Glenn Greenwald has a fascinating piece in The Intercept making - TopicsExpress



          

Glenn Greenwald has a fascinating piece in The Intercept making the case that the war on terrorism is going to be endless, as he puts it. From a decade to twenty years to Leon Panetta’s recent pronouncement that I think we’re looking at kind of a thirty years war, Greenwald painstakingly documents statements by Obama administration officials essentially showing that they see the war as having no geographic or temporal limit. And that’s not the worst of it: he goes on to show that not only Panetta but also the person likely to be the next American president is projecting our current Middle East intervention into the indefinite future. .... He then takes us through the details of how much the military-industrial complex has profited – and will continue to profit – from America’s wars. The piece is helpfully illustrated with graphs showing the skyrocketing gains enjoyed by stockholders in such companies as Lockheed-Martin, Northrup-Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics. Greenwald concludes with the observation that the War on Terror was designed to be endless. Power and profit will flow to the Usual Suspects, in spite of election outcomes, because the conflict has no discernible enemy and no identifiable limits. In his editorial in the magazine’s first issue in November 1914, Herbert Croly cheerily prophesied that the war would stimulate America’s spirit of nationalism and therefore bring it closer to democracy. At first hesitant about the collectivist war economies in Europe, The New Republic soon began to cheer and urged the United States to follow the lead of the warring European nations and socialize its economy and expand the powers of the State. This ideology has a name: we call it progressivism. It has a long history, starting with Teddy Roosevelt and his intellectual publicists, continuing through the Great War and the run-up to World War II – when it was the left that was screaming for US intervention in the European conflict – and its aftermath. Once our progressives had transformed the old America into an experimental laboratory for their social engineering projects, it was only natural that these crusading idealists would turn their sights on the rest of the world. Not content to thrust the paw of government power into every aspect of our lives here in America, the nation’s do-gooders are intent on exporting their do-goodism to the four corners of the globe. This is why our foreign policy consists of endless war, as Greenwald puts it: because if your goal is world domination, then the war to establish a global authority – with Washington as its capital – must be necessarily open-ended. That’s because there will always be resistance to such a project: once a rebellion is put down in the Middle East, for example, another one is more than likely to pop up in Africa, or eastern Europe, or someplace else.
Posted on: Sun, 12 Oct 2014 11:06:29 +0000

Trending Topics



Recently Viewed Topics




© 2015