How US is fuelling hatred + sustaining terrorism

Contrary to US claims - far from winning its war against terrorist - its acting as recruiting officers for Al-Queda + other terorist groups. Its a war without end .
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"Yemeni man brings the horror of drone strikes home to US Senate"

Instead of first experiencing America through a school or a hospital, most people in Wessab first experienced America through the terror of a drone strike. What radicals had previously failed to achieve in my village, one drone strike accomplished in an instant: there is now an intense anger and growing hatred of America

eXTRACT :- Just six days ago, this so-called war came straight to my village. As I was thinking about my testimony and preparing to travel to the United States to participate in this hearing, I learned that a missile from a US drone had struck the village where I was raised.

For almost all of the people in Wessab, I’m the only person with any connection to the United States. They called and texted me that night with questions that I could not answer: Why was the United States terrifying them with these drones? Why was the United States trying to kill a person with a missile when everyone knows where he is and he could have been easily arrested?

My village is beautiful, but it is very poor and in a remote part of Yemen. In the past, most of Wessab’s villagers knew little about the United States. My stories about my experiences in America, my American friends, and the American values that I saw for myself helped the villagers I talked to understand the America that I know and love. Now, however, when they think of America they think of the terror they feel from the drones that hover over their heads ready to fire missiles at any time.

rEAD FULL ARTICLE ABOUT of a 23-year-old Yemeni writer named Farea Al-Muslimi travelled to Washington D.C. to tell the US Senate about the impact the strikes are having in his country.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-drone-strikes-home-to-us-senate-8586860.html

Drones must be subject to the rules of war
The Senate committee testimony of Yemeni writer Farea al-Muslimi has placed the issue of drone strikes firmly on the political agenda

To politicians and people in Pakistan, this is not a new question.

Nor are the controversies new to the US administration; it has wrestled with them for several years. This week, though, they have been brought home to US Senators, and thence to the American public, in a way that places the whole subject firmly on the political agenda. Testifying at a Senate committee hearing, a Yemeni writer – Farea al-Muslimi – compared the impact of a US drone strike on the village where he grew up to that of the marathon bombings on the city of Boston. Such strikes, he said, only turned Yemenis against America.


There are other arguments that are routinely used against the US use of drones, whether in Yemen, or against targets in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Some are practical: the risk of harming people other than the target, including women and children. Errors have embittered relations and forced US apologies. Others, though, are legal and moral. They include the lack of an international judicial framework governing the use of such weapons; the whole concept of so-called targeted assassinations, and the secrecy that has attended US decisions about drones and targeting.

Peter Bergen, an expert on counter-terrorism at the New America Foundation, told the hearing that while George W Bush had authorised only one drone strike in Yemen, at least 46 were launched in the country by the Obama administration in 2012 alone
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Last, but not least, comes the asymmetry of drone warfare. There are justified misgivings about the morality of a weapon whose use entails no physical risk to those ordering its use. They are presented as trigger-happy teenagers playing computer games who have – and need have – no concern for real-life effects.

The notion of targeted killings, in which the attacker is detective, judge, jury and executioner rolled into one, raises – and should raise – profound qualms. So should the fact that drones are not subject to any accepted laws of war..


. As with any new, and destabilising, capability, the use of drones needs to be codified internationally. There must be less secrecy about targeting – something President Obama has addressed by announcing that responsibility for drone strikes is to be transferred from the CIA to the military. The most effective disincentives, however, will come from the inevitable proliferation of what is relatively cheap technology – a time will come when the US will see itself as vulnerable, too – and from the long-term hostility that drone strikes leave in the communities where they kill and maim.

“It’s a tragedy,” Mr Muslimi said. “Everyone in my village was angry with the US, and even at me. The kids in the village call me ‘the American’, because I studied there. It’s a personal problem for me as well. I have to explain to this old man in my village, who I had previously told that America is such a great country, why this country is sending drones to attack him.”
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Farea's own positive experiences of living in America mean he is not ready to give up on it yet. “It’s not black and white,” he said in the interview. “There are things happening in Washington DC that are not representative of America, and there are things happening in Sanaa that are not representative of Yemen. And that has to be fixed.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-against-drones-has-barely-begun-8586888.html


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So when is Obama going to quit using drones knowing full well of the collateral damage?

