It is necessary sometimes to ask questions just so they’re not forgotten in the miasma war-mongers, who know that war is the health of the state, consciously create. Pat Buchanan obliges:

[I]s it not time to put al-Qaeda in perspective and consider whether our Mideast policy is creating more terrorists than we are killing?

…

But by having fought a “war on terror” overseas in [Lindsey] Graham’s way — invading, occupying, nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq — we lost 6,000 soldiers and brought back 40,000 wounded Americans.

Were the wars in which we suffered such casualties, and that cost us $2 trillion and counting, really worth it? Did they make us more secure?

…

Ten years ago, anti-interventionists warned that a plunge into the Islamic world would produce what it was designed to prevent. We could create more terrorists than we would kill.

For the root of 9/11 was Islamic hatred of America’s perceived domination and a fanatic determination to drive us out of their world.

They were over here because we were over there. And if we went over there in even greater force, even more Muslims would rise up to expel us from what is, after all, their neighborhood, not ours.

So the anti-interventionists argued.

…

After 58,000 dead we left Vietnam. How many Americans have the Vietnamese killed since we left?

William Pfaff agrees, but in different terms:

The war against terror now being conducted from the White House, with the increasing use of drones, obviously is a self-perpetuating and self-enlarging undertaking that of its nature guarantees that the United States is the creator and perpetuator of the very war it fights.

…

What has happened to this administration? We know that the Republican Party is now institutionally deranged. The government bureaucracy has since 9/11 been purged of dissent, militarized, securitized, all of its members now under orders to spy on all of their fellows to report any suspicious move anyone might make. Washington is thereby rendered increasingly immobile when confronted with a need for thoughtful action. The world regards the American government today with amazement and no little fear.

…

The George W. Bush administration, the neo-conservatives, the Zionist movement and now the Barack Obama administration, have out of colossal ignorance and lack of prudence gone to war against this fundamentalist movement. It is this upheaval that Mr. Obama thinks he is going to conquer, with his drones and his talismatic technological modernism of mass information—and supposed mass omniscience.

These tools now tell American governments about everything except the essential facts. These facts are that Islamic fundamentalism will fail because theocracy cannot survive in the post-Ottoman world. This already is being demonstrated in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia and Turkey. Despite that, Islamic society will in the end settle its own history—which may prove only another tragedy. The other fact is that an arrogant and foolish United States, as exists today, can only harm itself by interfering, and become part of the tragedy.

Were I to travel abroad today, I’d have to say repeatedly “I love my country but detest its government.” Because I write blogs like this, I could add “and oppose it openly.” And I can tell my grandchildren that I did not sit idly by as the Great Hubris played out.

History, insofar as it cares at all, will presumably find plenty to fault in my positions (I am reflexively opposed to violence).

But I very much doubt that history will say “Islamic fascism arose spontaneously and the United States of America fought valiantly against it.” The judgment, I fear, will be more like “Islamic extremism arose in response to the insouciant American crypto-Empire, and America fanned the flames, to keep the voters scared and compliant, until the Great Collapse of the American Hegemon, which the world greeted with a sigh of relief.”

In other words, I think we’re living in an unfolding tragedy, wherein America’s tragic flaw – the felt necessity of being about something, of needing a grand-if-not-grandiose mission, of being a “nation with the soul of a [fundamentalist] Church” – plays out in folly, perversity, and collapse.

And then … it will be some other empire’s turn, until Messiah comes (again).

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.