Terrorism:
A Product of Expanding U.S. Wars

Jan 10, 2010

On Christmas day, over the skies of Detroit, a young Nigerian man attempted to kill himself in order to blow up an airplane, along with all its passengers and crew. When pulled off the plane, he claimed allegiance to al-Qaeda.

Individual terrorism is a horrifying act, engaged in by desperate people, often aimed against civilians. Organizations that engage people in such self-destructive acts, targeting civilians as a way to get back at governments, are despicable.

But despicable as they are, the terrorists are gaining adherents today. And they are gaining them precisely because the U.S., with its vast arsenal, has engaged itself in terrorist actions against whole populations.

It’s been eight years and three months that the U.S. has been in Afghanistan. Almost eight years in Iraq. Those wars were reflected in “secret” U.S. wars in Pakistan and Yemen, which have now become open wars. And now, we even hear hints about a U.S. war in Somalia.

Of course, terrorism didn’t start with the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. The attacks of 9-11 showed that. But ironically, the reservoir of terrorists who were behind 9-11 came from forces the American CIA helped establish in the 1980s. Used originally against the Soviet Union, these brutal forces then bit the U.S. hand that had fed them, turning their U.S. money and covert military training against the U.S. itself.

Instead of stopping the activity that had created these terrorists, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, overthrowing its government and attacking a civilian population who had nothing to do with the attack of 9-11.

Then the U.S. invaded Iraq, pretending that al-Qaeda had forces there – an outright lie. More than a million people are dead in Iraq as the result of this U.S. war – most of them civilians. The U.S. thus demonstrated its own despicable disregard for human life. Using the pretext of terrorism, the U.S. attacked a whole population in order to impose its control over this oil-rich region. In so doing, the U.S. vastly increased the numbers of desperate people open to the call of terrorism.

This growing war in the Middle East has now circled back to Afghanistan and spread to Pakistan and Yemen – and who knows where else.

Every time an unmanned drone hits a village in Pakistan, killing women and school children,

al-Qaeda gains recruits. Every time Blackwater’s private army shoots up a busy cross-roads in Iraq, killing dozens of people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, more young people are convinced to sacrifice themselves. Every time Special Forces raid a village in Yemen, pulling out all the young men, trashing the village, al-Qaeda gains support. Every time U.S. money and troops go to prop up a corrupt Afghan government, every time the U.S. uses brutal Afghan warlords to impose order, it funnels more desperate people into the terrorist reservoirs.

The U.S. military is in the Middle East and nearby Asia today in order to maintain the hold of U.S. corporations over the region’s oil and its oil pipelines. The so-called war on terrorism is only a pretext.

But in carrying out these imperialist wars, the U.S. has increased the numbers of people ready to throw themselves into the arms of the terrorists. It’s a vicious circle. But its motivating force is the drive of U.S. imperialism to control the material resources and the wealth created by labor around the world.

To end the ravaging of the world by terrorism requires the ending of imperialist wars that terrorize civilian populations.