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| President John Dramani Mahama of Ghana |
By Ekow Mensah
The Mahama administration is battling for its
life in board rooms in the United States of America.
This is because both the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) and the World Bank are insisting on moves which will definitely make
the Government unpopular and deepen its wounds at a time of industrial unease.
The two institutions have advised the government
of Ghana to increase utility tariffs to compel Ghanaian consumers to pay what
they call realistic prices for electricity and other utilities.
So far the Mahama administration is believed to
have put up stiff resistance on account of the suspicions that the move will
not go down well with the Ghanaian consumer.
The institutions claim that a rise in utility
tariffs will make the sector more attractive to the private investors.
Ghana’s Trade Union congress (TUC) has kicked
against the advice and warned that it will affect working people adversely.
The Committee for Joint Action (CJA) also says
that these suggested increases would only enable the utility companies to pass
on the cost of inefficiency and corruption to already suffering consumers.
Ghana’s Minister of Finance, Mr Seth Terkpeh is
currently in the United States as head of a government delegation to the board
meeting of the IMF where these issues will be discussed.
The Volta River Authority (VRA) is reported by
the World Bank to be indebted to the tune of US $ 550 million only in respect
of crude oil purchases.
Both GRIDCO and the Electricity Company Of Ghana
(ECG) are also reported to be heavily indebted.
Ghana has also suffered significantly from the
refusal of Western countries to release close to US$ 400 million pledge last
year to support the economy.
Some Ghana watchers claim that the Western
countries refused to make the disbursements because they were not sure about
which party would win the 2012 elections.
From all indications, China remains the main and
most reliable source of funding for Ghana currently.
China pledged to make US $ 3 billion available
to the Mills administration.
It is still not clear how much of the US $ 3
billion has been disbursed.
A chunk of the money was to be used for the
development of Ghana’s gas infrastructure.
As things stand now, it is difficult to predict
whether the Mahama administration will cave in to the demands of the World Bank
and the International Monetary Fund.
Editorial
LIVE COVERAGE
The decision to provide live TV coverage of the petition
against the results of the 2012 presidential election has been hailed as a
victory for democracy.
The Insight has no intention to disagree.
However, it has become obvious even to the casual
observer that national productivity is suffering a great deal.
Most people who
should be working have abandoned their duty post and are watching the
proceedings with rapt attention.
Our question is, couldn’t the state make the proceedings
available to the people of Ghana without having to disrupt national life?
Perhaps the
authorities would like to take a look at the possibility of recording the
proceedings during working hours and playing them back at night.
In our view, this would kill two birds with one stone.
People will get to know what happened in court and at the same time, national
productivity will not suffer.
Who is listening?
US drone attacks killed 700 civilian
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| This is a Drone |
In 2009, 44 predator strikes carried
out by the CIA in the tribal areas of Pakistan struck only five of their
intended al Qa'eda and Taliban targets, but more than 700 innocent civilians
also died, according to Pakistani authorities. A senior Taliban commander said
a suicide bomb attack that killed seven CIA operatives in Afghanistan last week
was an act of retaliation against the US drone attacks.
Pakistan's Dawn
newspaper reported: "According to the statistics compiled by Pakistani
authorities, the Afghanistan-based US drones killed 708 people in 44 predator
attacks targeting the tribal areas between January 1 and December 31, 2009.
"For each al Qa'eda and Taliban terrorist killed by US drones, 140
innocent Pakistanis also had to die. Over 90 per cent of those killed in the
deadly missile strikes were civilians, claim authorities."
The Wall Street Journal
said: "A senior commander connected to the Afghan Taliban and involved
with the attack against the CIA that left eight people dead said on Saturday
that the bombing was retaliation for US drone strikes in the Afghan-Pakistan
border region. " 'We attacked this base because the team there was
organising drone strikes in Loya Paktia and surrounding area,' the commander
said, referring to the area around Khost, the city where the US facility was
attacked.
The commander, a prominent member of
the Afghan insurgency, spoke on the condition of anonymity. "The suicide
attack, which dealt the biggest loss to the agency in more than 25 years,
killed a woman who was the station chief along with six other CIA officers and
one private security contractor. " 'We attacked on that particular day
because we knew the woman who was leading the team' was there, the commander
said."
ABC News
reported the suicide bomber was a regular CIA informant who had visited the
same base multiple times in the past, according to someone close to the base's
security director. "The informant was a Pakistani and a member of the
Wazir tribe from the Pakistani tribal area North Waziristan, according to the
same source.
