Re: ...we should be dealing with our domestic problems instead of blowing billions in a f'ing desert. So whose interests are being served? And don't even tell me it's for the oil.
Of course it's not for oil....(*) As I explained in dozens of posts on other threads, the US could make do without Gulf oil, whereas the opposite isn't true: Saudi Arabia and her neighbors have basically been selling their oil on an oligopsonic market where oil-guzzlers like the US and Western Europe called the shots... Even today, Canada is still the US's #1 oil supplier --before Saudi Arabia, Venezuela,...(**)
The US is crusading in Iraq for Israel's sake. Period. But then, since Israel is part and parcel of the Judeo-Protestant mythology and a cornerstone of Bible Belt ideology, we must admit to the fact that the US crusade serves genuine US interests as well --ideological/political interests, that is. The US has been run all along by a Judeo-Protestant elite. In its early history the emphasis being on the "Protestant" part, with a gradual shift to the "Judeo-" part since the end of WWII.... Now, it's clear, from a foreign/outside vantage, that the aforesaid Judeo-Protestant elite feels increasingly threatened and besieged by "alien" ideologies and worldviews... Many US opinionmakers are Protestant or Jewish white people who are convinced that the success of America --of the so-called American Dream-- stems from its Biblical, Judeo-Protestant creed. And, to their chagrin, that creed is jeopardized demographically by an immigration that's increasingly non-white and non-Judeo-Protestant (Hispanics) and ideologically by the so-called secular relativism that posists that most religions and mythologies are interchangeable and morally equivalent, implying that one can be a good American and a Muslim at the same time, or a good American and a shintoist Japanese-American at the same time, etc. Of course, some Americans, some parts of America --the blue states-- abide by such a liberal vision/opinion, but other parts and constituencies of the US don't!
Americans fancy they all live in the same country... LOL! How wrong! The vastness, the geographical expanse of North America gave them the illusion thereof. Yet, it's now obvious that two different Americas have grown alongside over the past fifty years, one of them being the reactionary South that, somehow, never kept up with the civil rights, the end of segregation, and the demotion of the Judeo-Protestant creed as just another religion.... White southeners have been circling their ideological wagons and have been fighting a rearguard action ever since the 1960s --against the civil rights, the Vietnam trauma, gay rights, secularism, and... Israel. Of all the latter battlegrounds, only Israel happens to be situated OUTSIDE the US. Hence the blind support of Israel provides white Zionists with a convenient outlet to vindicate their domestically frustrated agenda while not rocking the boat at home... Cynically, we can put it this way: better for the Bible belt's unremitting racism and religious fanaticism to unleash themselves half a world away in backward Arab "failed states" than at home. In this sense, I believe, the US crusades in the Middle East, conveniently suits the Judeo-Protestant elite.... Peace at home, hell abroad --but for how long?
Gus
(*) Message 20425946
(**) Message 20454841 |
