Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is currently saying that Dick Cheney’s vision of policy towards the Middle East after 9/11 was to re-draw the map:
Vice-President Dick Cheney’s vision of completely redrawing the map of the Middle East following the 9/11 attacks is “not stupid,” and is “possible over time,” former British Prime Minister Tony Blair says.
In his new book, A Journey, the former Labour Party leader wrote that Cheney wanted a wholesale reorganization of the political map of the Middle East after 9/11. The vice president “would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it — Hezbollah, Hamas, etc,” Blair wrote.
What does this mean?
Well, as I have repeatedly pointed out, the "war on terror" in the Middle East has nothing to do with combating terror, and everything to do with remaking that region's geopolitical situation to America's advantage.
Things the American government and media don’t let go of. And neither do I.
Iraq
“They’re leaving as heroes. I want them to walk home with pride in their hearts,” declared Col. John Norris, the head of a US Army brigade in Iraq.[1]
It’s enough to bring tears to the eyes of an American, enough to make him choke up.
Enough to make him forget.
But no American should be allowed to forget that the nation of Iraq, the society of Iraq, have been destroyed, ruined, a failed state. The Americans, beginning 1991, bombed for 12 years, with one excuse or another; then invaded, then occupied, overthrew the government, killed wantonly, tortured … the people of that unhappy land have lost everything — their homes, their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their environment, their neighborhoods, their mosques, their archaeology, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their state-run enterprises, their physical health, their mental health, their health care, their welfare state, their women’s rights, their religious tolerance, their safety, their security, their children, their parents, their past, their present, their future, their lives … More than half the population either dead, wounded, traumatized, in prison, internally displaced, or in foreign exile … The air, soil, water, blood and genes drenched with depleted uranium … the most awful birth defects … unexploded cluster bombs lie in wait for children to pick them up … an army of young Islamic men went to Iraq to fight theAmerican invaders; they left the country more militant, hardened by war, to spread across the Middle East, Europe and Central Asia … a river of blood runs alongside the Euphrates and Tigris … through a country that may never be put back together again.
“It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis that things were better before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003,” reported the Washington Post on May 5, 2007.
Sometimes editors like to have fun with their writers — like this week when my editor at the Charleston City Paper declared that controversial Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and yours truly are actually the same person. Explains Chris Haire:
“You want proof? Well here goes: As you know, Rauf is the guy behind the so-called Ground Zero mosque. Not surprisingly, Sean Hannity doesn’t like him. On his Monday afternoon radio show, Hannity played an audiotape of Rauf, one which Sean believes proves just how anti-American the imam is … The funny thing is, the main point that Hannity offers as an example of Rauf’s virulent anti-Americanism is more or less the same point that the City Paper’s own Jack Hunter has been saying for years now … . Namely that the United States has killed more innocent Muslims than Al Qaeda has killed innocent Americans.”
When facts are inconvenient, when international law, human rights and history get in the way, when war crimes can’t easily be justified or explained away, when logic doesn’t help much, the current crop of American political leaders turns to what is now the old reliable: 9/11. We have to fight in Afghanistan because … somehow … it’s tied into what happened on September 11, 2001. Here’s Vice-President Joe Biden: “We know that it was from the space that joins Afghanistan and Pakistan that the attacks of 9/11 occurred.”[1]
Here’s Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC): “This is the place [Afghanistan] we were attacked from 9/11.”[2]
Rep. Mike Pence, the third-ranking House Republican, asserted that the revelations in the Wikileaks documents do not change his view of the Afghan conflict, nor does he expect a shift in public opinion. “Back home in Indiana, people still remember where the attacks on 9/11 came from.”[3]
Everyone knows that Osama Bin Laden confessed to 9/11 on videotape.
Admittedly, German experts say (rough English translation here) that the Bin Laden confession tape was mistranslated. But what do the Germans know, other than how to make beer?
Sure, an American computer expert says that a Bin Laden video released in 2007 was spliced together from earlier footage, and that:
There are so many splices that I cannot help but wonder if someone spliced words and phrases together. I also cannot rule out a vocal imitator during the frozen-frame audio. The only way to prove that the audio is really bin Laden is to see him talking in the video….
But he’s just a pencil-neck computer geek, so why should we listen to him?
A primary reason Bush and Cheney succeeded in their radical erosion of core liberties is because they focused their assault on non-citizens with foreign-sounding names, casting the appearance that none of what they were doing would ever affect the average American. There were several exceptions to that tactic — the due-process-free imprisonment of Americans Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla, the abuse of the “material witness” statute to detain American Muslims, the eavesdropping on Americans’ communications without warrants — but the vast bulk of the abuses were aimed at non-citizens. That is now clearly changing.
Citing the possibility of a terrorist organization getting hold of a nuclear weapon as the greatest threat to U.S. security, Barack Obama persuaded 46 other countries at the recent Nuclear Security Summit to agree to secure the world’s loose nuclear material. Those leaders who came to Washington might have made done more to avert a nuclear attack, however, if they had asked the U.S. President to account for America’s own loose nukes.
Of course, President Obama may not even be aware of the egregious failure of the United States to secure its nuclear materials and know-how from the predation of its alleged “closest ally.” But since Obama is unwilling to even “speculate” about which country in the Middle East has nuclear weapons, he could hardly be expected to acknowledge how it got them.
Recently, a friend relayed a story about an acquaintance who is a Sons of Confederate Veterans member who wanted it known that while he agreed with me “99% of the time”-I still “had my head up my ass” concerning foreign policy. The gentleman pretty much supports our current foreign policy and takes issue with my frequent criticism of it. But there’s only one person here who cannot see the light for the darkness.
That any member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans would defend America’s recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is mindboggling. That any supporter of Southern heritage would applaud increased executive power during wartime betrays his ancestors’ memory. Waving a Confederate flag, while also readily waiving the civil liberties of one’s countrymen in the name of “national security,” is a slap in the face to the soldiers’ who fought under that proud Southern banner.
There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest.
Today Americans are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it.
Truth is an unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits. Those who speak it run the risk of being branded “anti-American,” “anti-semite” or “conspiracy theorist.”
Truth is an inconvenience for government and for the interest groups whose campaign contributions control government.
Truth is an inconvenience for prosecutors who want convictions, not the discovery of innocence or guilt.
One of the distinguishing characteristics of statists is their inability to take responsibility for their failures. The fault always lies elsewhere. Two of the best examples of this phenomenon are the welfare state and the warfare state.
For more than a century after the founding of the Republic, Americans had lived with little or no income taxation, economic regulation, paper money, legal-tender laws, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SBA loans, corporate grants, education grants, drug laws, and other forms of paternalism. Early Americans believed that freedom involved the rights to engage in economic enterprise freely, accumulate unlimited amounts of wealth, and decide what to do with their own money — e.g., invest, save, spend, or donate.
All that changed in the 20th century, thanks to the statists. In 1913, the income tax and the Federal Reserve were established, heralding a way of life in which government would wield omnipotent power to take or destroy people’s income and wealth.