The base security director, an Afghan
named Arghawan, would pick up the informant at the Ghulam Khan border crossing
and drive him about two hours into Forward Operating Base Chapman, from where
the CIA operates. "Because he was with Arghawan, the informant was not
searched, the source says.
Arghawan also died in the attack.
"The story seems to corroborate a claim by the Taliban on the Pakistani
side of the border that they had turned a CIA asset into a double agent and
sent him to kill the officers in the base, located in the eastern Afghan
province of Khost. "The infiltration into the heart of the CIA's operation
in eastern Afghanistan deals a strong blow to the agency's ability to fight
Taliban and al Qa'eda, former intelligence officials say, and will make the
agency reconsider how it recruits Pakistani and Afghan informants."
The Financial Times
said: "The attack was linked by some US officials to a militant network
created by Jalaluddin Haqqani, a legendary Afghan warlord widely believed to be
close to Taliban militants while also maintaining ties with Pakistan's security
and intelligence establishment. "After Thursday's attack, Pakistan's
security officials have moved to distance the country from any links to the
Haqqani network but have also warned against an escalation in attacks by
pilot-less US drones on the country's territory. "
If the Americans step up the attacks at
what they suspect are locations of Haqqani's men inside Pakistan, that would be
a risky step,' one security official in the provincial city of Peshawar told The
Financial Times. 'The Americans can not simply go by assumptions. First,
all the facts must be ascertained.'" The Sunday Times
added: "Although Chapman was officially a camp for civilians involved in
reconstruction, it was well-known locally as a CIA base.
Over the past couple
of years, it focused on gathering information on so-called high-value targets
for drone attacks, the unmanned missile planes that have played a growing role
in taking out suspected terrorists since President Barack Obama took office.
The Haqqanis were their principal target.
" 'That far forward they were almost certainly from the CIA's paramilitary
rather than analysts,' said one agent. "The head of this
intelligence-gathering operation was a mother of three.
Although the Chapman
base chief has not been named, she was described as a loving mother and an
inspiration by a fellow CIA mum. " 'She was a dear friend and a touchstone
to all of the mums in CTC [counter-terrorism],' she said.
"Another CIA official said the
base chief had worked on Afghanistan and counter-terrorism for years, dating
back to the agency's so-called Alec Station. That unit was created to monitor
Osama Bin Laden five years before the attacks of September 11, 2001.
"Wednesday's bomb wiped away decades of experience. Eight years into the
war, the agency is still desperately short of personnel who speak the language
or are knowledgeable about the region.
" 'It's a devastating blow,' said
Michael Scheuer, a former agent and head of Alec Station. 'We lost an agent with
14 years' experience in Afghanistan.'" The Wall Street Journal
said: "The bombing is a blow to America's foremost intelligence agency and
could, at least temporarily, set back counterterrorism operations in a land
where the US continues to struggle.
"The Khost officers were providing
key intelligence to the fight against al Qa'eda and the Taliban, former agency
officials said. That included running networks of informants into Pakistan and
providing support, as nearly all area operations do, to the CIA's drone program
that kills high-value targets in Pakistan's tribal regions.
"Previously, the CIA had lost a
total of only four officers in Afghanistan, where a cadre of its personnel
helped Afghan tribal forces oust the Taliban within weeks of the September 11,
2001, terrorist attacks. Thursday's blast brings that toll to 11.
"A number of the dead had been
counterterrorism operatives since before the 9/11 attacks. "Those killed
included 'experienced, front-line officers and their knowledge and expertise
will be sorely missed,' said Henry A Crumpton, who led the CIA campaign in
Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002. Mr Crumpton, who is retired, said the experience
of those lost won't be easily regained."
Manning
proudly admits to exposing U.S. war crimes’
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| Bradley Maning |
By Chris Fry
APvt. B. Manning read a
35-page statement to a court-martial session at Fort Meade, Md., on Feb. 28, in
which the whistleblower proudly admitted having released documents and videos
that exposed the U.S. military’s war crimes and U.S. government support of
corrupt regimes around the world.
“I began to become depressed at the situation we found
ourselves mired in year after year. In attempting counterinsurgency operations,
we became obsessed with capturing and killing human targets on lists,” Manning
said. “I wanted the public to know that not everyone living in Iraq were
targets to be neutralized.”
