New fronts in our endless “war on terrorism” are opened, it seems, with each passing week: Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, the Philippines, Pakistan, and now Libya – where we are carrying out the new co-optation strategy of the Obama administration, which seeks to hijack the “Arab Spring” and utilize it as a weapon of against Islamist extremism. By setting up US-aligned “democratic” states in the Middle East, from Egypt to Libya and beyond, the Americans hope to inoculate the region against the virus represented by al-Qaeda.
This is a dangerous policy in so many ways that it would take more than a single column to even list them. Suffice to say that recent events in Egypt, and the growing influence of Islamist elements among the Libyan rebels, underscores how the “blowback” from our efforts could backfire in our faces.
We’ve spent trillions fighting this losing battle, but more than money has been lost – we’ve forfeited our freedom. The barrage of legislation enacted since 9/11 that empowers our government to openly spy on us in ways that would have been inconceivable before has effectively abolished our old republic, and replaced it with something else – a misshapen, polyglot creature, half “democratic” and fully authoritarian, which cannot sustain itself economically, and – for all its vaunting about exercising “world leadership” – shows every sign of descending into an irreversible decline.
For ten years they’ve been driving this country into the ground, just as bin Laden predicted they would. As dead as he is, he’s having the last laugh: his strategy is working.
Is it too late for us? I fear the answer to this question, because we cannot know it until that point is well behind us. I can only let the historians of the future argue the question, while here, in the present, I fight – in my small way – to influence their verdict.
