By Daniel McAdams
Terrorism is great for business if you’re in the business of growing the
government leviathan. The bodies in Paris are not yet buried, while the
vultures with dollar signs (and pounds and Euros, etc) in their eyes
have already swooped down for a feast.
Terrorism, what is it good for?
1) The military-industrial-Congressional complex: Thanks to Glenn Greenwald for bringing to light the
enormous profits that are already rolling in for the merchants of death
as Paris still smolders. As Greenwald points out, the markets could
hardly wait to start buying from these military suppliers:
And France’s largest arms manufacturer:
2) The surveillance/spy state: This morning UK prime minister David Cameron announced that,
in light of the Paris attacks, an additional 2,000 spies will be hired
in Britain’s MI5, MI6, and GCHQ. The British are among the most
spied-upon people on the planet, and with a 15 percent increase in spy
hires they can look forward to having even more of their private lives
in view of government snoops, as well as their civil liberties further
clipped in the name of freedom. Cameron calls ramping up the
surveillance state “invest[ing] more in our national security,” but does
anyone believe an even larger spy bureaucracy will keep Britain safe?
3) The regime-change interventionists: Still in the UK, Prime Minister David Cameron is planning, in light of the Paris attacks, to greatly expand British training of rebels to
fight in Syria. The 85 British troops already training “moderate”
rebels in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Jordan are “woefully
insufficient,” according to former chief of the defense staff, Lord
Richards. In Saudi Arabia, the British are training the much-touted but
rarely-sighted Free Syrian Army, which has the Assad government as its
primary target. Anyone who believes those passing through this ramped-up
British military training program are not going to focus on removing
the Assad government rather than fighting ISIS are drinking far too much
government-supplied Kool-Aid.
4) Washington’s foaming-at-the-mouth-troops-on-the-ground faction:
Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham are demanding a US ground force
of 80-100,000 US soldiers to invade Syria with the unenviably complex
task of wiping out ISIS, clearing out Russia, and tossing out Syrian
President Assad. That should leave….what exactly? The mythical rainbow
unicorn called “pro-democracy” to take up running the place. Kind of
like what was supposed to happen in Libya. But it will work this time,
they promise.
Bill Kristol has blown a gasket, quoting Winston Churchill about “total victory.” On This Week Sunday, he smirked
that while “Americans are a little war weary and they’re worried about
another intervention in the Middle East… If ISIS is going to be
destroyed, America has to be in the lead… you are going to need troops
on the ground.” He’d like to see 50,000 Americans go to war in Syria.
Considering that State Department Spokesman John Kirby has asserted that
ISIS’s presence in Syria is all Assad’s fault, it is not too difficult
to see that Kristol’s army would “finish the job” in Syria by taking out
its secular president Assad.
Yes, while the relatives of the slain are left to grieve, so many others
are smiling and rubbing their hands together greedily. As Rahm Emmanuel
once so famously said, “you never let a serious crisis go to waste. And
what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you
could not do before.”
Terror attacks provide that opportunity and so many of the worst sort are rushing to capitalize on it.
The above originally appeared at LewRockwell.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment
You can easily comment anonymously if you'd like.