Washington
Arrogance Has Fomented a Muslim Revolution
by
Paul Craig Roberts
by Paul Craig Roberts
DIGG THIS
"In
a government of law, the existence of the government will be imperiled
if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the
potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches
the whole people by example. Crime is contagious. If the government
becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites
every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy."
~ Justice Louis
Brandeis
Is Pakistan
responsible for the Mumbai attack in India? No.
Is India’s
repression of its Muslim minority responsible? No.
Is the United
States government responsible? Yes.
The attack
on Mumbai required radicalized Muslims. Radicalized Muslims resulted
from the US overthrowing the elected government in Iran and imposing
the Shah; from the US stationing troops in Saudi Arabia; from the
US invading and attempting to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq, bombing
weddings, funerals, and children’s soccer games; from the US violating
international and US law by torturing its Muslim victims; from the
US enlisting Pakistan in its war against the Taliban; from the US
violating Pakistan’s sovereignty by conducting military operations
on Pakistani territory, killing Pakistani civilians; from the US
government supporting a half century of Israeli ethnic cleansing
of Palestinians from their lands, towns and villages; from the assault
of American culture on Muslim values; from the US purchasing the
government of Egypt to act as its puppet; from US arrogance that
America is the supreme arbiter of morality.
As Justice
Brandeis said, crime is contagious. Government teaches by example,
and America’s example is lawlessness. America’s brutal crimes against
the Muslim world have invited every Muslim to become a law unto
himself a revolutionary. It is not terror that Washington
confronts but revolution.
By illegal,
uncivilized and undiplomatic behavior, the US has stirred Muslim
peoples from their long slumber as serfs of Western colonial powers.
Some Muslims have had all that they can take, and their fury drives
them to rouse a billion of their fellows to throw off the yoke of
foreign hegemony.
The arrogant
incompetence of American governments brought this conflict to the
American people and inflicted it upon the world. By destabilizing
Pakistan, the US lost a puppet and created an opportunity for Muslim
revolutionaries to exploit. By enraging India against Pakistan,
the Mumbai attack has created new problems for Pakistan that will
focus that government’s attention away from combating Taliban sanctuaries
on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. If the US picks up the slack,
it will have invaded yet another country and become trapped in a
larger quagmire.
Having fomented
terrorism, the American government now pretends to be the innocent
victim, just as Israelis, having brought about terrorism by driving
Palestinians from their homes and villages, pretend to be innocent
victims.
Today European
members of NATO, an outdated organization formed to defend Western
Europe against Soviet invasion, are sacrificing the lives of their
soldiers fighting the American Empire’s war in Afghanistan. If America
continues to have its way, Europeans will soon be dying in Ukraine,
Georgia, and Iran.
The American
government, which preaches "freedom and democracy" has
in the 21st century gone to great extremes to stamp out the US Constitution
and the civil liberties that it guarantees. The US government has
repudiated the Geneva Conventions and the prohibitions in US statutory
law against torture. The US government has set aside habeas corpus,
the ancient legal principle guaranteed by the US Constitution that
prohibits governments from holding people in prisons without presenting
charges. The US government has broken the laws of other nations
by kidnapping foreign citizens and transporting them to other lands
to be tortured.
These
massive crimes have been justified in the name of the "war
on terror." In truth, America’s crimes foment revolution.
It was the
US government that created the "war on terror," which
has been used to murder and dispossess millions of Iraqis and Afghans,
to imprison US citizens as if they were medieval serfs, and to squander
three trillion dollars for the sole purpose of enriching Halliburton
and the military-security complex.
Investigative
journalist John Pilger has shown that the so-called "moral
superiority of the West" is a hoax designed to shield from
view the self-seeking West’s crimes against humanity.
Obama promised
change from this destructive behavior, but how does change arise
when the most arrogant woman on earth is appointed Secretary of
State and the rest of the new government is staffed with tried-and-true
Likudniks and servants of the military-security complex?
The change
over which Obama will preside will have no American victories. The
change will come from America as a failed state, from the dollar
dethroned as reserve currency, from America repudiated by its allies
and paid puppets, from massive unemployment for which there is no
solution, from hyperinflation that produces anarchy.
The day might
arrive when Washington is faced with revolution at home as well
as abroad.
December
5, 2008
Paul
Craig Roberts [send
him mail] a
former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate
editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases
of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book,
The
Tyranny of Good Intentions,
co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how
Americans lost the protection of law, has just been released by
Random House.
Copyright
© 2008 Creators Syndicate
Paul
Craig Roberts Archives
|