Why war needs a new approach

I went home for Thanksgiving last week for the first time in years, and was consequently exposed to truly unhealthy levels of hard-core reactionary pro-war doctrine. My home state, Alaska, has gone fully postal. I heard it all last weekend: leasing the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will reduce our dependence on foreign oil -- and thus we will win "the war." Torture and horrifying weapons like white phosphorous are a necessary evil that we must employ -- that is, if we want to win "the war."

And, indeed, we are winning, according to the sea of patriotic bumper stickers affixed to the surfeit of gas-guzzling monster-SUVs menacing Anchorage's highways.

The perverse hypocrisy of it all is mind-boggling.

I spend a lot of time agonizing over the lack of meaningful activism in Seattle, but a few days in the Last Frontier put Seattle's apathy back in perspective. Those people are just crazy.

But more than that, they are just absolutely wrong.

Their sheer clumsy insistence upon asserting their wrongness only makes their wrongness unfailingly clear.

Much like the counter-protestors in Crawford, Texas over the holiday shouting things at Cindy Sheehan like "Bush rules" and "Hippies go home," the fervent devotion my fellow Alaskans have for their messiah-president and his disastrous mission only highlights the tragic error of their ways.

I have friends who still support what we're doing in those far away places that most of my fellow political science graduates still can't find on a map. And they know that for four years of this "war on terror," I've listened to their arguments and agreed with what I could. But I can't find anything redeemable in this mess anymore -- nothing at all.

Afghanistan still manages the occasional Potemkin tour when Laura Bush comes to Kabul, but our botched invasion and subsequent neglect have led that country right back into the kind of despair and underdevelopment that proved to be such fertile ground for the Taliban.

Iraq is just a complete disaster: We've created the perfect storm for a horrible civil war that is poised to explode as soon as we withdraw our forces -- which we must do. It would have been difficult to imagine a worse scenario for the security and well-being of both Iraq and the United States when all this began, yet here we are.

We continue to indefinitely detain and torture prisoners who have no representation or recourse. The administration just last week finally charged Jose Padilla -- a U.S. citizen who has been detained and denied due process as an "enemy combatant" for three years now -- but they charged him with totally different allegations than what he was originally accused of. There is accumulating evidence that we used white phosphorous, a horrible incendiary that the United States has long lambasted Saddam Hussein for using against the Kurds and civilians when we flattened Falluja last year. The Pentagon charmingly calls white phosphorous "shake and bake."

Can any of us imagine, just for a moment, what it must have looked like to the rest of the world as we stood in lines thousands deep and trampled each other to grab discounted electronics the morning after Thanksgiving?

Two thousand people can get up and get in line at Best Buy before dawn in Anchorage to buy new Xboxes and digital cameras, but those same people don't have the energy to end the madness in Iraq and devote the creative energy that is so desperately needed to define an alternative. What is wrong with us?

I've got news for my oil-soaked state, and everyone else: The "war on terror" is already over. We lost, and we lost big. And we deserved to lose. The war is over, and the entire globe needs a Marshall plan for recovery and reconstruction. We have all the power we need to fix this disaster for ourselves and everyone else -- we just have to see the reality for what it is, and stop numbing ourselves to it.