As I stated in an earlier blog, the problem is not the drones, the problem is the people picking the targets, mainly because they seem to have no idea what is actually going on in the Islamic world.
This is nothing new. We as a nation appear to have long ago embraced functional ignorance of how the other people who inhabit our planet think and why they do what they do. This is not to say that we are all wrong and that they are all right but simply to be a plea for our leaders to try to understand that all people do not think as we do and all people’s ends are not the same as ours.
I agree with our government that there are people in the world that want to kill us and the best solution to that is to kill them first. These people, however, are a distinct minority; more so than our press and our politicians would have us think. One can scan the papers and TV for weeks on end and find no reference to something called the counter jihad movement and yet it is a movement, so widespread that it encompasses just about every Muslim nation and most segments of those nations that are free or sometimes not so free to espouse it.
Our bombing individual targets in these nations and accidentally killing innocent people in our search for the bad guys, does nothing to help enrich the counter jihad movement, rather it kills it in the immediately targeted area.
But what is this movement and why have we heard almost nothing about it? Well, it is a movement that is so prevalent and so widespread that it defies reason that it has not been a major feature of our foreign policy and press investigations. How could our media ignore the fact that many of those who were part of Osama bin-Laden’s original cadre, even his mentors, now publicly eschew his teachings and call for the end to al Qaeda and its policies of death and destruction. Why do we see nothing of the Middle-East comedians who openly ridicule militancy and the progenitors of jihad.
This counter-jihad movement is far more widespread than was jihad, itself. It is openly espoused in Tehran’s street protests, by the evolving leaders of Turkey’s ruling party, by the resistance in Pakistani villages to Taliban intrusions and even in political debates in Egyptian prisons by former jihadis.
Many Muslim clerics have declared a counter-jihad against terrorism. One went so far in 2010, as to issue a 600 page fatwa that condemned al Qaeda, outlawed suicide attacks and condemned bin Laden for leading Muslims into “hellfire.”
And still we ignore it and still our government makes foreign policy decisions without considering the consequences of its existence. Our press acts as if it doesn’t exist. But what else is new. In a nation that prides itself on being the greatest country in the world we seem to constantly be inundated by a blizzard of foreign policy stupidity. Since WWII our foreign policy has consisted of fighting off imaginary foes and allowing ourselves to be dragged into battles in foreign lands, the only reason for which, has been the expansion of our industrial rather than our national policy.
The post WWII bugaboo of communism was responsible for some of the worst decisions ever made by any government, of any country, on any planet, for any reason. The faux threat of atomic warfare kept us on constant alert and the phony threat of communists subverting countries like Vietnam and Korea where we had little or no interests wasted thousands of lives and trillions of dollars much like we have done again in Iraq and Afghanistan four decades later. We didn’t belong in Korea or Vietnam just like we didn’t belong in Afghanistan or Iraq but we have always had some group in our government, egged on by the military industrial complex, who demand war regardless of its necessity or consequences. Right now they are doing it again with Iran.
We have not put boots on the ground in Central or South America, at least not in any clearly labeled invasion but we have been so incredibly involved in their politics and counter insurgencies that we might as well have just pulled up the landing barges. And why have we been screwing around in the countries of our southern neighbors? Because big business has vested interests in those countries and we have tried to adjust their national policies to meet the needs of our industries. We have kept or tried to keep brutal dictators in power in Cuba, Peru, Venezuela, Columbia, Argentina, and many more. We have done the same in most of the countries in Central America and, of course, Cuba. We did this despite the fact that these men were bad for their countries, because they were good for American business interests.
Our neighbors in Central and South America should hate us and many of them do, but an equal number realize which side their bread is buttered on and as soon as the anti-dictatorial forces managed to oust US backed dictators they were quick to make accommodations to the US businesses that had backed the ousted dictators.
This is no way to run a foreign policy, not if you want a peaceful world. Not if you want to evade twin tower disasters. The twin towers happened because we have continually backed the same kind of brutal dictatorships in the Middle-East as we did for half a century below our own borders and in Africa.
When we finally decided to take out a brutal dictator, it was a guy who had been our ally for almost a decade, a guy we had backed in his war with Iran. And when we did finally, make our move against Saddam Hussein, it was to grab his oil production not save his citizens and we did it in such a sloppy, incompetent way that when we left, ten years later, we had killed thousands of American kids, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and wasted trillions of dollars and, oh yeah, we didn’t get the oil. Let’s hear it for American foreign policy as practiced by everyone up until now.
Now after half a century of screwing up royally, of making Britain and France look like colonial geniuses, we have a chance to finally do the right thing for the rest of the world, but not if we listen to the wretched voices of the still wrong, neo-coms. Karl Rove and Dick Cheney should be in jail and John McCain is a sweet, doddering old man but he knows nothing about foreign policy. Having been a prisoner of war does not validate his credentials as a foreign policy expert.
We need to stop meddling in the internal affairs of other countries. Our intrusions in Afghanistan and Iraq have been disastrous for those countries and for us. We did the right thing in Libya and we seem to be doing the right thing in Syria, especially since we have no idea who is fighting on the rebel side.
Saber rattling in Iran is brain dead. The Iranians aren’t going to build a bomb even if they could but nuclear energy is the right thing for their country. If they did build a bomb what would they do with it? Are they stupid enough to think that if they used it on Israel that their entire country wouldn’t be turned into a radioactive fire pit? Only the Rove’s, Rumsfeld’s and Cheney’s of the world are thick headed enough not to envision that scenario.
The key to Iran is the same as was the key to the Soviet Union. Only the dumbest members of the Right think that Ronald Reagan toppled the Soviets. Television was the hero and it and the internet will do the same thing to Iran. Dictatorship cannot withstand the onslaught of the media. People are inherently greedy and they want what they see. Release the tube. Show ‘em enough bling and they will take care of their own clerics. We won’t have to lift a finger. The tube and the Internet are our most devastating weapons of foreign policy. We just have to be bright enough to use them creatively.