|
Washington Arrogance Has Fomented a Muslim Revolution
Paul Craig Roberts
Prisonplanet
Friday, Dec 05, 2008
"In a government of law, the existence of the
government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously.
Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for
ill, it teaches the whole people by example. Crime is contagious. If
the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law;
it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy."
~ Justice Louis Brandeis
Is Pakistan responsible for the Mumbai attack in India? No.
Is India’s repression of its Muslim minority responsible? No.
Is the United States government responsible? Yes.
The attack on Mumbai required radicalized Muslims. Radicalized Muslims
resulted from the US overthrowing the elected government in Iran and
imposed the Shah; from the US stationing troops in Saudi Arabia; from
the US invading and attempting to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq, bombing
weddings, funerals, and children’s soccer games; from the US violating
international and US law by torturing its Muslim victims; from the US
enlisting Pakistan in its war against the Taliban; from the US violating
Pakistan’s sovereignty by conducting military operations on Pakistani
territory, killing Pakistani civilians; from the US government supporting
a half century of Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their
lands, towns and villages; from the assault of American culture on Muslim
values; from the US purchasing the government of Egypt to act as its
puppet; from US arrogance that America is the supreme arbiter of morality.
As Justice Brandeis said, crime is contagious. Government teaches by
example, and America’s example is lawlessness. America’s
brutal crimes against the Muslim world have invited every Muslim to
become a law unto himself – a revolutionary. It is not terror
that Washington confronts but revolution.
By illegal, uncivilized and undiplomatic behavior, the US has stirred
Muslim peoples from their long slumber as serfs of Western colonial
powers. Some Muslims have had all that they can take, and their fury
drives them to rouse a billion of their fellows to throw off the yoke
of foreign hegemony.
The arrogant incompetence of American governments brought this conflict
to the American people and inflicted it upon the world. By destabilizing
Pakistan, the US lost a puppet and created an opportunity for Muslim
revolutionaries to exploit. By enraging India against Pakistan, the
Mumbai attack has created new problems for Pakistan that will focus
that government’s attention away from combating Taliban sanctuaries
on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. If the US picks up the
slack, it will have invaded yet another country and become trapped in
a larger quagmire.
Having fomented terrorism, the American government now pretends to
be the innocent victim, just as Israelis, having brought about terrorism
by driving Palestinians from their homes and villages, pretend to be
innocent victims.
(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)
Today European members of NATO, an outdated organization formed to
defend Western Europe against Soviet invasion, are sacrificing the lives
of their soldiers fighting the American Empire’s war in Afghanistan.
If America continues to have its way, Europeans will soon be dying in
Ukraine, Georgia, and Iran.
The American government, which preaches "freedom and democracy"
has in the 21st century gone to great extremes to stamp out the US Constitution
and the civil liberties that it guarantees. The US government has repudiated
the Geneva Conventions and the prohibitions in US statutory law against
torture. The US government has set aside habeas corpus, the ancient
legal principle guaranteed by the US Constitution that prohibits governments
from holding people in prisons without presenting charges. The US government
has broken the laws of other nations by kidnapping foreign citizens
and transporting them to other lands to be tortured.
These massive crimes have been justified in the name of the "war
on terror." In truth, America’s crimes foment revolution.
It was the US government that created the "war on terror,"
which has been used to murder and dispossess millions of Iraqis and
Afghans, to imprison US citizens as if they were medieval serfs, and
to squander three trillion dollars for the sole purpose of enriching
Halliburton and the military-security complex.
Investigative journalist John Pilger has shown that the so-called "moral
superiority of the West" is a hoax designed to shield from view
the self-seeking West’s crimes against humanity.
Obama promised change from this destructive behavior, but how does
change arise when the most arrogant woman on earth is appointed Secretary
of State and the rest of the new government is staffed with tried-and-true
Likudniks and servants of the military-security complex?
The change over which Obama will preside will have no American victories.
The change will come from America as a failed state, from the dollar
dethroned as reserve currency, from America repudiated by its allies
and paid puppets, from massive unemployment for which there is no solution,
from hyperinflation that produces anarchy.
The day might arrive when Washington is faced with revolution at home
as well as abroad.
|