 

Another blame the USA, the Islamist have been terrorising the world since 680 AD the only solution to resolve all this is for the USA to step back and let countries with the political will to do what it takes to defeat all these Islamist such as Russia, China, India and Israel.

There are only two choice here:
1. Islamist
2. USA

I am very glad that I am with the USA and the West, we will always get involve because too many people in Muslims lands are being oppress and we are their only hope.

 

Why don't you hold Arabs and Islamics to the same standards as NATO countries?

IED's are against the rules of war. Why arn't the Yemeni people and government demanding Islamic terrorist groups stop using them?

Have the terrorist groups in Yemen and elsewhere signed the Geneva Convention?

Mr Marlow, are you holding these people to a different standard?

 

Go ask him. (wink)

 

Oh, please not that Samuel Huntington clash of civilizations trash again.

So folks, Islamists have been terrorising the world since 680 AD with all their sabres of mass destruction.

 

Did you read and understood what the writer Farea said ? take note of the last paragraph

Which people ? the defenseless villagers - women-children -etc. ?

He also asked " Why was the United States trying to kill a person with a missile when everyone knows where he is and he could have been easily arrested?

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Please follow the link and try reading what Farea said .


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Probably. But they have fewer friendly states to use as a base of operations now.

What we have now is preferable to what our alternatives were. Regardless of whether or or not you think we are currently winning or losing.

 

Almost a year ago, Glenn Greenwald wrote this:

Today’s defense of President Obama from Andrew Sullivan is devoted to refuting Conor Friedersdorf’s criticism of Obama’s drone program. Says Sullivan:

What frustrates me about Conor’s position – and Greenwald’s as well – is that it kind of assumes 9/11 didn’t happen or couldn’t happen again, and dismisses far too glibly the president’s actual responsibility as commander-in-chief to counter these acts of mass terror.

This is exactly backward. I absolutely believe that another 9/11 is possible. And the reason I believe it’s so possible is that people like Andrew Sullivan — and George Packer — have spent the last decade publicly cheering for American violence brought to the Muslim world, and they continue to do so (now more than ever under Obama). Far from believing that another 9/11 can’t happen, I’m amazed that it hasn’t already, and am quite confident that at some point it will. How could any rational person expect their government to spend a full decade (and counting) invading, droning, cluster-bombing, occupying, detaining without charges, and indiscriminately shooting huge numbers of innocent children, women and men in multiple countries and not have its victims and their compatriots be increasingly eager to return the violence?

Just consider what one single, isolated attack on American soil more than a decade ago did to Sullivan, Packer and company: the desire for violence which that one attack 11 years ago unleashed is seemingly boundless by time or intensity. Given the ongoing American quest for violence from that one-day attack, just imagine the impact which continuous attacks over the course of a full decade must have on those whom we’ve been invading, droning, cluster-bombing, occupying, detaining without charges, and indiscriminately shooting.

One of the many reasons I oppose Obama’s ongoing aggression is precisely that I believe the policies Sullivan and Packer cheer will cause another 9/11 (the other reasons include the lawlessness of it, the imperial mindset driving it, the large-scale civilian deaths it causes, the extreme and unaccountable secrecy with which it’s done, the erosion of civil liberties that inevitably accompanies it, the patently criminal applications of these weapons, the precedent it sets, etc.). I realize that screaming “9/11″ has been the trite tactic of choice for those seeking to justify the U.S. Government’s militarism over the last decade, but invoking that event strongly militates against the policies it’s invoked to justify, precisely because those policies are the principal cause of such attacks, for obvious reasons.

In fact, one need not “imagine” anything. One can simply look at the explanations given by virtually every captured individual accused of attempting serious Terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. The Times Square bomber, the Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad, said this:

As soon as he was taken into custody May 3 at John F. Kennedy International Airport, onboard a flight to Dubai, the Pakistani-born Shahzad told agents that he was motivated by opposition to U.S. policy in the Muslim world, officials said.

