Since the beginning of the unconstitutional "war on terror"(and perhaps the time before 9/11), U.S. military adventurism into the Middle East has made the problem of terrorism worse, not better. Explains Anthony Gregory in a blog for the Independent Institute: "Obama’s war is actually empowering al-Qaeda, as the terrorist group is reportedly looting weaponry from Libyan rebels. This is in addition to the fact that U.S.-supported rebels themselves have admitted to having ties to al-Qaeda. This would make the undeclared war in Libya only the latest to benefit America’s no. 1 terrorist enemy. The Iraq war, according to many experts, was a great boon for al-Qaeda, which used the massive U.S. military presence as a recruiting tool. There were practically none of these people in Iraq until after the U.S. invaded."
This situation in Libya, along with the failures of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan clearly demonstrates that U.S. interventionism, especially in the Middle East creates blowback. Blowback is a term that describes the unintended consequences of military interventionism overseas. One of the worst forms of blowback is terrorism, especially suicide terrorism. The 9/11 attacks are a clear example of blowback.
Many Americans, especially neoconservatives, will rationalize that the 9/11 attacks came out of nowhere and that the 9/11 terrorists attacked us because they "hate our freedom, our culture, our way of life." Congressman Ron Paul once remarked that "To dismiss terrorism as the result of Muslims hating us because we're rich and free is one of the greatest foreign-policy frauds ever perpetrated on the American people."
Jacob Hornberger notes that "the 9/11 terrorists did not attack New York and Washington because of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, or any other religion. They attacked because they were retaliating for the horrible things that the U.S. government had done to people in the Middle East, most of whom happen to have been Muslims."
Hornberger further explains the reasons (which Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda stated themselves) why the United States was attacked on 9/11:
Well, how about the intentional and deliberate killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. If you want to read the sordid details on how that took place, go to this page on The Future of Freedom Foundation’s website or, better yet, purchase and read a copy of Joy Gordon’s new book Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions.
The U.S. Empire killed those kids with one of the most brutal systems of economic sanctions in history. Since 99 percent of the population of Iraq is Muslim, the odds are that 99 percent of those dead Iraqi children were Muslim.
Now, that’s not to say that the U.S. government killed those children because they were Muslim. It’s simply to say that the kids they killed in Iraq were Muslims.
Why did they kill those children? Because they hoped that Saddam Hussein would leave office rather than continue to watch his own people die from the sanctions. They were using the Iraqi children as the means by which to pressure him into relinquishing power in favor of a U.S.-approved ruler.
The strategy didn’t work. Saddam let the children die, as did the U.S. government, year after year after year....Adding fuel to the fire was the U.S. government’s unconditional flow of foreign-aid largess to the Israeli government; the stationing of U.S. troops, most of whom had to have been Christians and Jews, on the holiest lands in the Muslim religion--Mecca and Medina; and the illegal no-fly zones that were being used to kill even more Iraqis.
Given that the foreign policy of the United States in the Middle East is based on this program of stationing troops in Middle East territory, toppling certain leaders while installing others, giving Middle Eastern tyrants American taxpayer dollars through foreign aid, strengthening and supporting authoritarian regimes that oppress their people, bombing, invading, and occupying Arab countries, one can easily understand the motive many Muslims have at trying to attack and kill Americans. Of course I am not justifying the terrible things that terrorists or insurgents do to American citizens, soldiers and property. I am merely stating the reasons why so many Muslims hate the United States and their motivations for wanting to attack the United States and its' citizens.
Anthony Gregory further describes our irrational foreign adventurism in the Middle East:
And although the Afghanistan war is widely seen as an anti-al-Qaeda war (it continues on with the rationale that the 100 or so members of the terror group who still reside in that country need to be wiped out, at a cost of about 1,000 U.S. troops and $300 million annually per al-Qaeda fighter) even in Afghanistan, the U.S. response to 9/11 has probably been in al-Qaeda’s interests. As Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA bin Laden Unit argues in his book Imperial Hubris, the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan was always a completely counterproductive strategy in stopping terrorism, since the major way bin Laden rallied material support and manpower for his crusade against America was by pointing out the U.S. occupations of Muslim countries, these occupations being the main impetus behind the terrorism in the first place...Osama bin Laden is dead, but he is still winning his war. This was all part of his plan, after all. He wanted the U.S. out of the Muslim lands in the very long run. But to achieve this, he knew America would have to bleed itself dry, and that this could never happen at the hands of Muslim suicide killers alone. Instead, the U.S. would have to overstretch its military forces and pour trillions of dollars of resources into a completely futile attempt to “democratize” the Middle East and stamp out terrorists in the most ineffective and profligate manner imaginable. Getting the imperial forces bogged down in a sand trap in Afghanistan worked in defeating the Soviets. Maybe it could work against the Americans. This was the whole idea.
And now it appears that a war in Yemen has emerged, almost out of the blue. The New York Times reported the following: "Central Intelligence Agency is building a secret air base in the Middle East to serve as a launching pad for strikes in Yemen using armed drones, an American official said Tuesday.
The construction of the base is a sign that the Obama administration is planning an extended war in Yemen against an affiliate of Al Qaeda that has repeatedly tried to carry out terrorist plots against the United States." Anthony Gregory further explained the reason for the shoebomber plot back in December of 2009: "Wasn’t Yemen implicated in the (foiled) shoebomber plot of Christmas 2009? In fact, history didn’t begin then, either. Eight days before that terror plot fizzled, the U.S. bombed Yemen, using cluster bombs (those weapons that are so evil when Gaddafi uses them but which the U.S. government has long embraced in its wars), killing dozens of civilians, including 21 children. At the time, this was falsely reported as a bombing conducted by Yemeni security forces, as the Yemeni and American governments agreed to deceive their populations about who was behind them. A month later Obama lied, saying he had no intention of sending U.S. troops there, when some were already there."
Bruce Fein, author of the book American Empire: Before the Fall (an absolute must read for all patriots), quotes Joseph Schumpeter about the essence of empire and imperialism, an essence that seems to permeate U.S. foreign policy, especially in the Middle East:
For it is always a question, when one speaks of imperialism, of the assertion of an aggressiveness whose real basis does not lie in the aims followed at the moment but an aggressiveness in itself. And actually history shows us people and classes who desire expansion for the sake of expanding, war for the sake of fighting, domination for the sake of dominating. It values conquest not so much because of the advantages it brings, which are often more than doubtful, as because it is conquest, success, activity. Although expansion as self-purpose always needs concrete objects to activate it and support it, its meaning is not included therein. Hence its tendency toward the infinite unto the exhaustion of its forces, and its motto: plus ultra. Thus we define: Imperialism is the object-less disposition of a state to expansion by force without assigned limits.Our analysis of historical material show[s]: First, the undoubted fact that object-less tendencies toward forceful expansion without definite limits of purpose, nonrational and irrational, purely instinctive inclinations to war and conquest, play a very great role in the history of humanity. As paradoxical as it sounds, innumerable wars, perhaps the majority of all wars, have been waged without sufficient reason.
In order to stop aiding Al-Qaeda through our foreign policy, the United States government must terminate all these wars in the Middle East, bring our troops home, and defend this country from genuine threats (which are almost nonexistent). The current U.S. foreign policy of interventionism and perpetual war has done more harm than good. As Congressman Ron Paul stated: "It is time to consider a sensible non-interventionist foreign policy as advised by our Founders and authorized by our Constitution. We would all be better off for it."
No comments:
Post a Comment