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For what might my draft-age son be fighting? For whom will the bells toll this time?
Seymour Hersh's article "The coming wars" in The New Yorker magazine should not have surprised anyone. Iran has been in the crosshairs, and remains there, ever since it was crowned as the biggest threat to international peace and security by the Bush administration soon after September 11, 2001.
President George W Bush, in his State of the Union address in January 2002, lumped Iran together with Iraq and North Korea as members of an "axis of evil", to be confronted in the United States' "war on international terrorism".
The real enemy, or the source of threat against the security of the United States, was reconfirmed to be the al-Qaeda camp, headed by Osama bin Laden, masterminding its operations from Afghanistan's mountain strongholds. However, the September 11 attacks provided an unexpected and highly welcomed opportunity for dormant power centers to come together and join forces with a common agenda. The target was broadened almost immediately to encompass the entire Middle East, and later Islam as a whole, called militant Islam, of course, for political correctness.
Organizations and think-tanks such as the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the Middle East Forum, as well as many hardcore evangelicals, found in the national tragedy the catalyst that brought them together in a crusade against a common enemy. A true national tragedy was thus hijacked.
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