When falsely convicted Andy Dufresne bored a hole through the Shawshank prison wall over the course of two decades, narrator “Red” says that Andy always liked geology, and that geology, like digging through a prison wall with a rock hammer, is just a matter of “pressure and time.” It’s much the same when it comes to American imperialism. Particularly the conquest of the Middle East, one of the longest-running projects in the U.S. pantheon. Our 16 seasons in Afghanistan counts as our longest foreign engagement to date. Even those living in a self-imposed media bubble of New York Times, CNN, and NPR are fully cognizant of this imperial project. George Bush called it the “Long War.” It can’t been disguised, even by the miserable mainstream media, where deception is an art form unknown to the deceived. Still, the causes and conditions of that project are as yet unclear to the masses. Mostly because the MSM daily reminds us that although we are on the right side of history, we are surrounded by crackpot Arabs, socialist lunatics, irrational Chinese, African bandits, and splenetic Slavs. Our borders are forever under attack. We must be eternally vigilant to ward off the thief in the night. This script was prepared in the ashes of World War Two, when our national security planners gleefully recognized that all the European nations had destroyed themselves fighting fascists, and that America had emerged comparatively intact. Our magnanimous brain trust quickly put together a plan to get its hands on Middle East oil, maintain our outsized consumption, violently snuff out any socialist movements rising from the European rubble, and scare the living daylights out of the exhausted population with demented fables of communist infiltration. It would require a garrison state, where the majority of money was dumped into the bottomless pit of defense spending. More or less everything was accomplished as planned.
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