While Eric Margolis’ entire comment in the Toronto Sun is a must-read, the following two quotes really hit the nail on the head:

More empires have fallen because of reckless finances than invasion…

If Obama really were serious about restoring America’s economic health, he would demand military spending be slashed, quickly end the Iraq and Afghan wars and break up the nation’s giant Frankenbanks.

Margolis is right.

As I have repeatedly shown, war is bad for the economy. According to a Nobel prize-winning economist, the head of JP Morgan and others, the Iraq war and the war on terror in general were huge factors in destroying our economy.
America is a dying empire, destroying the last of its resources to fight unnecessary wars. Instead of rebuilding our economy so that we can once again be a strong nation, we are wasting trillions fighting those unnecessary wars, thus guaranteeing that we do not have the economic resources to defend ourselves in the future from real threats.

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The handwringing about the would-be Christmas Day airplane bomber and the politicians’ tiresome declarations that it will never happen again miss the point: As long as the U.S. government pursues its imperial program of invasion, regime change, occupation, and sponsorship of corrupt governments in the Muslim world, Americans will be targets for avengers. This does not excuse the killing of innocents — it merely points out an inevitable chain of events.

It’s either foreign intervention and retaliatory terrorism or nonintervention and security. There’s no third way.

We can’t eat our cake and have it too. Every empire has reaped a terrorist whirlwind. “Terror” is the tactic that the weak use against the strong. The U.S. government unleashes the most powerful “conventional” weapons known to man, including pilotless killer drones operated like videogames thousands of miles away. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab sewed an explosive into his underwear and ended up burning himself.

It is disgraceful that the choice between terrorism and security is rarely publicly discussed in terms of the choice between American imperialism and nonintervention. The empire is treated as a given — even by most so-called progressives — as though it were ordained by history. The American people are expected to believe that the very existence of their society depends on the U.S. government’s policing the globe and using whatever violence it deems appropriate (that is, whenever things do not suit the interests of U.S. policymakers and their economic partners in the “private” sector).

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