Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
What I think US needs to do now is to look very harshly and coldly at changes that are
going on in the world. The most powerful truth to come out of the last 10 years is the relative
ineffectiveness of the US military in achieving the kinds of goals that we set for it. And
we have to begin to rethink very strongly: what is military effectiveness? How can military
force be used in ways that advance our national interests, that reinforce our sense of who
we are, that do well for us in the world and also do well for the world as a whole? They
were the wrong kind of choices for what we wanted in the long term to achieve in the
Muslim world. In other words, we were doing things that as you just suggested may have
felt good, may have addressed a tremendous sense of emotional angst that we felt, but
in the long run we're achieving in many ways the opposite of what we wanted.
We're always told that 9/11 changed everything. And certainly it is a changing point in American
and world history, but I think if you look into what took place in the aftermath of 9/11,
they don't flow from the events, they flow from the policies that had been in the works
for at least the previous decade. The perception among what became the predominant layer of
the whole of American foreign policy-makers is that a unipolar moment had arisen, that
the United States could carry out its will by military force anywhere in the world, and
it could use military force to reverse what had become more and more evidently an economic
decline in its position on the world stage. Then you take Iraq. I mean, Saddam Hussein
was an opponent of al-Qaeda. They invented reasons to go into Iraq. They claimed he had
relations with al-Qaeda which everyone now admits was a lie. They claimed he had weapons
of mass destruction which now everyone knows was a lie. So what you're dealing with are
wars not to protect the American people, but to serve the interests of the elite that run
this country - the top one percent, the corporations, the banks that saw in wars and plunder the
ability to get ever more wealth and to consolidate American grip on the oil resources of the
world.
"Now a recent poll shows that the American public -- only about 25 percent -- think that
the war in Afghanistan or the war in Iraq - pick and choose which one you want - had
a positive effect on fighting terrorism. In fact 75 percent think it either had no effect
or it had a negative effect. And I'm in the negative effect category. I think George Bush
did exactly what Bin Laden wanted him to do, he overreacted and went into Iraq, terrorism
spiked. And the reason that Obama has not used the term "war on terror" I think is because
it has been discredited. The United States has many terrorist groups on its terrorism
list, but most of them don't attack the United States, and therefore the United States should
have focused on Al Qaeda and excluded Saddam Hussein and all these manufactured associations
between Iraq and Bin Laden which were totally false.