The first quarter of the 21st century has come to an end, and so has the year 2025. It’s difficult to overstate the impact of the military excesses of the United States on the course of the last 25 years when comparing these two events.
The US launched the so-called “global war on terror” shortly after the start of the new century under the enlightened leadership of President George W. Bush, who made the professional call to arms following the 2001 attacks by 9/11: “We have our marching orders. Let’s roll, American people.
Bush claimed that the US had “engaged in a war to save civilisation itself,” leading to the destruction of numerous nations and the massacre of millions of people.
I was a junior at Columbia University in New York City, the site of the World Trade Center attacks, on September 11, 2001. However, I was actually in Austin, Texas, where my family then resided, because I was supposed to study in Italy that fall.
I watched apocalyptic replays of the incoming planes on a large projector screen set up by my colleagues specifically for that purpose during the day at the office where I had been working for the summer.
As the nation attempted to rank itself as the most perilous victim of terrorism in the world’s history, American flags started to appear on every surface, not to mention the quite literal terror the US had been inflicting on other countries for decades, from Vietnam and Laos to Nicaragua and Panama.
My boyfriend and I went over to see them that evening, and they were morosely urinating on the living room floor amid numerous buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken, which they explained was meant as a “comfort food” to ease the suffering of a national tragedy.
Massive fast-food takeaway orders were generally not an option for the countless civilians who were soon to be hit by US bombs.
I flew from Austin to Rome via New York, where I watched on Italian television as my nation bombed Afghanistan’s daylights to “saving civilization itself.” By the time the Iraq War broke out in 2003, a country well aware of the phenomenon, it was estimated that half a million Iraqi children had perished as a result of US sanctions.
Bush would say, “You know, one of the hardest parts of my job is making a connection between Iraq and the war on terror,” in a rare and presumably unintended moment of clarity.
And while Bush, the president’s vice president and the recently deceased Dick Cheney, who were much more serious about producing threats to justify war forever, were on his side as well. He may have been better known for his grammatical incompetence than for his ability to instill existential fear in Americans.
Barack Obama, a premature Nobel Peace Prize winner, who managed to drop no fewer than 26, 172 bombs on seven different nations, succeeded Bush as the leader of the world superpower.
Yemen was one of these nations, where Obama’s illegal drone strikes had already claimed the lives of Yemeni weddinggoers. In the first 100 days of his presidency, Donald Trump changed the rules to allow the military to “authorize strikes without running them through the White House security bureaucracy first,” according to the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
Joe Biden, who previously served as president between the two Trump administrations, distinguished himself during his term in office by expanding Washington’s historically egregious support for the massacres of Palestinians to fund a total genocide in the Gaza Strip with the aid of US taxpayers’ billions.
Israel, which jumped on the “war on terror” bandwagon right away after 9/11, is now killing Palestinians in Gaza under the guise of a Trump-brokered ceasefire.
Trump’s resumption of control over world-wide “counterterror” operations has been underscored by even less restraint this time around, as his newly renamed Department of War deliberately bombs boats off Venezuelan waters and extrajudicially murders the people on board.
Trump can’t seem bothered to waste too much time creating a veneer of legality, preferring to fling about absurd claims of Venezuelan “narcoterrorism” and oil “theft,” as the US did in the old Bush-Cheney days.
A man’s spontaneous and haphazard bombing of Iran, Yemen, Syria, and other locations resembles his pathological stream-of-consciousness style of discourse, is now increasingly being used to control the US military might.
One cannot help but think of those unfortunate “marching orders” that sparked the beginning of the 21st century as we enter the second half of a country already defined by the disastrous legacy of US militarism: “My fellow Americans, let’s roll.”
Source: Aljazeera
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