We appreciate that strange things happen during an American presidential campaign, but the weirdness meter is bursting through the roof in Washington this week - to judge by the Pentagon's proposal to Congress to provide $500 million to build a network of friendly militias around the world to purge terrorists from "ungoverned areas." The man who pressed this case before Congress earlier this week was Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a key architect of the Iraq war and the wider neoconservative ideology that underpins it. The rationale behind this idea is that conventional American armed forces - despite their impressive technical prowess, political will and human determination - cannot fight or win wars against small bands of irregular guerrillas or terrorists who find sanctuary in remote regions in lands like Afghanistan, Pakistan or Yemen. Smaller local militias, this thinking goes, would have a better chance of fighting such battles and winning such wars. (Never mind for the moment if Wolfowitz's list of remote, ungovernable regions that offer sanctuary and planning venues for terrorists include places like the suburbs of Newark, New Jersey and Buffalo, New York, or Madrid, Spain; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; or Hamburg, Germany, all of which generated serious terrorist activity).
Good god. Support for "a network of friendly militias"? This is an idea so monumentally stupid that I will be very surprised if it turns out not to have originated with this man.
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