring order to Iraq has failed as evidenced by the daily bloodbath on the streets of the war-plagued country.

The world’s elite and justice-seeking people have repeatedly reminded the US that it is sinking further in the quagmire of Iraq. The Bush administration is under growing domestic pressure to call back troops home, while at the same time it has to cope with the US besmirched image globally.

It is no secret that the US so-called ‘War on Terror’ has been a shameful defeat and this has been recurrently admitted by political analysts and leaders the world over.

The Iraq war costs will exceed $1 trillion in tax-payers’ money as forecast by the US Congressional Budget Office.

Instead of stirring public anxiety through recurrent warnings that the nation is under threat of biological and nuclear assaults, the US administration could perhaps spend a fraction of that money on tightening security and assuring the public it will protect them against the alleged terrorist attacks.

In reaction to Tancredo’s blatant remarks, US State Department’s Spokesman Tom Casey said the Bush administration has always made it very clear that “we want to have good, positive relations with countries certainly in the Middle East and broader Muslim world.”

Upon hearing those words, one wonders if the incumbent US government speaks a different language when it talks about ‘good, positive relations’ with the Muslim world. How can such remarks be construed against the background of rampant carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan and the US mum on the stream of atrocities by Zionists against Palestinians?

Casey said “to suggest that an appropriate response to terrorism would be to attack sites that are holy and sacred to more than a billion people throughout the world is just absolutely crazy”.

The US statesmen however have fallen short of admitting that staging a war of terror that has led to a surge in terrorism rather than curb it and has claimed 755,000 civilian lives only in Iraq is far crazier. They’ve failed to admit that the so-called Operation Iraqi Freedom has only brought death, poverty and sufferings – and not freedom – to the Iraqis.

Tancredo’s remarks can be interpreted as an ‘absolutely crazy’ brainchild, whereas the US invasion of Iraq is an ‘absolutely crazier’ pet project viciously and tactlessly translated into action.