As we continue to mourn the horrendous tragedy of 9/11, death of over 3,200 young American lives, the permanent wounding of over 50,000 with at least 23,000 damaged for life, and the aftermath of the 4th anniversary of “SHOCK AND AWE” Operation Iraqi Oil eerrrr I mean Freedom and the quagmire, it will be important for ordinary Americans to keep world events in perspective.
We must put things in proportional perspective by remembering just that last year an average of more than 3,000 Iraqis died PER MONTH, in the fractious sectarian violence which is a direct result of our invasion.
We also must not forget that evil cunning terrorists took 8 years between the first attack on the WTC towers and the second one. There cannot be any false complacency on our part. We hate our enemies and should wipe them out too; justifiably so right? Then what logic says that Iraqis and other Moslems who see what happened in Iraq and Lebanon, should not hate us for our invasion which caused over 150,000 dead civilians?
Do we really think those who have their families killed by our bombs in Iraq or in Israeli hands will have logical rational reasoning capacity to distinguish between terrorist attacks and what we callously call “collateral damage”?
Iraq today has galvanized those who want to hurt us and has given our real enemies a free recruiting campaign. Our leaders claim we have not been attacked in 5 years because of our successful invasion of Iraq and "taking the battle to them" into Iraq.
That is baloney because we did not complete our mission in Afghanistan. We must not forget that we invaded the wrong nation and hid facts from our people. Before Iraq was invaded our leaders “forgot” to tell us not one hijacker was Iraqi and 15 of them were Saudis.
Rather queer won’t you say? 80 percent of our people believed the line “Saddam, 9/11, terror” that was repeated over and over again by the President and Vice President; we felt that Iraq was responsible for that terrible tragedy because it was suggested to us. Thus,more Iraqis have been killed than in the 9/11 tragedy since our invasion in 2003; thus leading to more and more anger and resentment towards us even in secular or moderate Moslem nations.
Is it anti Arab racism or bigotry or ignorance about Moslems that cause us not to wonder about casualties that add to the flames of hatred? Are some of our Christian political leaders as bad as the Islamic nutcases who think their faith is the only correct faith? When a President says he believes freedom is a gift from God and he intends to spread it, even by force he is as nutty as the extremists we fight.
Iraq has galvanized those who want to hurt us and has given our real enemies a free recruiting campaign. We must also must think of many other nations where tens of thousands more have died fighting terrorist separatist groups(such as Sri Lanka). We must not think our WTC was the only towers that were attacked.
In 1997 Sri Lanka's WTC towers were attacked by the world's most ruthless terrorist separatist group with their hallmark suicide bombers(it failed). Just 10 days ago some of their operatives were busted by the FBI in some clever police work in Statten Island. They were here to buy SAMs and other weapons to do harm in Sri Lanka. Where does their money come from? It comes from Canadian, US and other citizens of Tamil origin who contribute millions to their tiger group. Al-Qaeda copied Tiger tactics of using bomb laden suicide boats and cars. Tigers perfected the technology of the suicide bomb vest, remote controlled Claymore mine attacks and those were copied by Al-Qaeda.
We mislead our people by linking Al-Qaeda to Saddam to justify the invasion. We failed to tell American people about our involvement in the Middle East where we prop up dictatorships and feudal oppressive regimes and do not care about Democracy as long as the oil flows. We continue to prop the House Of Saud, and their oppressive Wahabi Intolerant ideologies that support Islamic terrorism. Not a single one of our allies is a real Democracy in the Middle-East(except Israel). The Madarassas in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan still espouse hate against us and will make sure there will be a steady stream of radical ideologues ready to hurt us in the future.
Intelligence agencies knew Saddam the secular tyrant (who we helped fight Iran in his 8 yr war) and Al-Qaeda type radical Islamic extremist types were enemies and our politicians still keep on lying about it. The Senate intelligence services report (too late and too little) has concluded what every well informed American knew. But even two years ago our President tried to say "Zarqawi is proof Saddam had links"; that is despite knowing that The
CIA last three years agol repudiated the idea that there were pre-war ties between
Saddam Hussein’s government and the terrorist psycho
Al Zarqawi, ( report issued on Friday by the Republican controlled Senate intelligence committee). That disclosure contradicts claims by the Bush administration that such ties existed, and that they provided evidence of links between Iraq and
Al Qaeda. The Republican-controlled committee also sharply criticized the administration for its reliance on the Iraqi National Congress during the run-up to the war in Iraq. A C.I.A. report completed in October 2005 concluded instead that Sadddam Hussein’s regime “did not have a relationship, harbor, or even turn a blind eye toward Mr. Zarqawi and his associates,” according to the new Senate findings.( NY Times). In fact we knew he was hunting for radical extremists in Iraq because of Iranian Shia threats to him. It is time our regime quit misleading us.
Our leaders, who claim to talk straight, never mention Saudi Arabia and Pakistan or the fact that not one hijacker was Iraqi and 15 were Saudis. We were misled into believing Iraq was behind the attack and we justifiably sought revenge, only to dismember the wrong nation by rushing in to a badly planned colonization attempt of an oil rich nation; and causing over 150,000 casualties we arrogantly dismiss as "collateral damage". We were told Iraqi oil revenues will pay itself for the war.
We were told by Rumsfeld, that it will not last 6 months. The gullible swallowed the line that “We will be greeted as liberators with roses and chocolates”. I guess those are on backorder now. The cost at present is over 450 billion by some estimates; nearly three thousand two hundred of our finest have died. Over twenty thousand are maimed for life and we don’t even want to show the horrors of war and suffering on TV so that our people will remain clueless and immune pawns for our leaders.