Some of the material that Manning released included videos of
airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan in which civilians were killed, logs of
military incident reports, assessment files of detainees held at Guantánamo
Bay, and a quarter-million cables from U.S. diplomats stationed around the world.
“I believe if the public — in particular the American public —
has access to the information” in the reports, “this could spark a debate about
foreign policy in relation to Iraq and Afghanistan,” Manning said. (Quotes from
thenewamerican.com, March 1)
Manning testified to having contacted the Washington Post in
early 2010 about the damning information, but the paper refused to commit to
report it. Manning’s calls to the New York Times were not returned. (New York
Times, Feb. 28) So the soldier decided to upload the information to the
WikiLeaks website. Manning says no one at WikiLeaks coached or pressured for
this decision.
By admitting to these disclosures in court, Manning risked
future freedom. In effect, this was a “guilty” plea to 10 charges that could
carry 20 years in military prison. In addition, the prosecutors in the case
announced on March 1 that they intend to try Manning on other charges that, if
convicted, could mean life in prison for the hero whistleblower.
In particular, the government wants to pursue the charge of
“aiding the enemy.” To the U.S. government, exposing imperialist war crimes to
the world’s people is itself a crime that merits the most severe punishment.
On the contrary, the principles derived from the Nuremberg
trials of Nazi leaders at the end of World War II dictate that the duty of
every soldier is to prevent, stop and expose war crimes, a duty that Manning
has heroically carried out.
Eugene R. Fidell, who teaches military law at Yale, said the
government wants to deter others from taking advantage of the Internet and
portable storage devices to follow Manning’s example and leak government
secrets. (New York Times, March 1)
“They want to scare the daylights out of other people,” Fidell
said.
Manning’s trial is slated to begin on June 3 and last for 12
weeks. But it is the U.S. military and government officials who should be tried
for their crimes against humanity, not heroes like Private Manning, who exposed
them. Free Private Manning now!
The Enemy-Industrial Complex
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| A North Korean Missile |
Only one small problem: there is as yet little evidence that the enemy with a few nuclear weapons facing off (rhetorically at least) against an American arsenal of 4,650 of them has the ability to miniaturize and mount even one on a missile, no less deliver it accurately, nor does it have a missile capable of reaching Hawaii or Washington, and I wouldn't count on Guam either.
It also happens to be a desperate country, one possibly without enough fuel to fly a modern air force, whose people, on average, are inches shorter than their southern neighbors thanks to decades of intermittent famine and malnutrition, and who are ruled by a bizarre three-generational family cult. If that other communist, Karl Marx, hadn’t once famously written that history repeats itself “first as tragedy, then as farce,” we would have had to invent the phrase for this very moment.
In the previous century, there were two devastating global wars, which left significant parts of the planet in ruins. There was also a "cold war" between two superpowers locked in a system of mutual assured destruction (aptly acronymed as MAD) whose nuclear arsenals were capable of destroying the planet many times over. Had you woken up any morning in the years between December 7, 1941, and December 26, 1991, and been told that the leading international candidate for America's Public Enemy Number One was Kim Jong-un’s ramshackle, comic-opera regime in North Korea, you might have gotten down on your hands and knees and sent thanks to pagan gods.
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| Kim Jong Un |
All these years, we’ve been launching wars and pursuing a “global war on terror." We’ve poured money into national security as if there were no tomorrow. From our police to our borders, we’ve up-armored everywhere. We constantly hear about “threats” to us and to the “homeland.” And yet, when you knock on the door marked “Enemy,” there’s seldom anyone home.
Few in this country have found this striking. Few seem to notice any disjuncture between the enemy-ridden, threatening and deeply dangerous world we have been preparing ourselves for (and fighting in) this last decade-plus and the world as it actually is, even those who lived through significant parts of the last anxiety-producing, bloody century.
You know that feeling when you wake up and realize you’ve had the same recurrent nightmare yet again? Sometimes, there’s an equivalent in waking life, and here’s mine: every now and then, as I read about the next move in the spreading war on terror, the next drone assassination, the next ratcheting up of the surveillance game, the next expansion of the secrecy that envelops our government, the next set of expensive actions taken to guard us—all of this justified by the enormous threats and dangers that we face—I think to myself: Where’s the enemy? And then I wonder: Just what kind of a dream is this that we’re dreaming?