“One of the first things he said was, ‘How would you feel if people attacked the United States? You are attacking a sovereign Pakistan’,” said one law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the interrogation reports are not public. “In the first two hours, he was talking about his desire to strike a blow against the United States for the cause.”

When the federal judge who sentenced Shahzad asked with disgust how he could try to detonate bombs knowing that innocent children would die, he replied: “Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody.” Those statements are consistent with a decade’s worth of emails and other private communications from Shahzad, as he railed with increasing fury against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, drone attacks in Pakistan, Israeli violence against Palestinians and Muslims generally, Guantanamo and torture, and asked: “Can you tell me a way to save the oppressed? And a way to fight back when rockets are fired at us and Muslim blood flows?”

Najibullah Zazi, one of the first Afghans ever to be accused of Terrorism on U.S. soil when he plotted to detonate bombs in the New York subway system, was radicalized by the U.S. occupation of his country (“This is the payback for the atrocities that you do,” he said). Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) expressly said that the Christmas Day bomb attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was in retaliation for the Obama cluster-bomb airstrike in Yemen that killed dozens of women and children along with U.S. support for the Yemeni dictator. The Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan was motivated by “the killing of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Anwar Awlaki was once such a moderate that he vehemently denounced the 9/11 attacks, got invited to the Pentagon to speak, and hosted a column in The Washington Post on Islam — but then became radicalized by the constant post-9/11 killing of Muslims by his country (the U.S.). David Rodhe, the former New York Times reporter who was held hostage by the Taliban for nine months, said after he was released that Taliban “commanders fixated on the deaths of Afghan, Iraqi and Palestinian civilians in military airstrikes, as well as the American detention of Muslim prisoners who had been held for years without being charged.”

Even The Washington Post just two weeks ago pointed out that the primary source of strength for AQAP — the Terror group which the U.S. Government insists is the greatest threat to the U.S. — are repeated U.S. drone strikes in Yemen; said The Post: “An escalating campaign of U.S. drone strikes is stirring increasing sympathy for al-Qaeda-linked militants and driving tribesmen to join a network linked to terrorist plots against the United States.” In late 2009 — almost three years ago – The New York Times pointed out exactly the same thing when quoting a Yemeni official after Obama’s civilian-killing cluster bomb attack (“The problem is that the involvement of the United States creates sympathy for Al Qaeda&#8220. Even Sullivan acknowledges: “there does seem a danger, especially in Yemen, that drones may be focusing the Islamists’ attention away from their own government and onto ours.”

In other words, the very policies that Sullivan and Packer adore are exactly the ones that make another 9/11 so likely. Running around screaming “9/11″ at Obama critics to justify his ongoing American violence in the Muslim world is like running around screaming “lung cancer” to justify heavy cigarette smoking. It isn’t those of us who oppose American aggression in the Muslim world who need manipulative, exploitative reminders about 9/11; it’s those who cheer for these policies who are making a follow-up attack ever more likely.

Prior to 9/11, of course, the U.S. spent decades propping up dictators in that part of that world, overthrowing their democratically elected leaders, imposing devastating sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Muslim children — literally — and then blithely justifying it like it was the most insignificant problem in the world, arming, funding and diplomatically protecting continuous Israeli aggression, and otherwise interfering in and dominating their countries. There’s a reason they decided to attack the U.S. as opposed to, say, Peru, or South Africa, or Finland, or Brazil, or Japan, or Portugal, or China. It isn’t because The Terrorists put the names of all the countries into a hat and — bad luck for us — randomly picked out the piece of paper that said “The United States.”

It’s because the U.S. has been and continues to be guided by the imperial mindset that causes Andrew Sullivan, George Packer and people like them to cheer and cheer and cheer for U.S. violence and other forms of coercion in that part of the world — violence and coercion that they would be the first to denounce and demand war in response to if it were done to the U.S. rather than by the U.S. Indeed, that’s precisely how they reacted — and, a full decade later, are still reacting — to a one-time attack on U.S. soil.

