slaar said:
That's fine, it's helping me clear my own mind too. It's a leap of faith because there are many ways of formenting and causing problems big enough to target Afghanistan and Iraq other than flying passenger jets into the symbols of America's power. I consider it not impossible, but highly unlikely that leaders of democratic countries would target their own people like that both for intrinsic moral reasons, although I agree there are limits to those, and for practical reasons of there being far easier and less risky ways to do it; if the US basically made up evidence about WMDs then it could easily have ramped up the threats the training camps in Afghanistan posed for example.
Leaders of democratic countries are ALWAYS targeting their own people when it comes to starting wars. America’s seven major wars since 1898 have been provoked by an “international incident" that cost American lives.
1898 - The Battleship Maine was conveniently "blown up by the Spanish" just in time to trigger a war with Spain that Spain did not want. It turns out that the Spanish didn't blow up the Maine.
1914: The US decides to enter World War One on the side of the British, though the American people favor neutrality and slightly prefer the German side. To whip up anti-German hatred, America loads down the Lusitania with both armaments and passengers and sends it straight into a pack of U-Boats. When the inevitable happens, the government whips up public hatred against the "evil Hun" and drags the American people into a war they didn't want.
1941: Once again, the American people oppose involvement in a war that the government deems "necessary for national security." Warmonger-in-Chief Roosevelt slaps an oil embargo on Japan, making a Japanese attack on the US inevitable. Japan's codes broken, Roosevelt knows the time and place of the coming attack, but neglects to alert the sailors at Pearl Harbor, because he wants thousands Americans murdered to whip up racist anti-Japanese hatred and drag the country into an unwanted war. The "thousands of murdered Americans conveniently whips up racist war fever" theme will return with a vengeance in 2001.
1950: The US signals to the USSR that it won't defend South Korea if the North tries to invade the south and re-unify the country. The USSR gives North Korea the go-ahead for the invasion, and the US jumps in, thinking it can win; it didn't quite work out that way though.
1964: The US government manufactures a fake "North Vietnamese attack" in the Gulf of Tonkin, dragging the US into all-out war in Vietnam. This time the outcome is even worse than it was in Korea, resulting in 58,000 troops dead, thousands more physically and mentally maimed, and instead of a draw, America pulls out of Vietnam, losing the war, and one million plus (1,000,000+) Cambodians and Vietnamese are slaughtered via mass genocide. America then gives up large-scale warmongering until
1990: The US orders Kuwait to steal Iraq's oil via slant drilling and sell it cheaply, driving world oil prices down and ruining Iraq's economy (ravaged by a war with Iran in which Iraq acted as a US proxy.) A clueless Saddam Hussein, then a loyal US ally, politely inquires if the US would mind if he took back the lost Iraqi province of Kuwait. The US, through Ambassador April Glaspie, gives Hussein the implicit go-ahead for the invasion. After Iraq obediently invades Kuwait, the US shows the Saudi leaders fake satellite photos of nonexistent Iraqi divisions massed on the Saudi border. The terrified Saudis fall for it and invite American troops into their country for Gulf War One, whose object, like that of the current war, was to destroy Iraq's economic and technological infrastructure to prevent its rise as a significant regional power.
2001: A fake "terrorist attack" is manufactured to drag the American public into wars to maintain and expand the US empire during the end of the age of oil.