A Door Marked “Enemy” and No One Home
Let’s admit it: enemies can have their uses. And let’s admit as well that it’s in the interest of some in our country that we be seen as surrounded by constant and imminent dangers on an enemy-filled planet. Let’s also admit that the world is and always will be a dangerous place in all sorts of ways.
Still, in American terms, the bloodlettings, the devastations of this new century and the last years of the previous one have been remarkably minimal or distant; some of the worst, as in the multi-country war over the Congo with its more than five million dead have passed us by entirely; some, even when we launched them, have essentially been imperial frontier conflicts, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, or interventions of little cost (to us) as in Libya, or frontier patrolling operations as in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Northern Africa.
(It was no mistake that, when Washington launched its special operations raid on Abbottabad, Pakistan, to get Osama bin Laden, it was given the code name “Geronimo” and the message from the SEAL team recording his death was “Geronimo-E KIA” or “enemy killed in action.”)
And let’s admit as well that, in the wake of those wars and operations, Americans now have more enemies, more angry, embittered people who would like to do us harm than on September 10, 2001. Let’s accept that somewhere out there are people who, as George W. Bush once liked to say, “hate us" and what we stand for. (I leave just what we actually stand for to you, for the moment.)
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| Kim and his generals at the target room |
There was admittedly a period when, in order to pump up what we faced in the world, analogies to World War II and the Cold War were rife. There was, for instance, George W. Bush’s famed rhetorical construct, the Axis of Evil (Iraq, Iran and North Korea), patterned by his speechwriter on the German-Italian-Japanese “axis” of World War II. It was, of course, a joke construct, if reality was your yardstick. Iraq and Iran were then enemies. (Only in the wake of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq have they become friends and allies.) And North Korea had nothing whatsoever to do with either of them.
Similarly, the American occupation of Iraq was once regularly compared to the US occupations of Germany and Japan, just as Saddam Hussein had long been presented as a modern Hitler.
In addition, Al Qaeda-style Islamists were regularly referred to as Islamofascists, while certain military and neocon types with a desire to turn the war on terror into a successor to the Cold War took to calling it “the long war,” or even “World War IV.” But all of this was so wildly out of whack that it simply faded away.
As for who’s behind that door marked “Enemy,” if you opened it, what would you find? As a start, scattered hundreds or, as the years have gone by, thousands of jihadis, mostly in the poorest backlands of the planet and with little ability to do anything to the United States. Next, there were a few minority insurgencies, including the Taliban and allied forces in Afghanistan and separate Sunni and Shia ones in Iraq. There also have been tiny numbers of wannabe Islamic terrorists in the US (once you take away the string of FBI sting operations that have regularly turned hopeless slackers and lost teenagers into the most dangerous of fantasy Muslim plotters). And then, of course, there are those two relatively hapless regional powers, Iran and North Korea, whose bark far exceeds their potential bite.
The Wizard of Oz on 9/11
The US, in other words, is probably in less danger from external enemies than at any moment in the last century. There is no other imperial power on the planet capable of, or desirous of, taking on American power directly, including China. It’s true that, on September 11, 2001, 19 hijackers with box cutters produced a remarkable, apocalyptic and devastating TV show in which almost 3,000 people died.
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| September 9/11 attacks |
The enemy was still nearly nonexistent.
The act cost bin Laden only an estimated $400,000-$500,000, though it would lead to a series of trillion-dollar wars. It was a nightmarish event that had a malign Wizard of Oz quality to it: a tiny man producing giant effects. It in no way endangered the state. In fact, it would actually strengthen many of its powers. It put a hit on the economy, but a passing one. It was a spectacular and spectacularly gruesome act of terror by a small, murderous organization then capable of mounting a major operation somewhere on Earth only once every couple of years. It was meant to spread fear, but nothing more.
When the towers came down and you could suddenly see to the horizon, it was still, in historical terms, remarkably enemy-less. And yet 9/11 was experienced here as a Pearl Harbor moment—a sneak attack by a terrifying enemy meant to disable the country. The next day, newspaper headlines were filled with variations on “A Pearl Harbor of the Twenty-First Century.” If it was a repeat of December 7, 1941, however, it lacked an imperial Japan or any other state to declare war on, although one of the weakest partial states on the planet, the Taliban's Afghanistan, would end up filling the bill adequately enough for Americans.
To put this in perspective, consider two obvious major dangers in US life: suicide by gun and death by car. In 2010, more than 19,000 Americans killed themselves using guns. (In the same year, there were “only” 11,000 homicides nationwide.) In 2011, 32,000 Americans died in traffic accidents (the lowest figure in 60 years, though it was again on the rise in the first six months of 2012).
