"There is every prospect of the 'war on terror' extending for 30 years or more," declares a report released by the Oxford Research Group, an independent think tank in Britain. "What is required is a complete re-assessment of current policies but that is highly unlikely, even with the recent political upheavals."

Professor Paul Rogers, who authored the report and is associated with the oldest university in the English-speaking world, believes "recent political upheavals," i.e., the Democrat victory in Congress, will not change the course of events. Democrats are not about to engage in a "complete re-assessment of current policies," but rather continue them, as there is little difference between Democrats and Republicans when you turn them upside down.

"Most people believe that the recent elections mark the beginning of the end of the Bush era but that does not apply to the war on terror," writes Rogers. "In reality there will be little change until the United States faces up to the need for a fundamental re-think of its policies."

I'm afraid the economy will need crash, the world community will turn against the United States, its people reduced to the sort of penury and humiliation suffered by the Germans at the midpoint of the last century before a "re-think" occurs.

Both Democrats and Republicans are on schedule with the "clash of civilizations," although they differ only slightly in style, not substance.

Democrats have gone out of their way to dismiss the large and growing antiwar faction of their party. Democrats do not consider George Bush and his camarilla of neocon fascists war criminals. Democrats will not impeach Bush. Democrats are traitors to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as they will not repeal the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, or put an end to the high-tech surveillance state. Democrats are soft and fuzzy Republicans. Democrats want to raise the minimum wage, allow stem-cell research, and protect the "right" to abortion (there are no rights beyond those enumerated in the Constitution), but when it comes to the phony "war on terrorism," they are indistinguishable from Republicans.

"The report showed that the United States is now faced with a dilemma: if it withdraws from Iraq, insurgent groups will be able to operate freely in the biggest oil reserve in the world," reports Yahoo News. "If it stays, though, then US soldiers become an increasing magnet for radical factions, with Iraq becoming a training ground for new generations of paramilitaries, just as Afghanistan was in the 1980s against the Soviet occupying forces."

A bit of casual googling reveals that Mr. Rogers in a professor of "Peace Studies," BSc PhD Lond., DIC ARCS, MIBiol, at the University of Bradford, West Yorkshire, UK. One has to wonder if they teach modern history at Bradford, for if they do Rogers should realize the "paramilitaries" in Afghanistan were wholly the creation of the CIA and Pakistan's ISI, with more than a little help from reactionary religious types in Saudi Arabia. In fact, the CIA, ISI, MI6, Mossad, and other intelligence agencies have a long-standing and continued interest in creating a never-ending stream of "radical factions," and the more radical, that is to say cruel and murderous, the better. Prior to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, there were precious few "radical factions" in Iraq. Now there is a surplus, including those working for the British SAS, caught with their wigs and explosives, and more circumspect "covert counter-terror" P2OG operatives, loosely based on Frank Kitson's "pseudo-guerrillas" used against the Mau Mau in Kenya and elsewhere.

Actually, Mr. Rogers has his timeline wrong. As we know, if we read beyond the official history books, the United States supported "radical factions" in Afghanistan prior to the Soviet invasion of December, 1979. "Former CIA director Robert Gates later admitted in his memoirs that aid to the rebels began in June 1979. In a candid 1998 interview, Zbigniew Brezinski, Carter's national security adviser, confirmed that U.S. aid to the rebels began before the invasion," writes Phil Gasper.

The CIA became the grand coordinator: purchasing or arranging the manufacture of Soviet-style weapons from Egypt, China, Poland, Israel and elsewhere, or supplying their own; arranging for military training by Americans, Egyptians, Chinese and Iranians; hitting up Middle-Eastern countries for donations, notably Saudi Arabia which gave many hundreds of millions of dollars in aid each year, totaling probably more than a billion; pressuring and bribing Pakistan-with whom recent American relations had been very poor-to rent out its country as a military staging area and sanctuary; putting the Pakistani Director of Military Operations, Brigadier Mian Mohammad Afzal, onto the CIA payroll to ensure Pakistani cooperation.

Indeed, the crowning glory of this effort was "al-Qaeda," a rather unusual Arabic phrase for a "radical faction" ("Ana raicha Al Qaeda" is colloquial for "I'm going to the toilet," according to Kawther Salam). Osama bin Laden ran Maktab al-Khidamar, the "Services Office" of the CIA created and organized Mujahideen, and was closely associated with the CIA's favorite fanatic, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. J. Michael Springmann, head of the non-immigrant visa section at the U.S. consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 1987-88, said he learned that the CIA had a "program to bring people to the United States for terrorist training, people recruited by the CIA and its asset Usama bin Laden, and the idea was to get them trained and send them back to Afghanistan to fight the then Soviets" (see CIA Visas For Patsies).

