While many Americans believe war in the Middle East was catalyzed by the attacks of September 11th, 2001, the true origin of this story is the same as every other story concerning the American Empire: it began with the closure of the Second World War. America declared the dollar the reserve currency of the world, eventually beat the Soviets (while they beat themselves) in the Cold War, and established a global hegemony. In the Middle East, this has meant various partnerships with various leaderships over time, our most prominent being Israel, a country our own government helped to bring into existence in 1948. We have been sending money and weapons to Middle Eastern political groups ever since.
While the latter half of the 20th century is indeed important for laying the groundwork (we armed anti-Soviet Afghans in the 1980s, for example, and bombed Iraq an average of three to four times a week during Bill Clinton’s Presidency), this book focuses mainly on the years after September 11th. There is no doubt that it was President George W. Bush’s War on Terror that escalated our presence: at its height, the U.S. had more than 100,000 troops in Afghanistan and 160,000 in Iraq. So, why did we go to war? What exactly was our mission in the Middle East? Were we successful? How do we measure?
The obvious reason we went to war in Afghanistan was to get Osama bin Laden, the man who organized the 9/11 attacks against us. However, it turns out this wasn’t quite true: Delta forces and the CIA had bin Laden cornered in Tora Bora, an eastern province of Afghanistan, in December of 2001. Then-Marine General James Mattis (later the secretary of defense under President Donald Trump) was among the various military leaders who were all denied permission by Washington to take bin Laden out. Why would American politicians let him escape to Pakistan? Because they needed a target, a bad guy, to keep up American support for the war. Additionally, what was the reason given for sending troops to Iraq? Because, according to the Bush administration, Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. It turns out this was also a lie: the truth was that our government wanted him dead for other reasons, and likewise used him as a bad guy to gin up further support for military actions in the region. Once Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were killed, the U.S. needed a different reason to remain in the area, and the political talking point became squashing al Qaeda wherever they sprang up. This wasn’t true either, evidenced by the fact that the U.S. funded al Qaeda groups in Syria (and other countries) when they were fighting against regimes they wanted to topple.
These facts and stories have since been brought to light in the media— they are the known wars, the known fights, the known bombing campaigns. What our author reveals, to the reader’s horror, is that Afghanistan and Iraq barely scratch the surface of American meddling in the Middle East. Since 2001, America has dropped a bomb or placed a boot in every country in the region including Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Kuwait, Jordan, Yemen, Lebanon, Qatar, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Sudan, Niger, and Mali, and the list almost certainly goes on.
“The drone program is probably the most potent recruiting tool that foreign terrorist groups have,” former CIA officer John Kiriakou explains in the book: “I can tell you that I interrogated dozens of al Qaeda fighters in my CIA years, and to a man they all said that they had no beef with the United States, they had no personal problem with the United States, until we rocketed their villages with drones, and we killed their cousin or their parents or their brother and sister or whatever it was—and they were compelled to take up arms against the United States.” When the Bush administration started the war on terror, there were around 400 al Qaeda fighters hiding in rural Afghanistan. Now, there are thousands spread throughout the entire Middle East.
Not only has al Qaeda grown stronger, but the terrorist organization ISIS has come into existence as a result of U.S. military actions in the area. In 2014, led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ISIS rolled from Syria into Iraq (with American weapons given to Syrian fighters to fight their government) and sacked every city west of Baghdad. Al-Baghdadi then declared himself ruler of the new Islamic Caliphate, a landmass encompassing provinces of eastern Syria and western Iraq, an area larger than Great Britain. He could never have gained this level of power without the assistance of the United States in the hands of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
According to his secretary of defense Robert M. Gates, “President Obama said that his decision to start the war in Libya was ’51 to 49’ percent, with Secretary Clinton pushing him over the line.” Basically, he went to war with a foreign nation (killing thousands of innocent people) because his ‘friends’ told him to. Obama also authorized support for the Saudi bombing campaign in Yemen, a coalition that has “launched 18,000 strikes by the fall of 2018, ‘one-third of which have hit non-military targets,’ according to Frank McManus of the International Rescue Committee.” Hundreds of thousands have died, with millions still in dire need of help, a humanitarian crisis that rivals some of the largest in history. While George W. Bush started three new wars, Barack Obama started six. Trump may not have started any, but he also didn’t end any either.
With the advent and advancement of these wars and bombing campaigns, America now has more enemies around the globe than ever before. Democracy and freedom are shrinking from the face of the planet with no foreseeable end to the violence and authoritarianism. We have also greatly weakened ourselves, for war necessitates funding, funding requires taxing the populace, taxes mean debt, and debt is fundamentally antithetical to liberty (war is one of the main cause of the dollar’s inflation). As James Madison, the principal author of the Constitution, once wrote: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
The real assault on our freedom began when Congress passed the Patriot Act right after the September 11th attacks, a bill authorizing the National Security Agency to illegally spy on American citizens. Bush also created CIA ‘ghost prisons’ and ‘black sites’ in countries like Poland, Romania, Morocco, and most famously Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where countless ‘terrorists’ have been tortured and held indefinitely. His government, led by Vice President Dick Cheney along with his lawyer and advisor David Addington, made it deliberate policy to “push against the Constitution’s constraints on the president’s powers until ‘some larger force makes us stop,’ as Addington told White House lawyer Jack Goldsmith.” Cheney and his lawyers introduced the ‘unitary executive’ theory of power which holds that in wartime, the ‘commander-in-chief’ clause of Article II grants the president ‘inherent’ and ‘plenary’ power which allows him to override any law, treaty or even other parts of the Constitution in order to wage war in any way he sees fit, even without an official declaration of war made by Congress. Ostensibly, Congress represents the will of the people, so this move by Bush and Cheney took power away from the people and gave it to the President. Again, this is antithetical to liberty.
As America (and the West) has become more and more involved in the scattered politics of the Middle East, we have become weak at home. Our returning soldiers are wrecked, our treasury is depleted, and the target on our backs is larger than ever. While our politicians continue to propagandize the populace with words about the fight for freedom and democracy, we have in actuality become the bad guy, the evil empire hellbent on global domination and absolute power. George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, once mentioned this in an interview, equating his Hollywood heroes with the rag-tag Vietnamese people fighting off the American empire on their own soil in the 60s and 70s (the first Star Wars film premiered in 1977). This story has played out in analogous fashion in the Middle East. Osama bin Laden once warned that “The U.S. government will lead the American people—and the West in general—into an unbearable hell and a choking life,” and he was absolutely right. He opened the door to hell, and our power hungry politicians and members of the military industrial complex walked right in, thanking him as they did. We have not yet received the bill, but the future of this country, and the Western world in general, will be a story of regular people paying the price for the war crimes of our political and elite class.
Enough already, it’s time to stop the War on Terror.
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