Once again a self-styled conservative nationalist candidate gets elected on a platform of America First, only to agitate another “forever war” at the expense of the American people. Donald Trump is now our generation’s George W. Bush.
Bryan Anthony Reo
I remember being 15 years old when the high school authorities interrupted everything to announce the 9/11 attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon. I was walking by the cafeteria/common area on my way to English Literature class and stopped to watch the TV that had been rolled out by the school authorities. There were replays of the World Trade Towers falling, collapsing perfectly in on themselves. It was the talk of each class at school for the rest of the day. I was one of the few students who openly said, “This is all a lie; buildings don’t collapse like that from airplanes slamming into them, and there’s no evidence that a plane even hit the Pentagon. Where is the wreckage? Where are the suitcases, the luggage, the fuselage, and the bodies? The Pentagon was struck by a missile! Now we have to wait and see who they want to blame for this. Will they blame rural gun-owner white male types, overseas brown Muslims who are sitting on top of oil, enemies of Israel, or foreign or domestic? Who gets the blame?”
There was no national discussion about what had happened; the network executives (often the presidents of the networks) made the presentations on 9/11, as opposed to letting the lower-level minions do the reporting. Within seconds of the announcement of the planes supposedly hitting the towers, it was proclaimed, “This is the work of Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan,” even though the FBI never updated his Most Wanted profile to include 9/11, as they said there was no credible evidence linking him to it.
By the end of the day, it was my position that “this entire incident is an elaborate false flag, and it is going to be used to justify a crackdown on domestic liberties and to provide the basis to start numerous foreign wars, none of which will benefit the USA or Americans.” I told a classmate, “I can’t prove it, but I am certain Mossad and the CIA teamed up and did this. Who benefits from this?” I can honestly say there was never a point in my life where I believed that 19 Arabs with box-cutters hijacked multiple aircraft, slammed them into the WTC and the Pentagon, and perpetrated the 9/11 attack. The official story to me was so utterly devoid of credible corroborating evidence as to be more consistent with the plot of a B movie or fan fiction. The official version was just insulting to anybody with a basic understanding of the laws of physics and the reality of common sense.
When the prevailing propaganda of “They hate us because of our freedom!” began, I reacted with a sort of visceral disgust, wondering, “What freedom?” and “That is just background noise nonsense meant to lull people into silence and acceptance. Nobody goes to war because they dislike the internal political system of the targeted nation. They must really think we are absolutely stupid if these are the lines they are pushing.”
It wasn’t long after the invasion of Afghanistan (which accomplished nothing except helping to turn Americans into opium addicts and helping to create dozens of new billionaires and thousands of new millionaires) that the US invaded Iraq on the flimsiest of pretexts: that “Iraq has a nuclear weapons program, was seeking to procure yellowcake in Niger, and is in possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction” and that “Saddam Hussein gave sanctuary and material support to Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda*.”
The US Has a Long History of Short-Sighted Founding of Terrorist Organizations
Very few of my classmates in high school or at university were ever aware of the history of Al Qaeda*, that it was essentially formed by the CIA in the 1980s from a collection of Mujahadeen groups as a tool to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, and that the American aid that so freely flowed to the Mujahadeen would fuel conflicts throughout the region and that American financed weapons would appear in conflict zones for years to come.
I’m not condoning the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but that war was about 40 years ago, and I’m not interested in re-litigating an old and closed case. The Americans, true to form, with little regard for what would happen or come after, poured weapons into a conflict zone, armed everybody and anybody who claimed to be willing to fight the Soviets, even men such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who often seemed more interested in trafficking opium and fighting other Afghan warlords than fighting the Soviets.
One would think that the West might at least have come up with some new lies instead of just using the same old flavors in new packages
As with all wars, the Soviet war in Afghanistan eventually ended, although the US, as I said, true to form, gave little thought to what would come next, leaving Afghanistan to descend into a vicious civil war as the US simply cut and run, curtailing any further aid, showing no interest in reconstruction, development, infrastructure, education, healthcare, simply adopting the position of “well we spent billions for arms for this conflict, the Soviets are gone now, we don’t really care about Afghanistan or the Afghans, you’re descending into a civil war, so we’re going to leave you mired in this mess, bye now!”
