Article: Maggie's Farm: The Roots and Fruits of Terror War

People inspect the wreckage of a car hit by an air strike in the central Yemeni province of al-Bayda April 19, 2014.
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Here's a video of a heinous "material supporter" of violent Islamist extremism, brazenly pledging to give millions of dollars to armed "holy warriors" fighting to overthrow a secular government. This shocking footage shows us some of the deepest roots of the sectarian violence raging across the globe today -- untold mountains of cash and arms shoveled to some of the most violent, retrograde religious gangs in the world by the leaders and war profiteers of the Western world and their economic cronies in Saudi Arabia. And this destructive dynamic is still going strong, still spreading death, destruction and hatred, most notably in Libya, Syria and Iraq. (Via the Angry Arab)

Or as Khurram Zaki, who posted the video, puts it:

"Watch how the 'free world' supported the same group of people (the 'mujahideen') along with notorious dictators they are fighting with right now to 'free the world.' That is how they imposed the extremist ideology upon us in the name of 'Jihad' only to later confront it with the name of war against 'terror.' Check how a so-called 'secular,' 'liberal' state invoked the name of God and religion again and again only to further their strategic interests in the region.

"'You left a godless country because you refused to live under a godless communist system which is trying to destroy your religion; [know that] the hearts of the Free World are with you.' -- Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, on a visit to the border with Afghanistan, during a state visit to Pakistan, 1981"

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UPDATE: Meanwhile, the beat goes on. On Monday, the Peace Prize Laureate launched his third drone strike in Yemen in as many days. (It is of course superfluous to point out that the United States is not at war with Yemen.) The latest strike followed one on Easter Sunday, when Barack Obama celebrated the Resurrection of his Lord and Saviour by killing 30 people in Yemen, by the usual courageous method of having an underling in a padded chair somewhere thousands of miles away courageously push a button while courageously viewing a video screen.

This heroic action was preceded by a strike on Saturday, in which 13 people were killed, including at least three civilians. This was purportedly a "signature strike," a common practice in which the courageous Americans actually have no earthly idea who they are courageously killing from thousands of mile away -- they just push the button because a bunch of people they are tracking seem to be "acting like" terrorists in some way or another. For all we know, all 13 people killed that day were civilians, like the 15 people on their way to a wedding whom the Peace Laurate killed last December.

In fact, we have no way of knowing if any of the dozens of people killed by the Peace Laureate during his busy Easter holiday were civilians or militants. Or what "civilian" and "militant" even mean in the context of the Peace Laureate's never-ending violation of other nations' sovereignty to kill people, many if not most of whom are completely unknown to him and his assassins.

We are simply told that all the shredded corpses are "al Qaeda militants." Which of course leads to the question: Are these the same "al Qaeda militants" whom the United States is supporting in Syria, or the "al Qaeda militants" it supported in Libya, or are they some other kind of "al Qaeda" militants? If the "al Qaeda militants" in Yemen suddenly decided to aim their attacks on, say, Iran, would they suddenly become "good" or "moderate" al Qaeda militants, like we have in Syria? And are these Yemeni "al Qaeda militants" of a different stripe from the "al Qaeda militants" the West supported in, say, Bosnia, or Afghanistan?

Anyway, who cares? The point is that Obama's peaceful, progressive expansion of the drone bombing and death squads initiated by George Bush is obviously quelling the spread of violent extremism. Whereas "al Qaeda" was once a handful of militants concentrated largely in one corner of Afghanistan, it is now a large, loose, proliferating confederation of violent extremists operating over vast swaths of Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Mali, Somalia, Nigeria and other countries. As both an ideological brand and physical force, "al Qaeda" is more powerful today than ever before -- after 13 years of unrelenting "war on terror." Every drone strike -- and the deep, horrific, constant dread and fear instilled in the multitudes of innocent people who live under the dead eye of American drones, never knowing when and where the bolt may fall -- are all incomparable recruiting tools for "al Qaeda militiants" around the world.

Every step taken in the blind, brutal "war on terror" has been counterproductive. Every step has increased terrorism, exacerbated hatred for America and the West, destabilized vast regions of the earth, destroyed all vestiges of constitutional government in the United States, militarized and corrupted Western democracies and visited unspeakable horror and suffering on millions of innocent people.

Yet it never stops. It just goes on and on, plunging the world deeper into darkness day by day, year by year. It's done by icky conservatives like George Bush and Margaret Thatcher; it's done by cool progressives like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. No one, none of our leaders and would-be leaders, will call it off. They don't know how. And they don't want to. So they will go on bombing and killing -- thus making even more "militants" to bomb and kill. They will pursue this literally insane course while the world burns up around them and their own nations fall to pieces. It is an astounding situation.