Robert Scheer: A Monster of Our Own Creation

[marmar]

from truthdig:




A Monster of Our Own Creation

Posted on May 4, 2011
By Robert Scheer


He was our kind of guy until he wasn’t, an ally during the Cold War until he no longer served our purposes. The problem with Osama bin Laden was not that he was a fanatical holy warrior; we liked his kind just fine as long as the infidels he targeted were not us but Russians and the secular Afghans in power in Kabul whom the Soviets backed.

But when bin Laden turned against us, he morphed into a figure of evil incarnate, and now three decades after we first decided to use him and other imported Muslim zealots for our Cold War purposes, we feel cleansed by his death of any responsibility for his carnage. We may make mistakes but we are never in the wrong. USA! USA!

Kind of like when the CIA assigned the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro and the Mafiosi turned out to have their own agenda, or when Pentagon experts anointed the Catholic nutcase Ngo Dinh Diem as the George Washington of predominately Buddhist South Vietnam before they felt the need to execute him. A similar fate was suffered by Saddam Hussein, whose infamous Baghdad handshake with Donald Rumsfeld stamped him as our agent in the war to defeat the ayatollahs of Iran.

Awkward, I know, to point out that bin Laden was another of those monsters of our creation, one of those Muslim “freedom fighters” that President Ronald Reagan celebrated for having responded to the CIA’s call to kill the Soviets in Afghanistan. That holy crusade against infidels was financed by Saudi Arabia and armed with U.S. weapons to oppose a secular Afghan government with Soviet backing but before Soviet troops had crossed the border. In short, it was an ill-fated and unjustifiable intervention by the U.S. into another nation’s internal affairs. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_monster_of_our_own_creation_20110504/

[geckosfeet]

1. The conclusion is interesting - it leaves several ideas on the table that were not fully discussed

in the piece. My view is that our being in Afghanistan has little to do with the Afghan people or terrorism. And that Pakistan has their own agenda - and that includes taping into the pockets of the American taxpayer.

A Monster of Our Own Creation

It is time to concede that the mess that is Afghanistan is a result of our cynical uses of those people and their land for purposes that have nothing to do with their needs or aspirations. Even if bin Laden had been killed in some forlorn cave in Afghanistan, it would not have made the case that he was using that country as a base. But the fact that he was in an area amply populated by the very Pakistani military and intelligence forces that we have armed, and that should have been able to easily nab him, gives the lie to the claim that Afghanistan is vital territory to be secured in what two administrations have now chosen to define as the war on terrorism.

Our use of Afghanistan, is likely as a military staging ground for mid-east operations. There is no oil that we know of. That the US government/military industrial complex are not altruistic in serving the Afghan people seems a naive notion. That Afghanistan is not vital to our interests depends on what you consider our interests to be. Not vital to the 'war on terror' - check. I would argue that the 'war on terror' itself, is one of the most effective canards ever perpetrated on the peoples of the world. Actual agenda - oil. Always was, always will be.

Another note of interest - what in the world was going on in Pakistan? How was such a complex built in the middle of a military intelligence community without their knowing anything about it's occupants? My (simple) answer to that is it wasn't. I suspect that they knew exactly who and what was in their midst. And that the negotiations over when and how the occupants would be eliminated hinged largely around the types of international currency that we the people are not privy to.


on edit - added link

[MasonJar]

2. I think we need to be reminded that we created this monster, along with

several others in our long twentieth century of constant war. Most of the things Reagan did are not in the history books. And that goes for many other USA leaders. Our government and our corporations are a greedy, vicious bunch. I hate to say it. but it is true. We are often not a nice country.