Loving Our Enemies
January 9, 2012 by Bob Livingston
“We’re under attack because we love freedom, is why we’re under attack. And our enemy hates freedom. They hate and we love. We differ from our enemy because we love. We not only love our freedoms and love our values, we love life itself. Our enemy hates innocent life.” — George W. Bush, addressing schoolchildren, Sept. 23, 2002
Any discussion of Ron Paul as a GOP Presidential candidate inevitably begets rants from the paranoids about how Paul’s non-interventionist foreign policy would make America vulnerable to attacks from Iran or Islamic extremists from one Muslim nation or another.
Typical of the responses are irrational, fact-devoid screeds like these, taken from our comments section last week:
- “Ron Paul is truly a loose cannon , short sighted and ignorant of world relations . On one hand he is correct , we should worry about America . On the other , we MUST worry about the spread of nuclear weapons in the hands of a militant regime who has no compunctions about using them in order to advance their agenda . If this half senile old fool thinks for one instance that Iran would be justified in closing down the Straights to prevent sanctions he should not be seeking the Presidency . Those who defend him should stop and think what it would mean to listen to him an sit back ignoring this bunch of crazed Iranian leaders as they lead us to a war no one will survive . You Have Been Warned !”
- “Screw Ron Paul and Screw Iran. A vote for Paul will just Make it easier for the A-hole to get back in and finish his job of destroying the economy. As for Iran, they need to be taken out, NOW! They are a pus filled infection on this planet.”
- “Is Ron Paul a Jimmy Carter replica? He needs to be sent off and released on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. As a life long registered Republican, I will vote for Obama if Ron Paul win the Republican nomination. Puttin would make for a better President than Ron.
Ron is a total loser, a Bolshevik !!!!! How low has the Republican party gone, to have him a a presidential candidate. Disgraceful”
The truth is the U.S. policy of the past 50-plus years of meddling in the affairs of other countries by covertly backing coups, propping up friendly dictators and fighting proxy wars with Russia and China — using billions of dollars stolen from the American people — have only made the world a more dangerous place. Sadly, not more than three in 10 people seem to understand this. They’ve swallowed the lie that America’s overseas adventures are not empire building, they are simply making the world safe for democracy. They live in a state of confusion and cognitive dissonance.
What the U.S. and its European allies have sought is hegemony over the entire Mideast, not to establish democracy, but to control the oil and other resources there to the benefit of a few fascist elites.
In doing so, they have stolen our wealth; trampled our liberties; killed, maimed and left millions of people homeless; dropped bombs that destroyed infrastructure; installed and financed dictators who enslaved their populaces; and created hatred of America around the globe. And they have developed a majority U.S. population that is eager and anxious to attack and kill anyone who expresses displeasure with U.S. actions — even U.S. citizens — whether abroad or in country, and a Congress and a President that believe such a thing is acceptable.
If you buy the official government line about the 9/11 attacks — that Osama bin Laden encouraged 19 cave dwellers to come to America and learn to fly airliners so they could commandeer them and fly them into two New York skyscrapers, the Pentagon and some other undetermined building in Washington, D.C. — then logic suggests you must also accept the reason bin Laden gave for orchestrating the attacks.
In a 1996 interview with The Independent’s Robert Fisk — 10 days after a truck bomb had torn down part of the U.S. Air Force complex at al-Khobar in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 American soldiers — bin Laden explained why he was taking the fight to America.
Not long ago, I gave advice to the Americans to withdraw their troops from Saudi Arabia. Now let us give some advice to the governments of Britain and France to take their troops out — because what happened in Riyadh and al-Khobar showed that the people who did this have a deep understanding in choosing their targets. They hit their main enemy, which is the Americans… This doesn’t mean declaring war against the West and Western people — but against the American regime which is against every American… The explosion in al-Khobar did not come as a direct reaction to the American occupation, but as a result of American behaviour against Muslims, its support of Jews in Palestine and of the massacres of Muslims in Palestine and Lebanon — of Sabra and Chatila and Qana — and of the Sharm el-Sheikh conference… When the American troops entered Saudi Arabia, the land of the two Holy places, there was a strong protest from the ulema and from students of sharia law all over the country against the interference of American troops. This big mistake by the Saudi regime of inviting the American troops revealed their deception. They were giving their support to nations which were fighting against Muslims.