Not willing to let a good thing slip away, the CIA later used "going to the toilet" in Kosovo, a fact corroborated by the German TV ZDF Network (see German Intelligence and the CIA supported Al Qaeda sponsored Terrorists in Yugoslavia). And then the group surfaced amidst the ranks of Chechen rebels. As to the former, "the US Administration's undercover military-intelligence operations in Bosnia have been fully documented by the Republican Party... The RPC Congressional report accuses the Clinton administration of having 'helped turn Bosnia into a militant Islamic base' leading to the recruitment through the so-called 'Militant Islamic Network,' of thousands of Mujahideen from the Muslim world," explains Michel Chossudovsky.

In regard to Iraq, Mr. Rogers' report claims "the 'fundamental mistake' was to remove the regime of president Saddam Hussein by force, which was a 'gift' for Al-Qaeda and extremist groups because the deployment of 150,000 US soldiers in the heart of the Arab world is considered by many to be 'an occupation force,'" Yahoo News reports. "At the same time, the war in Afghanistan, that has so far lasted six years, has seen 'a marked increase in Taliban activity at a time of record revenues from opium production' and the insurgency there 'shows no sign of ending.'"

Of course, the removal of Saddam Hussein, a documented CIA asset (see Saddam Was key in early CIA plot, United Press International), was part of the "Clean Break" connivance, based on earlier work by the Israeli Oded Yinon (according Ze'ev Schiff, the military correspondent of Ha'aretz, the Israelis have long hankered for the "dissolution of Iraq into a Shi'ite state, a Sunni state and the separation of the Kurdish part," a plan currently unfolding with bloody efficiency). Such violent balkanization, according to Yinon, will "guarantee ... peace and security in the area in the long run" and the "dissolution of Syria and Iraq ... into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel's primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target."

Mr. Rogers is wrong. Getting rid of Saddam was not a "fundamental mistake," but part and parcel of the primary plan, sketched out well before Oded Yinon wrote his paper in the mid-1980s. Indeed, it is a "gift" to the "going to the toilet" terrorist group, as the point is to break Iraq into more easily isolated Bantustans. "The Mujahideen Shura Council-the Al-Qaida umbrella group for extremist mujahideen factions operating in Iraq-has attempted to make history today by announcing the foundation of a Sunni Islamic state out of the remnants of Iraq," Evan Kohlmann wrote last month.

But even after Iraq is sliced and diced into more easily manipulated chunks based on ethnicity and religion, the United States will remain ensconced in its elaborate and expensive "enduring camps," and well past my 84th birthday. "The importance of oil in the region 'means that it would be entirely unacceptable for the United States to consider withdrawal from Iraq, no matter how insecure the environment.'" On this point both sides of the war and property party, otherwise known as Democrats and Republicans, agree, although the oil card is an ostentatious play designed to cover other, more immediate objectives.

The Oxford Research Group, as well as Democrats, Republicans, and corporate media op-ed scribes, assiduously avoid all mention of the Israeli master plan for the Arab and Islamic Middle East, a plan shared by Israel First neocons and bankster neolibs keen to domesticate one of the last remaining areas not comfortably under the thumb of "free trade," that is to say unopposed thievery and exploitation. In order to cover the plan, we are told "radical factions" (courtesy of the CIA-MI6-ISI-Mossad, etc.) are on the loose, dispensing terror and severed heads, and we must engage them for the next thirty odd years, although the neocons put this figure at a hundred years or more. Anything less, of course, is Chamberlainesque appeasement of "Islamofascists."

Finally, the "recent political upheaval" of the Democrat victory in Congress plays nicely with the plan. "Anxious to chart a centrist course with Democrats' new majority in Congress [i.e., fascist neocon, but with classic Democrat fuzziness], incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her top deputies are busily working in private and public to rein in the liberal ambitions of some senior party heavyweights," reports the Boston Globe. One such "liberal ambition" is putting an end to the occupation of Iraq and another is investigating and prosecuting the Bush criminals.

Of course, by the time this happens, I will be much older than 84.