Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) Read Online Free PDF

goals in the Islamic world; that is, to destroy the family-owned and U.S.-supported Muslim tyrannies that have ruled the region since 1945 and to destroy Israel. This is, of course, serious business, but it is America’s business only to the extent that Washington allows it to be, and that extent will be determined by whether or not the U.S. government maintains the status quo of its policies toward the Muslim world, energy supplies, and Israel. Since 9/11 the Bush administration, all of Congress, and the country’s bipartisan governing elite have behaved as if the threats to the Muslim tyrannies and Israel were equally threats to the United States and its citizens. What this means is that U.S. leaders have decided to forgo fighting a necessary but limited war in favor of fighting a worldwide and very likely unending war, one that holds every possibility of causing Americans to live a lifestyle shaped by war and their enemies’ actions, and not by their traditions, preferences, and aspirations.
    What Is in Pandora’s Box?
    To use James Madison’s metaphor, Osama bin Laden and the forces he leads and inspires have long held Pandora’s box open so U.S. leaders could examine its contents. They do not like what they see, however, because from the box are flowing woes for America that derive from the cumulative impact of thirty years of their counterproductive foreign policies. The U.S. governing elite has allowed—indeed, it has promoted—the steady development of a situation in which the energy resources upon which the U.S. economy depends are controlled by foreigners, among whom are Muslim leaders and regimes that regard our culture, political system, and dominant faith with contempt; work actively to spread a violent, anti-American brand of Islam in the United States and the societies of our European allies; and no longer believe that U.S. military power merits respect. Our immense and growing federal deficit is increasingly held by China and Saudi Arabia, the first a nation that appears headed to become America’s main economic rival, and the latter, already our energy master, a nation that funds the worldwide spread of a faith that encourages the acceptance of bin Laden’s message and therefore runs directly counter to U.S. national-security interests. In addition, our elite has put the United States in the addle-brained position of backing both sides in a vicious religious war between Israelis and Arabs, thereby making us part of an endless war in which we have nothing at stake but the emotions, religious affiliation, and divided loyalties of two small segments of our population.
    Because of our governing elites’ willful blindness to this reality, the most important decision that can be made by an independent people, the decision of peace or war, is drifting ever further from American hands. Unexpected and disruptive fighting in Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich Eastern Province or in the Niger Delta would, for example, prompt the large-scale deployment of U.S. military forces to restore reliable pumping, processing, and export in one or both locations. The U.S. president and Congress of the day would publicly go through a set of rushed “high-level deliberations,” quickly “consult with allies,” and then would roll out full-blown Cold War rhetoric and lie to Americans that “freedom is threatened” and “aggression must be crushed.” It will sound like that old-time religion and might temporarily rally Americans. But it all will be play-acting: America would be on the way to war because of Washington’s decades-old, near-criminal negligence regarding energy policy.
    Likewise, U.S. participation in future Middle East wars is now virtually automatic; as the bipartisan Iraq Study Group Report recently declared: “No American administration—Democratic or Republican—will ever abandon Israel.” 3 Written by a group of unelected Cold Warriors, the report thereby definitively formulated the long-unstated