It is almost as though most Americans fail to understand that the U.S. is in fact at war
You Call This a War? I’ll Show You a War
By Anthony Gregory | Tuesday March 20, 2012
In light of Obama’s “National Defense Resources Preparedness” Order, I’d like to comment on a troubling trend I’ve seen in American discourse about war since 9/11. From left to right, it was often said that the U.S. government’s interventions abroad as well as its activities at home did not rise to the level of drama and seriousness that typified previous U.S. wars. In particular, World War II has been brought up time and again as a model of which the current militarism has fallen far short. This observation has generally been given with the observer demonstrating palpable lament if not nostalgia.
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The U.S. government has spent trillions on these wars; destroyed the infrastructure of Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions; killed many thousands in Afghanistan, the longest U.S. war to date, and in Pakistan without any conceivable justification; unleashed an ethnic cleansing in Libya that has already depopulated an entire town; trashed habeas corpus and the Bill of Rights, detained thousands of captives, many completely innocent and very few of them terrorists, often for years without meaningful oversight; tortured many hundreds of people, dozens of whom died in U.S. custody; shoveled many billions to military-industrial-complex firms, some that now permeate every major federal department with facilities in most states, and hundreds of others that are much smaller but exist solely because of the war on terror; nearly completely overturned all Fourth Amendment standards concerning national security; turned every American airport into a microcosm of a police state; ramped up funding to militarize nearly every police department in the country, giving them tanks, assault weapons and even unmanned drone technology; spied on rightwing tax protesters, leftwing antiwar activists, Muslims, Catholic charities, Quakers, and many others in the name of stopping terrorism; preempted one ridiculous “terror plot” after another, in almost every case setting up the suspect to plan violence he never would have without federal instigation; claimed the Stalinist authority, possessed by the president acting alone, to kill anyone on earth he deems a threat; made traveling to Mexico and Canada, a previously routine endeavor, into something out of an Orwell novel; and finally destroyed previously sacred (if inconsistently upheld) taboos on federal molesting of travelers, violations of financial privacy, interrogation techniques, Congressional war powers, and judicial due process.
Ah. But NOW we are on a war footing. And sadly, it is true that something has shifted with Obama’s executive order. It is more out in the open than before that the entire U.S. economy operates at the discretion of America’s rulers—just as in fascist Italy. It is now clearer than ever that the lives of American citizens can be sacrificed on the altar of Mars should the president decide that those registered in the Selective Service must go abroad and shoot at Iranians, whose country has not attacked America (or any other country, really) in centuries. All the economy, and all our lives and liberties, belong to the presidential state, as far as it’s concerned. And where’s the opposition party on this issue, one that would seem to make the importance of all others—certainly all others that are ever discussed on CNN—pale in comparison? I hear no criticism, and if it came it would be transparently disingenuous, since people like Romney, Santorum, and Gingrich have been calling for a “real war” for years. Yes, they are finally saying maybe the U.S. should leave Afghanistan, but this simply amounts to a concession that it’s time for the empire to move on and crush another country.
Once again the U.S. hyperpower is ready to pounce. It smells Persian blood, and on the basis of a tissue of lies no less absurd and easily debunked than those that pulled America into war with Iraq, or wars with many other nations, the U.S. may very well jump into a conflict that develops into something that conservatives and liberals have long wanted—a dramatic sequel to the great crusades of America’s most worshiped presidents. Conservatives will get their blood-letting. Liberals will get their collectivist sacrifice.
You call this a war? I’ll show you a war, says the President. He with the Peace Prize appears unsatisfied with the relatively low-cost discrete militarism we’ve seen since 9/11. Unfortunately, so have many of his subjects, making his Order of last Friday all the more ominous.
http://blog.independent.org/2012/03/20/you-call-this-a-war-ill-show-you-a-war/
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