A Staggeringly Well-Funded Blowback Machine | History News Network - 0 views
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Watson Institute published an estimate of the taxpayer dollars that will have gone into America’s war on terror from September 12, 2001, through fiscal year 2018. That figure: a cool $5.6 trillion (including the future costs of caring for our war vets)
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those refugees -- or at least fantasy versions of them -- played in Donald Trump’s full-throated, successful pitch for the presidency? What, in the end, might be the cost of that?
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The tens of millions of people displaced in their own countries or sent as refugees fleeing across any border in sight?
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How could you factor in the way those masses of uprooted peoples of the Greater Middle East and Africa are unsettling other parts of the planet?
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for instance, helped fuel an expanding set of right-wing “populist” movements that threaten to tear Europe apart.
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America’s never-ending twenty-first-century conflicts were triggered by the decision of George W. Bush and his top officials to instantly define their response to attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center by a tiny group of jihadis as a “war”; then to proclaim it nothing short of a “Global War on Terror”; and finally to invade and occupy first Afghanistan and then Iraq, with dreams of dominating the Greater Middle East -- and ultimately the planet -- as no other imperial power had ever done
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I’ve never forgotten the 2002 warning issued by Amr Moussa, then head of the Arab League. An invasion of Iraq would, he predicted that September, “open the gates of hell.”
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It wasn’t just the US military that, in the spring of 2003, passed through those gates to hell. In our own way, we all did.
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Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett -- now possess as much wealth as the bottom half of the US population, of 160 million Americans,
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How, for instance, could I begin to explain to them the ways in which, in these years, money flowed ever upward into the pockets of the immensely wealthy and then down again into what became one-percent elections that would finally ensconce a billionaire and his family in the White House?
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none of this would have been imaginable if, in the aftermath of 9/11, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney & Co. hadn’t felt the urge to launch the wars that led us through those gates of hell. Their soaring geopolitical dreams of global domination proved to be nightmares of the first order. They imagined a planet unlike any in the previous half millennium of imperial history, in which a single power would basically dominate everything