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From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Sat Sep 11 2010 - 06:31:04 EDT
When Will the Bad Dream End?
by <mailto:anthony1791@yahoo.com> Anthony Gregory
Recently by Anthony Gregory:
<http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory200.html> The Persistence of
Red-State Fascism
September 11, 2010
..This is an era when threatening Eritrea is the least of it...
In a normal country, war is front-page news. It is a big deal to invade and
bomb another nation. Most of the world's people can probably name all the
foreign governments their own government is at war with. If any other
industrialized nation were bombing Pakistan, for example, and displacing
hundreds of thousands of people from their homes, the average taxpayer would
be aware. It would be the biggest news story. If you are a typical person
living in a normal country, and your government threatens to invade, say,
<http://news.antiwar.com/2009/04/17/us-threatens-to-invade-eritrea/>
Eritrea, you would probably hear something about it. And you would probably
even want to know where Eritrea is on a map.
The United States is not a normal country. If it ever was one, it certainly
isn't now. Its imperial foreign policy has long made it special, and now
that it's the world's lone superpower - with an effective monopoly on aerial
warfare, calling the shots as to who can have nukes, claiming the unilateral
right to start wars against anyone - the U.S. government has become so
belligerent, and especially in remote lands, that American wars have become
routine, its casualties relegated to the back page.
This decade has obviously been especially bad. Nine years ago, the Twin
Towers fell, the Pentagon was hit, and the United States, its government and
political culture, fell under a spell of mass delusion that still shows no
signs of abating. It has been nine whole years since 9/11, and it is
starting to look like the "post-9/11" insanity that marked America under
Bush has become a permanent feature of the American landscape.
Looking around at what has happened in these last nine years, we are
reminded of what a long period of time this is in the modern age. iPods took
the world by storm and became obsolete. Such movies as the
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0001VL0K2?ie=UTF8&tag=lewrockwell&linkCod
e=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B0001VL0K2> Lord of the Rings trilogy forever
changed film in ways we now take for granted. Trashy reality TV conquered
most of the airwaves, but television has at the same time blossomed into a
bona fide art form, with HBO, Showtime and even network TV producing
programs of a quality previously unimagined. The internet has gone from
being a ubiquitous convenience to becoming the major network of all
communication, to which practically every other communicative and
technological medium is to be connected.
In nine years, we've seen the housing market boom and bust. We've seen,
according to the hyperbolic media, our nation's greatest environmental
disaster, one of the worst natural disasters, and a nearly unprecedented
financial collapse. And speaking of the old media, the giant newspapers
still seemed like leaders in 2001. Now they look like a dying breed, with
whole enterprises selling for literally less than a single issue at a
newsstand price. Meanwhile, many consumer goods, including food staples,
have nearly doubled in cost. China is now the second biggest economy in the
world.
And certainly, nine years is quite some time in the lives of actual people.
We all know folks who've had children or passed away. Kids have grown from
losing their baby teeth to taking their SATs. We've been to many weddings.
On the political scene, in the last nine years we have watched nearly two
full terms of one president and half a term of another - two presidents who
represent different parties, opposing sides of the culture war and,
ostensibly, contrasting approaches on how to govern the country. We've seen
the Republicans capture the federal legislature and then lose it all again.
We've seen both parties undergo significant rhetorical makeovers.
But one thing that hasn't changed at all is U.S. foreign policy, and the
entire American style of responding to supposed threats abroad with the
brute force of war and the continual expansion of government power at home.
