### Seems this is from a US historian. The main point of interest from local perspective is that what he says seems to reflect what many outside the US truly believe. These are some ugly home truths ...

[link|http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,7757853%255E7583,00.html|http://www.theaustra...%255E7583,00.html]

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Chalmers Johnson: Hawks come home to roost

November 04, 2003
On Sunday, Iraqi guerrillas downed a US military transport helicopter near Baghdad airport, killing 16 and wounding 20.

Thus began the post-Tet phase of the current re-enactment of the Vietnam War. US leaders immediately echoed the old Lyndon Johnson refrains - there will be "tragic" days ahead, we are being "tested" in Iraq by foreign infiltrators, we must "stay the course," we dare not "cut and run".

This is nonsense. The US will be leaving Iraq in disgrace sooner or later.
The Iraqis are behaving just like the Vietnamese - and as any patriot (American, Australian, or Chinese) would - if invaded by self-righteous, hypocritical imperialists bent on stealing their resources.

Why the British and Australians joined the Americans in this fiasco when they could so easily have stood for something other than "might makes right" remains a mystery.

The two wars that the US launched pre-emptively after the September 11 attacks were the pet projects of special interest groups that used the threat of terrorism as cover to hijack US foreign policy and implement their private agendas. These interest groups include the military-industrial complex and the professional armed forces, close US supporters of Israel's Likud Party, and neoconservative proponents of an American empire.

This latter group is composed of "chicken-hawk" war lovers (that is, soi-disant military strategists with no experience of either the armed forces or war) who seized on the national sense of bewilderment after September 11 to push the Bush administration into conflicts that were neither relevant to, nor successful in, destroying al-Qa'ida. Instead the wars accelerated the recruitment of more suicidal terrorists and promoted nuclear proliferation in countries hoping to deter similar pre-emptive attacks by the US.

Two years after September 11, America is unquestionably in greater danger of serious terrorist threats than it has ever been before.

The Afghan and Iraq wars resulted in easy US "victories", but both soon re-erupted as guerilla struggles of attrition. Experience has shown that hi-tech armed forces are inappropriate, overly blunt instruments against terrorists and guerillas. What was called for was international police co-operation to hunt down the September 11 terrorists and changes in US foreign policy to separate militant activists from their passive supporters,whose grievances need to be addressed.

The objective should have been to turn supporters into informers against the militants, thereby allowing them to be identified and captured.

Serious high-level intelligence efforts against organisations such as al-Qa'ida and intelligence sharing with other services that may have greater access or capabilities than America's are also important in this context, as are collaborative efforts to interrupt financing of terrorist activities and prevent money laundering.

Instead, the US came up with a particularly cynical and destructive strategy. It sent CIA agents to Afghanistan with millions of dollars to bribe the warlord armies that the Taliban had defeated to reopen the civil war, promising them air support in their new offensive. The warlords, with a bit of help from the US, thus overthrew the Taliban government and soon returned to their old ways of regional exploitation.

Afghanistan has descended into an anarchy comparable to that which prevailed before the rise of the ruthless but religiously motivated Taliban.

The propaganda apparatus of the Pentagon claims a stupendous US victory in Afghanistan but, in fact, leaders of the Taliban and al-Qa'ida escaped and the country has become an even more virulent breeding ground for terrorists.

The war with Iraq that followed had even less justification and subverted the system of international co-operation that the US had worked since World War II to create. Immediately following September 11, American leaders began to fabricate pretexts for an invasion of Iraq. These were then uncritically disseminated by US print and television media, leading a majority of Americans to believe that Saddam Hussein was an immediate threat to their own safety and that he had personally supported al-Qa'ida in its attacks of September 11.

The US will feel the blowback from this ill-advised and poorly prepared military adventure for decades. The war has already had the unintended consequences of seriously fracturing the Western democratic alliance; eliminating any potentiality for British leadership of the European Union; grievously weakening international law, including the Charter of the UN; and destroying the credibility of the President, Vice-President, Secretary of State, and other officials as a result of their lying to the international community and the American people.

Most important, the unsanctioned military assault on Iraq communicated to the world that the US was unwilling to seek a modus vivendi with Islamic nations and was therefore an appropriate, even necessary, target for further terrorist attacks.

Chalmers Johnson is author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (forthcoming, Verso, London).


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#1 corrected point that Chalmers Johnston may be Brit Journo when in fact he is a US historian