In other words, Americans accept without blinking the equivalent yearly of more than six 9/11s in suicides-by-gun and more than 10 when it comes to vehicular deaths. Similarly, had the underwear bomber, to take one post-9/11 example of terrorism, succeeded in downing Flight 253 and murdering its 290 passengers, it would have been a horrific act of terror; but he and his compatriots would have had to bring down 65 planes to reach the annual level of weaponized suicides and more than 110 planes for vehicular deaths.
And yet no one has declared war on either the car or the gun (or the companies that make them or the people who sell them). No one has built a massive, nearly trillion-dollar car-and-gun-security-complex to deal with them. In the case of guns, quite the opposite is true, as the post-Newtown debate over gun control has made all too clear. On both scores, Americans have decided to live with perfectly real dangers and the staggering carnage that accompanies them, constraining them on occasion or sometimes not at all.
Despite the carnage of 9/11, terrorism has been a small-scale American danger in the years since, worse than shark attacks, but not much else. Like a wizard, however, what Osama bin Laden and his suicide bombers did that day was create an instant sense of an enemy so big, so powerful, that Americans found “war” a reasonable response; big enough for those who wanted an international police action against Al Qaeda to be laughed out of the room; big enough to launch an invasion of revenge against Iraq, a country unrelated to Al Qaeda; big enough, in fact, to essentially declare war on the world.
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| CIA Boss John Brennan |
What’s remarkable is how little the disjuncture between the scope and scale of the global war that was almost instantly launched and the actual enemy at hand was ever noted here. You could certainly make a reasonable argument that, in these years, Washington has largely fought no one—and lost. Everywhere it went, it created enemies who had, previously, hardly existed and the process is ongoing. Had you been able to time-travel back to the Cold War era to inform Americans that, in the future, our major enemies would be in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Mali, Libya and so on, they would surely have thought you mad (or lucky indeed).
Creating an Enemy-Industrial Complex
Without an enemy of commensurate size and threat, so much that was done in Washington in these years might have been unattainable. The vast national security building and spending spree—stretching from the Virginia suburbs of Washington, where the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency erected its new $1.8 billion headquarters, to Bluffdale, Utah, where the National Security Agency is still constructing a $2 billion, one-million-square-foot data center for storing the world’s intercepted communications—would have been unlikely.
Without the fear of an enemy capable of doing anything, money at ever escalating levels would never have poured into homeland security, or the Pentagon, or a growing complex of crony corporations associated with our weaponized safety. The exponential growth of the national security complex, as well as of the powers of the executive branch when it comes to national security matters, would have far been less likely.
Without 9/11 and the perpetual “wartime” that followed, along with the heavily promoted threat of terrorists ready to strike and potentially capable of wielding biological, chemical or even nuclear weapons, we would have no Department of Homeland Security nor the lucrative mini-homeland-security complex that surrounds it; the 17-outfit US Intelligence Community with its massive $75 billion official budget would have been far less impressive; our endless drone wars and the “drone lobby” that goes with them might never have developed; and the US military would not have an ever growing secret military, the Joint Special Operations Command, gestating inside it—effectively the president’s private army, air force and navy—and already conducting largely secret operations across much of the planet.
For all of this to happen, there had to be an enemy-industrial complex as well, a network of crucial figures and institutions ready to pump up the threat we faced and convince Americans that we were in a world so dangerous that rights, liberty and privacy were small things to sacrifice for American safety.
In short, any number of interests from Bush administration figures eager to “sweep it all up” and do whatever they wanted in the world to weapons makers, lobbyists, surveillance outfits, think tanks, military intellectuals, assorted pundits... well, the whole national and homeland security racket and its various hangers-on had an interest in beefing up the enemy. For them, it was important in the post-9/11 era that threats would never again lack a capital “T” or a hefty dollar sign.
And don’t forget a media that
was ready to pound the drums of war and emphasize what dangerous enemies lurked
in our world with remarkably few second thoughts. Post-9/11, major media
outlets were generally prepared to take the enemy-industrial complex’s word for
it and play every new terrorist incident as if it were potentially the end of
the world. Increasingly as the years went on, jobs, livelihoods, an expanding
world of “security” depended on the continuance of all this, depended, in
short, on the injection of regular doses of fear into the body politic.That was the “favor” Osama bin Laden did for Washington’s national security apparatus and the Bush administration on that fateful September morning. He engraved an argument in the American brain that would live on indelibly for years, possibly decades, calling for eternal vigilance at any cost and on a previously unknown scale.
