Politics of a New Paradigm

In order to understand why we need a new paradigm, you have to understand the present, or “old” one. I’m just a simple citizen like everyone else, but I want to be informed. It is our responsibility as Americans to educate ourselves, and I think that if everyone put forth sufficient effort to understand what is being done in our behalf, what is now considered to be “fringe thinking” would land firmly in the center.

I read on Friday that the Pentagon expects more attacks from the Taliban in Pakistan, who Time magazine suggests may be “making a comeback.” According to the AP, the Pentagon report says that we can expect the Taliban to “maintain or even increase the scope and pace of its terrorist attacks and bombings in 2008″ and that the Taliban has “coalesced into a resilient insurgency.”

Who the hell are the Taliban? They were created by the American C.I.A. via Operation Cyclone in the early ’80’s. It seems we secretly allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to recruit, train, bribe, arm and incite radical Muslims from across the Arab world into resisting the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Osama bin-Laden is said to have been one of the beneficiaries of Operation Cyclone.

So I originally thought I would write about the bizarre fact that we are in fact going backwards against the Taliban in Afghanistan after all of these years, all of those lives lost, and all of this money spent. But now I realize that we created, financed, armed, and trained the movement that we are fighting.

But it doesn’t end there. We are now doing the same thing in Iran, fueling the flames of an internal “resistance” by arming and bribing terrorist groups, including Sunni radicals with links to al-Qaeda.

Seymour Hersh asserts in his New Yorker piece entitled “Preparing The Battlefield” that the C.I.A and the Joint Special Operations Command have escalated covert operations in Iran. Bush issued a Presidential Finding asking Congress to approve $400 million to finance this covert maneuvering, ostensibly to facilitate regime change in Tehran. Of course, Bush immediately got what he wanted from the eight ranking members of the respective intelligence committees in the House and Senate who have a say, half of them Democrats.

Hersh reports that we seem willing to prop up groups that have been known to work against American interests in the past, like the Baluchis. Former C.I.A. clandestine officer Robert Baer said:

“The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda. These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers—in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.”

Hersh goes on to mention that Ramzi Yousef, who has been convicted for his role in the 911 bombings, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who helped plan the WTC attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists.

I’m not going to reiterate the Hersh piece any further here, but please, take the time to read it yourself. The Baluchis are not the only extremist group that we are supporting, and the experts seem to feel as though the entire exercise will do more harm than good in the end, an assessment that comes as no surprise to me. Thanks to Seymour Hersh for shining some light where it is needed the most.

So this is what we do. We create terror. And then, later on, we fight our own creations. Direct diplomacy is the way to reach a lasting peace, not the supporting of clandestine murders. That stuff comes back to bite you, and you can’t tell the players without a scorecard.

There is no denying that there are well funded, lawless American entities teaming up covertly with some very bad men. Anyone who wonders whether it is possible that 911 was an inside job, well…I think you may want to stop wondering.