A Nation Unmade by War by Engelhardt Tom;

Author:Engelhardt, Tom;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2018-04-23T04:00:00+00:00

A World of a Tweeter-in-Chief and “Some Stirred-Up Moslems”

Donald Trump’s recent tweets do make one thing clear: we’ve been on quite an American journey over the last four decades, one that could be thought of as a voyage from Brzezinski (Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew, who died in May 2017) to Brzezinski (Mika, his daughter).

In a way, you might say that, back in 1979, Brzezinski, the father, first ushered us into a new global age of imperial conflict. He was, after all, significantly responsible for ensuring that the United States would engage in a war in Afghanistan in order to give the Soviet Union its own Vietnam. He launched what would become a giant CIA-organized, Saudi- and Pakistani-backed program for funding, training, and arming the most fundamental of Afghan fundamentalists, and other anti-Soviet jihadists, including a young Saudi by the name of Osama bin Laden. (President Ronald Reagan would later term those Afghan Islamist rebels “the moral equal of our Founding Fathers.”) In doing so, Brzezinski set in motion a process that would drive an Islamic wedge deep into the heart of the Soviet Union and, after Soviet intervention in Afghanistan resulted in a disastrous decade-long war, send the Red Army limping home in defeat, all of which would, in turn, play a role in the implosion of the Soviet Union.

On this subject, Brzezinski would be forever unrepentant. As he said in 1998, “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?” And as for those millions of Afghans who would end up dead, wounded, or uprooted from their homes and lives as a result, well, really, who cared?

We are now fully in that world of “stirred-up Moslems” and, as it happens, the United States is still fighting a war in Afghanistan as the Trump administration gets ready to surge militarily there, for perhaps the fourth or fifth time since October 2001. And who’s even paying attention? Who could with the latest presidential tweets headlining the news and all-hands-on-deck in Washington for the insult wars? Who woulda thunk that between 1979 and 2017 the United States would twice find itself at war (for more than a cumulative quarter century so far) in, of all places, Afghanistan, with a billionaire president, literally a casino capitalist, now running the White House as an adjunct to his family business and sending out bizarre messages about Zbigniew Brzezinski’s daughter Mika, to a media obsessed with covering that as the news of the moment?

Make America great again? You must be kidding. It’s time to stop insulting pigs and focus instead on the state of our planet.

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