Dear Mr. President:
Five years ago, you told us you would “bring to justice” the perpetrators of 9/11. Yet today, five years later, the man who is undisputed to have caused the 9/11 attack — Osama bin Laden — remains at large. Instead of making it your mission — and that of the U.S. military — to capture or kill bin Laden, you have wasted America’s resources — and your own — on a wild goose chase in Iraq. In the process, you have needlessly killed or maimed (both physically and emotionally) hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslims. We must assume that some of these people — or their spouses, parents, children, friends, etc. — will harbor extreme hatred toward America for this loss.
Indeed, we should not think otherwise given our own extreme reaction to the 9/11 attack. We must also assume that some of these angry people will, in some way, at some point in their lives, support violence against America. Whether it is by strapping a bomb to their chest and blowing up a street market, or merely providing a safe house to someone who does, we cannot tell. But we do know, for certain, that violence begets violence, especially when the violence is perceived as unjust — which is exactly how your invasion of Iraq and many other misguided policies are perceived.
The Bible tells us to love our enemies. This probably does not mean bombing their families and neighbors, perhaps because doing so merely creates new enemies where none existed before. It is the latter point that everyone in your Administration seems to ignore. Your single-minded obsession with Saddam Hussein and your fraud-based invasion of Iraq have apparently created more new enemies of America than existed before. We can only assume, therefore, that we are less safe than we were before. It is here where your “war on terrorism” is failing even more than it is failing in the streets of Baghdad and Kabul: for all your military actions, for all your secret prisons, for all your torture, wiretaps, military tribunals, and for all your bloviating, the fact is that more people around the world hate America now than did before, and this hatred is the ultimate stock from which terrorism is brewed.
The inescapable conclusion we must all draw is that while you have scoured the globe searching for terrorist camps, and blowing up everything you see along the way, you have overlooked the most obvious of all terrorist recruiting aids: you, your Administration, your lies, and your propaganda-driven destruction.In your zeal to give the stick to everyone you imagine to be a terrorist, you have ignored the power that the carrot might have given you. Indeed, just look at the support that entities such as Hezbollah and Iran now enjoy throughout the Middle East, and the lesson is obvious: improving local infrastructure (houses, hospitals, schools, etc.) does a lot more to create political support than does threatening to destroy the meager infractructure that already exists.
Unfortunately for our nation — indeed our planet — by exporting (to a world full of poor people and non-Christians) the same self-serving, misguided policies that you use to crush poor people and undermine non-Christians here at home, you are creating a future in which America will almost certainly be the main target of poor and non-Christian terrorists. I fear, as a direct result of your incompetent leadership, that we have seen only the beginning of the carnage that is to come. Fighting terrorism isn’t just about threatening to kill people who are already willing to die for their cause (such threats obviously have little impact); it’s also about taking away the causes that people are willing to die for, whether it is unmitigated poverty, religious intolerance or something else.
Your policy of “pre-emption” might…or might not…help stop people who have already committed their lives to terrorism, but, in the process, it appears to be creating many more people who are likely to follow in those footsteps. A better policy might be one that stops this circle of violence from starting — stops people from wanting to kill, by mitigating the sources of their frustration and hatred. Perhaps we need only to look at the successful community projects of Hezbollah and Iran to see how to win the hearts and minds of those who would otherwise hate us. Indeed, it’s unlikely to be any less effective than the obviously failed policies you have been using.
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