the war on sand nig.... uhh, terror

so i've been frittering away my eight-hour workdays largely by surveying the blogging scene, particularly when it comes to politics. i especially like daily kos, for its quasi-antipartisanism. any number of other assorted dem-type blogs are certainly worthwhile, like myDD and the Agonist, though kos is my favourite, if only for the sheer volume of stuff that gets posted everyday. there's always something new to look at, at least.

but one thing that's starting to piss me off quite a bit is how often the stupid, inane phrase "war on terror" gets thrown around by both sides of the debate in american politics. the democrat vs. republican debate essentially precludes any sort of free critical thought. the GOP shouts, "you bleeding-heart liberal faggots, you don't give a shit about the war on terror!" and the dems shout back, "yeah, well you're just pursuing the war on terror to support halliburton oil and you don't give a shit about real terrorism!" so instead of any kind of reasoned debate about terrorism, its roots, its spirit, and even its existence, we get impassioned name-calling about who's fighting it better.

to start, the very idea of a "war on terror" is a complete and utter misnomer. terrorism, we can see by its rather obvious name, has the goal of promoting, (you guessed it) terror. thus a 'war on terror' would, one might hope, have the goal of preventing ... guess ... terror! hot damn, we're getting somewhere. but wait. what does tom ridge's homeland security color-level bullshit do? oh, fuck, looks like it promotes terror! how about channel 7 action news spewing bullshit about the latest cooked-up CIA intelligence and WHY YOU SHOULD BE SCARED SHITLESS RIGHT NOW! how are they contributing to the war on terror? by terrifying their audience! how does every damn thing that the government does in the war on terror affect society? by increasing the level of terror amongst the populace. wow, what useful contributions. it's like the DEA trying to win a war on drugs by sniffing them all up themselves. (not to say that the DEA doesn't do that already, of course.)

one of the most interesting bits of thought that i've come across recently was in a BBC documentary about terrorism that i saw on the fifth estate a while back. essentially it proposed that al-qaeda and the idea of a worldwide terrorist network is a myth, nothing more than a useful fiction. osama bin laden may well be a convenient figurehead, kind of like the queen, or jesus, or george bush. but when it comes down to it, there's no tightly-woven network of international terrorists, there's just a bunch of pissed-off brown guys with a variety of bones to pick with america. and sure, the CIA says that there's tons of evidence supporting the existence of al-qaeda, but it's always easy to find evidence for what you already know is there. when you already "know" that a terrorist network exists, it's not hard to construct plausible explanations for its existence.

and it's a useful fiction for all of the parties involved. neither the republicans or the democrats want to challenge the conceptualization of al-qaeda, because hell, it gives them something to bitch at the opposition about, plus it gives them an excuse to tramp all over civil liberties and inflate the state apparatus like a big ugly deficit-laden balloon. neither the republicans nor the democrats have any interest in winning the war on terror, or even pursuing it, because the maintenance of a terror-stricken populace has become one of the pillars of the postmodern state. and the terrorists sure as hell aren't interested in debunking any myths which might spring up about them. can you picture osama releasing a newscast saying "you idiots, we're not a huge well-connected international organization, we're just a bunch of pissed-off retards with box cutters and a disregard for our own lives!" doesn't exactly strike fear into the hearts of the infidels, does it?

thus my irritation at the state of the political discourse, even in the blogosphere. markos at dailykos does a great job, and he's more than sufficiently distrustful of democratic establishment. but nevertheless, blogs on the left and right alike are a bit too fond of slinging memes at each other, and not quite fond enough of deconstructing the inaccurate and flawed structures of those memes themselves.