When the next terrorist attack against Americans takes place, you can be certain that there will still be at least a few Americans, including within the Pentagon and the CIA, who will come out with their standard line about how the terrorists are motivated by their hatred for America’s freedom and values. A few others will claim that the attacks are part of some centuries-old caliphate conspiracy by Muslims to take over the world.
Consider this: According to a story on Alternet, the U.S. government dropped at least 26,171 bombs in seven Muslim-majority countries in 2016. In a related article on the same subject, Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin said that this amounts to three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day.
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, the purpose of dropping bombs is to kill or maim people and destroy homes, businesses, and other property. Of course, it’s impossible to say exactly how many people have been killed and maimed and how much property has been destroyed by all the bombs the U.S. government has dropped in the Middle East for the past 25 years but it has to be substantial.
Question: Is it possible — just possible — that all those thousands of bombs and all that death and destruction bear a relationship to anti-American terrorism? That is, is it possible — just possible — that when Muslims or others commit acts of terrorism against Americans, they are doing it to retaliate for all the death and destruction that has been wreaked on them by the U.S. government?
Statists say no. They say that all those bombs and all that death and destruction bear no relationship to anti-American terrorism. They say the bombs, deaths, and destruction are irrelevant in the sense that the families who lose loved ones or whose homes or businesses are destroyed don’t really care about that. They don’t get angry or upset, statists say, when their loved ones are killed or maimed or their homes and businesses are destroyed by some foreign regime. It’s all about hatred for America’s freedom and values or about some supposed centuries-old caliphate conspiracy.
When you ask such statists why they had no concern for anti-American terrorists from the Middle East and Afghanistan during the Cold War, they are stymied. They know full well that throughout the Cold War their bugaboo was the Soviet Union, Red China, Cuba, North Korea, North Vietnam, communists, and communism. Not one single peep about those Muslim terrorists who supposedly hated America for its freedom and values or about the caliphaters who were coming to subject America to the Koran and Sharia law.
In fact, when it was the communists, rather than the Pentagon, who were occupying Afghanistan, statists actually cheered when the Pentagon partnered with Muslim religious extremists in Afghanistan in the attempt to oust the Soviets from that country.
Why is the issue of motivation so important? Because if a sufficient number of Americans will finally come to recognize that anti-American terrorism is rooted in the death and destruction that the U.S. government has been wreaking and continues to wreak in the Middle East and Afghanistan, there will be growing demands to finally bring all the troops home.
That would mean no more anti-American terrorism, which would mean no more need for a war on terrorism, which would mean no more infringements on our rights and liberties in the purported attempt to “keep us safe.”
If we are lucky, enough people might even also begin asking a fundamentally important question: Given that the national-security establishment was brought into existence to fight the Cold War, why can’t we now bring an end to America’s military-CIA empire and restore a constitutional republic to our land?