This is not to say that there was a qualitative break in U.S. policy nine
years ago, not even as far as the Muslim world was concerned. The U.S.
overthrew Iran's government in 1953, installed a dictator and taught his
goons how to torture. The U.S. backed Saddam and his ilk from the late 50s
through the 1980s. The U.S. engineered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in
1979 and continued to meddle in that country, radicalizing Islamist fighters
and helping to create the modern fanaticism there. In the 1980s, the U.S.
government bombed Libya and encouraged Saddam to invade Iran, even as
President Reagan secretly sent weapons to Iran. In 1990, the U.S. government
started a war with Iraq that has essentially continued to this day. Clinton
bombed Iraq and Afghanistan. In the decades leading to 9/11, it is fair to
say that the U.S. government directly or indirectly murdered millions of
innocent people in its interventions in the Middle East and Central Asia.
Every president from Eisenhower through Clinton shares some of the blame.
But there has been something particularly insane about U.S. policy since the
events of 9/11. Previous limits upon imperial boldness, even if they existed
only out of pragmatic concerns, have been swept aside. What was once
considered beyond the pale is now accepted as normal.
Abroad, there is the war with Iraq that seems crazy even for the U.S.
empire. It used to take something like the Soviet Menace, with tens of
thousands of nuclear weapons - or someone like Hitler or Tojo, with some of
the mightiest militaries on earth - to scare the living daylights out of
Americans. But the Iraq war showed that the most ludicrous of pretenses -
that a lame duck dictator like Saddam, who had never attacked the United
States and showed no signs of doing so, was somehow a threat to America -
could now be used to justify a project to "liberate" and bring democracy to
a whole nation that itself was cobbled together by the West, held
precariously intact under a brutal strongman, and that would inevitably fall
short of American dreams of democracy no matter how many times its people
voted.
Then there's the fact that the U.S. government now goes to war, and is
peripherally involved in even more wars, without anyone in America seeming
to care. This is an era when threatening Eritrea is the least of it. The
U.S. supports an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia - barely a blip in the news.
The U.S. backs an ally, Israel, that invades its other ally, Lebanon, and
maybe the talking heads care for about a day. The U.S. is essentially at war
with its own nuclear-armed ally, Pakistan - and many Americans have no clue.
The U.S. backs suicide bombers in Iran with possible ties to al Qaeda who
are bent on changing Tehran's government - not that most Americans even know
the difference between Iran and al Qaeda, Persians and Arabs or Sunni and
Shi'ia. And then, when an airplane passenger fails in his attempt to kill
Americans on Christmas Day with explosives hidden in his underwear, the
media scream that perhaps it's time to wage war on Yemen. No one of
prominence even mentions that Obama was already bombing Yemen, days before
the underwear bomber almost struck.
But Afghanistan has got to be the most insane example of what's going on.
This is the war that marks the shift since 9/11 - even more than Iraq. The
U.S. realists, in one of their only foreign policy successes ever, used
Afghanistan against the Soviets, knowing it was the graveyard of invading
empires. Now the U.S. is, in the midst of a recession, tripling down on a
completely unjust and completely unwinnable project to save Afghanistan from
its own tribal people, win the war on drugs there, bring freedom to the land
and defeat a terrorist network that barely even exists in the country.
This is a reminder of why it's so important to oppose a war before it
begins. The Afghanistan war was always a terrible idea. Nine years ago, a
few Americans stood up and pointed out that the 9/11 attacks were
<http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory192.html> retaliation for U.S.
foreign policy, which must be changed if we are ever to address the problem
of terrorism. But these voices were in the minority. More than 90% of
Americans cheered the invasion of Afghanistan. Now many on the left think it
was folly, but the U.S. can't pull out. Or they are quiet because their
beloved president is doing the killing.
The Democrats practically all backed this war, and in both 2004 and 2008
attacked Bush for "neglecting" Afghanistan. Obama always promised us he'd be
even worse on this war than his predecessor. It almost inspires nostalgia
for Bush, who was essentially no more aggressive than Obama but who seemed
to get away with less.
