When Will The Bad Dream End? By Anthony Gregory
(2010-10-09 at 19:27:09 )

When Will the Bad Dream End? By Anthony Gregory

In a normal country, war is front-page news. It is a big deal to invade
and bomb another nation. Most of the worlds 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, 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 is not now. Its imperial foreign policy has long made it
special, and now that it is the worlds 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 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 have seen the housing market boom and bust. We have
seen, according to the hyperbolic media, our nations 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 have had children or passed away. Kids
have grown from losing their baby teeth to taking their SATs. We have
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 have
seen the Republicans capture the federal legislature and then lose it all
again. We have seen both parties undergo significant rhetorical makeovers.

But one thing that has not 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 Irans government in 1953, installed a dictator and taught his
goons how to torture. The U.S. backed Saddam and his ilk from the late
1950s 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 is 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 Tehrans 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 is 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 is 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 is 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
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 percent of Americans cheered the invasion of
Afghanistan. Now many on the left think it was folly, but the U.S. can
not pull out. Or they are quiet because their Beloved President is now
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
would 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 is 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 is the big deal? Even
conservatives who think Obama a totalitarian tyrant do not 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.

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 70 percent 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 is
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 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 has not even caught
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 do not get
sick of it and demand that it end, or military defeat does not do it, the
U.S. empire will simply run out of money. Its days are numbered. It is
just tragic and sickening that many more will die before that happens.

September 11, 2010

Anthony Gregory is a research analyst at the Independent Institute. He
lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and
personal information.

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