As we look over today's American landscape, what do we see? We see a nation strained by giving all the commonwealth's money to its military industrial complex and Wall Street through "privatization" while its main street suffers. We see a nation that has squandered its defining concepts of a nation "By the People For the People" and liberty and justice for all for concepts of "unitary executive", signing statements, and military conquest. We see a nation of war and "security" profiteers, "global war on terrorism" and the concepts of global hegemony with a forced strident Friedman school of economics and Grover Norquist. We see a nation where people inside and outside government participate in the nuclear black market of the Middle East and Central Asia, international terrorism, money laundering, and the global heroin trade as revealed in the case of F.B.I. whistleblower Sibel Edmonds ( http://letsibeledmondsspeak.blogspot.com/ / , http://www.justacitizen.com/ / ). How in the world did we get to this state of affairs?
It all appears it began in earnest when Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter, came up with a plan to give the Soviet Union their "Vietnam", a long lasting quagmire to weaken them. This would be acheived by arming the mujahadeen fighters in Afghanistan to create civil disturbance for the Soviet backed government there. Thus the journey began in earnest and invariably has led us to today where it has become our lasting quagmire and quite possibly, with all the turmoil now in in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, our declining moment as it was originally for the Soviet Union. I wrote in September of 2007 in MMonk's Journal a piece about terrorism and foreign policy I think bears repeating.
Understanding terrorism as policy construct, oil, and why we are in Iraq.
In 1979, a group of powerful people from various countries gathered together in Jerusalem to promote the idea of "international terrorism" as a sort of policy construct. It was a forum set up by Benjamin Netanyahu and was officially known as the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism. The idea was originally formulated to blame terrorist activities on the Soviet Union as a continual pretext to protect the free enterprise areas of the world dominated by U.S. based multi-national corporations from being taken over by host states as national companies. Some prominent attendees were as follows; George Bush Sr., Ray S. Cline (former Deputy Director for Intelligence at the CIA), Henry M. Jackson (Sen. from Washington State), Richard Pipes (professor and Russian expert in Reagan's Security Council), Sir Hugh Fraser (Conservative MP and former British Undersecretary of State for Colonies), Paul Johnson (former editor of New Statesman), Maj. General Schlomo Gazit (former military intelligence chief of Israel), Lt. Gen Aharon Gazit (Israel), Shimon Perez, Manachem Begin, and Benzion Netanyahu (Cornell University professor emeritus) among others. Interestingly enough, operations of the US helping the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan in an attempt to get the Soviet Union to step into a quagmire and experience their “Vietnam” was underway.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, many thought there could be a peace dividend. Many in the pentagon and the state department had another idea. The US was the remaining super power, and thus with the collapse of the soviet union, there didn’t have to be any more constraints on US policy. This they thought, meant the US could control the world and its economies with its 700+ military bases around the world. Any who opposed this American run world could be dealt with without serious consequence as such was the thinking. The pentagon had always thought that if the US could control central Asia and the Middle East, it could control the energy resources of the world. Hence the real reason of why we are where we are today.
Any doubters need only take a look at the Bremer “orders” implemented after the invasion of Iraq. It is very clear and probably why the compliant media doesn’t discuss such things. Examples are as follows: Order 1-deBathification , Order 2- Dissolve the Iraqi military and intelligence apparatus, Order 12 and Order 54- Trade Liberalization, Order 14 -Prohibited media activity, Order17 -Contractor and military immunity from Iraqi laws, Order 37 and 49- Replace progressive tax system with flat tax system, Order 40 and 94- Iraqi banking open to foreign ownership, Order 62 -Bremer to determine who could run for office, Order 65 Iraqi Communications and Media Commission appointed by Bremer, Order 57 and 77-place American representatives in key decision making positions in the government ministries, Order 80, 81, and 83 Rewrote Iraq’s patent, trademark, and copy write laws. But the most obvious is Order 39. Provision-1, privatization, Provision 2-100 percent Foreign Ownership of Iraqi Businesses, Provision 3 National treatment of foreign investment, Provision-4 Unrestricted Repatriation of Profits for Foreign Investors, Provision 5-Forty Year Leases of Iraqi Real Estate by Foreign Entities and Provision 6 Disputes could be settled in international tribunals instead of Iraqi Courts.
This is, of course why we are over there. This is not the common cry of the followers of the right that we are there so we don’t have to fight them over here. Americans must push for their politicians to come clean. No more talk about a “war on terrorism” or if we left there would be chaos.
Sources
The Bush Agenda. Invading The World One Economy at a Time by Antonia Juhasz
The War on Truth. 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed.
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/mmonk/26
Saturday, February 2, 2008
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