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Terror and the fight against it have proven to be the most useful instruments for the spread of US global hegemony. They are, however, a fiction – a useful fiction that has served the purposes of the international élite. This fiction will be maintained.
We can put the idea that the United States invaded Iraq to neutralise weapons of mass destruction to bed. That was never the reason. It was only ever the pretext for something completely different. Intelligence isn’t an exact science to be fair, but US intelligence so faulty as to conclude that Iraq posed a real and present nuclear threat to regional and world security leads to the reasonable suspicion that the United States knew that no such threat existed. Of course something else was going on, and, as can be inferred from what happened in the wake of the Iraq invasion, we can safely piece it all together.
Central to the United States’ foreign policy shift towards the Middle East after 11 September 2001 was the mission to spread “freedom and democracy,” and this is where the truth of what the sum of all post 9/11 US military intervention was all about. In order to fully understand this we need to first consider another shift – meaning shift. This term “freedom and democracy” doesn’t mean quite what it says on the tin. This couplet of freedom and democracy is a Chicago School economic holophrasis, phrasal shorthand for a much more complex idea. In this case the complex idea is the doctrine of spread through applied social shock of a set of neoliberal principles – the Shock Doctrine.
According to Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky this “freedom and democracy” is an abbreviation for hard-line free market economics and a version of corporatist democracy; a powerful oligarchy hidden behind the structures of a weak and misinformed democracy. Here “freedom and democracy” has nothing whatsoever to do with personal liberty and the informed rule of the people. This is the opposite. Corporate-owned government and media conspire to manufacture the consent or silence of the majority in order to mobilise the apparatus of the state to the benefit of veiled corporate interest. In the case of Iraq this was the destruction of the Iraqi state to the end that its natural resources – oil and gas – could be seized by the corporations. This is exactly what did happen.
We now find ourselves globally in a predicament where war has become an essential component in the success of international economics, and successful economy is the state’s – especially the United States’ – number one priority. From its early and equally brutal application in Latin America to the current mess that is the Middle East this military interventionist economic doctrine has proven to be the quickest and most effective way of spreading the free market and amass wealth for the few. This was the sole reason for the invasion of Iraq, and is likely also the only reason for US military interest in Syria and Iran.
Does The USA Use Terror To Start Wars?
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