Crimes committed by the empire on the periphery always return to the center.

Always.

Bombing, murder, torture, drone assassinations, and employing terrorist proxies as cut-outs are some of the many crimes carried out by the US government in an effort to maintain control of an increasingly chaotic neo-imperium.

Because of these “foreign policies” it was inevitable that we’d have another terrorist attack here in the homeland.

Not if, but when.

Here’s what I wrote a month ago--I feel like a lonely voice in the wilderness, warning of the consequences of US foreign policies.  The polices our elite have chosen– employing Sunni terrorists to smash any secular government that puts its citizens ahead of US corporations–have always contained the seeds of a great tragedy.

It’s pretty simple, really. If we don’t want terrorists attacks here in the homeland, we should stop using terrorists to carry out policies of regime change throughout the world.

The conventional narrative of the war on terror has America beset upon by evil terrorists who hate us for our freedom and way of life. Instead, the harsh reality is that the US has been utilizing terrorists to carry out a divide and rule foreign policy, invading or surreptitiously overthrowing foreign governments for the past 65 years. Consider the covert war waged on Syria where the US utilized the terrorist skills of the exact same Sunni terrorists–Al Qaeda–who attacked us on 9/11, as part of a redirection of US covert policy towards confronting the Shiite crescent.

The American people, by and large, remain blissfully unaware of the true nature of the war on terror. And President Obama seems incapable of informing them, instead offering a misleading narrative.

Daniel Lazare examines President Obama’s speech in the aftermath of the terror attack in San Bernardino and sees the same contradictions that I do. “He supports Sunni extremists in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Syria, yet is shocked, shocked, when they unleash their violence on innocent bystanders in Paris or San Bernardino…Obama claims to be at war with Al Qaeda, yet looks the other way when close friends supply the same group with money and arms. He cautions Americans not to give in to Islamophobia, but says nothing as Wahhabists rage against Christians, Jews and Shi‘ites. The President is all in favor of secularism, yet is seeking to topple the secular Baathist regime in Damascus. Indeed, he is waging war against one of the few secular governments left standing in the Muslim world.

The depressing reality of the latest terrorist attack in San Bernardino is that it’s a win for the terrorists and a win for the worst sort of reactionary right-wing politics. We can witness this phenomenon with the rise of semi-fascists like Donald Trump in the US, and Marine Le Pen in France.

I believe that this turn to reactionary politics here in the US is because voters have lost confidence in our leaders’ ability to tell the the truth about foreign policies. Because of their ignorance of US foreign policy these same voters are lured by demagogues. Panic creates the longing for a strong leader, and therefore there arises a sort of muddled response, with liberals calling for gun control and conservatives calling for the confinement and deportation of Muslims, as well as more unhinged responses. 

Sigh.

We are balanced on the precipice where one more mass-casualty terror attack will be the end of the American Republic. Another attack will bring the deep state out into the open to govern the US under martial law. And, here’s the thing–I don’t know that many American’s would notice or care about this momentous occasion, numbed as they are the constant degradation of American life.

Mike Lofgren, former congressional staffer, and author of Anatomy of the Deep State, describes this reality. “The Deep State’s physical expansion and consolidation around the Beltway would seem to make a mockery of the frequent pronouncement that governance in Washington is dysfunctional and broken. That the secret and unaccountable Deep State floats freely above the gridlock between both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue is the paradox of American government in the 21st century: drone strikes, data mining, secret prisons and Panopticon-like control on the one hand; and on the other, the ordinary, visible parliamentary institutions of self-government declining to the status of a banana republic amid the gradual collapse of public infrastructure.”

Investigative journalist Robert Parry believes that to to end the deceptive and highly destructive war on terror we need a dose of honesty from President Obama. “I have long advocated that Obama should go on television in the style of President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address in 1961, sitting in the Oval Office, hands-folded, none of Obama’s glitzy stage-craft, and simply level with the American people.”

I think this scenario is highly unlikely.

In the wake of Turkey shooting down a Russian bomber, I wondered if President Obama was in on the whole deep state thing or if he was simply a figurehead. With Obama’s subsequent pronouncements and press briefings, I’ve come to think that he’s one evil dude.

Hope and change, indeed.

At times like these, I find myself returning to a familiar poem by William Butler Yeats, entitled The Second Coming.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity…

Update: It’s really getting hard to believe that more Americans don’t know about the false war on terror narrative. Here’s another reminder of the consequences of US foreign policy of employing terrorists from Harper’s magazine.

“In 1996, the CIA set up a special unit to track down bin Laden, led by the counterterrorism expert Michael Scheuer. Now settled in Afghanistan, the Al Qaeda chief had at least theoretically fallen out with the Saudi regime that once supported him and other anti-Soviet jihadis. Nevertheless, bin Laden seemed to have maintained links with his homeland — and some in the CIA were sensitive to that fact. When I interviewed Scheuer in 2014 for my book Kill Chain, he told me that one of his first requests to the Saudis was for routine information about his quarry: birth certificate, financial records, and so forth. There was no response. Repeated requests produced nothing. Ultimately, a message arrived from the CIA station chief in Riyadh, John Brennan, who ordered the requests to stop — they were “upsetting the Saudis.”

Five years later, Al Qaeda, employing a largely Saudi suicide squad, destroyed the World Trade Center. In a sane world, this disaster might have permanently ended Washington’s long-standing taste for mixing Islam with politics. But old habits die hard.”