In light of that, I can’t even conceive of the uncontrolled rage, righteous fury and insatiable desire for violence in which they would be drowning if those attacks lasted not a single day but a full decade, if it involved constant video imagery on American television of dead American children and charred American wedding parties and thousands of Americans imprisoned for years in cages in a distant ocean prison without charges and surveillance and weaponized drones flying constantly over American soil and unignited cluster bombs left on American soil that explode when American children find them.

Although I can’t conceive of the rage that would be produced in people like Sullivan and Packer from a decade’s worth of that kind of violence on American soil, they should spend some time trying to imagine it. Then perhaps they’d understand how much they — and the President whose foreign policy they venerate — are doing to bring about “another 9/11″ with the non-stop violence they so enthusiastically endorse.

* * * * *

For those who don’t understand or who like purposely to ignore the difference between observations about causation (A causes B) and arguments about justification (B is justified) — where “B” is “violent attacks on civilians” — see here. To be clear, this analysis is an example of the former (a causal argument), not the latter (an argument about justification).

On a related note: a Democratic Party club recently created a website to tout all of President Obama’s sterling achievements. As Charles Davis and Reason both note, half of those “achievements” are corpses that he created. This, ladies and gentlemen, is your Democratic Party in the Era of Obama:

I have no idea who my President keeps killing — never heard of almost any of them — but I’m going to blissfully assume that they’re TERRORISTS and thus stand and cheer when their lives are ended.

Why do they hate us?

UPDATE [Wed.]: My Salon colleague Jefferson Morley has an excellent article documenting the mass political instability that Obama’s militarism in that part of the world is breeding; it’s well worth reading.

UPDATE II [Wed.]: A new poll from the Pew Research Center finds that “The Obama administration’s increasing use of unmanned drone strikes to kill terror suspects is widely opposed around the world“; in particular: “in 17 out of 21 countries surveyed, more than half of the people disapproved of U.S. drone attacks.” Caring about world opinion is so 2004.

http://www.salon.com/2012/06/12/what_might_cause_another_911/

 

So it's clear that the US war of terrorism is totally counterproductive, not that this was anything other than a no-brainer anyway.

This raises the question as to why would they continue with their use of drones in the knowledge that such a policy is likely to create more Bin Laden's further down the line?

Given that US foreign policy-makers are not stupid, it must be reasonably assumed that counter-terrorism on US soil is being used as their justification to perpetuate their war of terror.

In other words, incidences like the Boston bombing are seen as a price worth paying as their means of meeting their medium to long-term foreign policy objectives.

 

That is not clear at all. You have failed to prove the alternatives would be worse.

 

TMR excellent article - well worth rereading later , after a short break. I'm off to the fridge . (wink)

 

Additionally, the use of drone strikes is only one part of the ongoing campaign against Islamo-fascism. Even if Marlowe proves that such strikes are counter-productive, that doesn't invalidate the need for such a campaign. It's like arguing that bombing Germany in WW2 was counter-productive (it may have been) and then jumping to the conclusion that thus being at war with Nazi Germany was a bad idea.

 

Ok, is it really necessary for me to cite the US academic studies that categorically show that Oboma's use of drones abroad perpetuates terrorism at home?

 

Firstly, Islamo-fascism is an oxymoron. Secondly, US academic studies DO prove that Drone strikes are counterproductive. Third, your Nazi example is a false analogy.

 

They really needed a study to figure that out? Seems to me if you imagine how Americans would react to the same thing you could easily conclude how other people might react.

 

Islamo-fascism is the term I am stuck with. It refers to the odd blend of Islamism and outright ideology practiced by Al-Qaeda and similar groups. If you know of a better term, feel free to use it and pass it along.

I haven't heard of one academic study of drone strikes which looks at the effect on the performance and threat-projection ability of Islamo-fascist organizations; they look solely at the effect on local civilian opinion. That's why I said it may or may not be counter-productive.

