A million Tim McVeighs now
By Chris Floyd
December 17, 2008 “Global Research” — The”Good War” in Afghanistan – the Bush-launched war that Barack Obamatells us we must fight and win – continues to deteriorate before oureyes. Just like every other operation in the so-called “War on Terror”(another Bush-launched campaign that Obama has fully embraced as hisown), the Afghan war, now in its seventh year, has proven entirelycounter-productive to its stated aims. Instead of stabilizing avolatile region and denying it as a base for violent extremism, it hasof course done the opposite. The shock waves of the heavy-handedAmerican-led invasion of Afghanistan – a country that no foreign powerhas ever conquered and held – have spread across Central Asia, mostdangerously into Pakistan.
Afghanistanitself is in a desperate condition, laden with a weak,foreign-installed government dominated by warlords and riddled withcorruption. The illegal opium trade, quashed by the Taliban, has nowsurged to historic levels, and is flooding the streets of Europe andthe West with cut-rate heroin – not to mention fuelling an astonishingrise in drug addiction among Afghans, Pakistanis and Iranians. At everyturn, the iron hand of American militarism is producing more suffering,more chaos, more corruption, more extremism, more slaughter, bothdirectly and as blowback from people maddened into wanton violence bythe relentless stream of atrocities. And no, to comprehend an origin ofviolence is not to condone it; but reality compels acknowledgment ofthe fact that state-terror atrocity breeds “asymmetrical” atrocity inturn. It also teaches by example. The state militarists of empire say:Violence works. Violence is honorable. Violence is the most effectiveway to accomplish your goals. And you must not blench at killinginnocent people in your violent operations. Is it any wonder thatothers adopt these methods, which are championed and celebrated by ourmost respected and legitimatized elites? Recall the words of one ofAmerica’s own home-grown “asymmetricals,” Timothy McVeigh, who at hissentencing for the Oklahoma City bombing quoted Justice Louis Brandeis:”Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or forill, it teaches the whole people by its example.”
McVeigh of course was schooled in death and violence as a soldier inthe first Iraq War, where he had been appalled to find himself killingpeople who wished America no harm, and to see the wholesale slaughterof innocent people in a conflict that need never have been fought. Apeaceful settlement of the complex financial and territorial disputebetween Iraq and Kuwait had been brokered by the Arab League; butalthough Iraq accepted the deal, at the last minute, the Kuwaiti royals– long-time business partners of then-President George H.W. Bush –reneged and declared, “We will call in the Americans.” Then theregional squabble between Iran and Kuwait was deceitfully turned into a”global threat” by the false claim that Iraq’s invading forces weremassing on the borders of Saudi Arabia. Pentagon chief Dick Cheneyclaimed secret satellite imagery showed vast Iraqi armies preparing toswoop down on the Saudi oilfields, the lifeline of the Americaneconomy. Bush Family capo James Baker, then Secretary of State, wentbefore Congress and declared that the imminent war was all about savingAmerican jobs. But commercial imagery obtained by a US newspaper at thetime showed there were no Iraqi forces on the Saudi border. It was alla knowing lie – as were the claims paraded before Congress that Iraqisoldiers were flinging infants from their incubators in Kuwaitihospitals. This bearing of false witness had been arranged by aprominent Bush-connected PR firm. The first Iraq War was just asfalsely based and pointless as the second.