Quote from seriouscoin:
No it wasn't. He doesn't give American's enough credit. Nobody miscontrued the "war on poverty" or the "war on drugs" to mean regiments of soldiers diving into foxholes, either. The "war on terror" concept is valid, that terror is something we don't want and will work to prevent. If brutal accuracy and trancparency in naming foreign policy objectives were the rule and not the exception, our current state would be "defending against and dismantling through military, diplomatic , and psychological means violent fundamentalist Islam," which hardly rolls of the tongue.
You wrote a fairly detailed post, but instead of addressing Soros' major points you seem to be delving into semantics and trivial lanes, as if you are blinded by brilliance of your own ability to focus on details. Please refute the major points of his article and his conclusion. In short, they appear to be that:
(please assume that war = "war" and terrorists = "terrorists". Also please assume that the war in its current form began on september 11th, 2001)
The war on terror is self defeating because:
The war in its current form is creating support for the terrorists via the deaths of many innocent civilians
The misapplication of the word terror has made it impossible to deal with any of the conditions that justify the existence of terrorist organizations to those who support those orgsanizations
The war in its current form is actually increasing the terrorist threat, rather than reducing it.
The war in its current form is isolating America in the eyes of the world and weakening our "goodwill" on a global basis (apply the accounting definition of goodwill as a parallel analogy to international diplomacy)
These factors taken together guarantee that the war in its current form will not reduce the global terror threat, but rather increase it.
In addition, the war on terror in its current form will only destabilize the globe, rather than stabilize it.
Our current policies are escalating the cycle of violence, rather than reducing it. These policies are also increasing the potential for greater and more widespread violence in the near, intermediate and long term.
Our current policies are also changing the dynamics of the relationsyhip between the executive branch of the American government and its 375 million constituents in a truly powerful and foreboding way
Anyone who follows international current events and has a solid grounding in world history would generally agree with these claims, since they are claims based on actual events and population-sampling studies over the past 5 years.
You seem to disagree based on a bias and your own opinion. Do you trade with a bias and base your trading decisions on opinion while ignoring fundamental and techincal analysis?
Simple observation and objective analysis proves all of these claims correct. Please refute them with factual observations that appeal to logic and rationale, rather than opinion.