Obama has meanwhile "ended" the war in Iraq by keeping 50,000 troops there -
troops involved in shooting and killing. Then there are the 100,000
contractors and permanent bases. Americans are snoozing. Who cares about
Iraq? That's so 2003. And on the civil liberties front - detention,
rendition, surveillance, even the unilateral presidential right to
assassinate US citizens he deems terrorists - Obama has pushed the envelope
further than Bush. But what's the big deal? Even conservatives who think
Obama a totalitarian tyrant don't seem to care about these, his most
totalitarian and tyrannical policies.
As for the national debate about U.S. foreign policy, there is none. The
idea that the minority was pushing even on 9/12 - that the attacks were
blowback from decades of U.S. aggression - is still hardly more discussed
than it was back then.
<http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/paul-said-it.html> Ron Paul made it a
somewhat common point of discussion back in 2007, but since then, who has
even touched upon the fundamental nature of 9/11? Instead, Americans are
divided as to whether to blame all of Islam or whether to blame radical
Islam, when revenge over U.S. aggression is the true motivation behind the
anti-U.S. attacks, and stopping the wars is the only answer.
But far from finally being open to the truth of blowback and the insanity of
the Afghanistan project, and far from having learned from Iraq to distrust
U.S. war propaganda, the American people appear to have forgotten about
these wars, to have stopped caring about U.S. foreign policy, except to be
worried, once in a while, about the next supposed foreign threat. The media
claim, without justification, that Iran is getting close to having a nuke.
The press, year after year, spins a story up about how Iran is just one year
away, but there is no proof this is even an Iranian goal, and practically no
one ever talks about the Non-Proliferation Treaty to which Iran is a
signatory, except to dishonestly imply that Iran has violated it. A poll
this year reveals that
<http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/02/19/cnn-poll-american-believe-i
ran-has-nuclear-weapons/> 70% of Americans believe Iran already has a
nuclear weapon - an astonishing accusation that the U.S. establishment has
never outright articulated. But just as the Bush administration, without
ever saying it, got Americans to believe that Saddam was behind 9/11, the
powers that be are now doing nothing to dissuade the American public from
these dangerous misconceptions about Iran. Indeed, all the actual
aggressiveness is coming from Washington, in the form of sanctions and
threats, and is directed against the Iranians - not the other way around.
Will the U.S. really go to war with Iran - a nation that has never attacked
America, a nation that offered its support right after 9/11 in the fight
against al Qaeda, a nation that would be even more unconquerable than Iraq
and could become the trip wire for world conflict? Is the government going
to challenge another country when it's already in the middle of more than
two wars with no end in sight? In a normal country, this would be an easier
question to answer.
It is just an accepted fact that the wars and siege mentality must continue,
that we cannot give up the empire lest we
<http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory120.html> surrender to the
terrorists. Instead, we must give away more and more of our freedoms for
which we are supposedly hated. And how much longer can this charade go on?
How much longer will the president be seen as the proper arbiter of life or
death for all people everywhere, the judge, jury and executioner at the top
of the U.S. justice system, with no territorial bounds on his power? How
much longer will we deal with increasing humiliations at the airports, the
rapid militarization of our police, the economy-crushing Pentagon that seems
to double in size every few years, the demonization of Muslims that has
become so commonplace? Will the U.S. be occupying Afghanistan nine years
from now?
And it goes without saying that the U.S. government hasn't even caught
<http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory91.html> Osama bin Laden. Not
that his capture would vindicate the million killed, the trillions
squandered and the liberties smashed in this war. This would be obvious to
people in a normal country.
But the madness will end, eventually. The bad dream that is post-9/11
America must at last give way to something else. If the people don't get
sick of it and demand that it end, or military defeat doesn't do it, the
U.S. empire will simply run out of money. Its days are numbered. It's just
tragic and sickening that many more will die before that happens.
Anthony Gregory [ <mailto:anthony1791@yahoo.com> send him mail] is a
research analyst at the <http://www.independent.org/> Independent
Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See
<http://www.AnthonyGregory.com> his webpage for more articles and personal
information.
Copyright C 2010 by LewRockwell.com.
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