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 wheel has turned full-circle. The wars against the terrorist evil are filled with similar anomalies. In Afghanistan, the Taliban are promising a major spring offensive with the help of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a reactionary Islamist warlord once armed by Israel and the US to fight the Soviets.
In Somalia the US is currently backing the same corrupt warlords who it once fought in Mogadishu in order to overthrow a grass-roots Islamist movement, the Union of Islamic Courts, that had at least brought a tentative stability to the country. While the US launches an airstrike to root out 'al-Qaeda' terrorists in the south, the warlords are back in Mogadishu, courtesy of the Ethiopian army, and Somalia and the entire horn of Africa stand on the brink of further conflict.
All these multiple fronts are part of the grandiose 'war' that George Bush once declared was intended to eliminate not only the perpetrators of 9/11 but all "terrorists with global reach". Yet more than five years later, Osama bin Laden and his cohorts are still at large and it is not clear whether they
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| Osama bin Laden and his men are still at large - and it is not clear whether they are being pursued |
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are even being pursued. We should not be surprised by this apparent oversight. From its inception the War on Terror cast its net deliberately wide in order to fulfil various geopolitical agendas that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or terrorism.
Whether these agendas are being realised is another matter. We may wonder about the vision, morality and intelligence of those responsible for this atrocious pseudo-war.
But as we contemplate the grim scenarios now unfolding, it may be time to ask whether men like Bush and Blair have a coherent vision at all or whether, like Macbeth, they have become so steeped in blood that they can only blunder onwards in the hope that somehow it will all come right in the end.
These are urgent and pressing questions in 2007. Because all the signs are that the coming year may be even more calamitous than its predecessors. The time may not be far away when the War on Terror slips the last vestiges of rationality and sucks us into the world war its neo-conservative sponsors have hailed so enthusiastically since 9/11. 
FIRST POSTED JANUARY 9, 2007
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