[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Sign-in] [Mail] [Setup] [Help] [Register]
Status: Not Logged In; Sign In
|
9/11 See other 9/11 Articles Title: Terrorized by 'War on Terror' How a Three-Word Mantra Has Undermined America The "war on terror" has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration's elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy, on America's psyche and on U.S. standing in the world. Using this phrase has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us. The damage these three words have done -- a classic self-inflicted wound -- is infinitely greater than any wild dreams entertained by the fanatical perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks when they were plotting against us in distant Afghan caves. The phrase itself is meaningless. It defines neither a geographic context nor our presumed enemies. Terrorism is not an enemy but a technique of warfare -- political intimidation through the killing of unarmed non-combatants. But the little secret here may be that the vagueness of the phrase was deliberately (or instinctively) calculated by its sponsors. Constant reference to a "war on terror" did accomplish one major objective: It stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear. Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue. The war of choice in Iraq could never have gained the congressional support it got without the psychological linkage between the shock of 9/11 and the postulated existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Support for President Bush in the 2004 elections was also mobilized in part by the notion that "a nation at war" does not change its commander in chief in midstream. The sense of a pervasive but otherwise imprecise danger was thus channeled in a politically expedient direction by the mobilizing appeal of being "at war." To justify the "war on terror," the administration has lately crafted a false historical narrative that could even become a self-fulfilling prophecy. By claiming that its war is similar to earlier U.S. struggles against Nazism and then Stalinism (while ignoring the fact that both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were first-rate military powers, a status al-Qaeda neither has nor can achieve), the administration could be preparing the case for war with Iran. Such war would then plunge America into a protracted conflict spanning Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and perhaps also Pakistan. The culture of fear is like a genie that has been let out of its bottle. It acquires a life of its own -- and can become demoralizing. America today is not the self-confident and determined nation that responded to Pearl Harbor; nor is it the America that heard from its leader, at another moment of crisis, the powerful words "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"; nor is it the calm America that waged the Cold War with quiet persistence despite the knowledge that a real war could be initiated abruptly within minutes and prompt the death of 100 million Americans within just a few hours. We are now divided, uncertain and potentially very susceptible to panic in the event of another terrorist act in the United States itself. That is the result of five years of almost continuous national brainwashing on the subject of terror, quite unlike the more muted reactions of several other nations (Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany, Japan, to mention just a few) that also have suffered painful terrorist acts. In his latest justification for his war in Iraq, President Bush even claims absurdly that he has to continue waging it lest al-Qaeda cross the Atlantic to launch a war of terror here in the United States. Such fear-mongering, reinforced by security entrepreneurs, the mass media and the entertainment industry, generates its own momentum. The terror entrepreneurs, usually described as experts on terrorism, are necessarily engaged in competition to justify their existence. Hence their task is to convince the public that it faces new threats. That puts a premium on the presentation of credible scenarios of ever-more-horrifying acts of violence, sometimes even with blueprints for their implementation. That America has become insecure and more paranoid is hardly debatable. A recent study reported that in 2003, Congress identified 160 sites as potentially important national targets for would-be terrorists. With lobbyists weighing in, by the end of that year the list had grown to 1,849; by the end of 2004, to 28,360; by 2005, to 77,769. The national database of possible targets now has some 300,000 items in it, including the Sears Tower in Chicago and an Illinois Apple and Pork Festival. Just last week, here in Washington, on my way to visit a journalistic office, I had to pass through one of the absurd "security checks" that have proliferated in almost all the privately owned office buildings in this capital -- and in New York City. A uniformed guard required me to fill out a form, show an I.D. and in this case explain in writing the purpose of my visit. Would a visiting terrorist indicate in writing that the purpose is "to blow up the building"? Would the guard be able to arrest such a self-confessing, would-be suicide bomber? To make matters more absurd, large department stores, with their crowds of shoppers, do not have any comparable procedures. Nor do concert halls or movie theaters. Yet such "security" procedures have become routine, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and further contributing to a siege mentality. Government at every level has stimulated the paranoia. Consider, for example, the electronic billboards over interstate highways urging motorists to "Report Suspicious Activity" (drivers in turbans?). Some mass media have made their own contribution. The cable channels and some print media have found that horror scenarios attract audiences, while terror "experts" as "consultants" provide authenticity for the apocalyptic visions fed to the American public. Hence the proliferation of programs