Below is my column from the latest print version of CounterPunch Magazine. It was written back on June 10, and published a bit later. Much water has gone under the bridge since then – much fire too – but as the piece is on a more general theme, I thought I’d go ahead and put it up.
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The red wheel of the “War on Terror” – which under the guiding hand of the Nobel prince of peace has mutated into a hydra-headed War on Everything and Everybody Everywhere All the Time – continues on its reckless, destructive way, bringing ruin to the present and sowing disaster for the future.
The Middle East, home of four the world’s most volatile religions – Islam, Judaism, Christianity and Petrochemical Extremism – is now more unstable and violent than it has been for decades, perhaps centuries. American-led military interventions have laid waste to two societies – Iraq and Libya – and spread violent extremism throughout the region, and deep into Africa. Washington, working closely with its beloved ally – the repressive, head-chopping, woman-hating propagator of retrograde religious extremism, Saudi Arabia – is now working relentlessly to turn Syria into a hellhole of ungovernable chaos dominated by warlords, like Somalia or Afghanistan.
At every single turn, without exception, the “War on Terror” and its successor have exacerbated the problems they are ostensibly designed to quell. The depredations of these morally insane (but immensely profitable) enterprises have radicalized multitudes of people across the world, destroying whole nations, blighting the future of generations, driving many to outrage and despair, prey to ideologies that promise revenge, retribution, a new beginning. Al Qaeda – the supposed Great Satan of our Terror Warriors – is now far more powerful than ever. Once a handful of cranks controlling a few compounds in remote Afghanistan, al Qaeda-associated groups now control vast swathes of territory in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. The Pakistani Taliban, once restricted to distant border regions, now launches attacks in the urban heart of the country. Groups like Boko Haram feast on the weapons unleashed by the West’s destruction of the Libyan state, and on the despair engendered by the corruption, repression and hopelessness imposed on Nigeria by Petrochemical Extremism. There are many more examples of this pernicious dynamic.
We are told this War on Everything is a war to defend “our values”: democracy, liberty, tolerance, justice. Yet at every single turn, without exception, every single day, day in, day out, year after year, our Terror Warriors show the world that their “values” – which they claim are “our” values, the values of Western civilization – bring nothing but death, grief, corruption, repression, extremism, injustice. To those on the receiving end of the Terror War – and we’re talking of millions upon millions of people – “Western civilization” has become a thing of dread and loathing, a crazed predator who mouths pieties and prayers while he burns down your house and kills your children. Nothing has subverted and denigrated the image of “Western values” more than the bipartisan Terror War. It is itself the greatest sustained attack on “Western values,” on “our way of life,” that we have seen in generations.
And this is true not only in regard to the image of Western values that the Terror War has shown to the world, but also in the way that it has been brought home against the West’s own populations, especially in the United States and Britain. It is an indisputable fact that Americans and Britons are less free than before, to a marked degree: more heavily policed in what they say and do, in what they can publish and read, where they can go and can’t go; subjected to a level of pervasive, invasive surveillance far beyond the dreams of the KGB or Gestapo; subject to arbitrary detention – or even, at the President’s order, extrajudicial assassination, if accused in secret of some nebulous connection to terrorism. The physical and social infrastructure of their societies are crumbling, as massive resources are redirected to sustain the gargantuan military/security apparatus and “project dominance” around the world. (And of course, another aim of this unprecedented redistribution is to starve the welfare state in order to feed the rich, whose wealth grows ever greater in a system sustained by Terror War, thus ensuring their support for its continuance.)
Far from “draining the swamp” of extremist-spawning elements, the continual interventions and drone strikes and death squads and subversions of the West’s Terror War have toxified the “swamp” beyond all measuring. Whole generations are now being raised in these conditions of howling chaos, of death and ruin and rejection and despair, with violent extremism on all sides, teaching them every day that this is the way of the world, this is the only way of the world. As Hamlet said: it is not nor it cannot come to good.
Yet still the wheel rolls on – toward ever greater dangers. For the War on Everything and Everyone is just that; it’s not restricted to the Middle East, or to Africa, or to wherever Muslims dwell. Under the wise guidance of the Nobel-belaurelled One in the White House, the Red Wheel is now “pivoting” toward Asia, trying ever more frantically to thwart the threat to Western dominance posed by the rise of China. It’s “pivoting” toward the underbelly of Russia, and pressing Western military power right up to the Russian frontier. Western elites are playing with Promethean fire – and have demonstrated, over and over again, that they have no vision, no restraint, no thought for the consequences of their actions.
We have seen unbearable horrors so far; but we may yet see horrors beyond description, beyond all imagining.