As for my Nazi example, it's a great analogy. The Islamo-fascists hate us and want to hurt us and weaken us and they want to remake the Muslim world in their image of some new blood-stained Caliphate. Success would mean the death of tens of millions of Muslims killed by the triumphan Islamo-fascists for not being "properly" Islamic. The parallel with the behavior of the Nazis when they thought they were going to be triumphant is surely obvious.

If you don't understand this, look at the number of attacks carried out on Shia Muslims outside of war zones like in Pakistan, the Gulf States and even Somalia. They are not proper Muslims in the eyes of Al-Qaeda and are therefore just as valid a target as a group of Americans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectarian_violence_among_Muslims
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectarian_violence_in_Pakistan

 

When you eventually figure out the fact that Islamo-fascism is an oxymoron you will be able to join the dots and thus understand that the Nazi example is a false analogy.

The studies are clear and unambiguous, namely, that the use of drones are counterproductive in terms of increasing the potential for US domestic-based terrorism.

 

I doubt that will prove it either, but it can't be worse than what has been presented so far.

No one has shown that appeasement or isolation would have worked better. That allowing these crazy people to have access to the resources of an entire nation would have been better than what we are dealing with now.

We did that with North Korea...how is that working out?

 

OK. If the Yemenis hate us, can there be a better reason to boot them out of the US?

 

Maybe they do no agree with you that it is actually counter productive?

 

Unquestionably, the US war of terrorism is fuelling domestic counter-terrorism. The Boston bombings are no exception. Leaving various caveats aside, it is clear as to what motivated the Boston suspects. As Glenn Grenwald argues:

.....[W]hat motivated the Boston suspects [is]... entirely unsurprising and, by now, quite familiar:

"The two suspects in the Boston bombing that killed three and injured more than 260 were motivated by the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, officials told the Washington Post.

"Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 'the 19-year-old suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings, has told interrogators that the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the attack,' the Post writes, citing 'US officials familiar with the interviews.'"

In the last several years, there have been four other serious attempted or successful attacks on US soil by Muslims, and in every case, they emphatically all say the same thing: that they were motivated by the continuous, horrific violence brought by the US and its allies to the Muslim world - violence which routinely kills and oppresses innocent men, women and children:

Attempted "underwear bomber" Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab upon pleading guilty:

"I had an agreement with at least one person to attack the United States in retaliation for US support of Israel and in retaliation of the killing of innocent and civilian Muslim populations in Palestine, especially in the blockade of Gaza, and in retaliation for the killing of innocent and civilian Muslim populations in Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan and beyond, most of them women, children, and noncombatants."

Attempted Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, the first Pakistani-American involved in such a plot, upon pleading guilty:

"If the United States does not get out of Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries controlled by Muslims, he said, 'we will be attacking US', adding that Americans 'only care about their people, but they don't care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die' . . . .

"As soon as he was taken into custody May 3 at John F. Kennedy International Airport, onboard a flight to Dubai, the Pakistani-born Shahzad told agents that he was motivated by opposition to US policy in the Muslim world, officials said."

When he was asked by the federal judge presiding over his case how he could possibly have been willing to detonate bombs that would kill innocent children, he replied:

"Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don't see children, they don't see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody. It's a war, and in war, they kill people. They're killing all Muslims. . . .

"I am part of the answer to the US terrorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim people. And, on behalf of that, I'm avenging the attack. Living in the United States, Americans only care about their own people, but they don't care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die."

Emails and other communications obtained by the US document how Shahzad transformed from law-abiding, middle-class naturalized American into someone who felt compelled to engage in violence as a result of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, drone attacks, Israeli violence against Palestinians and Muslims generally, Guantanamo and torture, at one point asking a friend: "Can you tell me a way to save the oppressed? And a way to fight back when rockets are fired at us and Muslim blood flows?"

Attempted NYC subway bomber Najibullah Zazi, the first Afghan-American involved in such a plot, upon pleading guilty:

"Your Honor, during the spring and summer of 2008, I conspired with others to travel to Afghanistan to join the Taliban and fight against the U.S. military and its allies. . . . During the training, Al Qaeda leaders asked us to return to the United States and conduct martyrdom operation. We agreed to this plan. I did so because of my feelings about what the United States was doing in Afghanistan."

Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan:

"Part of his disenchantment was his deep and public opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a stance shared by some medical colleagues but shaped for him by a growing religious fervor. The strands of religion and antiwar sentiment seemed to weave together in a PowerPoint presentation he made at Walter Reed in June 2007. . . . For a master's program in public health, Major Hasan gave another presentation to his environmental health class titled 'Why The War on Terror is a War on Islam.'"

Meanwhile, the American-Yemeni preacher accused (with no due process) of inspiring both Abdulmutallab and Hasan - Anwar al-Awalaki - was once considered such a moderate American Muslim imam that the Pentagon included him in post-9/11 events and the Washington Post invited him to write a column on Islam. But, by all accounts, he became increasingly radicalized in anti-American sentiment by the attack on Iraq and continuous killing of innocent Muslims by the US, including in Yemen. And, of course, Osama bin Laden, when justifying violence against Americans, cited US military bases in Saudi Arabia, US support for Israeli aggression against its neighbors, and the 1990s US sanctions regime that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, while Iranians who took over the US embassy in 1979 cited decades of brutal tyranny from the US-implanted-and-enabled Shah.

It should go without saying that the issue here is causation, not justification or even fault. It is inherently unjustifiable to target innocent civilians with violence, no matter the cause (just as it is unjustifiable to recklessly kill civilians with violence). But it is nonetheless vital to understand why there are so many people who want to attack the US as opposed to, say, Peru, or South Africa, or Brazil, or Mexico, or Japan, or Portugal. It's vital for two separate reasons.

First, some leading American opinion-makers love to delude themselves and mislead others into believing that the US is attacked despite the fact that it is peaceful, peace-loving, freedom-giving and innocent. As these myth-makers would have it, we don't bother anyone; we just mind our own business (except when we're helping and liberating everyone), so why would anyone possibly want to attack us?

With that deceitful premise in place, so many Americans, westerners, Christians and Jews love to run around insisting that the only real cause for Muslim attacks on the US is that the attackers have this primitive, brutal, savage, uncivilized religion (Islam) that makes them do it. Yesterday, Andrew Sullivan favorably cited Sam Harris as saying that "Islamic doctrines ... still present huge problems for the emergence of a global civil society" and then himself added: "All religions contain elements of this kind of fanaticism. But Islam's fanatical side – from the Taliban to the Tsarnaevs – is more murderous than most."

These same people often love to accuse Muslims of being tribal without realizing the irony that what they are saying - Our Side is Superior and They are Inferior - is the ultimate expression of rank tribalism. They also don't seem ever to acknowledge the irony of Americans and westerners of all people accusing others of being uniquely prone to violence, militarism and aggression (Juan Cole yesterday, using indisputable statistics, utterly destroyed the claim that Muslims are uniquely violent, including by noting the massive body count piled up by predominantly Christian nations and the fact that "murder rates in most of the Muslim world are very low compared to the United States").

As the attackers themselves make as clear as they can, it's not religious fanaticism but rather political grievance that motivates these attacks. Religious conviction may make them more willing to fight (as it does for many in the west), but the motive is anger over what is being done by the US and its allies to Muslims. Those who claim otherwise are essentially saying: gosh, these Muslims sure do have this strange, primitive, inscrutable religion whereby the seem to get angry when they're invaded, occupied, bombed, killed, and have dictators externally imposed on them. It's vital to understand this causal relationship simply in order to prevent patent, tribalistic, self-glorifying falsehoods from taking hold.

Second, it's crucial to understand this causation because it's often asked "what can we do to stop Terrorism?" The answer is right in front of our faces: we could stop embracing the polices in that part of the world which fuel anti-American hatred and trigger the desire for vengeance and return violence. Yesterday at a Senate hearing on drones, a young Yemeni citizen whose village was bombed by US drones last week (despite the fact that the targets could easily have been arrested), Farea Al-Muslimi, testified. Al-Muslimi has always been pro-American in the extreme, having spent a year in the US due to a State Department award, but he was brilliant in explaining these key points:

"Just six days ago, my village was struck by a drone, in an attack that terrified thousands of simple, poor farmers. The drone strike and its impact tore my heart, much as the tragic bombings in Boston last week tore your hearts and also mine.

