Jumping through the hoops for America's imperialist wars.
Next time you're at the airport… by robertjb
(centrist)
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
It is truly amazing when it comes to the security of the United States the margin for error is an absolute zero. Let there be even one failed terrorist act against the homeland and there is mass panic, security is raised to yet another spellbinding level, politicians give fleeting reassurances, more money is thrown at the problem and millions of air travelers are inconvenienced.
 Nobody seems to consider that as fortress North America is being turned into a police state security ghetto we grant terrorists their victories one after another as even a failed attack cause's great political turmoil, huge public inconvenience, and further millions thrown at an ineffective and dysfunctional security bureaucracy.
 President Obama has been so candid as to state publicly the intelligence ("actionable intelligence") was there to prevent this most recent attempted attack; the failure was to act on it. In spite of government denials at the time, 9/11 was also preventable-the actionable intelligence was there, but there was a failure to co-ordinate and act on it. Then too, the incoming Bush administration ignored the warnings of the outgoing Clinton administration that Al Qaeda was an imminent threat to US security. It also ignored warnings from the Arab world and its own embassies that an attack on the US mainland was imminent.
 It was considered very briefly in the aftermath of 9/11 the way to deal with al Qaeda was not a hot war but covert police work, where the perpetrators were rooted out and brought to justice. The berserk desire for revenge prevailed and some poor forlorn country had to be punished and the designated target was Afghanistan, even though virtually all of the 9/11 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia -but then SA is a coveted US ally. So B-52's rained bombs on Afghanistan, "stirring the rubble" of thirty years of war in that country and allowed Osama Bin Laden with his Al Qaeda followers to escape into Pakistan.
 Nobody wants to make the connection between the indiscriminate use of Predator drones in both Pakistan and Afghanistan as these pilot less remote controlled drones kill off a disproportionate number of innocent civilians-and-explosive packs stitched into men's underwear inbound for Detroit.
While the predator drones kill indiscriminately they are also one of the consummate recruiters for Muslim terrorists who are outraged at the occupation on their homelands and justifiably see these wars as an attack on them-remember too: One man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter.
 We are suffering a pathetic loss of perspective. During the London blitz of WWII there really was cause for fear and panic as the city was bombed nightly with regular loss of life and huge property damage. The enemy really was very formidable and really was a threat to global security. Now the enemy is too a very large degree manufactured, its capabilities exaggerated and our strategies for fighting it exacerbate rather than eliminate the threat. We pummel Third World countries indiscriminately with state of the art military technology and then cry foul when explosives show up in men's underwear. Freedom fighters/terrorists use the weapons available to them, in this instance rude and crude. If we continue to pursue our flagrantly incompetent and deceitful strategies they might just become more determined than ever to get hold of a real bomb, maybe nuclear, then, like the citizens of London, we'd really have something to worry about.    Â
 Nobody wants to consider that the so called War on Terror is really a clever trick to justify what are really imperialist wars. Afghanistan is undeniably one of the world's poorest countries, but as they say in real estate-it has location, location, and location! If you were an imperial power wanting to establish global hegemony and wanting to contain future challengers like say China and Russia, what better place to set up shop than good old Afghanistan. You, of course, claim you have every intention of leaving but in fact you have no intention of leaving. The real intention is too build more military bases in addition to about eight hundred others already straddling the globe.
 The first rule of a deception is that it has to be believable and well managed otherwise it becomes no more than a grotesque distortion of the truth. The War on Terror has now become just that and the truth is hemorrhaging everywhere. It has been horribly managed and too many common sense approaches and alternatives have been suppressed for too long. As we now have bombs in men's underwear this war has gone from pathos to bathos and the war's practitioners become the Keystone Kops.              Â
 Next time you are in an airport line up totally wasted, on your cell phone making apologies for your late arrival, trying to conceive of a way of napping in the upright position, wishing to hell you had packed food and water, try to reassure yourself you are making a "noble" sacrifice as you consider your tax dollars are being pissed away on ill-conceived and dysfunctional security measures. Consider for a moment that sons and daughters are being are being killed off in wars being fought for ulterior motives. Be mindful the suffering here is nothing compared to what is happening over there. The bombs are delivered all too regularly, actually do go off, and actually kill people in significant numbers.
 Consider also, these small regional wars are precipitating another totally unnecessary arms race. They might be mere prelude to larger and nastier real wars. Be heartened, that you, like millions of others, are just another hoop-jumper in America's imperialist wars and ruinous militarism.
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