Welcome to the War on Terrorism

You've got to hand it to the Bush administration. They are really good at taking charge, then blaming everyone else when things go wrong.

A little over three years ago, we started the war on terrorism. The war began for various reasons, which really depends on who you are, what your background beliefs are, etc., etc. I'm not going to bother going into whether or not the war is right or wrong. But an article from Reuters last week needs to be examined, to see just where the U.S.'s priorities are.

According to the article, Porter Goss, who was at the time head of the CIA, and the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, the constant turmoil in Africa is undermining the fight against terrorism and the region has become fertile ground for recruitment.

"In Africa, chronic instability will continue to hamper counterterrorism efforts and pose heavy humanitarian and peacekeeping burdens," says Goss. Well duh.

Africa has been the most destabilized, insecure region in the world for decades. While all of the other continents have their troubled areas, in Africa, just about anything seems to go. So why are we so surprised that this turmoiled continent is now the ideal breeding ground for terrorists? Afterall, who even knows they are there, or would care to stop them?

In addition, what has the U.S. government ever done to counter this threat? Obviously, we all remember the humiliating advance into Somalia in 1992. But since then, Africa has remained largely dead on the government screen. Perhaps a little humanitarian aid here, we'll ignore a little genocide there, but what have they ever done to deal with this extreme terrorist threat? Absolutely nothing.

The U.S. government has known that Africa was a breeding ground for Al-Qaida since the embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998. That's 3 years before 9/11 and the start of the war on terrorism. So the next time the Bush administration starts looking for Al-Qaida in Iraq, maybe we should point them south.

Click here to see the article: http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7652049