Sorrows of Empire: a must read!!!!!!!!

[umtalal]

http://www.presentdanger.org/papers/sorrows2003.html

[loveable liberal]

1. fantastic essay

really gets to the guts of it all....

[milkyway]

2. Thanks for this great essay! I just purchased the book a couple days ago.

I can't wait to read it.

[umtalal]

3. here is an interesting view from another forum on the author

Chalmers Johnson is an interesting guy. He was once, as he put it in his introduction to Blowback, a 'spear carrier for Empire' but defected. I had to read him as a graduate student: stuff he wrote when still a Spear Carrier! Its interesting to compare. Blowback is a very good book, particularly good because it was written before 9/11. His point that ordinary Americans were likely to pay a very high price for crimes most of them are probably unaware of was apposite. Imagine the blow back on its way after the last two years. It really does'nt bear thinking about. The numbers of people who now have good reason to want revenge is now so much larger then it was before. I think its very likely that London (where I live) will be the next target. And I'll know exactly who to blame.
The interesting stat was on US casualties though. Apparently even now most Americans don't really know the scale of the wounded and maimed, the media focusing only on deaths. Whilst deaths have declined we know that the number of attacks on Coalition forces continue to rise day by day. They were apparently higher this month then even at the height of the insurgency a few months ago.

Whilst it is of course true that Bin Laden is not involved in avenging injustices wreaked by the west but propagating an obscurantist fundementalism, mass support for that obscurantist fundementalism would not exist outside of the context of the resentment generated by those injustices. It provides the oxygen which his movement breathes (and oxygen is not of course the same thing as the creature it sustains). This seems a very obvious point but seems beyond the comprehension of some people.

[HamdenRice]

4. Bush says let's invade 60 countries - reasonable Cheney say only 40

The paragraph that blew me away was this:

At West Point, the president said that the United States had a unilateral right to overthrow any government in the world that it deemed a threat to American security. He argued that the United States must be prepared to wage the "war on terror" against as many as sixty countries if weapons of mass destruction are to be kept out of terrorists' hands. "We must take that battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge." Americans must be "ready for pre-emptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives ... . In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act." Although Bush did not name every single one, his hit-list of sixty possible target countries was an escalation over Vice President Dick Cheney, who in November 2001, said that there were only "forty or fifty" countries that United States wanted to attack after eliminating the al Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan.