The tenth anniversary of 9/11 came and went. A day before that the residents of New York left the city for the weekend saying that they had it up to here with the yearly celebrations that make the event look like a triumph of the terrorists. Other Americans and foreigners came to the city as tourists to see what the fuss was all about, to buy souvenirs and to take souvenir pictures. The media had a good day making gobs of advertising money recycling old ideas without spending a penny chasing new ones or making them up. And then there was the dance of the scorpions as represented by the old conservatives and the new ones who are better known as the neocons. And as usual, the two movements entertained us as they circled each other waiting for the moment of the Rapture when each side believes it will be able to pounce on the other and devour it.
In their morbid dance, the scorpions copied the steps of each other and looked so much alike that you could not tell one from the other most of the time. In fact, you could even say that the neocons have returned after a hiatus of nearly three years in a form so well disguised that they blended not only with the other conservatives but with the liberals too. And Joseph Lieberman who can defy Euclidean geometry by sitting on three sides of a two-sided fence ran around explaining in conservative, independent and liberal fashions how the continuation of the war against the Arabs and the Muslims that ruined America in the first place can now save America and pull it from the financial hole where he and his neocon pals buried it.
And war is what unites the two conservatives. Both want to continue America's wars abroad and they use the arguments of each other to make their points. To this end, you find an article written by Michael Gerson under the title: “The Ugly gash of 9/11” published in the Washington Post on September 8, 2011. Gerson is a mild mannered man who says he is not of the neocons but you can hardly tell that because he thinks and writes like them. He describes the Bush Doctrine in the article and holds it as the perfect response to the events of 9/11. He then takes pride in saying that the doctrine was adopted by the Obama Administration and that it has worked so well it was vindicated by the events. Well, let me say that I disagree on both counts and here is why. To explain the point he makes on the Obama response, Gerson says this: “Under the direction of the president [Obama], thousands of Predator and Reaper unmanned aircraft conduct targeted killings in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.” But the fact is that before being elected, candidate Obama promised during the presidential campaign to do what Bush was not doing which was to go after the terrorists in a hot pursuit wherever he will find them, a stance for which he was severely criticized. The fact is that Obama did not imitate Bush; he devised a contrary policy and followed it.
As to the claim that the Bush Doctrine was vindicated by events, Gerson's assertion that we can relax now because Bush found the right formula to save the world, and that Obama is following it is what concerns me because I do not see it as: “the admirable achievement of two presidents,” which is the way that Gerson put it. In my view, this attitude has the potential to lead to what he describes as follows: “Given advances in technology, future attacks could be worse.” And so when someone makes two such statements in the same article, he shows that he does not realize what it is that gives America its ugly look and why bad things can happen again even though the terrorists possess no inherent strength that is formidable enough to make them succeed or even remain as a force that is worthy of mention. In my view, America has been the one to nurture and to amplify what little strength the current terrorists had at the start. It did so with its own responses and with the neocon verbiage that accompanied those responses. Indeed, what happened to the dozens of terrorist organizations that came and went over the decades could have happened to the current organization but for the domestic political scene in America that refused to let go of this foreign matter.
And here is how things work out according to Gerson's own account of the historical events. It looks from his description that W. Bush began to formulate his doctrine shortly after September 11, 2001. He recalls that in the State of the Union address of 2002, Bush argued the following: “...the rule of law, respect for women, equal justice and religious tolerance ... would be the basis for reform in Arab nations.” Also in 2002, W. Bush is reported to have noticed that: “Poverty, weak institutions and corruption can make weak states vulnerable to terrorist networks and drug cartels within their borders.” He therefore argued for more international development to counter all this.
Well, let me say the following in response, something I do as politely as I can and in all respect. Go to an Arab or a Muslim country and say to the people that you have come to show them how to run their affairs because they know not how to do this, and there will be not one citizen -- man or woman, Christian or Muslim, young or old who is not in jail or out of a mental institution -- that will not want to kick you in the ass and throw you out of the country. In fact, the most that the Americans were able to do in this regard is that they took advantage of their military occupation of Iraq to shove down the throat of the Iraqis the “liberation” of the women there. And the result has been that the cause of women has regressed so much that Iraqi women would vote in droves to hang the American soldiers of occupation if given the chance.
Also the Americans took advantage of the confusion that has accompanied the recent revolution in Egypt to illegally hand out money to a few individuals and organizations behind the back of the provincial government there. The result has been that the Americans were told politely by that government never to do so again and got assurances to this effect. But when the people (of Tahrir Square and others) learned about the incident, they made it clear that if such thing happens again, they will have no compunction kicking the ass of the American ambassador and kicking him or her out of the country. To the Arabs, to the Muslims and now to the whole world, the American system of governance is viewed with as much respect as the Simpson trial. The fact is that America has become a joke in the eyes of the world and it is getting more laughable by the day. Go and teach these people what, America? Teach them how to have a political gridlock? To engineer a financial meltdown? To collapse the housing market? To invite a little puke like Netanyahu to come and urinate on your rug in full view of the cameras? To run a presidential campaign where the candidates take turn to show how intimately they would kiss the ass of a Jew? Come on America, get serious!
And this is where an old novel comes to mind. It was written by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer in the late Nineteen Fifties and had the title “The Ugly American.” It happened that even before the start of the Vietnam War these two authors had gathered enough insight and had seen enough disturbing information related to the comportment of American officials sent to Asia that Burdick and Lederer felt compelled to write that novel. In it, they draw attention to a reality that had escaped the notice of the government which sent these people abroad to represent it and represent America. Then came the Vietnam War and a film was made by that title to point out the reasons why America was failing to win the hearts and minds of the people on whose behalf it claimed to be fighting. The American was ugly then because of his comportment and he is ugly today for the same reason not because of a gash in the ground or a scar made by war.