"What radicals had previously failed to achieve in my village one drone strike accomplished in an instant: there is now an intense anger and growing hatred of America."

He added that anti-American hatred is now so high as a result of this drone strike that "I personally don't even know if it is safe for me to go back to Wessab because I am someone who people in my village associate with America and its values." And he said that whereas he never knew any Yemenis who were sympathetic to al-Qaida before the drone attacks, now:

"AQAP's power and influence has never been based on the number of members in its ranks. AQAP recruits and retains power through its ideology, which relies in large part on the Yemeni people believing that America is at war with them" . . .

"I have to say that the drone strikes and the targeted killing program have made my passion and mission in support of America almost impossible in Yemen. In some areas of Yemen, the anger against America that results from the strikes makes it dangerous for me to even acknowledge having visited America, much less testify how much my life changed thanks to the State Department scholarships. It's sometimes too dangerous to even admit that I have American friends."

He added that drone strikes in Yemen "make people fear the US more than al-Qaida".

There seems to be this pervasive belief in the US that we can invade, bomb, drone, kill, occupy, and tyrannize whomever we want, and that they will never respond. That isn't how human affairs function and it never has been. If you believe all that militarism and aggression are justified, then fine: make that argument. But don't walk around acting surprised and bewildered and confounded (why do they hate us??) when violence is brought to US soil as well. It's the inevitable outcome of these choices, and that's not because Islam is some sort of bizarre or intrinsically violent and uncivilized religion. It's because no group in the world is willing to sit by and be targeted with violence and aggression of that sort without also engaging in it (just look at the massive and ongoing violence unleashed by the US in response to a single one-day attack on its soil 12 years ago: imagine how Americans would react to a series of relentless attacks over the course of more than a decade, to say nothing of having their children put in prison indefinitely with no charges, tortured, kidnapped, and otherwise brutalized by a foreign power).

Being targeted with violence is a major cost of war and aggression. It's a reason not do it. If one consciously decides to incur that cost, then that's one thing. But pretending that this is all due to some primitive and irrational religious response and not our own actions is dangerously self-flattering and self-delusional. Just listen to what the people who are doing these attacks are saying about why they are doing them. Or listen to the people who live in the places devastated by US violence about the results. None of it is unclear, and it's long past time that we stop pretending that all this evidence does not exist.

Dirty Wars
Several weeks ago, I wrote about the soon-to-be-released film, "Dirty Wars", that chronicles journalist Jeremy Scahill's investigation of US violence under President Obama in Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere. That film makes many of the same points here (including the fact that many Yemenis never knew of any fellow citizens who were sympathetic to al-Qaida until the US began drone-bombing them with regularity). Scahill's book by the same title was just released yesterday and it is truly stunning and vital: easily the best account of covert US militarism under Obama. I highly recommend it. See Scahill here on Democracy Now yesterday discussing it, with a focus on Obama's killing of both Anwar Awlaki and, separately, his 16-year-son Abdulrahman in Yemen. He also discussed his book this week with MSNBC's Chris Hayes and Morning Joe (where he argued that Obama has made assassinations standard US policy).

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34728.htm

 

Or more likely US political strategists are "clever" enough to understand what all sensible people already know, namely, that Obomas use of drones increase the likelihood of US-based terrorism which in turn justifies in the eyes of US policy-makers, the further use of drones. It's clear to everybody with eyes in their heads willing to see, that the US policy is a deliberate policy of perpetual warfare.

 

Yes, you are special. So your explanation is the only one that could possibly be true.

 

All sensible people understand that the NK policy is partly responsible for keeping in check US aggression in the South China sea region. The US only attacks relatively defenceless nations. Have you ever considered who the real crazy people are?

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No, not just me. I mean are you actually capable of joining any dots together and arriving at 1 plus 1 equalling 2?