Combs: Cops, Crimestoppers could have won the war years ago

What with all the fun at home -- the depression, inflation, banks and businesses collapsing, unemployment and the continued curtailing of civil rights and growth of runaway government -- it's easy to forget we have a lot of wars going on these days.

We can be excused for forgetting. The wars are all far away, against people with whom we have virtually no contact. Our "enemies" have no names, no formal organization, control no territory and have no infrastructure. Since they have virtually no ability to strike us -- other than the occasional lone would-be bomber comically setting his naughty bits on fire -- we neither see nor hear from them.

But sure enough, our beloved and wise, omnipotent and omniscient masters in Washington are waging war.

Let's review briefly: Since 2001, direct military expenditures will soon exceed $1 trillion, according to the National Priorities Project. That's not counting the hundreds of billions wasted on contractors and assassins-for-hire like Blackwater, or money paid to CIA torture specialists or the guys who operate the drone plane that so effectively exterminate whole Pakistani villages. Nor does that include all the hundreds of billions wasted on silly government busywork offices like TSA and Homeland Security.

Some 4,350 Americans have died in the war and about 31,000 have been wounded. It is simply impossible to accurately say how many Iraqi and Afghan civilians have been killed. Hundreds of thousands is a safe estimate. Millions have been made homeless.

And while President Obama promises we'll be quitting the theater soon, we're spending billions on permanent bases and lavish embassies and palaces in Baghdad and Kabul.
Of course, the goal of neutralizing Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda followers seemed pretty important in 2001. Naturally, it was a priority task. We have failed. Why? Because we sent soldiers to do a cop's job.

Despite the current and prior administrations' insistence, the conflict currently waged by the U.S. against terrorists is not a "war." How else can one explain the inability of the U.S. military -- indisputably the best-funded, best-trained, best-equipped, and highest-paid soldiers in the world -- to defeat a small and old fashioned, ragtag enemy? Because al-Qaeda is not a military enemy. They present no military targets.

Al-Qaeda is a criminal enemy, no different from Crips or Bloods or KKKs or Mafia or Democrats or Republicans.

What a mess, huh? Let's play do-over: Rewind to fall, 2001. With intelligence indicating that al-Qaeda is responsible for the 9/11 attack and that the leaders and executives of al-Qaeda are in Afghanistan, Bush turns a deaf ear to his sociopathic sidekick, Dick Cheney, and instead approaches the crisis as a law-enforcement task.

He utilizes the almost universal sympathy from around the world to tighten a net around Afghanistan. No one can get out. Now here's the clever bit. He offers the government of Afghanistan (that is, the Taliban) an outrageous sum of money for the live capture and extradition of al-Qaeda members -- Osama bin Laden, whomever. Make it a really outrageous sum, say, $100 billion.

How long do you think the Taliban would have ruminated before accepting the offer and stabbing bin Laden in the back? If you answered, "about one one-hundredth of a second," you are correct.

The matter would be finished. Bin Laden would already be in custody, thoroughly tortured and convicted in an open trial in criminal court today. Think about that. It would be finished already, the War on Terror would be over. Today. Now. Done with. A page of history.

About 4,000 U.S. soldiers would still be alive, instead of being dead. About 100,000 Iraqis and Afghans would be alive today, instead of being dead. Homes, schools hospitals and places of business and houses of worship would be standing today, instead of destroyed.

Hundreds of thousands, even millions, of young men who now hate America with such passion that they're willing to kill themselves in a suicide bombing raid would instead not hate America enough to sacrifice themselves in a suicide bombing raid. We'd be without several million individual blood enemies we now have.

We'd be many hundreds of billions of dollars better off, without the waste, fraud, plunder and theft of the war on terror. Tens of thousands of TSA and Homeland Security employees would be working legitimate real jobs. They'd have to gaze at naked people and listen in on others' phone conversations on their own time.

If Bush and Obama had consciously decided to utterly ruin, bankrupt, destroy, betray and enslave America, how could they have done so more efficiently and effectively that they have done?