Apparently our moral values say it is more important to be outraged about a Presidential act of fellatio and lying about it than about a war that has now lasted longer than our involvement in World War-II.
In fairness we must also contrast our two ongoing wars. Everyone must agree that Afghanistan was the correct war. In that case, Bush was justified and gave great political leadership to the correct war that was lacking in the previous regime. Credit must be given to the Bush administration for attacking Afghanistan and depriving Al-Qaeda of a state to keep their operational base. Not one Democrat or Liberal should suggest otherwise. Everyone was unanimous about supporting our attack in Afghanistan. But everyone now can see that job was half done; and the Taliban who harbored Al-Qaeda are resurgent with open full scale battles being fought in some regions. Why didn't we complete that job? Now that facts are out, we can see that we missed the bus in Afghanistan by not providing enough Rangers to corner and kill Usama Bin Laden when he was cornered in Tora Bora; and the CIA sent repeated requests for reinforcements. NATO asks for more troops now because of a resurgent Taliban. Taleban now are depending on revenues from the rapidly expanding post invasion heroin Poppy farming that was curbed by the Taleban regime previously.
Yet it is important to know that the reason we went in there was not because of democracy. As Colin Powell said , “no matter how murderous Taliban regime was, we would not have attacked them if they did not support Al-Qaeda”. What does that statement shed light on our duplicitous role in spreading “democracy” or our feigned concern for the oppressed women of Afghanistan in comparison to the oppressed women in Saudi Arabia (Laura Bush lamented their oppression during Taleban rule) ? Personally we and the Pakistanis caused Taleban types to take over Afghanistan in the first place. History will teach us that Afghanistan and its Tribal factions have never been conquered by foreign powers and that they will continue to fight us for decades more.
Our actions in Iraq have strengthened Iran and its Shia radicals and Iran has become the dominant force in Mid-East politics now. That is one reason we did not invade Iraq after the Persian Gulf war in 1991. Our leaders then were astute and not blind ideologues driven by Christian radical zealotry. We in fact preferred a Secular Socialist thug like Iraq to keep Iran at bay. Ironically, while we make a soap opera of Sadddam’s murder trial, those horrid massacres/incidents for which he is being tried happened at a time we were actively supporting him(1982-89) to ward off Iran!;rather hypocritical to now use that argument to justify the war don’t you think? We knew at that time what Saddam was doing and did not care, so why should we be so self-righteous now?
We also used radical Arab jihadis to purge the Soviets out of Afghanistan during the cold war; hence creating a new Saudi Arab based monstrous radical network which at that time were given billions of dollars, weapons including Stingers, mules from Tennessee and were referred to as "Freedom Fighters" by Reagan and Usama was one of those Arab wealthy zealots we abetted to Fight Soviets. The unstable tribal North Western frontier of Pakistan was the conduit through which we armed these evil nutcases in the late 70s to 1989. To the hapless Soviets they must have been "Radical Jihadi Islamo-Facists" as they are to us now(election time buzzword). But to us they were “freedom fighters” then.
Then we must ask ourselves why radical Islamist Saudi civilians resent us, and turn to Islamic terrorism? We have secret bases very close to their holy cities because of our oil interests and we will never allow democracy to flourish there. What will we do if we had an Arab Army next to the Vatican or to the National Cathedral in DC? We must stop simplifying complex issues and putting two-second sound bites in the mouths of our people to drive fear. We have with our chaotic invasion of Iraq ensured that we cannot withdraw now(and we should not) for decades and we have given rise to very extremist cells in Secular Europe as well.
Terrorism cannot be beaten until the root causes are addressed and fixed. Will we call for democracy in Saudi Arabia and withdraw from there? Will we keep propping the secular military dictatorship in Pakistan(we should because if there is democracy there the radicals will win). Might is not always right nor righteous. Let us guard ourselves again hate but lets not give more opportunities to launch false wars that actually will create future generations of terrorists. When a few bold educated Americans foolishly dared to question the invasion in 2003 they were silenced by our theocratic regime. Our op-ed columns were abused and some were physically threatened for telling Americans the truth. We were accused as being traitors and appeasers when sadly everything we predicted and everything Bush-41 and his intelligent cabinet knew would happen has happened. When a blinded ideologue claims he talked to the “higher father” to launch this war instead of his higher father, we know there must be something wrong with the logical thought process. Clearly his “higher father” had no clue about Kurds, Sunnis and Shias and terrorism and Islamic sentiments and radical ideologues.
These guys are deadly and the only way to wipe them out now is via intelligence actions, covert operations, and not by invading oil rich nations on false pretenses and causing more and more resentment and tens of thousands of civilian casualties to justify our hurt and anger. The most effective weapon we have against them is intelligence, clever police work and more intelligence and not arrogant bull in the china shop invasions of oil rich nations on other pretenses. Above all, other nations that have fought different terrorist groups will tell you ultimately that the root political causes such as our support of oppressive Feudal Arab nations, corruption, poverty and ignorance are tackled we will only be feeding the flames of radical Islam. May we all be safe and may all beings including innocent Iraqis be free of violence, and hate. Waging war for democracy is like having sex for virginity. Let us not be Pontius Pilates ever again please. GOD BLESS AMERICA & ALL THE CHILDREN OF THE WORLD who are "collateral damage".
I have lost many friends, family and acquaintances to terrorism in Sri Lanka. My cousin survived the attack on her and is blind in one eye now. She cannot go back to Sri Lanka because terrorists will try to kill her again. She was the President of Sri Lanka from 1994 to Nov 2005. She survived the attack in Dec 1999. Even she knows and still says revenge is not an option and that Sri Lanka has to address the root causes of
Tamil Tiger terrorism to end violence.
