Op-Ed: RAND Corp Reccomendations Weak

In light of the thriving chaotic spray of clean-handed innocent blood shed since, well, the dawn of man, it might be time to go ahead and accept the crippling truth that it will be this way until the end.

This end however is not yet to come, thus leaving the pressing issue at hand of thwarting those who wish to hasten the process. This paper will discuss weaknesses in the policy recommendations posed by Bruce Hoffman to the RAND Center for Middle East Public Policy and Geneva Center for Security Policy's fifth annual conference in late June 2004, as well as the dangers posed by political belligerence's persistent attempts to gain power and influence on the worldstage through not so unfamiliar means. To begin with I am not of the school of thought that the free world faces an enemy like never before as posited by Hoffman. After much consideration I have determined the face of a 'war on terrorism' and a 'war on communism' is not a drastically different face at all, only a distant cousin—or half brother—bearing much resemblance to puppet (proxy) warfare executed during the Cold War days. When Al Qaeda was bombarded by an onslaught of US power in retaliation for the 11 September attacks inside Afghanistan, a vast array of data was discovered which—in the accurately descriptive words of Hoffman—resembled, “dimensions of a lumbering bureaucracy.” Considering the forced dispersion of central leadership of Al Qaeda they naturally have done all they know how to do—flexibly adapt the fight to counter the enemy and keep their political movement alive. This has taken the form, Hoffman says, of an ideology, a “vast enterprise” or even “an international movement. Now this ideology requires containment just as communism required containment. Consider the reaction of the US and the installment of the Truman Doctrine, inspired by the Berlin Crisis and the Soviet-dominated countries in Eastern Europe if there is any doubt. Interchange terrorism with communism and the true question at hand—as it relates to present day events—is who is pulling the puppet strings of our seemingly new proxy war? As I see images within international news coverage of Russian President Vladimir Putin strutting around arrogantly with the President of Iran, regurgitating cold war banter no doubt left over from his days with the KGB—a part of the Soviet System I stress was not defeated, only reformed into the FSB—I am left pondering whether the American government has mistakenly treated Russia as a defeated enemy instead of a wounded, reforming system, thus alienating them, angering them, and leaving the opportunity for it to sneak back to prominence while cleverly turning CIA recruited proxies (i.e. Mujahadeen) against their creators as an ironical twist on an intense attempt to regain political ground within a nuclear charged landscape sculpted by these very same uncontrollable transnational non-state actors dead set with the desire to bring the world into all out nuclear war. Either way it is necessary to avidly continue the fight with resolve, and do so while being more adaptive than our enemy, because now is truly the time when collectively the American people must determine whether we intend to repeat our past or learn from it. As I see it the most daunting threat facing humanity is whether or not we allow nuclear weapons—or technology—to enter the hands of Al Qaeda or known supporters of terrorism, Iran, as we foolishly allowed it within the grips of the Soviet Union. In conclusion, it is for these reasons I believe the policy recommendations made by Hoffman are entirely to lax and dangerously accommodating to a truly ravenous enemy, and will serve to completely dismantle any productive strategies to be devised where the ends justify the means and the US steps up and takes its place as one nation under God, in defense of the poor, the helpless and the stupid.