Viraj's Weblog

From George Soros' The Age of Fallibility:

What makes the war on terror a false metaphor is that it is taken literally. Terror is an abstraction. One cannot wage war on an abstraction. We have the means to destroy any target as long as we can identify it, but terrorists rarely provide an identifiable target. When we declare war, we must find a target; but the target we choose is unlikely to be the right one. We have killed more innocent civilians in Iraq than the terrorists killed on 9/11. In addition to killing, we have also humiliated and tortured many Iraqis. By creating innocent victims, we have advanced the terrorists' cause. They can now depict us as the terrorists and enlist the support of theiry countrymen, just as President Bush has enlisted ours. We find this difficult to understand because we cannot envision ourselves as terrorists. Yet, that is exactly how we appear to many Iraqis.

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Since terrorists are invisible, they will never disappear. Since the war on terror is counterproductive, it is liable to generate more terrorists or insurgents that it can liquidate. As a result, we are facing a permanent state of war and the end of the United States as an open society. All men and women of good faith, regardless of party affiliation, must come together to reject the war on terror as a false and dangerous metaphor.

Oceania is at war with Eastasia... no, I mean Eurasia.