Stoking Anxiety for Fun and Profit

Faced with the threat of exploding underwear, the administration has expanded our “Long War” to include the small country of Yemen. This is encouraging news for our corporate-military infrastructure as Iraq winds down and as we move closer to declaring victory in Afghanistan and splitting, thus threatening two of their revenue streams.

Couple this with increased saber rattling over Iran and it looks like its flush days for the Pentagon for several more decades.

It’s all part of the Beltway’s Terror Feedback policy in which we pick a small, impoverished Muslim country, start bombing it , thus creating another generation of terrorists who will provide the rationale for future military campaigns, though military campaign is a misnomer since you can mount a credible campaign against an elusive insurgency.

But campaign or no campaign, our Empty War provides one additional benefit: it stokes America’s anxiety level and turn flying into an even more wretched experience than it already is.

Even though recent attempts to blow up airplanes have been exercise in ineptitude, the Beltway’s response has been one of studied hysteria in which a remote probability is treated as an imminent threat. Personally, the benchmark I use is to ask if the probability of being blown up in an airplane is greater than the possibility of being wacked in an automobile accident. If the probability of death by airplane is less than death by car, I don’t sweat it.

Of course, Beltway couldn’t afford to take this attitude since it would endanger a very viable profit center.

It would also help if our leaders realized that the most effective way of fighting terrorism is to stop producing terrorists. But that would be too boring. It would mean our leaders would have to give up the adrenalin high that comes with bombing impoverished villages into oblivion.

Then there is the stimulation that comes with playing the Great Game, that nineteenth-century struggle between the White nations to control Central Asia and the Middle East. It’s a replay of an aged geopolitical chess game. What our leaders don’t realize is that the rules have changed. The lowly pawn now carries a Kalashnikov and can move with the same impunity as the queen. Not only that, the pawn can leave the board, hide behind the game box and blow away the queen as she passes.

But then, much of our thinking is mired in the nineteenth century, which was the acme of White male supremacy and we’re loathe to let go of it. So we will continue our march into bankruptcy and oblivion just to pump life into a dead past. It’s the only way to keep our credibility intact. Besides, our corporate-military infrastructure is the only one we have left. We’ve off-shored all the others.