Yes, I did post an entry earlier today about Barack Obama’s recent appointments. And yes, it did include speculation and some condemnation. But to be honest with you, I’ve reached the end of my rope with regards to speculating about the pros and cons of Obama’s soon-to-be administration. The truth of the matter is that no matter Obama’s historic victory, and the sense of optimism that it has created, the state of the American military industrial complex will not be significantly altered. And because of that, neither will those bedrock aspects of US foreign policy that have remained consistent since the end of the Second World War. In truth, there is only one thing that can threaten that reality – an economic collapse. Beyond that, its prevalence within the modern American landscape will remain intact.
Members of Presidential administrations are only significant in their peripheral, even unknowing, role of helping support the status quo and that on which the military industrial complex thrives – neocolonialism, economic imperialism, militarism, and the now inseparable connection between government and the defense sector. That is a national reality that no President has been able to even come close to altering in half a century. Barack Obama will fair no different.
The world is replete with contradictions driven by the need to sensationalize that which supports policy. The recent attacks in Mumbai are being labeled “India’s 9/11”. That said, I have a question: what, or when, was Iraq’s 9/11? Was it during the decade in which international sanctions caused the deaths of some 1 million Iraqis after America’s once Middle Eastern golden boy overstepped his bounds? Or is it the last 5 years of war that has killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions? It would seem the people of Iraq don’t get their own 9/11, despite the fact that their country was illegally invaded based on lies and the hegemonic lust of ideological neoconservative zealots. Over 4,000 American soldiers have paid with their lives and yet Iraq remains the most dangerous country in the world despite what those makeup laden spin doctors on television routinely spew.
Today, 58 Iraqis were killed and another 112 were injured by a car bomb and a teenaged suicide bomber in Bagdad, a bombing in Suleikh, a suicide car bomber in Mosul, and a bomb in Yarmouk.
Hear about it?
How Iraqis die doesn’t concern us. Iraqis die every day. Old news. How Americans die, on the other hand, does concern us and is always news worthy.
A US historian once opined on the Spanish conquest of the South West during which Native Americans were given 5 minutes to choose whether to convert to Catholicism or face annihilation. The edict that they were read was in Latin, so of course they couldn’t understand it and were thus killed. The point made was what if a foreign peoples arrived in Catholic Europe and told the French or the Spanish that they had 5 minutes to abandon a belief system and an entire way of life that had been over a millennia in the making? You can imagine the response.
Now imagine it again.