Dysmey Post > Essays > Politics > Ten Years After …
The blue arrow (➤) next to a term is a link that will take you to the appropriate Wikipedia entry.
The title of this essay is a play on the name of a late 1960s/early 1970s English rock band ➤ whose only American hit, I'd Love to Change the World, still gets airplay every so often.
The attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001 I call the Muslim Attacks ➤ because it was Muslims who planned, paid for, and carried out the attacks. It is not relevant whether the name discredits all Muslims, since the attackers did that already. But unless we keep in mind who our enemies are, we will never learn anything from what happened.
I refuse to dignify the mindless loss of our freedoms with the sugarcoating of patriotism. That is why I call the security law passed shortly after the Muslim Attacks the Law of 26 October 2001 ➤, rather than its official but deceptive name. It is the reason most libraries now keep only the most basic records on patrons (and never on what books they read).
The name of the entity, that the Law of 26 October 2001 created, is sugarcoating, too. That is why I call the entity what it is, the Department of Internal Security ➤. It is governmental unit charged with security inside the country, including the brutish airport police. The official name was created only to fog your minds to what it does.
Using the naming of the Plinies (two ancient Roman statemen and authors) as a template, I call the first George Bush (president 1989-1993) Bush the Elder ➤, and his eldest son Bush the Younger (president 2001-2009) ➤. It is unlikely that any other Bush relative will ever serve as president.
This is a republication of a blog entry I posted a year ago. But first, I should explain how I see things.
First, let me repeat what I had written the day after the Muslim Attacks.
First, let me say that there is no such thing as a good or holy war.
Fanatics with dreams of earning a place in paradise, who kill themselves and take as many blameless people as they can, go to Hell. There is no salvation for them. They have thrown themselves away like used wads of toilet paper. Let such as they be remembered as the evil sons of bitches that they are. And let those who cheer the vile acts of these murderers have their suffering grow tenfold!
I stand by that statement still, as I stand by the curse I leveled on the Palestinian Arabs, who cheered and celebrated as the Twin Towers ➤ came crashing down. Let us never forget that.
The destruction of human life, just because one does not like Americans polluting the holy soil of Islam, can only earn the murderers a one-way ticket to Hell. The murderers are still there, writhing in the misery of having been deceived — or, worse, forcing themselves out of pride to refuse to believe that they were deceived — while the deceivers live on, tucked in their hideaways, exalting themselves in the glory of the struggle.
The Americans polluting Islamic holy soil
were tens of thousands of U.S. troops based in Sa'udi Arabia, where the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina are located. Their presence was the original reason for the founding of al-Qa'eda ➤. Those troops were pulled out after the start of the Second Iraqi War; and only a tiny Air Force group remains.
The murderers now have company to share their torment: Their mastermind, Usama bin-Laden ➤, was assassinated earlier this year, joined later by many of his lieutenants.
I also stand by what I said about the World Trade Center: The buildings were ugly monstrosities. If not for the massive loss of life, their destruction would be the best thing that could happen to the New York skyline. Now they are building even worse monstrosities on the site! ➤
We had a reason to invade Afghanistan, true. But we should have left once a new State was founded. More than that, we should have taken out the root cause of the Taliban: Pakistan.
studentsin Arabic.
If we had invaded Pakistan to finish off the Taliban and their backers, we would have been out of South Asia sooner and Pakistan would not be the nuisance it is today.
As for Iraq, we should never have gone in, no matter how many falsehoods Bush the Younger pulled out of his rear orifice. Or, as an alternative, we should have just killed the country's caudillo ➤, Saddam Hussein ➤, and let his successors fight it out for control. The results would have been the same, either way.
It does not matter what excuses are made: We conquered Iraq for its oil and to clean up the mess Bush the Elder left behind in 1990. Those are the reasons we Americans invaded Iraq. But, having invaded and conquered the country, we should not have screwed it up afterwards.
But we did screw up, by dissolving the regular army and the state apparatus. Why? One of the minions of vice-president Dick Cheney ➤, a bureaucrat named Wolfowitz ➤, decided that the Ba'ath Party ➤ is identical to the Nazi Party. And since the soldiers and bureaucrats had to join the Ba'ath Party to get their jobs — out they go! Not only was idea stupid on its face, it forced otherwise-cooperative but now-unemployed soldiers and bureaucrats to become the fighters and organizers of the many guerrilla groups fighting our troops!
Worse, Iraq had become a proxy battleground between the Sa'udi Wahabbists and the Iranian Shi'ites, with our troops caught in the middle of it all.
It is evident that, through the last ten years, the incompetence and pride of our leaders have kept our soldiers in the Middle East, and have striped us of our rights and our freedoms and our prosperity — with our consent and in the name of security.
But what is the most incomprehensive is that Barack Obama, a president elected to end those wars, instead keeps them going. The American people wanted the wars to stop. Obama has refused to do so, choosing instead to buy societal quietude with borrowed money, albeit to different recipients than those of Bush the Younger. And he choses to ignore the coming crisis where those recipients will far outnumber the taxpayers' willingness to pay — and the willingness of foreign investors to buy our government bonds.
Meanwhile, the wars suck money out of our pockets as taxes and as capital otherwise available. This ensures that banks do not lend, businesses do not hire, and Americans do not work. The Great Recession ➤ is the result of these wars, and not just the culmination of over a decade of predatory lending and of finance capitalist chicanery. This legacy of Bush the Younger — whom Obama owes nothing and yet whose policies he insists on keeping — unless they end in the withdrawal of all of our troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, will make Barack Obama the latest in a string of incompetent presidents over the past twenty years, with which the American people have chosen to curse themselves.
