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April 10, 2004

US Created Global Terrorism

Read this.

The dirtiest, dirtiest secret of the "war on terrorism" is that the US created its own enemy, not casually or accidentally, but with broad strategic planning over decades to support the rise of Islamic militancy across the globe.

Why did we do that?

Because the US government hated commies.

After Vietnam...the American government shifted from a strategy of direct intervention in the fight against global Communism to one of supporting new forms of low-level insurgency by private armed groups.

It was the CIA and other US intelligence outfits that trained informal militias around the world in how to conduct terrorist and proto-terrorist movements in Indochina, Latin America, Africa and, of course, Afghanistan:

The best-known C.I.A.-trained terrorist...is Osama bin Laden.

Because of our embrace of Apartheid in South Africa, in the 1970s we supported two of the bloodiest, nastiest terrorist rebel groups in Africa, Renamo in Mozambique and UNITA in Angola, then went on to spread the model globally:

Drawing on the same strategy used in Africa, the United States supported the Contras in Nicaragua and then created, on a grand scale, a pan-Islamic front to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.

The Afghanistan proxy war with the Soviet Union was an especially dangerous game, since it changed the typical US proxy terrorist group from a nationalist force, into a global ideological force that could, and did, spin out of control:

Whereas other Islamic movements, like the Iranian revolution, had clear nationalist aims, the Afghan jihad...was created by the United States as a privatized and ideologically stateless resistance force.

A result...was "the formation of an international cadre of uprooted individuals who broke ties with family and country of origin to join clandestine networks with a clearly defined enemy."

US enemy's were any movement around the world allied with the Soviet Union or "potentially" allied-- meaning that they promoted even vaguely socialist policies.

So the US overthrew progressive governments in Iran, Guatamala, Chile and other places around the world.

But overthrowing governments was not enough. Socialist movements had the ideological allegiance of millions of people, so the US elites saw strategic gains in supporting a counter-ideological movement, conservative Islam, to mobilize a popular alternative and, where necessary, a military challenge to the socialists. (Notably Israel in alliance with the US had the same idea, and supported the growth of Hamas originally as an alternative to the PLO.)

Here is the deadly bottom line-- where people around the globe have been desperate and poor, they have looked for justice and a better life. The socialists promised justice in this world, but the US elites didn't want justice in this world; they wanted to protect the profits of US multinationals, so any movement calling for justice in this world was seen as too dangerous.

So they decided movements promising justice and paradise in the next world was the best way to compete for the loyalties of the poor and desperate. So Islamic fundamentalist movements were seen as good proxies that the US elite could support against its socialist enemies.

But when paradise is in the afterlife, that removes any limit to the violence such fundamentalist movements might promote, since fear of death is no longer a rational restraint on action.

And so we have the blowback of 911-- US elites supported the growth of radical Islamic movements for decades, most specifically training a global cadre of them for our war on the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and it came back to kill our citizens.

Posted by Nathan at April 10, 2004 08:17 AM