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By Mark Biskeborn (about the author) Page 2 of 2 page(s)
The American industrial military complex makes less money in the labor intensive guerrilla wars than they do in wars that require sophisticated, manufactured weaponry. It's basic business strategy to maintain high profits--to hell with the reasons for the outcomes of the war. Defense contractors earn much smaller profits in guerrilla warfare which requires labor intensive work in urban settings with ears to the ground. In his books, Baer makes this a central argument. Using bombers, sophisticated equipment, missiles,...it's the only thing that makes business sense. Any one with a pulse could understand that in 1983, when a terrorist cell blew up the US Marine barracks in Lebanon. Likewise most intelligence agents operating in the Middle East knew that a persistent, organized movement of Islamist guerrilla fighters bombed the U.S.S. Cole in 2000. In his many books on the subject Robert Baer describes how he tracked militant Islamists. They had been a well known enemy decades before 9/11/2001.
The guerrilla war we face has no one leader, no one country, no standing army. Our enemies in this so-called war on terrorism do not wear uniforms. They are guerrilla warriors who use any means possible to harm their enemies. They use bombs, booby traps, and hijacked airliners because they have neither conventional weapons nor armies. They made this point abundantly clear when they bombed the World Trade Center's basement in 1993.
Bush Jr. would have us believe that these guerrilla warriors hate America and its freedom. He never bothers to consider the simple economic situation in which only the small royal families control the oil wealth in most Arab countries and they do not give much more than a fig to diversify their own economies and develop their own people. Unemployment and poverty enrage Muslims. Fanatical anti-American religious training helps to set an unemployed, hungry, angry, idle man down a path to destruction and mayhem, as was the case for Mohammed Atta and others. Most any religious group provides this sort of narrow education. Just watch Pat Robertson on his evangelical TV show, the 700 Club, or visit one of Jerry Falwell's Liberty Universities to witness how the later day church of neocons indoctrinate our own credulous youth.
Among Bush's many mutating reasons for invading Iraq, he finally claimed that it was America's moral duty to create a democracy throughout the Middle East. For a year or two around 2003, he had most American yahoos believing this. It is another part of the neocon catechism. Another one of Friedman's mind boggling theories is that once a country's economy begins to operate in a capitalistic fashion, it will inevitably become a democracy. Likewise, so the theory goes, if a country becomes democratic, it naturally seeks to implement a liberal capitalism. Neither has proven true in the real world. As a totalitarian regime, China thrives on capitalism. We buy products from totalitarian capitalist China because their regime encourages, nay, enforces, sweatshop labor.
Contrary to Pope Friedman's crack-pot ideas, once given the vote for a democratic government, several countries have recently voted against democracy in favor of theocracy--Islamist regimes like Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, or President Gull in Turkey who has an Islamist background. Like the Catholic dominated politics in most of South America, many Islamic countries are theocracies. Given the theocratic proclivities of President Bush, he too would like to see America governed by some inerrant, one and only Biblical interpretation and not by its Constitution. "We need common-sense judges who understand our rights were derived from God," --As quoted in Understanding the President and his God
Guerrilla warfare is messy and much more difficult to win than invading a crumbling nation. For this reason it never benefits individuals like Bush, who intend to expand their personal political and financial success at the detriment of national security and economic stability. As we learned in our own War of Independence and, likewise in Vietnam, guerrilla warfare is extremely messy, costly, and bloody. Contrary to Rumsfeld's infamous statement that "democracy is messy," it is the insurgency and the guerrilla fighters that clog the wheels of industry. The Russians learned this when they invaded Afghanistan and it cost them the collapse of their already frail economy. And the neocon schmoes would have us believe that Reagan caused the fall of the Soviet Union.
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