I’m convinced of it. Politicians definitely live in a parallel universe,
one that could easily be called Bizarro
World.
Just read a recent op-ed in the Washington Post by
Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. It provides irrefutable
proof that these people live in an alternative universe.
The title of McConnell’s
article is “Withdrawing from Syria Is a Grave Mistake.” As
you can tell from the title, McConnell, like the good little Republican he is,
is an interventionist . That means he believes that the U.S. government should
intervene in the affairs of other countries, like with coups, assassinations,
invasions, bribery, extortion, sanctions, and embargoes, even while lamenting
when foreign governments (e.g., Russia) intervene in the affairs of other
countries in the same ways.
Okay, so Republicans are
interventionists. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they live in a parallel
universe. It just means that they are seriously misguided. The proof that
McConnell lives in an alternative universe comes through the analysis he
employs to justify his interventionism.
Number 1.
McConnell says that that interventionism is necessary to combat “Islamic
terrorism.”
What? Is he kidding? He obviously
doesn’t get it. He still believes that the terrorists are targeting America
because of their supposed hatred for America’s “freedom and values.” He still
doesn’t understand that it is interventionism itself (which he ardently
supports) that is the root cause of the anger and hatred that foreigners have
toward the United States. Stop the interventionism and anti-American terrorism
dissipates.
In
McConnell’s universe, the “war on terrorism” goes on forever because, in
his mind, the Muslims will hate America forever. The Pentagon and the CIA will
just have to continue inflicting death, suffering, and destruction on
foreigners on a perpetual basis until the war is “won,” that is, when all the
Muslim terrorists are finally eradicated, which just might be never, especially
since the interventionism produces a never-ending stream of anger and hatred
toward the United States.
Number 2.
McConnell says that America’s post-World World II regime has brought an
“unprecedented era of peace” to the world.
Is he
kidding? Has he never heard of the Korean civil war in the early 1950s, where
the U.S. government intervened and killed millions of North Koreans and
sacrificed tens of thousands of American soldiers for nothing in an illegal
war, given that the president, the Pentagon, and the CIA waged it without the
constitutionally required congressional declaration of war?
Has
he never heard of the Vietnam War, another illegal war that was waged without
the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war? In that war
also, the U.S. national security establishment killed millions of Vietnamese
and sacrificed tens of thousands of American soldiers for nothing.
Has
he never heard of the CIA’s invasion of Cuba, a country that has never attacked
the United States? Has he never heard of the U.S. government’s decades-long
brutal economic embargo against that nation, which has targeted the Cuban
people with death and impoverishment for the sake of regime change? Is he
unaware of the fact that U.S. interventionism against Cuba brought the world to
the edge of worldwide nuclear devastation?
Has
he not heard of the many state-sponsored assassinations of innocent people by
the CIA and the Pentagon since World War II?
How
he never heard of MK-ULTRA, the CIA’s secret drug-experimentation program that
deliberately murdered innocent people? Has he never heard that the CIA secretly
employed Nazi war criminals to help the CIA with its operations? Has he never
heard of Operation Northwoods?
Has
he never heard of the many regime-change operations, such as in Chile,
Guatemala , Libya, and, yes, Syria, which have not only destroyed democratic
and non-democratic regimes alike but also subjected millions of innocent people
to death, suffering, impoverishment, rape, indefinite detention, torture,
execution, or chaos?
Has he never heard of the
U.S. government’s undeclared intervention in the Persian Gulf War, which
brought about the massacre of thousands of Iraqis? Or the Pentagon’s
intentional destruction of Iraq’s water and sewage treatment plants with the
aim of killing people through infections and malnutrition? Or the 11 years of
brutal sanctions against the Iraqi people, which killed hundreds of thousands
of Iraqi children? Or UN Ambassador Madeline Albright’s infamous declaration
that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the sanctions, while
hard, were “worth it.”
Has
he never heard of President George W. Bush’s undeclared war of aggression
against Iraq, which violated the principles set forth at Nuremberg as well as
the U.S. Constitution, which succeeded in killing hundreds of thousands of more
Iraqis as well as destroying the entire country?
Or
the undeclared war against Afghanistan, which has killed hundreds of thousands of
more people, 99 percent of whom had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks?
Number
3. McConnell says that American had a “comforting blanket of isolationism in
the 1940s.” Is he kidding? How can he not know about President Roosevelt’s
interventionist machinations to embroil the United States in World War II? How
could he not know about FDR’s Lend-Lease program with England, his military
assistance to British forces, his oil embargo on Japan, his freezing of
Japanese assets in the United States, and the humiliating dictates he issued to
Japan, all with the aim of provoking Germany and Japan to attack and kill U.S.
troops, so that he could manipulate the American people into having to enter
World War II? How can he not know that that war, which is so beloved to
Republicans (and Democrats), delivered Eastern Europe and East Germany into the
hands of the Soviet Reds, which was then used to justify the Cold War and the
anti-communist crusade (and, later, the anti-Russia crusade), and the
conversion of the federal government from a limited-government republic to a
national-security state, which is a totalitarian form of governmental
structure?
How can McConnell not see such things? There can be only one
explanation. McConnell is, in fact, living in a parallel universe, one
called Bizarro World?
Reprinted with permission
from The Future
of Freedom Foundation.
Jacob
Hornberger [send
him mail] is founder and president of The Future of Freedom
Foundation.
Copyright
© 2019 The
Future of Freedom Foundation
