America Has Been The World's Bully For 62 Yearsby Timothy Gatto | Aug 3 2007 - 1:12pm
This country has been heading downhill for a long time and we only have ourselves to blame. When the attacks on the USS Cole happened, we were outraged. Blackhawk Down was a movie that hurt American Pride. When the attacks on the World Trade Center happened, nobody asked the right questions, we were all too mesmerized by the constant repetition of those planes hitting the towers over and over again. The American people wanted someone to pin it on, and the Bush Administration, after they finally had the guts to come back to Washington, gave us the perpetrators.
How quickly they had all 19 terrorists identified and their recent histories ready for publication. It didn’t seem odd to anyone that while Bush was flying around in Air Force One, the only other airplanes that were in the air were members of Bin Laden family and members of the Saudi Royal Family. I was always told to be careful of the company you keep. It didn’t surprise anyone that most of the members of the gang that supposedly did the hijackings were mostly Saudi citizens?
I watched Bush ratchet up the hysteria toward Iraq and Saddam. At that time even the Democrats were foaming at the mouth. I volunteered to go to Afghanistan but came down with cancer. I’m glad I didn’t go. I would still probably be in the Army at 56 rears old, fighting in Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with any attack on America. I learned something back then, something that I knew at thirteen when I watched a “Special Report” on television while my mother was in the kitchen making dinner.
She walked into the living room near the end of LBJ’s speech. She asked me what was going on. I turned to her and said “it’s war Mom, the government said that North Vietnamese patrol boats attacked American destroyers and now he’s going to send the rest of the Army in there.” She asked me why would patrol boats attack destroyers? I told her so LBJ could send the Army in. I shook my head and went down to my room in the cellar and fumed, mad as hell at the government for blowing things out of proportion.
You might believe that I’m making this up, but I assure you that what I’m writing here is the truth. I absolutely knew then that it was ridiculous to believe that Vietnamese patrol boats tried to take on American Navy destroyers. The rest of the country didn’t think it was unbelievable. In fact, Congress let LBJ have Carte Blanche to do exactly as he pleased. The same way 30 years later that Congress rolled over and did exactly the same thing over again with Iraq.
You see, at first it’s that old “fight or flight” instinct. Works every time. When Hitler invaded Poland, he said that the Polish Army had overrun a radio station on the border with Poland. The German Army took some old polish uniforms, put them on convicted criminals and shot them to death at the radio station. They had a newsreel of some old trucks with polish markings crashing through the fence and then had German commando’s in Polish Uniforms shoot civilians that were surrendering. The stage was set. Of course nobody asked how the German Army just happened to be there en masse, that was immaterial. The German citizens wanted blood, and they got it too. So much blood that even now Europeans don’t have the thirst for the stuff they used to have.
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