with bearded "terrorists" as the central villains. Their general effect is to reinforce the sense of the unknown but lurking danger that is said to increasingly threaten the lives of all Americans. The entertainment industry has also jumped into the act. Hence the TV serials and films in which the evil characters have recognizable Arab features, sometimes highlighted by religious gestures, that exploit public anxiety and stimulate Islamophobia. Arab facial stereotypes, particularly in newspaper cartoons, have at times been rendered in a manner sadly reminiscent of the Nazi anti-Semitic campaigns. Lately, even some college student organizations have become involved in such propagation, apparently oblivious to the menacing connection between the stimulation of racial and religious hatreds and the unleashing of the unprecedented crimes of the Holocaust. The atmosphere generated by the "war on terror" has encouraged legal and political harassment of Arab Americans (generally loyal Americans) for conduct that has not been unique to them. A case in point is the reported harassment of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) for its attempts to emulate, not very successfully, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Some House Republicans recently described CAIR members as "terrorist apologists" who should not be allowed to use a Capitol meeting room for a panel discussion. Social discrimination, for example toward Muslim air travelers, has also been its unintended byproduct. Not surprisingly, animus toward the United States even among Muslims otherwise not particularly concerned with the Middle East has intensified, while America's reputation as a leader in fostering constructive interracial and interreligious relations has suffered egregiously. The record is even more troubling in the general area of civil rights. The culture of fear has bred intolerance, suspicion of foreigners and the adoption of legal procedures that undermine fundamental notions of justice. Innocent until proven guilty has been diluted if not undone, with some -- even U.S. citizens -- incarcerated for lengthy periods of time without effective and prompt access to due process. There is no known, hard evidence that such excess has prevented significant acts of terrorism, and convictions for would-be terrorists of any kind have been few and far between. Someday Americans will be as ashamed of this record as they now have become of the earlier instances in U.S. history of panic by the many prompting intolerance against the few. In the meantime, the "war on terror" has gravely damaged the United States internationally. For Muslims, the similarity between the rough treatment of Iraqi civilians by the U.S. military and of the Palestinians by the Israelis has prompted a widespread sense of hostility toward the United States in general. It's not the "war on terror" that angers Muslims watching the news on television, it's the victimization of Arab civilians. And the resentment is not limited to Muslims. A recent BBC poll of 28,000 people in 27 countries that sought respondents' assessments of the role of states in international affairs resulted in Israel, Iran and the United States being rated (in that order) as the states with "the most negative influence on the world." Alas, for some that is the new axis of evil! The events of 9/11 could have resulted in a truly global solidarity against extremism and terrorism. A global alliance of moderates, including Muslim ones, engaged in a deliberate campaign both to extirpate the specific terrorist networks and to terminate the political conflicts that spawn terrorism would have been more productive than a demagogically proclaimed and largely solitary U.S. "war on terror" against "Islamo-fascism." Only a confidently determined and reasonable America can promote genuine international security which then leaves no political space for terrorism. Where is the U.S. leader ready to say, "Enough of this hysteria, stop this paranoia"? Even in the face of future terrorist attacks, the likelihood of which cannot be denied, let us show some sense. Let us be true to our traditions. Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, is the author most recently of "Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower" (Basic Books).
Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: Eoghan (#0)
Damn. Has Zbig had an epiphany or something? Great thoughts.
Zig contributed mightly to the warfare/welfare state that Bush has merely built upon. This natural progression of it to outright tyranny is what Zig sees now- and what he and many of his ilk denied was happening for 40 years. It's good to see him recognize this but at the same time I can't help but feel he is about 40 years late to the party. But better late than never I guess.
Yeah, and I'm disappointed (not surprised) to see that Zbig continues the propaganda about the "....plotting against us in distant Afghan caves.
It's exactly what they intended. They knew we would overreact, go to war, lose a trillion dollars, lose thousands of dead and wounded, clamp down on freedoms at home -- and ultimately have to withdraw from the Muslim world. And the idiots in the U.S. government fell right into this all-too-obvious trap.
"The urge to do good cannot be countered with reason."
Oh- that is mandatory. The parameters of debate must be adherred to or you are a "kook" and dismissed and not given a platform in the MSM. You first have to acknowledge the falsehood that "we" are in "real danger" from terrorists when discussing this nonsense. The fiction that AQ is a real organization somewhere out there- tightly organized- seemingly a hydra that is always being "defeated" but never vanquished- must be bowed to by all "serious" pundits. In reality- while AQ must be the most talked about and mentioned "terrorist" organization in history- what we really know about this group- concrete hard facts- quantitative measurements and "metrics"- wouldn't fill a pamphlet. Never has so much been said about something with nothing actually ever really being said.
The media's and politicians' elevation of the word "democracy" into a national mantra has had a pernicious impact on the American REPUBLIC...
#7. To: All (#0) Zbigniew Brzezinski writes about the ‘war on terror’. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is for Americans to understand that the entire concept is Israeli, invented by Israeli strategists, and promulgated mainly by Benjamin Netanyahu (and his agents working within the highest levels of the American government), to provide a rationale for the peculiar against-interest continued American sponsorship of Israel after the fall of the Soviet Union (sponsorship needed for Israel to continue to build its empire after the loss of the concept of Israel as the bulwark in the Middle East against Soviet influence). Brzezinski is aware of this, or course, but can’t say it, although you can get hints of what he is talking about by the Islamophobia examples that he gives. There were terrorist attacks in the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s, but nobody thought about responding with a ‘war on terror’. The concept is absurd. You fight wars against countries. We’re told that a bunch of guys, mostly Saudis, directed by a fellow closely associated with the Saudi power elites, attacked the United States. What is the response? The United States attacked Afghanistan, the whole country, because the guy the FBI claims directed the attack was living in a cave somewhere there! Before the concept of the ‘war on terror’ was invented by the Israeli right this would have been regarded as sheer lunacy, but Americans swallowed the whole thing. At the time, many people made the sane suggestion that, since the terrorist attacks were a criminal act, the appropriate response would be to send some FBI agents to Afghanistan to conduct an investigation, find the guilty parties, apprehend them, and bring them back for trial (had the United States asked nicely the Taliban would have consented to this). Instead, the United States decided to fight a war – a war which it and its allies are losing rather badly – in order to clear the way to place some pipelines and prepare the intellectual climate in the United States for the war that was really the main neocon agenda item, the attack on Iraq. The assassination of JFK contained big pointers leading you to think that either Cuba or the Soviet Union was behind the crime. These pointers were all bogus, manufactured by whoever planned the murder. The idea was to leave options open for a right-wing goal of attacking either the Soviet Union or Cuba. The back-up plan, if something went terribly wrong (which it did, when Oswald wasn’t killed at the scene – note how the 9/11 planners avoided the problem by killing the perpetrators off in the act of committing the terrorism), was to leave the threat of a ruinous war out there to scare reasonable people in Washington to assist in covering up the crime. The cover-up by the war-avoiding Washington establishment would also provide cover for the real forces behind the assassination (I’m following Peter Dale Scott on this, although I think that the 9/11 conspiracy is much different that the JFK assassination conspiracy, as conspirators learn from their mistakes, as well as by reading commentators on their mistakes like Peter Dale Scott!). The big pointers from September 11 directed attention to places like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, obviously not practical places for an American attack. Yet it seemed that the American government had to do something, and the main pointer to Afghanistan, Osama himself (a guy who denies having had anything to do with the attack), together with the illogic of the ‘war on terror’, led directly to the attack which had been pre-planned by the Bush Administration before September 11 (along with the attack on Iraq which was intended to be prepared by the introduction to the American people of the ‘war on terror’ concept in Afghanistan). I really have to wonder if the cover-up, with enthusiastic if somewhat incompetent assistance of the Washington elite, was motivated by threats to reveal manufactured evidence connecting the attacks to the Saudi royals (Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid al-Midhar look more and more like double agents, explaining how they moved through and into the United States unimpeded, ended up living in a house in San Diego owned by an FBI informant, and even attended the Malaysia meeting) leading to the threat of a war which the American Establishment would do anything to prevent (Senator Graham seems to a pointer, and I’d be looking for people connected to him very suspiciously). The Israeli extreme right won the ‘war on terror’. Who lost? Besides the obvious victims in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine, the losers are the people who are now subjected to the regime of fear caused by the ‘war on terror’, in the United States and its allies.
#8. To: Eoghan, *US is Proxy State For Israel* (#0)
"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes nor between parties either — but right through the human heart." — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest |
||
|
[Home]
[Headlines]
[Latest Articles]
[Latest Comments]
[Post]
[Sign-in]
[Mail]
[Setup]
[Help]
[Register]
|
||