We’ve tried it the War Party‘s way for about 5 years now, and, with the newest suicide bomb plot, at long last, the ridiculous lie that our enemies are a finite number of “Islamic fascists” who hate us for our freedom has finally finished running its pathetic course. Or has it just received a breath of new life?
The governments of the US and UK are responsible for the deaths of thousands of these “extremists” (and more than a hundred thousand innocent people) so far, and at the rate they’re going, they have about a billion left to go – not because Islam produces terrorists, but because people, no matter who they are, will always fight back against foreign invaders.
Before the U.S. government financed the Mujahedeen resistance to the Soviets in Afghanistan, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and the religious schools in Pakistan, the dominant terrorist factions in the Middle East were secular communists like the PLO.
It has been the deliberate (and in some cases unintentional) policy of the US government (and the Israeli one) to encourage the rise of Islamic political power as a check on the secularists.
There is no bigger or more cynical lie rehearsed by this country’s politicians and TV “experts” today than that the Terroristsâ„¢ are motivated by religious fanaticism and hatred of liberty in our faraway land, unless, perhaps, it’s their assertion that the solution to the problem is more war, more foreign occupation, and more “regime change” throughout the Middle East.
The motivation for terrorist violence was foreign occupation then, and as Robert A. Pape, author of Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, recently explained to interested reporters on the other side of the world from here, it is foreign occupation now. This Wikipedia entry has a good outline of Pape’s study.
To call them “fascists” must simply be the projection of their own guilt onto others. After all, the fascists had states, armies and an economic program. As free-market economist Lew Rockwell points out, fascism,
“a 20th-century scourge, … combines the corporate state, the welfare state, the police state, the national security state, religion, glorification of the military, aggressive war, hatred of the other, state control of the culture, education, and the media, political centralization, the leader principle, and the rhetoric of fear and belligerent nationalism. Now, who does that sound like?”
America’s enemies in the Middle East, as even George W. Bush himself correctly noted once when his regular speechwriters were out sick, are “more like a loose network with many branches than an army.”
Are we to believe that this “loose network” maintains discipline among its members simply by ridiculing American culture and promising its recruits a bonus heaven?
Our “leaders” know good and well that this is a lie and that the solution to stateless terrorist groups like al-Qaeda is to treat the individuals like criminals: arrest them, try them and imprison them, while at the same time stopping the unjust policies that are motivating their actions.
(Yes, unjust. How would you like it if all the Arab countries propped up a Bush family kingdom in the U.S., controlled our markets, stationed thousands of troops at bases across the country, and paid billions to, say, the Dutch, so their government could commit acts of terrorism and wage aggressive war to steal the old “Oregon Country” from the U.S.A.?)
Waging war and killing innocents is counterproductive. It only helps to persuade people that the Wahhabist crazy down the block has been right all along – in the very same way that reasonable, educated adults in this country turned to a bunch of former followers of Soviet Red Army founder Leon Trotsky to tell them what to think after September 11th – and have yet to turn back.
Nearly every actual victory in the “war on terror” since September 11th has been accomplished not by the military, but by cops – mostly Pakistani ones.
Both Osama bin Laden and his right-hand man, the former leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are still free and podcasting from the Hindu Kush today, while untold innocents have lost their lives in the wars fought in the name of avenging their deeds.
When the CIA begged Tommy Franks to let the Marines finish off bin Laden at the infamous battle of Tora Bora, he refused.
The cops walked right in to Khalid Sheikh Mohammad’s apartment in Karachi and arrested him. The same was true of al Qaeda’s resident computer genius who was turned into a valuable informant … until he was outed by the publicity-seeking Bush administration during the Democrat’s political convention in 2004.
Now we have this story about a plot to bomb multiple airliners over the Atlantic Ocean. The national government of this country has lied about terrorist plots so many times since 9/11, that the whole damn Department of Justice ought to be in prison. I know of no reason – so far – to expect this one is anything but more cries of wolf from the same liars.
Of course, Bush has already moved to exploit it as proof that we need more more war and that his political opponents aren’t tough enough.
If it turns out that this was a real plot, what is their motive? Freedom-hatred, virgins in heaven or US foreign policy?
Who found them out, cops or soldiers?
Should we invade Pakistan now? How about the UK?
Are we really better off giving up our freedom to the state which is creating our enemies for us, or would it make more sense for the people of the US and UK to take their security as their own responsibility?
This just in: The US government is now shipping an emergency order of cluster bombs to the government of Israel.
Imagine being thrown in Saddam’s imaginary human shredder, only with really, really hot blades. Now imagine a billion Muslims imagining that. Now you know why they hate us.
The truth is that terrorism is good for our government. They love it. It only helps them to justify expanding their own power while the population defers to them out of fear – and gets accustomed to doing so. Israel and the neocons get their Clean Break, cops get to run around with their camouflage and MP-5 machine guns, the oil companies get to keep the prices artificially high, and the bomb makers and those who rebuild what they bomb get to loot the treasury for hundreds of billions of dollars. This is why every attempt by Shi’ite Iran to cooperate with the United States in the fight against al-Qaeda has been thwarted while we threaten war against them instead – exactly as Osama bin Laden wants.
As long as we live in a country where a third of the population can’t even remember what year the casus belli took place, it only seems likely to get worse.
Update: The Independent: “It has also emerged that there was a police informer working closely with the plotters.”
I am shocked.
