18 August 2010
By Jacob G. Hornberger With the welfare state cracking apart and with
rising concerns among the citizenry about federal
spending and debt, count on federal officials to
provoke more overseas crises as a way to frighten
people into rallying toward the government. It is an
old tried-and-true trick that government officials use
to distract people’s attention away from the problems
government is causing and toward supporting the
government’s efforts to keep people “safe.” U.S. officials are not the only ones who have used
this trick effectively. James Madison pointed out that
officials in the Roman Empire did it too: “Among the
Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war,
whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all
Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of
defending, have enslaved the people.” In the war on terrorism, fear is the coin of the
realm. “Be afraid, be very afraid” has become the
standard catcall of the statists. One option, of course, is for the citizenry to
resist the fearmongering and steadfastly oppose all
governmental efforts to infringe liberty and privacy
in the name of keeping people safe. The problem with
that approach, however, is that it can be endless
since the government can use its forces to provoke new
overseas threats whenever it wants. It can do things
constantly to keep the people afraid. Therefore, the only real long-term solution is to
dismantle America’s disastrous experiment with empire,
interventionism, and a warfare state. That would
entail an immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan and
Iraq, bringing all the troops home from everywhere
around the world and discharging them, closing most of
the military bases here in the United States, ending
all foreign aid, and ridding our nation of a standing
army. That was the type of nation — a constitutional
republic — our American ancestors intended for America
to be. By embracing empire and foreign interventionism
(and a welfare state), America has deviated from the
vision that the Founding Fathers had for our nation,
and the results have been disastrous. Think of the advantages that would accrue from the
U.S. government’s exiting Afghanistan, Iraq, and the
rest of the Middle East and the world, and from
dismantling the entire U.S. military empire: 1. The biggest benefit would be that the threat of
terrorism against the United States would evaporate.
That’s where motive is so important. From the get-go,
U.S. officials wanted Americans to believe that the
9/11 terrorists attacked America because they hated
our freedom and values. Nonsense. The attacks were
“blowback” or retaliation for the bad things the U.S.
government was doing in the Middle East. The empire-intervention crowd claims that the
Empire must remain occupying Afghanistan indefinitely
to ensure that the Taliban doesn’t regain power. They
say that the Taliban might make Afghanistan into a
haven for more 9/11-type terrorists. But that’s just nonsense. For one thing, the U.S.
didn’t attack Afghanistan because the Taliban were
complicit in the 9/11 attacks. It attacked because the
Taliban refused to unconditionally comply with
President Bush’s demand to deliver bin Laden to the
CIA. Thus, the fear that drives statists to call for a
permanent occupation of Afghanistan is that the
Taliban must now be so angry over what the U.S. Empire
did to them that they might want to retaliate by
offering a base from which terrorists can initiate
strikes against the United States. But that’s just speculation and empire talk. There
is no reason to believe that the Taliban will engage
in such actions after the U.S. Empire exits the
country. After all, do we see any terrorist strikes
against Russia despite the fact that the Soviet Union
wreaked untold death and destruction during its
occupation of Afghanistan? Do we see any terrorist
strikes against the United States by North Vietnamese
people who lost friends and relatives from U.S. bombs
and bullets during the Vietnam War? Moreover, since terrorism against the United States
is rooted in what the U.S. government is doing over
there, once the U.S. government is no longer over
there, there won’t be any more terrorist threat
against the United States. In other words, what
difference would it make if the Taliban were to
announce Afghanistan as a haven for terrorists if
nobody cared anymore about planning terrorist strikes
against the United States? Anyway, as we’ve seen time and time again, people
who are determined to do harm to the United States can
plan terrorist strikes from a hotel or house anywhere
in the world. They don’t need an entire country to
serve as a safe haven for them. 2. With the anger and hatred that gives rise to
terrorism having dissipated, the entire
war-on-terrorism edifice could be dismantled,
beginning with the Patriot Act and the Department of
Homeland Security. Life could return to normal,
without all the perpetual crises and fear-mongering.
3. An enormous amount of taxpayer money could be
saved, perhaps as much as 1/3 of the federal budget.
When a person is stricken by cancer, it’s important
to attack the source of the cancer cells. The same
principle applies to when the body politic is attacked
by cancer. The source of America’s cancer is the U.S.
Empire. It’s time to attack the cancer at its source
by bringing all the troops and contractors home now,
dismantling Americas’ military empire, and ending its
foreign policy of meddling and interference. That
would go a long way toward restoring health to our
nation, along with peace, prosperity, harmony, and
normality. Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The
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