The United States and its allies have set the stage for the Mother of All Blowbacks: a long period of convulsions in the Muslim and Arab world that will ultimately lead to America’s expulsion from much of the region. The reason it is so easy to read the handwriting on the wall, is that we have been watching the scenario unfold for three decades, ever since the last years of the Jimmy Carter administration, when the United States, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan spent billions to create a worldwide Muslim jihadi army and unleashed it on the Soviets and their allies in Afghanistan, plunging that country into endless war.
When these Muslim warriors turned on the United States – or, depending on your vantage point, when the United States turned on them – we experienced the first blowback. The American public, shocked and traumatized, gave first, a Republican, and then a Democratic president all the guns and money and extra-Constitutional powers they demanded to push back against the Muslims who had not long ago been U.S. allies. The war planners in Washington figured they could live with the way events had turned out. After all, al-Qaida and its Salafist brethren were in no position to challenge U.S. dominance in the world – not anyplace that really counted – and their mere existence provided the U.S. war machine with a purpose in life, an excuse to subvert and wage low-level war against those nations that refused to tow the U.S. line.
And then came the so-called Arab Spring, and with it the terrifying prospect that Muslims in North Africa and the Middle East might take control of their own destinies – and the oil and natural gas that goes with it. Democracy means death to U.S. imperialism. Pew Research pollsters report that, on average, only 15 percent of Egyptians, Jordanians, Lebanese, Pakistanis and Turks have a favorable view of the United States. That’s down from 25 percent in 2009, when Barack Obama came into office. If the Arab and Muslim “street” came to power, the United States would be run out of that whole section of the planet – and Washington knows it.
(Source: theamericanbear)
