If the Mafia, or whoever runs the narcotics business, can smuggle tons of white powder into the United States any time they feel like it, what makes you think terrorists can’t do the same? How effective has the government’s “War on Drugs” been and isn’t the same level of incompetence what we can expect from Homeland Security? Do you think 170,000 bureaucrats stumbling over themselves will do better?
If international terrorists are after you and me, out to destroy our way of life, wouldn’t they have already killed millions of us? How hard is it to put a handful or vial of airborne chemical or biological agents into the ventilation systems of our schools, churches, malls, supermarkets, office buildings, arenas, theaters, or even pass it off as the subtle lady so that a great many Americans can stick it directly up their noses? Couldn’t they do the same thing with our water or food supply once the stuff is inside the country?
Do you truly believe that some huge bureaucracy in Washington is going to prevent this? The same people that didn’t see 9/11 coming? The same people who can’t find Osama bin Laden and whoever mailed those anthrax letters? The same people who have left our borders wide open and can’t keep track of thousands of legal visitors who overstay their visas? The same people who recently let two sniper nitwits terrorize their own neighborhood for two months running. The same people who never solved the Tylenol poisoned packages, the Legionnaires disease, or the sickness our boys are still carrying from the first Desert Storm.
And let’s not forget that these are the people taking away our individual liberties one by one, defiling the Constitution, and implying that suicidal guerilla fighters will use our own airplanes against us time after time because they can’t figure out any other way to get us?
Even the Indians and our own revolutionist forefathers didn’t ambush the enemy over and over in the same canyon. Isn’t the element of surprise what makes it work against superior forces? Having survived the first stone, do you think Goliath would have let David throw another one? Do you think David didn’t know that? Do you think the Philistines started searching everyone for slingshots? Did David try to corner the market on slingshots?
More importantly, do you really believe that foreign terrorists are after you and me? Do you blindly accept the story that they’re after our way of life, our cars and our toilets, or our rapidly disappearing liberties? Who’s been telling you this anyway?
Is it possible for the American people to even entertain the idea that the terrorists are after our government, the people who ordered atrocities in their country, even caused accidents that took the lives of their loved ones, accidents that would never have happened if GIs hadn’t been there playing war games in the first place?
Do you think that the people from dictatorial cultures where power is in the hands of a few have somehow leaped to the conclusion that it’s the American people who support, sponsor, and concede power to elected representatives who then send soldiers to interfere in their way of life? And therefore it’s the American people who must be brought to their knees?
Haven’t the American people enough empathy to understand what their own reaction would be to foreign troops roaming our streets and generally doing what armies do? How would you like a Chinese airbase in Chicago? How about Russian soldiers stationed in Tucson or Cincinnati to “keep the peace.”
Supposing, just supposing, that the suicidal attacks of September 11, 2001, were a surgical strike against the New World Order. Isn’t international banking at the heart of our empire building along with our military, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Federal Reserve, all headquartered inside the District of Corruption?
Look at the unanswered questions. Why has the Bush administration consistently stonewalled a true and independent investigation into the events of that fatal day? What does he have to hide? And how many U.S. citizens were in the list of almost 3,000 lives lost as the towers collapsed? Two towers that were said to house people from 92 different nations. And why would terrorist so capable of planning this dastardly attack pick the early morning when the big wigs were probably not in their offices yet? Do you think that a group smart enough to pull this off, people who had lived and trained in our country for some time beforehand didn’t know this, couldn’t have taken later flights?
Benjamin Netanyahu tells us that we must steel ourselves against such “false and debilitating thoughts” and retaliate immediately. It’s the only way to handle terrorists. The only way that has obviously worked so well for Israel. Send money.
Who am I to say differently? All I’ve got is one good friend, Yossi a man from Israel, who back in the Seventies told me that he would “never work for an American Jew.” When I innocently tried to connect him with another friend, Yossi forcibly sat me down to explain that it was Americans like Golda Meir who caused all the trouble in his native land and that he migrated to the U.S. because he was tired of killing Arab friends he grew up with and would still be living with peacefully if it hadn’t been for American Jews sticking their noses into Israeli affairs.
Yossi’s hatred wasn’t directed against all Americans, just American Jews. Don’t you think it could be the same with terrorists, that they’re not after all Americans, just the Americans that cause them grief—our leaders, the people who continue to meddle in the affairs of other countries?
What would happen if we pulled our troops out of the more than 250 countries where we’ve got hundreds of thousands of American boys and girls and tons of armament stationed today? Do you think we could then stop worrying about terrorists? I do.
Every hawk and military genius in the country, particularly those who have never stared death in the face, would rise up to put the kibosh on that idea. They would drag out all of the old stories about the responsibilities of a superpower, the need for police activities, how we’re saving religious fanatics from themselves, and so forth. But they would fail to mention how we cherry-pick these squabbles on the basis of our “national interests” while ignoring absolute genocide in places like Rwanda.
And they will certainly fail to remember that the United Nations was designed specifically for this purpose, to keep the peace, and that we should not be on any foreign soil without being called there by the UN. In other words, isn’t one of the purposes of this unarmed body to take the onus off individual nations?
It would be interesting to see if the warmongers, the hawks pushing for an invasion of Iraq, are the same people who have been adamantly against the United Nations and recommending that we drop our membership. They probably feel handicapped by this body of reasonableness.
The real question is what would we do with all of the troops and equipment if we did pull them back? Just imagine what a splash they would make on the job market already suffering high unemployment. Do we send them out to stand shoulder-to-shoulder across the Canadian and Mexican borders? Do we put them to work deriving square roots with pencil and paper like we did with the CCC in the Great Depression? Do we create jobs for them, all the time remembering that they are trained to kill? And what would it cost to “debrief” them all?
Do you think Don Rumsfeld and his legions in the Pentagon would be happy without some battles to plan, troops to lead, or dreams of becoming heroes? Until they can play virtual reality video war games, is there anything but real death and destruction that will satisfy their blood lust and training?
Do you suppose that maybe our fathers and grandfathers were right when they told us “war is good for the economy?” Is it true that the United States of America is the only nation that profits from war, not from the bounty we seize like pirates of old, but from having to replace the vast inventory of expensive hi-tech equipment we use up? Making more cannon balls keeps us busy.
Nobody else invents and creates better killing equipment. Nobody else has ever used nuclear weapons and is threatening to do so again. Nobody else has huge stockpiles of hi-tech war machinery that requires upkeep and periodic replacement. Weapons of mass destruction-R-US. To everyone else, war is an expensive liability.
Now, as we give up our freedoms and our Constitution for a false sense of safety, as we experience a new enemy that has always been our Achille’s heel, as we embark on the possible road to tyranny, the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt may ring with greater truth than ever; “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
Great words, but I’m afraid they flow like water off the proverbial duck’s back while today’s American spirit is more in line with a slogan from Despair.com; “No single raindrop feels responsible for the flood.”
“Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”