Status of the Long War, aka, Global War on Terror, aka, GWOT, etc.

Robert Scheer gives a good glimpse at the larger context of the current US military budget and it's relationship to the safety of Americans: It's a war on terrorism, not on poverty San Francisco Chronicle 02/08/06.  He writes:

To begin with, we must remember that this "war" [the GWOT] was launched against an enemy, still mostly at large, who on Sept. 11 accomplished phenomenal destruction and suffering with armaments no fiercer or costly than some box-cutters. Their key weapon, in fact, was suicidal fanaticism.

Yet, rather than sensibly investing in aggressive global detective work, collaborating with our European allies, engaging meaningfully with an independent and skeptical Arab world, and working to protect vulnerable U.S. sites such as nuclear-power plants, our leaders decided to turn logic on its head and make ignorance about the enemy into a virtue, slash civil liberties and recklessly invade a major Muslim country that had no connection to the attacks.

In other words, our response to Sept. 11 has been almost completely military in nature, granting the Defense Department an excuse to increase spending by 48 percent in just four years. Yet, despite all this spending, and the loss of life that has accompanied it, our standing in the Muslim world has been in freefall since we invaded Iraq, we have never captured or killed Osama bin Laden or his top strongman, we don't know how to "fix" Iraq or Afghanistan, and we have greatly strengthened the hand of our rivals in Iran.

We don't even know, as the Sept. 11 commission report revealed, much of anything about the 15 Saudi hijackers and their four leaders from other parts of the Arab world who committed the Sept. 11 attacks. We do know, however, that they weren't from Iraq, weren't funded by Iraq and weren't trained by or in Iraq; nevertheless, the huge elephant in the Bush budget is the war and occupation of Iraq, now approaching its third anniversary, not the effort to dismantle al Qaeda.

And the vision of the Pentagon in the newly-issued Quadrenniel Defense Review (QDR) shows little more than rhetorical adjustments are being made to incorporate the real lessons of Afghanistan, Iraq and the larger GWOT.