Seeds of Chaos / Roots of Terror
“Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.”
— Sun Tzu, The Art of War
The story remains the same, whether the players are Al Qaeda, the Taliban or ISIS. Western (primarily U.S.) military intervention in countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria…) in the oil-rich Middle East has created its share of death, destruction and chaos, which serves to fuel the flames of anti-Western and anti-American hatred, which helps to recruit more Muslim extremists to join groups like ISIS, which causes the West to drop more bombs and kill more terrorists (and innocent civilians), which further enrages radical Islamic ideologues, whose ranks grow in size and strength and who engage in more heinous acts of violence, which get amplified by the media and stoke greater fear and hysteria in the West, which leads to more bombings and deaths in the Middle East, which… an unending cycle of destructive madness.
Violence begets violence…terror begets terror… and the hope for a more peaceful world begins to fade from our consciousness like the colors of a setting sun.
A seemingly perpetual war – one that has continued into the Obama administration with its recent escalations of military force in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria – is being waged with no end in sight for our children and their children. The only true beneficiary of this unending war is the corporate defense establishment once described by President (Gen.) Dwight D. Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of Allied Forces during WWII, as the military-industrial complex, whose unchecked power and influence he soberly warned the American people about in his farewell address to the nation in 1961. It is the same arms establishment responsible for “…building all the guns, the death planes, and the bombs…” that a young folk artist railed passionately against in his classic 1963 Cold War anthem, “Masters of War.”
One of the most important lessons to be learned from recent history is that foreign military intervention in the Middle East by the United States and other nations often has unforeseen and tragic consequences. That seems especially true when the intervention involves taking sides in a civil war and/or toppling a national leader, however despotic and brutal they may seem, as in the case of Hussein in Iraq or Gaddafi in Libya. The events of the last few decades make it clear that such actions help to sow the seeds of social and political instability and chaos, richly fertile ground in which Islamic fundamentalist groups like ISIS can firmly root themselves, grow and thrive.
In a frequently cited biblical passage from Galatians it is stated that, “A man reaps what he sows.” That same wisdom applies to nations as well as individuals. In other words, the United States reaps what it sows with respect to its foreign policy, especially its militaristic interventions in the Middle East.
A deeper understanding of the causes of the violent madness that has cast its dark and ominous shadow on the modern world, including the painful acknowledgement that the policies of our own government have helped to create and nurture the madness, can hopefully shine a light that will lead us out of the darkness and toward a more sane and enlightened world for future generations.
Know thy self… know thy enemy.
“Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.” – Noam Chomsky
READ FULL ARTICLE :-
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/04/ ... of-terror/