As the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), that neocon think-tank-cum-shadow-government, so fatefully put it in "Rebuilding America's Defenses" a year before the 9/11 attacks: “Further, the process of transformation [of the military], even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”
So when the new Pearl Harbor arrived out of the blue, with many PNAC members (from Vice President Dick Cheney on down) already in office, they naturally saw their chance. They created an Al Qaeda on steroids and launched their “global war” to establish a Pax Americana, in the Middle East and then perhaps globally. They were aware that they lacked opponents of the stature of those of the previous century and, in their documents, they made it clear that they were planning to ensure no future great-power-style enemy or bloc of enemy-like nations would arise. Ever.
For this, they needed an American public anxious, frightened and ready to pay. It was, in other words, in their interest to manipulate us. And if that were all there were to it, our world would be a grim, but simple enough place. As it happens, it’s not. Ruling elites, no matter what power they have, don’t work that way. Before they manipulate us, they almost invariably manipulate themselves.
I was convinced of this years ago by a friend who had spent a lot of time reading early Cold War documents from the National Security Council—from, that is, a small group of powerful governmental figures writing to and for each other in the utmost secrecy. As he told me then and wrote in Washington’s China, the smart book he did on the early US response to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, what struck him in the documents was the crudely anti-communist language those men used in private with each other.
It was the sort of anti-communism you might otherwise have assumed Washington’s ruling elite would only have wielded to manipulate ordinary Americans with fears of Communist subversion, the “enemy within,” and Soviet plans to take over the world. (In fact, they and others like them would use just such language to inject fear into the body politic in those early Cold War years, that era of McCarthyism.)
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| Former US Vice President Dick Cheney |
Or consider the issue of Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, that excuse for the invasion of Iraq. Critics of the invasion are generally quick to point out how that bogus issue was used by the top officials of the Bush administration to gain public support for a course that they had already chosen.
After all, Cheney and his men cherry-picked the evidence to make their case, even formed their own secret intel outfit to give them what they needed, and ignored facts at hand that brought their version of events into question.
They publicly claimed in an orchestrated way that Saddam had active nuclear and WMD programs. They spoke in the most open ways of potential mushroom clouds from (nonexistent) Iraqi nuclear weapons rising over American cities, or of those same cities being sprayed with (nonexistent) chemical or biological weapons from (nonexistent) Iraqi drones.
They certainly had to know that some of this information was useful but bogus. Still, they had clearly also convinced themselves that, on taking Iraq, they would indeed find some Iraqi WMD to justify their claims.
In his soon-to-be-published book, Dirty Wars, Jeremy Scahill cites the conservative journalist Rowan Scarborough on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s growing post-invasion irritation over the search for Iraqi WMD sites. “Each morning,” wrote Scarborough, “the crisis action team had to report that another location was a bust.
Rumsfeld grew angrier and angrier. One officer quoted him as saying, ‘They must be there!’ At one briefing, he picked up the briefing slides and tossed them back at the briefers.”
In other words, those top officials hustling us into their global war and their long-desired invasion of Iraq had also hustled themselves into the same world with a similar set of fears. This may seem odd, but given the workings of the human mind, its ability to comfortably hold potentially contradictory thoughts most of the time without disturbing itself greatly, it’s not.
A similar phenomenon undoubtedly took place in the larger national security establishment where self-interest combined easily enough with fear. After all, in the post-9/11 era, they were promising us one thing: something close to 100 percent “safety” when it came to one small danger in our world—terrorism.
The fear that the next underwear bomber might get through surely had the American public—but also the American security state—in its grips. After all, who loses the most if another shoe bomber strikes, another ambassador goes down, another 9/11 actually happens? Whose job, whose world, will be at stake then?
They may indeed be a crew of Machiavellis, but they are also acolytes in the cult of terror and global war. They live in the Cathedral of the Enemy. They were the first believers and they will undoubtedly be the last ones as well. They are invested in the importance of the enemy. It’s their religion. They are, after all, the enemy-industrial complex and if we are in their grip, so are they.
The comic strip character Pogo once famously declared: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” How true. We just don’t know it yet.
The US needs to tread carefully to avoid escalating tensions with North Korea, Robert Dreyfuss writes.
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