“Zarqawi is dead, but the difficult and necessary mission in Iraq continues,” Bush said in a press conference the following morning. “We can expect the terrorists and insurgents to carry on without him.”

In recent public appearances, administration officials have continued to press the theme that Washington is engaged in a “long war” that doesn’t end with the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

In his address at the May 27 commencement ceremony at the U.S. military academy at West Point, Bush defended the course his administration has led under the banner of fighting the so-called war on terror.

“The focus of much of your military careers” Bush told the future U.S. Army officer corps, will be “the long war with Islamic radicalism.”

“The terrorist enemies we face today hide in caves and shadows—and emerge to attack free nations from within,” the president said. He reiterated that Washington “makes no distinction between the terrorists and the countries that harbor them.”

Bush once again reviewed historic changes his administration has overseen in Washington’s military strategy, global deployment, and order of battle. These include establishing new alliances that shift from task to task; transforming the military’s structure from the old large divisions to smaller and more agile combat teams that can move quickly to any theater of battle around the world, as well as elevating the role of Special Operations forces; and reorganizing the federal government, including its domestic police and military apparatus.

He pointed to the shift in relations with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan from governments that “once turned a blind eye to terror” to close U.S. military allies.

Bush also cited the establishment of the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) involving some 70 states. Under this program, Washington and its allies assert the right to stop on the high seas and board any vessel suspected of carrying “weapons of mass destruction.”

A few days after Bush’s speech, U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld toured Indonesia, Vietnam, and Singapore. His Indonesian counterpart agreed to discuss participation in the PSI “on an ad hoc basis.” Washington reestablished military ties six months ago with the government of Indonesia, the world’s most populous country that’s largely Muslim. Rumsfeld announced that “Washington intended to give Jakarta sustained access to American training and equipment,” Reuters reported.

Likewise, Bush said, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the U.S.-led military alliance established during the Cold War, has been transformed from “a defensive alliance focused on protecting Europe from Soviet tank invasion into a dynamic alliance that is now operating across the world.” Bush pointed out that “for five decades, NATO forces never deployed outside of Europe.” Today they are operating in Iraq, Pakistan, Sudan, and Afghanistan.

At a June 8 meeting of NATO’s North Atlantic Council, involving the defense ministers from 37 countries, NATO announced plans to increase its forces in Afghanistan from 9,000 to 16,000 by this summer, with an eye toward eventually taking command of the mission there. According to the New York Times, 6,000 of those troops—provided by the British, Canadian, Dutch, and Australian governments—will be stationed in southern Afghanistan, where they are expected to engage in combat.

“We created a new Northern Command responsible for homeland defense,” Bush said. This is the first time a military command under the direction of the commander in chief has been responsible for military operations inside U.S. borders since after the Civil War.

He also pointed to passage of the Patriot Act and moves to further centralize federal police powers by combining 22 separate agencies into the Department of Homeland Security. Bush also warned that the governments of Syria and Iran could be the next targets for a U.S. attack.

The killing of Zarqawi “was a development in the war on Islamic extremist terrorism that not even some of the Bush administration’s toughest critics found fit to criticize,” the New York Sun said in a June 9 editorial.

The paper said that Leslie Cagan, a leader of the antiwar group United For Peace and Justice, “would not condemn the killing” of Zarqawi. “There seems to have been a body of evidence that this man has been involved in terrorist activities,” she is quoted as saying to the Sun.

Cagan told the Militant that this quote is accurate, but a little oversimplified. “We don’t support acts of terrorism be they state terrorism from a government like the United States or committed by a militia,” Cagan said. “When people commit terrorist acts there should be some attempt to bring them to justice. Its better to do that through a criminal trial.”

Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth also told the Sun that Washington was “perfectly within its rights” to kill Zarqawi.
 
 
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