And this is why I worry not about the inherent strength of the terrorists which I see as minimal but because of the current comportment of America which is shaped by the neocons and their buddies, the old conservatives. If America continues to show its ugly face to the world, the work of the terrorists could metamorphose and become something different from what it is now; something that cannot be predicted at this time. And given that science and technology keep advancing, we cannot tell what capabilities the weapons of the future will have or how they will be used. The way that the future will be shaped, therefore, will depend on America's behavior. And this is where I see that even well meaning people like Michael Gerson make a big mistake by consistently diagnosing the situation the same old way and coming to the same old conclusions.
And while America's attitude now makes the Americans look ugly to most foreigners the way they looked to the Asians half a century ago, something more odious has been added to the mix. It is the elephant in the room which is the foreign policy that America has franchised to the Jewish groups, foremost among these the lobby calling itself AIPAC whose purpose is to work for the glory of the little fart that is Israel at the expense of everyone and everything else. It is bad enough to think of yourself as having a messianic mission you must spread around the world to save it when you're the one that needs to be saved, it is another thing to be seen ridden by the little fart that keeps telling you how to rampage through a world that no longer stands your looks or stands the smell of your rider. To be governed by AIPAC makes you look ugly and smell awful, America!
And try as he may to hide what shapes his view of the world and of history, Michael Gerson could not hide the one reality that never leaves those of the Washington Beltway. They all believe that the spin they hear is more true than the truth they see. Show them someone kill another and whisper in their ear he was only feeding him bullets and they will disbelieve what they see to accept your spin. Here is an example of this. Gerson writes: “...the realist practice of supporting favorable autocrats in the Middle East and North Africa seems hopelessly naive … Obama has been a reluctant, foot-dragging convert … But he is a convert nonetheless.” The fact is that what was happening in that part of the world which he describes as being a “combined dictatorial rule of 95 years” has been happening not under Obama who had been in office for only two years when the Arab Spring erupted but under several presidents, many of whom were Republicans and one of those being W. Bush. As can be seen, Gerson does not believe what he saw because the Jewish propaganda machine whispered something different in his ear. This is what adds to the ugliness of America.
As you continue to read the article, Gerson hits you with a sentence that baffles you at first until you realize it is a preamble to something big. Here is the sentence: “Citizen participation always carries the risk of poor choices by citizens.” This is from someone who belongs to a group that used to say the democratic participation of citizens leads to infallible choices. So then, what happened that changed all this? Well, what happened was that an election was held in Palestine where Hamas won fair and square. The Israelis and their Jewish and non-Jewish cohorts in America who used to push the idea that the world will be safe when America uses its military power to “democratize” the Muslim world especially the “Arab core”, quickly changed their stance and sang the new tune that was taught to them by the AIPAC people. They began to sing: “Oh yes, yes this is true but you see, elections have consequences.” Thus, where there was never a consequence when the Israelis elected a blood thirsty government, there are now consequences because Hamas was elected and it is disliked by Israel and its cohorts in America. You see, my friend, the truth to these people as well as historical events and opinions are like a windbag; they gyrate in response to the direction of the wind. Nothing is sacred and everything is malleable enough to fit the occasion.
Which tells you what the Gerson preamble was all about. It was to prepare you for the day when the same people will again call for America's military intervention in the Arab and Muslim countries under the command of AIPAC. And to deny you the possibility of believing the truth you will see, Gerson tries to spin something that should be as hard to spin as the Rock of Gibraltar. To this futile end, he whispers the following in your ear: “Criticism of the Bush Doctrine was always based on a distortion – that it was somehow generated by neoconservative ideology. But Bush did not come out of a neoconservative foreign policy tradition.” Well, given that neocon ideology is euphemism for Jewish control, Gerson tries hard to push you away from the truth into believing this distortion: “Each element of the doctrine was a response to … the need to protect Americans...” And to make the pill easy to swallow, he tries to bribe the Obama supporters by telling them this: “Bush was not an ideological radical, just as Obama is not an ideological turncoat,” which is the equivalent of: I'm okay Jack and so are you.
But he still wants to intimidate the realists (as he calls them) before ending his dissertation and so he hits them with this: “They [the realists] placed their bet in favor of a permanent serfdom in the Middle East and now seem disappointed by historical miracles.” He is saying this at a time when the Iraqis are telling America: “Look what you have done to us, you ugly Americans. You robbed us of the chance to do for ourselves what everyone in the world did for themselves, including you who had your own revolution and the Arabs who had theirs. Now they have a history to be proud of, and we can envy them but not emulate them. Damn you, Americans and damn the Jews who told you to do this to us.”
And to make sure you understand what it is that he wants to accomplish, he ends with a paragraph that contains this: “On Sept. 12, 2001, I entered the White House complex through … [an] expanded security perimeter … Since those days, America has expanded its security perimeter beyond Constitution Avenue to rural Yemen and Abbottabad, Pakistan.
Here you see that the old neocon dream of imposing on the world a Pax Americana that will be controlled by AIPAC is rearing its head again. And there is nothing more Jewish than flogging a lost cause.
Let me tell you something, Michael Gerson. You have the essential qualities to be a winner but for this to happen, you must abandon the ruinous enterprise you're on now because America will never again intimidate as much as a fly. Get off this road and think of ways to re-industrialize America by getting it to produce what the people buy today not what the government believes they ought to be buying tomorrow. Do this and you will be a true Conservative instead of being a lackey of AIPAC.