Indeed the US has visited untold violence on Islamic countries in order to create a new geopolitical reality in the Middle East and Central Asia. Unfortunately for those countries, they happen to sit on vast natural resources or the route to and from those resources. But please, not by any means can Islamic countries claim a monopoly on US militaristic brutality.

Ask the Wampanoag or Massachusetts native Americans who were handed smallpox blankets as gifts by the early settlers and whose populations were thus reduced by 80 to 90%. Such unimaginable cruelty was seen as quite in line with Judeo-Christian tradition and the idea of ‘promised lands’ for “chosen peoples”.

And you can ask Mexico that was practically dismembered in the name of the Manifest Destiny of a “chosen people”. Then there was the Philippines, Cuba, Haiti, Guatemala. In post-WWII times, came the horrible bombings of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos killing millions. The brutal coups in Guatemala and Chile resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Now let me pose you a question. How many Islamic leaders back then protested American aggression against those peoples? How many millions of Arabs or Muslims took to the streets of their cities to protest the genocidal actions in Southeast Asia? As far as I know, only Gamal Abdel Nasser and Sukarno showed a modicum of solidarity with other third world countries. On the contrary, most of the Islamic world applauded anything America did, from Korea to Chile. Yet, as you well know, a lot of people from those victimized countries for which Islam showed no sympathies are steadfastly showing solidarity with Arab and or Islamic countries that are the new victims of the Pax Americana.

I am curious, don’t fervent Muslims regret having participated so eagerly in the destruction of the Soviet Union? Was that not kind of dumb?

What about Clinton’s Bosnian adventure?

(sounds like a theme park)

MM

This basic and basest of human instincts that might makes right has been the guiding principle of American evolution and is its fundamental ethos. It was eloquently articulated by La Fontaine in his fable “Le Loup et L’Agneau: la loi du plus fort est toujours la meilleure”.

It is as old as empires from time immemorial. It is to Julius Caesar’s eternal credit that when he took stock of the abhorrent and ruthless conditions he imposed upon those he brutally conquered that he had at least a conscience to reflect: Vae Victis or woe to the vanquished. President Ulysses S Grant was another warrior with a conscience who was convinced that the Civil War was divine retribution for the brutal aggression against Mexico and its emasculation for no other justification other than the US was the more powerful and might makes right.

When you have the largest military establishment in the history of mankind, what are you going to choose? This is a no brainer. Do you choose peace or war? As Madeleine Albright noted, when you put so much money and resources into military power, it would be a waste not to use it. It would not make economic sense. After you make your bed, you should lie in it.

Pardon my pedantry, but I think this is a slight simplification, not to mention an example of the sunk cost fallacy. I would argue that it has more to do with the fact that war, or the threat thereof, produces an outcome more favourable to American interests, and that causality runs the other way: America invests so much in its military because it can outspend any of its rivals and incur substantial political and, ultimately, economic benefits by doing so.

This is the “logic” of US foreign policy. Everything is geared around this premise. No one has ever challenged it or disproved it. Ron Paul has attacked it. But that is about it. No one has ever even put a tiny dent into this paradigm of war as the ultimate God, the ultimate arbiter of all things. And until that happens, this will remain the overriding US foreign policy paradigm.

A keen observation, and a thought that I’d been harbouring for some time. As it happens, you do have figures like Chomsky and Lew Rockwell challenging the moral premises of this insane, martially-oriented “logic”, but I presume you’re referring to the various talking heads, politicians, media personalities, and other highly visible public personages, in which case the consensus on this broadest of broad issues is near unanimous. I suspect when the American economy finally implodes under the weight of its own contradictions the pundits will still be claiming we didn’t use enough force to attain our ends. To listen to them, you’d never guess the “guiding paradigm” as you put it is fundamentally misguided.