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Ending the War on Terror

A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. Sir Winston Churchill

It has been said that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. This is most certainly true. From the Maccabee's rebellion against their Greco-Syrian oppressors, to the Irish Republican Armythe Sandinistas, Mujahadeen, Chechnians, Basques, Hammas, and the colonial American revolutionaries-it is clear that the only way to end a terrorist war is to simply stop fighting it. Insurgents are like the mythical Hydrayou cut off one head and it grows another. It is simply impossible to defeat revolutionaries with military action. It has never happened and it never will. The only way to stop people who have such do-or-die commitment to their cause is to stop trying to kill them. And therein lies the rub.

In the early part of the last century, Ernst Benn, a London bookseller noted that, " Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy." Some things never change!
Just prior to the invasion of Iraq, British intelligence services produced a 50-page dossier outlining the threat that Iraq posed to the world. The document proved to be a complete work of fiction.

The report maintained that Saddam Hussein had direct control over large arsenals of chemical and biological weapons; and the capability to deploy those weapons within 45 minutes.
It also said that Iraq has tried to acquire "significant quantities" of uranium from Africa, despite having no civil program for which it might be used. The conclusion was that the regime was five years away from producing a nuclear weapon on it's own, and one to two years if it managed to obtain weapons-grade material from abroad.

In addition to these fantastic claims, the intelligence assessment went on to say that Iraq had medium-range missiles in defiance of U.N. sanctions, as well as a well-developed program to produce long-range delivery systems capable of delivering all three categories of weapons of mass destruction. The document said, in no uncertain terms that Iraq had a program for the development of long-range missiles capable of reaching targets in Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey, as well as all of its neighbors in the Gulf region, including Israel.
Two days after being delivered to Prime Minister Tony Blair, the "confidential dossier" showed up at CIA headquarters where it was reworded and a turned over to U.S. Secretary

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