Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
Something here in central Ohio has been spewing out pollen like mad these past few days and my histamine system is not liking it one bit. I can take a decongestant for the stuffiness and runny nose, eye drops for the itchy eyes and cough drops for the throat irritation, but, that would merely be treating the symptoms. The smart move is to take an antihistamine and treat the problem at its source. Sadly, when it comes to the geopolitical problems the United States blunders its way into, the best “solutions” our “leaders” propose typically amount to treating the symptoms while ignoring the root cause of the problem being addressed.
“U.S. President Donald Trump on Sunday urged the world to stop being ‘politically correct’ in order to ensure security, after three attackers drove a van into pedestrians and stabbed revelers in London, killing seven,” David Morgan wrote for Reuters on June 4, referring to the attack in London on Saturday were at least 48 people were injured by Muslim terrorists, along with the seven killed.
If making off-color jokes about women and minorities was sufficient to “ensure safety,” the Internet would have already made Earth as safe as possible, so, that must not be the sort of political correctness he’s talking about.
“We need to be smart, vigilant and tough. We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!” Trump tweeted on Saturday.
Of course, the travel ban. If we pretend banning immigration from specific, predominantly Muslim countries will make us safer the way Trump does, his proposal still amounts to treating the symptom while ignoring the root cause of the malady. The reason the West is experiencing terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims motivated by a particularly violent strain of Islam is that the West has, for the last 15-some years, been dropping bombs upon people in predominantly Muslim countries.
Its a fairly simple concept. A person is minding their own business in Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, etc. and an American-made Predator drone fires an American-made hellfire anti-tank missile into a Peugeot carrying a suspected terrorist. The Peugeot – being no where near as large as the T-72 main battle tank the Hellfire was designed to destroy – does a poor job of containing the warhead’s blast, which goes on to kill the above person who was minding his own business. Turns out, he’s someone’s brother, cousin, father and uncle – and now all those people have a legit gripe against the West and a high probability of becoming a terrorist or insurgent. Revenge is a simple enough motivation for anyone to understand, but blend that with the lack of there being much else for young men to do in many of those countries anyway, and some of the Quran’s more violent passages and the desire for revenge takes on a sense of religious duty. Repeat at an average of once every 20 minutes for 15 years and you’ll end up with plenty of “bad guys” to deal with. Which is what we have now.
So, of course the simplistic response is to simply ban people coming to the USA from countries whose citizens we might have pissed off with our awful foreign policy. When your country spans a continent, however, banning anything doesn’t work. When most Americans think of illegal immigration, they think of the southern border with Mexico. Truth is, an awful lot of aliens are smuggled across the St. Clair River from Canada into Michigan every year as well. Banning immigration will work about as well at keeping people from those specific nations out as banning drugs has worked in keeping those specific substances out of the country.
Now, I’m just a guy sitting here in central Ohio and therefore not the only one on earth to have figured this out. Far from it. The concept of “blowback” is well known within Western intelligence circles, our spooks have witnessed it repeatedly over the decades. The genesis moment of our ongoing misery, 9/11 itself, was blowback from CIA operations going back to the 1980 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The terrorism Western Europe is experiencing now is blowback from the West’s response to the blowback that was 9/11.
So, obviously our “leaders” know that the only way to stop all this blowback is to quit screwing with other people in their own countries to begin with; specifically by not shooting them dead with anti-tank missiles on a regular basis. Yet, Both Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Theresa May have suggested escalating, not winding down, military operations in Iraq and Syria – where ISIS is strongest – as a response to the Saturday attacks.
Again, this policy doesn’t make sense. ISIS didn’t send those men to attack London, ISIS isn’t that coordinated, I’m quite certain. Likely, those men were recent immigrants; or, they may well have lived in Britain for years, hearing radical sermons on Fridays – another thing May has hinted at cracking down on is Britain’s tolerance for extreme (read: “free”) speech. Either way, bombing more people in Syria who had nothing to do with driving a van into a crowd in London and then jumping out and stabbing people on Saturday won’t do a damn thing to help the situation or prevent further attacks. I know this. May probably knows this. Someone may have told Trump this. The long-serving, entrenched, bureaucratic policymakers deep within the workings of the government and military know this.
Yet, our tax money is about to go out and create some more terrorists for us to fight later with our tax money. Someone is benefiting from this, that’s why it’s being done and has been going on for 15 years. It’s clearly not us average Americans who don’t work for defense contractors orbig oil, it’s certainly not the young men and women of Western militaries who will be sent to die in futile battles; but someone, or likely many well-connected someones, will benefit mightily.
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