Based on facts and not posturing, the greatest damage to the United States over the past decade has been done by its politicians and their embedded media rather than Al Qaeda and similar groups. For example:
- During this period the United States government has not taken a single significant step to reduce hostility towards it in the Muslim world, thereby serving as a continuous de facto recruiting tool for Al Qaeda et al. After all, the best way to reduce the appeal of the most extreme is to meet the concerns of the most rational.
- Excessive spending for unnecessary and counterproductive military conflict has done far more damage to the country's fiscal state than Al Qaeda could even imagine.
- The dismantling of the Constitution and the steady drift towards a police state damages our safety or freedoms, and supports the arguments of Al Qaeda et al.
- Finally, and hardly ever mentioned, the US government has been over three times more deadly to its citizens due to its policies than has Al Qaeda and similar groups. In addition, as this rare and remarkable 2009 chart by Stephen Walt in Foreign Policy illustrates, we have also killed over a quarter million Muslims, hardly a good approach to a safer America.
4 comments:
No. Meeting the "needs of the most rational" is to submit to Saudi Arabia and become an Islamic state. Nothing at all irrational about that. It works very well for them, as long as you believe against all evidence in the myth of "asymmetrical" warfare and continue to pander to Saudi clients. Saudi Arabia is the inexhaustible source of money and control for international terrorism. The only asymmetry is that they continue to be at war with us and we refuse to go to war with them.
To kill the snake, you must cut off its head.
I disagree. America is not a threat to itself. The threat is that the Elite (i.e. the 1%) have a different value reckoning system than the rest of the populace. I doubt they even consider themselves Americans. The specious wars enrich them as it drains our treasury, wastes our precious young (i.e. the soldiers lost in combat), kills innocent foreign civilians and foments ill will for Americans worldwide. No matter, their accounts bulge with loot. And regards the Constitution, they have no concern for it: they trust in money and the influence and "justice" it can buy. Only the poor need a Constitution. The rich and powerful provide for their own civil protection, much as they provide for their physical protection in gated subdivisions.
Frankly, we will continue with this scenario until the majority of us have nothing left to lose. Then, maybe, we will put an end to this vile arrangement. All we can hope is that it won't be too late.
Why do they make still more gigantic planes, still heavier bombs and, at the same time, prefabricated houses for reconstruction? Why should millions be spent daily on the war and yet there's not a penny available for medical services, artists or for poor people?
Why do some people have to starve, while there are surpluses rotting in other parts of the world? Oh, why are people so crazy?
I don't believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone, are guilty of the war. Oh no, the little man is just as guilty, otherwise the peoples of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There's in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated, and grown will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again.
-- Anne Frank, May 3, 1944
So true. The American fantasy that we are God's chosen people blinds us to our weaknesses, a guttering mass education "system", a mass entertainment system that itself erodes true values,indeed has virtually displaced the failing public schools. Racism is revealing its only temporarily hidden acculturation as the displaced, offshored middle class decides to blame the bottom feeding blacks for their painful losses. We've been faking crucial yalues, e.g."With Freedom and Justice for all", with the largest incarceration in human history, in which blacks and browns selling dope go to jail and their white suburban clients smoke with impunity. It will not be easy for a culture that was based until yesterday on red genocide and black (and, increasingly, brown) slavery to learn how to live according to its putative ideals. As a professor of American Lit I used to tell my students that a people who don't read their great writers inevitably lose their minds. More and more Americans are culturally crazy. The Chinese used to say "You can't carve rotten wood". Even if you wanted to try! Most don't give a hoot or a holler anyway. Patrick D.Hazard,Weimar, Germany.
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