"Dirty Wars and Endless Lies:
Scott Horton’s Shattering History of America’s War on Terror"
by Michael Holmes
Excerpt: "Scott Horton’s masterpiece “Enough Already” shows how the U.S. and its allies spread devastation through Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and Pakistan, propping up despots and arming extremists along the way. The final balance sheet: two million dead, thirty-seven million displaced, and a world made more dangerous than before.
Scott Horton – editor-in-chief of Antiwar.com and host of the legendary Scott Horton Show with over 6,000 interviews – is one of the most profound critics of US foreign policy since 9/11. His fact-filled and compelling 2021 book “Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terror” is one of the most comprehensive accounts of the so-called War on Terror: In a precise chronology, Horton shows how, after the attacks of September 11, the US and its allies unleashed a global spiral of intervention that not only claimed millions of victims but often spawned “wars for terror” itself – through support for radical Islamists in Syria and elsewhere. From the Iraq wars to Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, and the genocide in Yemen, Horton’s work offers an unflinching overview of the American wars of the 21st century.
Anyone who wants to understand why Washington systematically launched wars that strengthened its own enemies after 9/11 cannot ignore this book. It’s an indictment of relentless moral force that reads like an evidence brief for the prosecution. Horton’s central claim is both simple and devastating: the dirty wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia increased the terrorist threat that was then used as an excuse for further intervention. Horton’s achievement is to bring into one narrative the scattered fragments of this bloody history: the covert deals, the proxy wars, the torture programs, the sanctions regimes, and the bombings whose scale Western publics still grossly underestimate. He makes clear that the real continuity in U.S. policy was not democracy or human rights, but partnership with Israel’s occupation, brutal dictatorships in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey and Pakistan, with warlords and militias whose crimes rivalled those of our official enemies. The result was a cycle of violence that bred more enemies than it destroyed. Nowhere is this more visible than in Iraq and Syria, where one war bled into another, and where American power not only failed to defeat terrorism but midwifed its most monstrous incarnation in ISIS.
Horton also shows that the War on Terror was just as often a War for Terror. Again and again, the United States and its allies armed, financed, and legitimized the very extremist factions and dictatorships whose crimes were then cited as justification for the next war. With an almost grim consistency, regimes or groups that Washington demonized in one decade had been cultivated as clients or proxies in another. This, Horton argues, was not a series of mistakes or accidents – it was the logic of empire applied to the Muslim world, with catastrophic results."
Full article is here:
No comments:
Post a Comment