Thoughts on War

with Bob Ellis

How the War on Terror was lost

Slowly but surely the War on Terror is being won - by the terrorists..

Look, if you will, at how well they're doing.

For the US is leaving the holy ground of Saudi-Arabia, the rst thing Osama asked for after 9/11, in a broadcast that was not repeated.

And the US has a 'roadmap' of a free, unpoliced, independent Palestinian state, the second thing he asked for.American rule is in chaos in Iraq, and Americans more hated than at any time in history.Osama and the Mullah Omah live, and al-Qaeda is back, and blowing up things as usual.

Saddam lives too, and is rallying his Ba'athists to expel the invader.

Air travel is down by a third, as al- Qaeda hoped.Tour i s m worldwide is a basket- case and the western economies toppling towards recession.

WiThevery warning of terrorist action or SARS, Australia makes enemies in Asia.

WiThevery gunshot into demonstrations America breeds, as predicted, more Osamas.WiThevery plane that does not y economies shrink, and governments tremble.

North Korea is brandishing atomic bombs and drugs unpunished.Russia is sabotaging America in Iraq.The search for weapons of mass destruction grows farcical, despite the capture of eminent scientists, and Hans Blix is calling, decorously of course, Bush, Powell, Blair, Straw and Rumsfeld liars.Belgium wants Tommy Fr a nks t o stand trial for war crimes.

The terrorists are winning, slowly but surely.

This is because the Americans, or the klutzes at present running America, do not know what they're doing.They call for a free democracy while planning to eradicate the Ba'ath party, to hunt down and 'neutralise', Paul Bremer says, its members.They do not understand that Ba'ath party members are brothers, cousins and fathers of two million Iraqis who will miss them when they are gaoled or slaughtered, and hope somehow to avenge them.They do not understand even that.

The terrorists are winning because their adversaries, and this includes Australians, look like idiots.

Soon the full expense of administering Iraq will fall on America, Australia and Britain because the UN, sidelined, will leave them to it.Billions not spent on our social services will be spent on Iraqi social services.

Oppositions will point this out and Bush, Blair and Howard will fall, or probably fall.And the terrorists will rejoice, and radical Muslims seize power in more and more countries.

In order to win a war you must ght it with cunning.And fools are in charge of our strategy.Men who dodged war in the sixties (Howard, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, not Powell) and know little of the unChristian world of poverty and cultural humiliation, of brothers dead in battle and a creed that promises Paradise to martyrs.

Dimwits are running the war on terror, and the terrorists are winning.Smarter folk will replace them when the votes come in, and come to an agreement as others did in Ireland, Algeria, Israel, South Africa, Indonesia, Cuba, New Zealand, with the terrorists, the insurgents, the patriots, the martyrs.

And the terrorists will have won.

• Bob Ellis will write weekly on the war for The Echo.