Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Most of us are baffled
(a) There is practically no al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Then why United States is not leaving the opium-rich, strategically vital mountainous country in a hurry
(b) Al-Qaeda never attacks Israel though as champion of Islam, you would think the Jewish nation ought to be its first target
(c) United States launched "War on Drugs" in 1971. It heralded "War on Terrorism" in 2001. US is no closer to winning these two wars. It is also no closer to quitting them. Since it doesn't take away "goods" from Afghanistan or Iraq, why is it losing thousands of its men, trillions of its dollars.
(d) In the Arab world, we hear hourly of Shias and Sunnis tearing each other apart. Yet only a quarter of a century ago, they lived peacefully next to each other. They intermarried freely. Why a lingering animosity betwen the two has become genocidal in nature.
(e) Cold War is over. So is Warsaw Pact. Why then NATO is spreading its footprints. Why spend $900 billion when the supposed enemy Russia only has $80 billion military budget.
(f) Islamic State (IS) is beheading innocents on videos. How a ragtag bunch has carried on its brutal acts against world's greatest military power's wishes. Funding. Arms. Recruits. Who provides them.
"How United States Shot Humanity: Muslims Ruined; Europe Next" traces the roots of the present crisis from the day the Cold War ended. From the Balkan Wars of the 1990s which created the first Muslim state inside Europe--Bosnia and Herzegovina. The former Yugoslavia was broken into weak and puppet states. Lawlessness let the genie of monstrous criminal syndicates out of the bottle. Trafficking, be it of opium, arms, terrorists, prostitution, car-jacking, cigarettes together as a trade became second only to oil and gas.
The book looks at the principal actors in this macabre drama; their continuing evil designs, the big picture of impending crisis and the solution which lies decades ahead in the womb of future--if humanity still has one. As the world, especially Europe, sits on a ticking bomb, our children might be left with no future.
General Wesley Clark, the Supreme Allied commander of the NATO forces during the Kosovo War, learnt just a few weeks after 9/11 in 2001 that United States had planned to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off with Iran.
Former US army officer and now a blogger, Joachim Hagopian has no doubt that all the US wants is to "balkanize" Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen. "Numerous sources back up the fact that US and its allies created, funded, armed, trained and continued supplying and supporting ISIS."
American historian Webster Tarpley has no doubt who has created IS. "US created the Islamic State and used jihadists as its secret army to destabilize the Middle East."
John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart estiamte the expenditure on domestic homeland security (i.e not counting the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan) has increased by more than $1 trillion since 9/11 even though the annual risk of dying in a domestic terrorist attack is about 1 in 3.5 million. They estimate that for this expenditure to be cost-effective, "they would have had to deter, prevent, foil or protect against 333 very large attacks that would otherwise have been successful every year.
World War II hero and 34th president of the US, Dwight D. Eisenhower, spoke thus in 1953: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."