Some of you have only the shallowest, most rudimentary understanding of what's going on in Iraq and you've uncritically bought the U.S. government's official line. I doubt you'll believe or even understand a word of what follows, but I'll try to lay it out for you anyway.
Iraq was the target of the new American right from the beginning, mostly because it was the easiest one. It's not about Sodamn Insane and WMD and never was, it's not about Iraq at all, neither is it about terrorism, oil (except peripherally), 9/11, al Qaida, or any of the other pap you've been fed. About 3000 people died in the attacks of 9/11. In an average month, that's about the toll of people killed on U.S. highways. And it happened only once, four years ago, while the highway death toll continues, month after month after month, and nobody seems particularly excited about it. 9/11 is peanuts. The world did not suddenly change on 9/11 just because a few terrorists chose the luckiest generation in history as a target. That's been happening to other people all over the world for thousands of years, and in recent memory (i.e. the last 100 years or so) because of the actions of the U.S. government in places like Nicaragua, Chile, Panama, Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, American Samoa... You can look it up. In fact look them all up, you might learn something useful. 9/11 was just the first time anyone seriously targetted U.S. citizens at home. And that's not what it's about either.
It's about U.S. imperialism, global hegemony, and who's going to run the world. The U.S. thinks it can do it indefinitely. It's wrong. All empires fall, yours will not be exempt. You'd do well to study a little history of a few places other than the United States and get a feel for the broader sweep of things.
For instance, the big event around the end of the 19th century was the Boer War, when Britain, by far the world's greatest power at the time, fabricated a little war against the Afrikaaner republics in southern Africa. It wasn't because the Afrikaaners were particularly nasty (though they were, especially toward black people and foreigners) but because they had gold the imperial power wanted. That war turned out to be much longer and harder than expected, and while Britain eventually won it by all the conventional measures, it was the beginning of a half century of decline that ultimately ended Britain's global superpower status.
That'll happen to the United States eventually too. Maybe not this time in Iraq, and in fact probably not, because the United States is far more powerful relative to the other powers in the world than Britain was in 1899. But it *will* happen, and history will judge this little adventure in Iraq in about the same terms it now judges the Boer War. And sooner or later one of these little adventures will mark the beginning of the end of American hegemony.
Global terrorism, personified by Osama bin Laden, and the American neocon fantasy of running the world forever, personified by George W. Bush, are what the Marxists (Marx wasn't wrong about everything) used to call "objective allies." They feed off each other, they couldn't exist without each other, they justify each other's existence, they thrive on the confrontation, and they're all full of shit.
I'm not concerned about the United States losing the war in Iraq, that's a foregone conclusion, as was the war in Vietnam. You can't beat guerrillas on their home turf. I worry that the United States won't lose the war in Iraq soon enough. Both sides' goals are ludicrous. The idea that Islamic fundamentalists can sweep into power across the Middle East, Talibanize it, and fight a successful holy war (jihad) against the West is as dumb as the notion that the United States can permanently be the global vigilante. The danger (credit to Gwynne Dyer for this one) is not that marginal extremists will dominate the future, it's that they'll do a lot of damage to everybody's future before they go down.
And for those who want more information and more detailed analyses, see the following by Gwynne Dyer from publisher McClelland and Stewart Ltd.:
Ignorant Armies, 2003, ISBN 0-7710-2977-2
Future: Tense, 2004, ISBN 0-7710-2978-0
and indeed, both wings have their own agenda to promote. (aka garbage)
