War on Terror Hawks Can’t Fail, They Can Only Be Failed - Conor Friedersdorf

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  • On explique les échecs de l’emploi de la force comme on explique ceux de l’austérité : ce n’était pas suffisant.

    War on Terror Hawks Can’t Fail, They Can Only Be Failed - Conor Friedersdorf - The Atlantic
    http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/war-on-terror-hawks-cant-fail-they-can-only-be-failed/281939

    On Sunday, Dianne Feinstein, the head of the Senate intelligence committee, and Mike Rogers, the head of the House intelligence committee, appeared on network television, where they announced that terrorists have gained ground in recent years. 

    Among their claims:

    – We’re less safe than we were two years ago.
    – Islamist groups are winning the minds of the disenfranchised in the Middle East and Asia.
    – There has been “a rise in fatalities from terrorist-related activities.”
    – The enemy has “increasingly specialized and dangerous technology,” including powerful bombs.
    – “Terror groups had already tried, on four separate occasions, to send these newer, more deadly explosives into the United States.”
    – “Al Qaeda as we knew it before is metastasizing to something different.”

    Got that? When it comes to terrorism, they say you’re no better off than you were two years ago. As a result, these two legislators have declared recent national security policy a failure, insisted on mass firings for cause in the national security bureaucracy, and called for a new approach to counterterrorism.

    Ha! Just kidding. Even though they think we’re less safe now, and that the enemy is more dangerous, they favor continuing or intensifying current policy, and they aren’t calling for any resignations at the CIA or the NSA or the DOD or the White House or anywhere else.

    • Feinstein, Rogers: War on Terror a Huge Failure
      http://wemeantwell.com/blog/2013/12/07/feinstein-rogers-war-on-terror-a-huge-failure

      We are a stupid, violent people. America is indeed an exceptional nation, exceptional in that it exists in a bubble, emerging only to lash out at others. Inside the bubble, rational thought and reasoned discussion have ceased, the air sucked out of them. [...] We have simply stopped thinking.

      Having stopped thinking, we fall into the comfort zone of repeating things like a mentally disabled child happy to spend hours walking in circles. Not quite for comfort, not quite for safety, just simply because it is what we were doing and so we keep doing it. We convince ourselves that the answer to failed policy is to keep repeating that policy. We ignore the empirical evidence of our failure– there it is people, the things done to make us safer have not made us safer– to twist logic into meaning we must keep doing what has already failed.

      Does that make sense? If it does, forget about a career in Washington.