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

reality that Washington has surrendered control over the decision for war or peace in the Middle East to Israel’s government of the day or any Muslim regime that chooses to attack Israel. In sum, the U.S. governing elite’s longtime use of blithe, best-case-scenario operating assumptions—i.e., the market will ensure adequate supplies of inexpensive oil, and the Arab-Israeli peace process will succeed—has vitiated the Founders’ careful, checks-and-balances-laden delineation of the process by which the United States would go to war, a process meant to leave that decision in the hands of the elected members of the U.S. Congress, not to the president, and certainly not to foreigners seeking our wealth and military protection. But in many cases it is foreigners who will decide when the United States goes to war, and to add insult to injury, today’s political environment tends to label Americans who object to this reality as less than loyal.
    This situation also highlights what today may be the most important and potentially destructive class division existing in U.S. society. U.S. politicians, the media, and our governing elite generally spend a great deal of time, talk, and ink describing black-vs.-white, rich-vs.-poor, educated-vs.-less-educated, old-vs.-young, and English-speaking-vs.-non-English-speaking divisions in American society. Such divisions undeniably exist and need focused, consistent, and sustained remedial attention, especially in the current environment in which Washington’s refusal to enforce federal immigration and border-control laws sharpens many of the just-noted societal divisions. But the greatest and most dangerous divide in American society is between our governing elites—political, economic, military, and media—and the great bulk of workaday Americans on the issues of foreign policy and war. Nonelite Americans are slowly coming to confront a reality in which those who govern them are eager to be “citizens of the world” and are more concerned with affairs outside the United States then they are with fixing such daunting domestic problems as illegal immigration and funding for Social Security. Even leading private-sector Americans do not seem immune from this aspiration. With so much to do in furthering equity, health care, and basic infrastructure rehabilitation, our leading and richest citizens prefer to donate their excess funds to foreign endeavors. Bill Gates, Ted Turner, Warren Buffett, and others have adopted an America-second attitude and are engaged in large, high-profile, and Davos-pleasing donations outside the country that nurtures, protects, and awards them breathtaking tax deductions. And now Bill Clinton, the ultimate European-wannabe ringmaster for this circus of aspiring world citizens, is strutting about the world seeking donations for humanitarian activities outside America. Even President Bush’s multibillion-dollar plan to combat HIV-AIDS in Africa seems an oddly ranked priority when the District of Columbia has an AIDS problem worse than some countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
    The most dangerous aspect of the division between the domestic focus of Americans and the international fixation of their elite, however, lies in the elite’s easy willingness to sacrifice the lives of the former’s sons and daughters in wars meant to install freedom and democracy in the Islamic world. These men and women have consciously made the decision that they will steadily spend the lives of our children to bring democracy, women’s rights, parliamentary government, human rights, and secularism to those who want no part of any of them in the Westernized form that is offered. And even if they did want them, it is no part of the U.S. government’s responsibility or constitutional writ to spend the lives and treasure of Americans to satisfy the desires of foreigners.
    What we are seeing today in Afghanistan is a perfect example of the willingness of U.S. leaders to spend the lives of