the loud and the quiet wars
To date, the US government has spent over 400 billion dollars and 3000 lives on war against Iraq. Forget for the moment that Iraq never attacked our country. And that our government lied about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction.
How much printer’s ink and computer bandwidth has been spent on the US’s global war on terrorism as practiced by ‘Islamic extremism’ as President Bush put it? According to him and assorted think tanks and pundits, fundamentalist Muslims in nations such as Iran and Iraq are waging a war of terror on Christian nations such as the US and Britain, the zionist nation Israel, and non-muslim African nations. It’s Muslims vs Judeo-Christians, they say, appealing for even more guns, money and soldiers in this ‘war with no end’.
On the other hand, fundamentalist Muslims have much in common with fundamentalist Jews and fundamentalist Christians. If they ever figure that out, we could end up with a war of terror waged by the religioso karass against secularists.
Of course that war has been with us for centuries, the army of god vs the unbelieving heathens…it goes back at least to the crusades (11th century) and the various Christian inquisitions which started about the same time. But the organized religions have their schisms, as do the nation-states. One wonders if multinational corporations play religions against each other, just as they do nations via the time-tested ‘divide and conquer’ stragegy.
So let’s enjoy this delightful historical period before religious fusion while we can. While President Bush closes speeches with lines such as ‘In all that lies before us, may God grant us wisdom, and may He watch over the United States of America’ I am grateful he has not thus far made church attendance mandatory. If there was a god, he would have prevented such an incompetent man from seizing the Presidency and wasting so many lives.