Endless War Is the Agenda
Pulitzer-prize winning reporter James Risen reminds us:
We are now in the longest continuous period of war in American history. And yet there is remarkably little debate about it.
Many Americans assume “because 9/11″.
But regime change in Iraq, Lybia, Syria and Afghanistan (and see this) was planned before 9/11.
Let’s take Iraq, for example. Former CIA director George Tenet said that the White House wanted to invade Iraq long before 9/11, and inserted “crap” in its justifications for invading Iraq. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill – who sat on the National Security Council – also says that Bush planned the Iraq war before 9/11. Top British officials say that the U.S. discussed Iraq regime change even before Bush took office. And in 2000, Cheney said a Bush administration might “have to take military action to forcibly remove Saddam from power.”
Cheney apparently even made Iraqi’s oil fields a national security priority before 9/11. And the Sunday Herald reported: “Five months before September 11, the US advocated using force against Iraq … to secure control of its oil.” (Remember that Alan Greenspan, John McCain, George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, a high-level National Security Council officer and others all say that the Iraq war was really about oil.)
Indeed, we’ve seen it all before.
We explained last year:
We are in the middle of a perpetual series of wars. See this, this, this and this.
As just one example, in 2010 the war in Afghanistan became the longest war in U.S. history.
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Why is the war of terror being waged indefinitely?
Many have said that “war is the health of the state”, and Thomas Paine wrote in the Rights of Man:
In reviewing the history of the English Government, its wars and its taxes, a bystander, not blinded by prejudice, nor warped by interest, would declare, that taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but that wars were raised to carry on taxes.
George Washington – in his farewell address of 1796 – said:
Overgrown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty.
James Madison said:
In time of actual war, great discretionary powers are constantly given to the Executive Magistrate. Constant apprehension of War, has the same tendency to render the head too large for the body. A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.The means of defence against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.
