In this radical assessment of the "war on terror", the author uses an approach not typically found in today’s journalism, as reflected in the title.
Readers, whether concurring or not, can draw fresh insight from this radical way of reassessing the conflict.
The Global War on Terror (GWOT) is, like all historical events, unique. But both its supporters and opponents compare it to past U.S. military conflicts. The Bush administration and the neocons have drawn parallels between GWOT and World War II as well as GWOT and the Cold War. Joshua E. London, writing in the National Review, sees the War on Terror as a modern form of the struggle against the Barbary pirates. Vietnam and the Spanish-American War have been preferred analogies for other commentators. A Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, Anne Applebaum, says that the war in Iraq might be like that in Korea, because of "the ambivalence of their conclusions." For others, the War on Terror, with its loose rhetoric, brings to mind the "war on poverty" or the "war on drugs."
I'd like to suggest another way of looking at the War on Terror: as a twenty-first century continuation of, or replication of, the American Indian wars, on a global scale. This is by no means something that has occurred to me alone, but it has received relatively little attention.
Here are ten reasons why I'm making this suggestion:
1. Key supporters of the War on Terror themselves see GWOT as an Indian war. Take, for example, the right-wing intellectuals Robert Kaplan and Max Boot who, although not members of the administration, also advocate a tough military stance against terrorists. In a Wall Street Journal article, "Indian Country," Kaplan notes that "an overlooked truth about the war on terrorism" is that "the American military is back to the days of fighting the Indians." Iraq, he notes, "is but a microcosm of the earth in this regard." Kaplan has now put his thoughts into a book, Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground, which President Bush read over the [Christmas/New Year’s] holidays. Kaplan points out that "'Welcome to Injun Country' was the refrain I heard from troops from Colombia to the Philippines, including Afghanistan and Iraq.... The War on Terrorism was really about taming the frontier."
As for Max Boot, he writes, "‘small wars' -- fought by a small number of professional U.S. soldiers -- are much more typical of American history than are the handful of ‘total' wars that receive most of the public attention. Between 1800 and 1934, U.S. Marines staged 180 landings abroad. And that's not even counting the Indian wars the army was fighting every year until 1890." A key GWOT battlefield, Boot suggests, is Afghanistan, noting that "f the past is any indication of the future, we have a lot more savage wars ahead."
2. The essential paradigm of the War on Terror -- us (the attacked) against them (the attackers) -- was no less essential to the mindset of white settlers regarding the Indians, starting at least from the 1622 Indian massacre of 347 people at Jamestown, Virginia. With rare exceptions, newly arrived Europeans and their descendants, as well as their leaders, saw Indians as mortal enemies who started the initial fight against them, savages with whom they could not co-exist. The Declaration of Independence condemned "the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." When governor of Virginia (1780), Thomas Jefferson stated: "If we are to wage a campaign against these Indians the end proposed should be their extermination, or their removal beyond the lakes of the Illinois River. The same world would scarcely do for them and us."
MORE- http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/it...wn_indian.html
The 'American Indian Wars' Are Not Yet Over
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Stormy 1/22/95 -8/23/10
Originally Posted by aslan
Others will be transferred to temporary facilities, nevertheless far more harsh, until their release. Still others will be deemed having served their time and released free as a bird. 
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