"Our Indian Wars Are Not Over Yet"

[Clara T]

"Our Indian Wars Are Not Over Yet"
Ten Ways to Interpret the War on Terror as a Frontier Conflict
By John Brown

I'd like to suggest another way of looking at the War on Terror: as a twenty-first century continuation of, or replication of, the American Indian wars, on a global scale. This is by no means something that has occurred to me alone, but it has received relatively little attention. Here are ten reasons why I'm making this suggestion:

1. Key supporters of the War on Terror themselves see GWOT as an Indian war. Take, for example, the right-wing intellectuals Robert Kaplan and Max Boot who, although not members of the administration, also advocate a tough military stance against terrorists. In a Wall Street Journal article, "Indian Country," Kaplan notes that "an overlooked truth about the war on terrorism" is that "the American military is back to the days of fighting the Indians." Iraq, he notes, "is but a microcosm of the earth in this regard." Kaplan has now put his thoughts into a book, Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground, which President Bush read over the holidays. Kaplan points out that "'Welcome to Injun Country' was the refrain I heard from troops from Colombia to the Philippines, including Afghanistan and Iraq.... The War on Terrorism was really about taming the frontier."

2. The essential paradigm of the War of Terror -- us (the attacked) against them (the attackers) -- was no less essential to the mindset of white settlers regarding the Indians, starting at least from the 1622 Indian massacre of 347 people at Jamestown, Virginia. With rare exceptions, newly arrived Europeans and their descendants, as well as their leaders, saw Indians as mortal enemies who started the initial fight against them, savages with whom they could not co-exist. The Declaration of Independence condemned "the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." When governor of Virginia (1780), Thomas Jefferson stated:
"If we are to wage a campaign against these Indians the end proposed should be their extermination, or their removal beyond the lakes of the Illinois River. The same world would scarcely do for them and us."

<snip>

9. As GWOT increasingly appears to be, the Indian wars were a very long conflict, stretching from the seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth -- the longest war in American history, starting even before the U.S. existed as a nation. There were numerous battles of varying intensity in this conflagration with no central point of confrontation -- as is the case with the War on Terror, despite its current emphasis on Iraq. And GWOT is a war being fought, like the Indian wars in the Far West, over large geographical areas -- as the Heritage Foundation's Ariel Cohen puts it, almost lyrically, "in the Greater Middle East, including the Mediterranean basin, through the Fertile Crescent, and into the remote valleys and gorges of the Caucasus and Pakistan, the deserts of Central Asia, the plateaus of Afghanistan."

The title for this paper comes from a 1692 quotation by Puritan preacher and witch-hunter Cotton Mather.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/indexprint.mhtml?pid=50043

[Fredda Weinberg]

1. Manifest destiny

Yup, this rings true to me. Sad thing is, there are true believers who will accept any consequences ... as long as they're happening to someone else.

[spun_in_montana]

2. Interesting take and angle, I

hadnt thought of the GWOT this way.
Off to read up and thanks for posting this.

[Redneck Socialist]

3. Project for the New American Genocide?

If'n dem dere furriners would just settle down, give us a buncha oil and open a few walmarts, everything'd be just great. If not we're just gonna hafta kill'em I guess.

That's how I read it at least.

[Karenina]

6. The visual...

[yurbud]

4. Palestinians have written similar essays, wondering if Israelis will

eventually have soccer teams called the Palestinians after most of them are gone.

[Clara T]

5. kick

for Anna Mae and the children of Iraq

[azndndude]

7. This is exactly what I told a republican friend

This friend who voted for GWB in 2004 was all gung ho for * until just recently, He has seen the light and now denounces *. he admitted his mistake and apologized to me. I almost passed out! I told him what America is now doing to the Muslims is what was and is still being done to we the Indigenous people of the Western Hemisphere

[Clara T]

8. Reading quotes by George Washington last night

about the necessity to exterminate Iroquois and destroy all their crops. The intansity and desire for complete annihilation was palpable in those words.

And that's the "Founding Father".

For more on this read about Sullivan's raids in the Cayuga Basin