Forum Post: Failed US Mid East Policy
Posted 12 years ago on May 2, 2012, 3:41 p.m. EST by bklynsboy
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$2 billion a week taxpayer money in Afghanistan, $300/gallon fuel for US vehicles, $300,000 for US mercenaries (contractors). The US crumbles with cuts to Social security, education, post office, health, ports, infrastructure, high taxes for endless war. We will never win as China does global trade without wars, and will beat us. Cut the endless global interventions and build America.
Oh, sweetheart... the US policy in the middle east has completely failed, but not really in the way that you might think. Follow me here, the logic gets a little curvy...
People in power only keep power using 2 methods: Tacit approval of their citizens, or fear. It's the classic Orwell vs. Huxley dichotomy. Either you have all the means to overthrow your government, but the thought never occurs to you because cheap, easy pleasure sedates you into being a drone, or you have all the will to overthrow your government but no rights, no weapons, and no way to assemble. The secret third option is that your government just really rocks at governing and nobody wants to overthrow it because they're too busy with their free education end excellent national healthcare. Yeah, fuck you Finland.
If you want to plunder your own country, you have to have either a great deal of bullshit entertainment and generally mind numbing social nonsense (Where people feel like they have sufficient interaction with others, but never discuss meaningful things or organize for their own benefit), or slowly erode their rights and freedoms so that by the time they want to stand against you, they can't.
But wait! The entire population of the US could never be distracted or controlled that easily... we're a country founded on the premise that tyranny is unacceptable. I guess we can't just take their rights... we'll have to get them to give up their rights willingly. If we can get them to think that they are in constant danger of outside attack, they will fall all over themselves giving away their fundamental liberties in the quest for security. I think there's a quote about that somewhere.
Conveniently, there's a terrorist attack roughly every 5 years, each one escalating in scale. After each one, we take a correspondingly large chunk of civil liberties away from the populace. Having a skinny, corn-fed looking white dude bomb a seemingly pastoral place like Oklahoma City was such an amazingly lucky break. I mean... If a dude with a Scottish surname can do this stuff, clearly we need to be keeping a more watchful eye on people. (Without a warrant. Duh.) Having 16 Saudis provoke us into attacking Iraq and Afghanistan is only confusing if you don't look at the long view.
So we go to war in a couple of places that are known hotbeds of fundamentalist rhetoric and happen to be very strategically located if you're trying to maintain a choke hold on oil production and gold without pissing off the Saudis.
In the process of doing this, we completely erode women's rights in one country, and set them back 200 years in the other. This creates a perfect environment for fundamentalist ideals to mix with violent rhetoric. I mean, face it: It's way harder to recruit young men to your cause if they are having intelligent conversations with women they respect. This is one of the many reasons why the women of almost any country at war become specific targets, and also why radical fundamentalists so fervently oppose equality and women's rights. I'm not talking strictly Islam here, I'm also looking at you, Roman Catholic church...
So we've got an angry populace where most people and all females go without any education besides what they receive from their radical fundamentalist leaders. We don't want to cripple their ability to attack us, so while we make sure we do a bunch of structural damage and enough deeply offensive bullshit to thoroughly enrage their already pissed off citizens, we don't actually really fuck them up. We also don't educate them or stand up for women's rights. That's what communists do. (I'm looking at you here, Russia. Sending Afghan women to schools and outlawing the burqa. Red bastards. That's probably how you fucked up Finland so bad too.)
Then, we start arming them. These folks can't put up any kind of a fight using all the guns we left behind when we armed them both in the early 1990's. Those weapons are really old and we look like imperial storm troopers killing ewoks when we fight them. So we start 'losing' tons of munitions of all types. Handheld weapons, grenades, claymores, your occasional anti-aircraft missile, you name it. Also, we arm 'security forces' in their country with even MORE guns, >90% of which are unregistered. See, when we report weapons seized from 'insurgents', we obviously can't have these guns tracked back to us.
Are you with me so far?
As near as I can tell, we mostly failed by not producing another terrorist attack in the last 11 years. And now look at us: Our people are angry, we just passed a whole bunch of legislation that strips their rights (but gives them to corporations), and we didn't even have any actual terrorism to wave around before we did so.
There's a lot more, but I don't really have time to get into it. Dancing With The Stars is on!
Awesome analysis.
No cares, its a bunch of pro war hacks in this nation.
All our problems come from crazy war spending; everything else is cut but money for war.