'US must renounce the war on terror'

That is the question controversial businessman and investor George Soros asks in his compelling and thought-provoking book, The Age of Fallibility, Consequences of the War of Terror.

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Soros, a tireless campaigner for open societies everywhere from America to Russia, will visit India next week, hoping to launch a foundation to promote understanding and better relations with Pakistan.

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Though horrified by the turn of events set in motion by the Republican party, Soros can also be quite critical of the Democrats. But most of his criticism of American blunders in Iraq is aimed at the Republicans, since they still rule the country.

Unusual for a book of its kind, the billionaire ties the success of Republican deception to the wider American view of the world, and the fear Americans have of death. Though he does not attempt to explain why Americans have a greater fear of death than other nationalities, he hints that it has something to do with their hunger for feeling good.

The 9/11 terrorists touched 'a weak spot in the national psyche: the fear of death,' he writes in his book. And President George Bush and his minions worked on the fear. But the terrorists knew about that fear too.

'A feel good society simply cannot face death,' writes 76-year-old Soros, an atheist and fierce opponent of closed societies. 'Osama bin Laden correctly identified the one aspect in which militant Islam is superior to Western civilization: the fear of death. The perpetrators of 9/11 were not afraid to die.'

Soros, whose foundations back non-government organisations, especially in the former Communist countries of Europe that work towards creating more open and accountable societies, has been ceaselessly campaigning for his book. For The Age of Fallibility is also a part memoir and discusses his ideas of philanthropy.

Soros, who was listed in BusinessWeek's list of major philanthropists for donating $2.1 billion in the past four years (at the top of the list, Warren Buffett donated $40.6 billion), notes in the book that one of the reasons he set up Project on Death was because he knew how much Americans are afraid of dying.

In 1994, the Open Society Institute founded by Soros launched Project on Death in America to help transform the experience of dying in the United States. Hungary-born Soros, who has experienced Communism first hand and has felt the effects of Nazism closely, established the project, 'one of his first US-based philanthropic initiatives', in response to his personal experiences with the deaths of his parents.

Little did he anticipate when he set up PDIA that the denial of death would have far-reaching consequences in the 21st century. The Bush administration was eager to exploit the fear of more deaths generated by 9/11 attacks for its own narrow purposes, he asserts in the book.

'The Bush administration fostered this fear and appealed to the instinct of self preservation,' he writes. 'But the appeal was unjustified.'

Offering a view that would have sounded unrealistic a few years ago, Soros writes the 9/11 attacks, 'tragic and traumatic as it was, did not really threaten the nation's existence.' He justifies this argument by noting that Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour did more damage to American military might.

The Bush administration's appeal to the fear syndrome stood in stark contrast to what President Roosevelt declared when America was attacked by the Japanese: 'The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.'

Soros says he does not believe in being soft on terrorists.

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A genuine war on terrorism, he explains in the book, 'should have included intelligence gathering, precautionary methods, reassuring than scaring American public, gaining the confidence and support of the Islamic public and, where appropriate, using military force.'

As for the war against Iraq: 'Has there ever been a war with an unidentified enemy, undefined objectives, unknown rules, and indefinite duration?'

Soros fervently believes that despite the limitations on civil liberties pushed by the Bush administration in recent years, America is still a far more open country than many other nations. He also believes America can play a positive role in making the world a better place if it forges ahead with transparent and honest goals. But to do so America must 'renounce the war on terror as a false metaphor.'

'What makes the war on terror a false metaphor is that it is taken literally,' he explains. 'Terror is an abstraction. Terrorists rarely provide an identifiable target.' As a result, Americans have killed more innocent civilians in Iraq than the terrorists killed on 9/11.

War by its very nature claims innocent victims, he says. Since terrorists often hide among civilians, the chances of creating innocent victims increases. 'We find terrorism abhorrent because it kills or maims innocent people to further the political cause.'

He then warns: 'The war on terror evokes a similar response from those who are its victims as the terrorist attacks on 9/11 evoked in us.'

For America to regain its soul and world respectability, there should be a vivid repudiation of the war on terror, he continues to argue. 'Quietly adjusting the behavior will not do,because our past behavior will continue to haunt us like a guilty secret.' Otherwise Americans will carry political burdens far worse than the ones Greek and Turkey carry, he warns. 'Greece refused to recognize Macedonia (which splintered from Yugoslavia) because it had followed the policy of turning ethnic Macedonians into Greeks 40 years previously.' Similarly Turkey cannot admit to the Armenian massacre or to the mistreatment of Kurds.

He credits America for acknowledging its past sins, and challenges it to admit to wrongdoing in other situations, particularly in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.

'The genocide of Native Americans has become part of the school curriculum, as has slavery,' he writes, without spelling out the opposition to that kind of curriculum in many southern and Midwestern school districts. Could there be a similar acknowledgement of the destruction in Iraq?

'We have compromised the integrity and morale of our armed forces,' he continues, 'lost the high moral ground and endangered our dominant position in the world.'

'If the United States fails to provide the right kind of leadership our civilization may destroy itself,' he muses. 'That is the unpleasant reality that confronts us.'

Meanwhile, he fears that since terrorists are invisible, they will never disappear. And if one has to follow the arguments proposed by the Bush administration, 'We are facing a permanent state of war and the end of the United States as an open society.'

The only hope he has in the reversal of fortune is a more enlightened and courageous public. 'All men and women of good faith, regardless of their party affiliations, must come together to reject the war on terror.'