Chomsky explains "stability"
Quote*: Chomsky also discussed how American foreign policy is used to stabilize other countries in which it has a vested interest. One of those countries was Chile during the 1960s and ’70s.
“When we invade those countries, and half destroy them, that stabilizes the region. This is the normal usage of the term stability,” Chomsky said. “Stability means we run it, we own the world.”
* Read full article here >>>
Ahh... Now I understand what they mean when they say "We are helping the US bring stability to the region." It's code for "we're breeding more 'terrorists' so that we can have eternal war for eternal peace, thereby keeping the military industrial complex fully oxygenated."
Does anyone still think that the Bali bombings were not a classic example of the fruits of our helping the US bring "stability" to the world?
“When we invade those countries, and half destroy them, that stabilizes the region. This is the normal usage of the term stability,” Chomsky said. “Stability means we run it, we own the world.”
* Read full article here >>>
Ahh... Now I understand what they mean when they say "We are helping the US bring stability to the region." It's code for "we're breeding more 'terrorists' so that we can have eternal war for eternal peace, thereby keeping the military industrial complex fully oxygenated."
Does anyone still think that the Bali bombings were not a classic example of the fruits of our helping the US bring "stability" to the world?
posted by The Editor at
9:32 AM
9 Comments:
Settle, Gerry.
There are, some of us, who remain, believing, in Australia.
Settle? You think I'm a sheep dog? Not sure what you're trying to say there, Davo. What has believing in Australia go to do with it? [puzzled look]
I first discovered I could detest the way Americans conducted foreign policy when the CIA helped fund and helped direct the military coup that wrecked the Allende government in Chile in 1974. Up until that event Allende had managed to construct, with the help of Stafford Beer, the world's first functional Marxist state.
But I completely fail to see how a gang of jihadis trained by Jemaah Islamiyah and endorsed by Abu Bakr Bashir have anything to do with American foreign policy. I know Banana bin Laden claimed it was retaliation for Afghanistan but that was obviously bullshit. After all, Afghanistan was the inevitable result of the WTC bombings, as bin Laden well understood.
And let's not forget that when Banana bin Laden created Al Qaeda there was no American intervention anywhere in the Middle East (except for arming Saudi Arabia and Israel), and Al Qaeda spent its first few years bombing Shias, Sufis and liberal Sunnis, before branching out to attack Americans in Yemen - the USS Cole, for example.
This comment has been removed by the author.
@AndrewM: It's my understanding that the reasons given for the Bali bombings were that we had joined the US in the invasion of Afghanistan, as well as our role in the East Timor independence struggle.
@lemmiwinks: I agree with you that organised religions are problematic. I think we need to remember that Judaism, Christianity and Islam share a developmental history and many disturbing "moral" values. Also, they have caused many wars and hovered in the background of countless others. However, politics and Big Business interests seem to be just as culpable as religion. I dunno...
Perhaps if all politicians baying for war had to send all their brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, as well as all their nephews and nieces off to the sharp end of said war, we'd have a lot less wars?
@Gerry: the story that the bombings were retaliation for Australia siding with the Americans comes from a single audio tape broadcast by Al Jazeera one week after the attack, purporting to be from Banana bin Laden. None of the Bali bombers themselves said this; they just said they wanted jihad against all foreigners, and singled out Bali because it was accessible, and full of foreign drunks.
Whether or not Hambali's funds came from Al Qaeda, as Mukhlas believed, remains unknown, and probably will never be known, since Hambali has vanished.
There's been a lot of "perception management" on this issue.
IIRC, Keelty said, immediately after the bombing, that it was clearly blowback for our participation in the invasion of Afghanistan.
Howard was ropable at Keelty for having said that and he got severely disciplined.
I can no longer find Keelty's comments on the net. Interesting.
The bombers were apparently trained in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.
Prior to the bombing, the ONA had assessed that Indonesian muslim extremists were planning to target citizens of the US and its allies (that's us) in Lombok and Bali.
I think the bombers have been very selectively quoted in the western media.
It was not "in our interests" to have the bombings seen to be reaction to our invasion of Afghanistan.
I'll stick with my interpretation of the motives.
@Gerry: you'll stick with your interpretation no matter what I say, but just for the record:
1. Keelty was asked by a journalist whether the Bali bombings could have been triggered by the invasion of Afghanistan, and he replied "It's possible." He shouldn't have said even that, of course, and Howard was quite right to have a go at him - it wasn't the job of the AFP Commissioner to speculate. Howard, of course, didn't give a shit whether Keelty speculated, he was just pissed that Keelty gave the 'Afghanistan Bad Idea' meme space to play.
2. The bombers were not trained by al Qaida. They met in a Jemaah Islamiyah training camp in Indonesia, and hatched their plot there. Abu Bakr Bashir claimed that he was never told exactly what they had in mind; they'd come to him seeking his opinion as to whether it was OK to attack Westerners in Bali, and he had told them something along the lines of "It's OK to attack unbelievers anywhere." The only one of the gang who might have been to Afghanistan was Hambali, who was the paymaster; nobody, to my knowledge, has suggested that the funds came from anywhere other than al Qaeda.
3. The ONA assessment was pretty much spot on, wasn't it? Note that ONA did not say: " ... and these attacks are a response to the invasion of Afghanistan."
@AndrewM: OK, I accept that JI's primary beef was what "western decadence" was doing to Indonesian (Muslim) culture.
And now please tell me that their thinking was not majorly influenced by the US (and Australian) invasion of Afghanistan (a fellow Muslim country, and the home of al-Qaeda.)
Interestingly, the Wikipedia article on the 2002 Bali bombings lists al-Qaeda as a co-perpetrator.
And now please also tell me that al-Qaeda, who financed the 2002 Bali bombing would not have been majorly motivated into doing so by the invasion of Afghanistan (their base) by US and Australian troops.
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