Tom Engelhardt's lenghty piece is interesting and I agree with most of it, yet, like most dissenters in the US, Engelhardt fails to address the gist of the issue and lucubrates on elusive concepts such as "the US's imperial policy".... Now, let's stop and look for a moment at that familiar bugaboo, the so-called American Empire. If anything, it's ebbing and retreating WORLDWIDE --except in the Middle East. Everywhere, the US's allegedly imperial hubris has actually backfired and brought about the REVERSE outcome!! It started with Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Chavez in Venezuela and, lately, that guy (I don't recall his name) in Bolivia... Even conservative Mexico is increasingly at odds with the US (and the 2,000-mile fence won't help it). Ditto with Europe. Ditto with Asia.... If, as mouthy pundits have it, the US was really bent on securing a worldwide empire then the 9/11 conspirators wouldn't have spun 9/11 as an Islamic plot but as a CHINESE one instead! They would have trumped up a cast of Chinese/Asian hijackers in place of Mohammed Atta and co. --because the Chinese behemoth, feeding upon the US market, makes up the one and only threat to US hegemony --not Arab wastelands, not the Arab Street, not the boastful mullahs! Well, that is, unless you take ISRAEL's national interest into account... Bring Israel into the picture and it's an altogether different kettle of fish. But that's not the spin the media-military complex wants to put on the whole affair, hence the propaganda ploy --all too popular on the left-- to blow the US-Israeli folie à deux(*) out of all proportion and somehow dilute it into a worldwide --almost galactic-- scheme of universal hegemony!
US troops keep shedding blood in Muslim Afghanistan, in Iraq, eventually in Syria and Iran, that is, in countries openly hostile to Israel, yet we are told that the US military machine is set on an anti-terrorist crusade WORLDWIDE?!? But tell me, since when the "world" consists only of Israel and her neighbors?
Gus
(*) education.yahoo.com |
