It is this reality--the reality of capitalism's march of destruction--that is the taproot of a century of conflict with Arabs and Persians. Imperial neoliberal capitalism is a holy terror. Think of what it has wrought. It has ravaged America, savaged Europe, and fractured the Ukraine. It has plundered Iraq. It has leveled Libya. It has turned Afghanistan into a narco-state. It is sundering Syria for all the wrong reasons. And it is behaving with its predictable belligerence toward the one nation in the Middle East capable of resisting its advances--Iran. If you want to see whom Washington hates, just find out who is in its way. Tehran is. Caracas is. Moscow is. Tripoli was. Baghdad was. Kabul was.
A Slim Pretext
Imperial capitalism is especially potent because it has the American military acting as its vanguard, clearing the ground, opening the market, and safeguarding the relevant ministries for use by exploitive capital. Likewise it has commandeered global lending and trade institutions to ensure its extractive objectives are embedded in every loan and free trade agreement it creates. Yet when a terrorist attack occurs in the West, challenging the wisdom of a policy of continuous intervention, our leaders never ask what could drive men to such extremes. They take their prefabricated answer--radical Islam--and redouble their commitment to intervention. But Islamic terrorism supplies the West with a plausible pretext for its resource wars. Nobody in the Middle East, save the comprador bourgeoisie, buys this farcical justification. Just think: we invaded Iraq on manufactured evidence, resurrected the old British Trojan horse, the Iraqi Petroleum Company, which immediately cut no-bid deals with Exxon Mobil, BP, and Shell over solicitations from dozens of other companies, including Russian and Chinese energy firms. We made foreign direct investment the law of the land. Then we told the world we were there to fight terror. Why would anyone believe such a claim?
Those who commit terror on Western soil are rightly hunted down and brought to justice. We rightly honor the dead and defend the liberties that make us Westerners. But we should also root out and rectify the causes of terror, even if it requires reevaluation of our own policies. But instead of removing the cause, we multiply it. Which is to say, we multiply the likelihood of more terror, not less. But that is the villainy of unchained capital, that every objective is eventually sacrificed to the singular goal of power and profit, no matter the means, however hurtful. But, as one senior officer on the Joint Staff reportedly told former Coordinator for Counterterrorism Michael Sheehan, colleagues not infrequently said that terrorist attacks were, "A small price to pay for being a superpower.
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