Selling the Long War

Writing for his Washington Post column, William M. Arkin targets, then skewers the brazen Bush strategy for accumulating power (while making his friends rich) by declaring a perpetual state of war: “Goodbye War on Terror, Hello Long War.”

Have you noticed? Perpetual war, not nearly enough unlike the conditions of George Orwell's “1984,” is where we're heading with the scattered War on Terror that Bush says he sees in our future. That neoconservative concept for expanding a wartime president's power is really nothing new. It's just another power grab, wrapped in a cheap banner of patriotism, nothing more, nothing new. Here's a sample of Arkin's bulls-eye:

“...Defense experts want the long war to be the new name for the war on terror, a kind of societal short hand that will stand shoulder to shoulder with the Cold War, promoted to capital letters, an indisputable and universally accepted state of the world. ‘This generation of service members will be in what we're calling the Long War,’ Army Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said earlier this week.”

This analysis lays out an important case quite well in a small space.