America's Genocidal Logic at Work Again

[unhappycamper]

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/william-boardman/52811/americas-genocidal-logic-at-work-again

America's Genocidal Logic at Work Again
by William Boardman | November 21, 2013 - 10:23am

What's the logic behind using terrorism as a response to terrorism?

American foreign policy as a state sponsor of terrorism in response to terrorism operates now with a decidedly genocidal logic. Perhaps that logic has been there all along, but with increased American use of drone assassinations in tribal areas on two continents, the logic has become inescapably real, albeit not officially acknowledged or, perhaps, consciously accepted.

~snip~

The meaninglessness of the terms "Global War on Terror" and "Long War" (both Bush era coinages without substantive definition) was made clear hilariously, if briefly, in March 2009 when the Obama administration dropped those terms in favor of "Overseas Contingency Operation" (a nicely sanitized coinage with Orwellian opacity, but still without any intellectual import). Regardless of the term describing it, American policy remains the same undefined, ad hoc striking out at countries or people we designate (often secretly) as enemies for reasons we don't even try to prove in order to get results we pretend are more rational than they are imaginary.

One explanation for America's miasmic waste of lives and dollars since 2001 is that we have officially chosen as our enemy a chimerical cohort of people who have little in common but their differences, whether geographical, national, or historical. Even their actual commonalities of religion and tribal tradition are more diverse than shared. It's not that the people America attacks "hate our freedoms." There's little evidence that they even know or care much about "our freedoms." What evidence there is suggests that what they hate – and have every right to hate – is our attacks on their freedoms, our assault on their culture and their traditions, our murdering of their friends and families.

[MisterP]

1. same with the Phoenix Project: it was called Counter Terror--not in the sense of "antiterror" but

"terror used oppositionally"