One question I hear quite often in the recent discussion of terrorism and OBL is, "Why do they hate us?" Many intellectually lazy people simply chalk it up to radical islamists and leave it at that. This is of course wrong and prejudiced, but it also misses a larger point that should be made about our current foreign policy failures and how and why we should rethink the old paradigms.
Over the past century or so, our unspoken foreign policy principle has been simply to control as many global resources as possible, whatever it takes. And there is no question that the US government has consistently supported brutally repressive dictators around the world because we think that's the way to protect our access to resources. So the population associates these evil dictators with the West.
But the goal of neocolonialism and neoliberalism is not only access to resources solely for the benefit of corporations, it is also to impoverish and suppress other countries access to those resources. The thinking goes that if we allow less-developed countries to control and keep their own resources, then we cannot maintain our own extremely high and wasteful standard of living. In other words, many poor people must suffer and die so that we can enjoy our lives of luxury and wealth. This is the premise that we must rethink.
Political Terrorism
When foreign governments refuse to cooperate with US-corporate takeover of resources, we offer them massive bribes, or if they refuse, we make it known we will support subversives who will overthrow them, or send in the CIA (the private army of the President) to assassinate them. These US-instigated coups and assasinations are not idle threats. We merely have to remind any principled leaders of what happened to other uncooperative leaders like Allende and bribe them to take their resources.
This is what we did with Iraq in the 60's. Abd al-Karim Qasim was a very popular Iraqi president who had decided he wanted more of the profits from oil to go to the Iraqi people. That was unacceptable to BP, so we decided he had to be killed.
We sent in an assassination team. It was headed by a young man at the time, who failed. He got wounded in the process and had to flee the country. That was Saddam Hussein.
Our hired assassin failed, So the CIA went in directly and had Qasim publicly executed on Iraqi television and then put Saddams family in power. That is STILL the basic foreign policy principle that the Obama administration subscribes to, although it publicly professes only to support free democracies. Why do you think we refused to help the Libyan opposition until Clinton met with the leaders of the rebel forces? We wanted to ensure our predatory interests would be protected before we intervened.
Economic Terrorism
The purpose of American control over other countries resources is always justified in terms of "growth," but what does that really mean?
To Wall Street, the World Bank, and the IMF, "growth" really means the enrichment of Western corporations at the direct expense of helpless citizens of non-industrialized countries who do not have a government in place that can protect it from the predatory corporations.
What happens is that Western countries and the World Bank intentionally keep third world countries in massive amounts of debt. They promise them they will create jobs and improve their economy by offering them huge loans to extract and export natural resources.
So the local government takes the rights to the resources away from its own people and gives them to big corporations like Haliburton, who then bring their own people in to extract the oil or copper or whatever and ship it back to America. So these countries get placed in massive quantities of debt (the taxpaying citizens, NOT the governments) and have no means of getting out of that debt. So the people starve as a few government officials get rich.
Another example of economic terrorism was the liberalization of world capital markets by the IMF and World Bank in the late 90's. You simply cannot build a factory in a country where capital is allowed to flow in and out of a country overnight. They knew it would be disastrous for developing counties, but they did it because Wall Street wanted it.
Liberalizing capital markets opened up a wholly new criminal environment, where capital could be shifted into tax havens around the world and evade taxes. The most recent estimate of the volume of money held off shore by rich individuals is $11.5 Trillion US dollars.
If we could tax that capital at a modest 30%, we could raise an extra $255 billion of tax revenue per year around the world that could more than ensure that nobody in the world ever died of starvation again.
This kind of growth is unsustainable and will ultimately result in the downfall of ALL modern civilization because the stability of industrialized powers can only be guaranteed to continue if the others well-being is guaranteed also. It makes absolutely no sense to allow millions of people to die of hunger every year when cutting global poverty in half would cost $20 billion. Less than 4% of the US military budget.
Yet this extreme poverty is not only allowed to happen, it is ENCOURAGED by the West. It is true that famines are effective market solutions. They reduce demand. So if we leave it to the free-market capitalists, that's what we get. If there's not enough food, then some will die and the market is balanced.
So the "free" markets bring famine and death in third world countries. While at the same time, less than 25% of the worlds population (mostly the US) uses 80% of the planets resources while producing 70% of it's pollution
When lots of people don't have water to drink, or a roof over their heads, their stability is extremely fragile as the Arab Spring has made clear. Currently, over 1/3 of the worlds population has no access to affordable clean water. 16,000 children die every day from hunger or hunger-related diseases.
I write this because I know that if we stay on the same path of global economic abuse, young Americans of today and their children are not going to have a stable and sane world. Unless the children of Ethiopia, Bolivia, and Indonesia also have that expectation, then the instability in the third world will bring about our own instability, chaos, and destruction.
Most of the statistics here were culled from the film, "The End of Poverty" which I just watched and encourage anyone who hasn't seen it to watch as well.