Bin Laden went on to say, “We as Muslims have a strong feeling that binds us together… We feel for our brothers in Palestine and Lebanon… When 60 Jews are killed inside Palestine” — he was talking about Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel — “all the world gathers within seven days to criticize this action, while the deaths of 600,000 Iraqi children did not receive the same reaction.” Fisk writes that this was bin Laden’s first reference to Iraq and to the U.N. sanctions that were to result, according to U.N. officials themselves, in the death of more than half a million children. “Killing those Iraqi children is a crusade against Islam,” bin Laden said. “We, as Muslims, do not like the Iraqi regime but we think that the Iraqi people and their children are our brothers and we care about their future.”
In 2004, bin Laden was quoted as saying:
God knows it did not cross our minds to attack the Towers, but after the situation became unbearable — and we witnessed the injustice and tyranny of the American-Israeli alliance against our people in Palestine and Lebanon — I thought about it. And the events that affected me directly were that of 1982 and the events that followed — when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon, helped by the U.S. Sixth Fleet. As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me punish the unjust the same way: to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our children and women.
Both the CIA and the 9/11 Commission have said that blowback — a CIA term that describes the repercussions of secretive U.S. foreign policy actions — contributed to the 9/11 attacks. Bin Laden blamed the U.S./Saudi Arabia alliance and presence of U.S. troops in the “holy land” after the first Gulf War, its alliance with Israel and against Palestinians, and sanctions against Iraq.
The FBI has used the blowback angle to set up terror plots that it then “thwarts” in order to give government more excuses to clamp down on civil liberties (via the USA (un)Patriot Act, the overbearing Department of Homeland Security or the newly signed National Defense Authorization Act).
It does this by infiltrating mosques to find patsies it can cajole, support and finance into setting up terror plots, allowing FBI agents to swoop in at the last minute to save the day. The patsies inevitably say their reason for wanting to pull off a terrorist attack against America is to exact retribution for ongoing attacks on Muslim citizens.
One such example is Rezwan Ferdaus, the American citizen charged with concocting a ludicrous plan to launch explosives-filled radio controlled airplanes and fly them into the Pentagon. When asked why he wanted to attack the United States, he replied: “’Cause that would be a huge scare… the point is you want to scare them so they know not to mess with you… They have… have killed from us, our innocents, our men, women and children, they are all enemies.”
It’s clear that U.S. policies in the Mideast have created blowback. Yet our government overlords and all but one of the GOP Presidential beauty contestants tell us that we must occupy Mideast nations, attack their citizens with drones, bomb them with NATO planes and place crippling sanctions on them in order to keep us safe.
We’ve been doing this to one Mideast country or another since 1990 (in addition to decades of backchannel and secretive CIA and non-government organization meddling in other countries’ affairs). Have 21 years of occupations, bombing and sanctions made us safe? No. They have made us broke and less free, and a whole new government entity, DHS, has been created and granted overarching unConstitutional powers to “keep us safe” because of it.
This is what Paul is saying when he says he wants to change U.S. foreign policy from one of empire and globalism to one of non-interventionism. Yet when he does, so-called conservatives get horn-mad.
During a recent GOP debate, self-proclaimed new front-runner Rick Santorum about came unglued when Paul said this, and he all but vowed to bomb the Muslim world out of existence on his first day in office. However, it doesn’t look like he will get his chance. President Barack Obama will have taken care of it prior to the election. As for Mitt Romney, he is simply a neocon, globalist puppet/echo chamber.
Americans have accepted as gospel that Iran is close to having a nuclear weapon. But reports of Iran’s nuclear capability are as dubious as similar reports were about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities — and are coming from some of the same discredited agencies and people.
Crazy is beating your head against a wall to cure a headache. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Stupidity is continuously buying into the lies of a consistently duplicitous Federal government.
Americans have been convinced that continuing — or doubling down on — a foreign policy that has led to attacks on America will make us safe, while that very foreign policy is what created in Muslims the desire to attack Americans in the first place.
George W. Bush, as I quoted above, said “they” hate and “we” love. We’re loving them to death and they hate us for it, and the only ones benefitting from it are the totalitarians, the banksters, the globalists and the military-industrial complex.
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