Fear and Loathing in the U.S.

For years I have been saying that this administration is using fear to control the masses. For this, I have been called names and laughed at by the neocons. Isn't it the fear of terrorists that allows our government to spy on our own people? Isn't it fear that caused a country to sit idly by while bushco re-wrote the Geneva Convention to allow torture? Isn't it the fear of terror and WMD's that this country watched with mouths shut, as these war mongers turned away from al-Qaeda and bombed and innocent Iraq?

Now, here we are at a threshold of another aggressive war. This administration is at it again. Fear mongering to serve their own greedy needs.

In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Bush warned that if the United States fails in Iraq, al-Qaeda will gain a safe haven from which to launch attacks against America. It is an argument that the president, other members of the administration, and neoconservative hawks have been using for years.

In late 2005, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld warned that al-Qaeda leaders “would turn Iraq into what Afghanistan was before 9/11 – a haven for terrorist recruitment and training and a launching pad for attacks against U.S. interests and our fellow citizens.”

Despite such scare mongering, it is highly improbable that al-Qaeda could use Iraq as the kind of safe haven it enjoyed in Afghanistan. There, the organization had the protection of an entrenched, friendly government, which it would not have in Iraq. Al-Qaeda also had a much larger force in Afghanistan – an estimated 18,000 fighters. Even the U.S. government concedes that there are fewer than 2,000 al-Qaeda fighters in Iraq, and the Iraq Study Group put the figure at only 1,300.

Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Republican of Nebraska, has it right. “I have never been persuaded to believe that whether we stay there six months, a year, or two years, that if we would leave, that somehow Iraq would turn into a haven for terrorists.”

His skepticism is well placed.

The notion of al-Qaeda using Iraq as a sanctuary is a specter – a canard that the perpetrators of the current catastrophe use to frighten people into supporting a fatally flawed, and seemingly endless, nation-building debacle.

Are we ready to open our minds now? Are we ready to think on our own? Are we ready to stop the fear mongering and the waging of illegal wars? Have we had enough yet?