Yet, if you were to step back for a minute and look at the history of the past 35 years -- from the Afghan covert op through the Iraq War and the U.S. interventions in Libya, Syria, Ukraine and elsewhere -- what you would see is the neocons and their liberal sidekicks behaving like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, stirring up troubles that soon spun out of control.
Just look at the chaos that has been unleashed by these reckless neocon and liberal interventionist policies -- from encouraging the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and facilitating the formation of al-Qaeda via the covert war in Afghanistan, from creating a hotbed for attracting and training jihadists during the Iraq War, from undermining regimes in Libya and Syria that -- for all their faults -- were trying to contain this spread of terrorism, and from provoking a new Cold War in Ukraine that risks bringing nuclear weapons into play in a showdown with Russia.
The latest outgrowth of all this trouble was the terror attack in Paris this month, with some European hotheads now calling for another neocon favorite idea, "a war of civilizations," pitting Christian societies against Islam in some modern version of the actual Crusades.
Yes, I know we're not supposed to talk about root causes of this chaos "at a time like this," and we are surely not supposed to blame the neocons and their liberal interventionist chums. Instead, we're supposed to escalate the conflicts and the chaos.
We're supposed to continue the neocon "tough-guy-ism" -- by repressing Muslims in the West, by ousting Assad in Syria, by crushing the ethnic Russian resistance in Ukraine, by destabilizing Russia, and by forsaking negotiations with Iran over its nuclear facilities in favor of more sanctions and maybe more bombing. All somehow in the name of "democracy" and "human rights" and "security."
As we gaze out upon this mad house built by the neocons, we are witnessing on a grand scale the old adage about the inmates running the asylum, except that this asylum possesses the world's most sophisticated weapons including a massive nuclear arsenal.
What the neocons have constructed through their skilled propaganda is a grim wonderland where no one foresees the dangers of encouraging Islamist fundamentalism as a geopolitical ploy, where no one takes heed of the historic hatreds of Sunni and Shiite, where no one suspects that the U.S. military slaughtering thousands upon thousands of Muslims might provoke a backlash, where no one thinks about the consequences of overthrowing regimes in unstable regions, where no one bothers to study the bitter history of a place like Ukraine, and where no one worries about spreading turmoil to nuclear-armed Russia.
Yet, this neocon madness -- this "anti-realism" -- has been playing out in the real world on a grand scale, destroying real lives and endangering the real future of the planet.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
3
1
1