So the US left Afghanistan mired in the muck and Al Qaeda* hovering around in the background.
As an aside, Ukrainians might wish to pause and ponder what will happen to them and their nation once the United States finds them no longer useful and grows tired of them the way the United States found the Afghans no longer useful, or the South Vietnamese no longer useful. America has a fairly consistent track record of discarding clients or washing its hands of a situation it no longer wants to be invested in. It is obvious to me the USA will eventually wash its hands of Ukraine while Americans go back across the Atlantic to the peace of the USA. Meanwhile, Ukrainians, those who didn’t get killed or maimed in a pointless war the Kiev regime and the West never had to start, will have to find some way to go forward with their lives, living next to Russia. The sooner the Ukrainians reclaim their country from Kiev and the West, and the sooner they end the Western instigated war against Russia, the better. The USA has a long history of viewing its clients and proxy pawns as condoms, discarding them when the deed is done and they no longer serve a viable purpose.
Al Qaeda* Opened the Door for the Forever War on Terror
Whether Al Qaeda* is a diligent CIA front that stages attacks against American targets at the behest of CIA handlers who want to procure a casus belli for American responses into foreign sovereign nations, or whether Al Qaeda* is a rogue mad dog that was trained to attack by American handlers and then went off the leash and bit its master, I am not entirely sure. I know it is basically one of those two situations. Either way, Al Qaeda* is a creation of the CIA and the American Deep State, whether as a deliberate mechanism to perpetrate false flags, or as Frankenstein’s monster that got out of control and embarked on its own campaign, Al Qaeda* was formed by the CIA, this is abundantly clear and demonstrably true.
Even technocratic liberal interventionists such as those at the Brookings Institute (an organization I consider suspicious, dubious, and corrosive to national morale) admit that the CIA circumstantially and indirectly enabled the formation of Al Qaeda* and concede that Iraq posed no threat to the USA at the time the US invaded in 2003.
By whatever means Al Qaeda* came into existence (it is clear the CIA was involved), we know that this organization, whether on its own initiative or acting as a tool for its creators and CIA handlers, attacked Americans and the United States property on numerous occasions, mostly across Africa and across the Middle East.
We also know that Al Qaeda was used to spread jihadist terrorism across the former Soviet Union, specifically in the Caucasus and in the Central Asian former Soviet Republics, specifically Tajikistan (with the Tajik Civil War) and Uzbekistan (with the Al Qaeda-affiliated Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan).
The main event was the 9/11 terror incident, which was never satisfactorily explained and where it was never established what precisely happened, let alone why. The official party line was to simply blame Al Qaeda*, while ignoring that Al Qaeda* was a creation of the United States.
Let Them Eat Yellowcake?
The US delivered an ultimatum to Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The Afghan senior leaders replied, “Present us with the evidence that Bin Laden did this, we will investigate, and if we agree with your evidence, we will send him to the USA to answer for these crimes.” George W. Bush replied along the lines of, “We know he did it, there’s nothing to discuss,” and then simply invaded Afghanistan.
The first wave of US soldiers in Afghanistan had scarcely rotated home in autumn 2002 when the US began to loudly proclaim that Iraq had tried to procure yellowcake from Niger.
George W. Bush, on 28 January 2003, in the State of the Union, said, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” The claim was that Iraq was trying to buy 500 tons of yellowcake from Niger.
Aside from the fact that George W. Bush couldn’t describe the process of nuclear fission or how to enrich uranium via gaseous diffusion centrifuges if his life depended on it (which fortunately for him it doesn’t), none of that State of the Union speech was factually true or accurate, it was a pack of lies.
It has since become abundantly and painfully clear that at no time was Iraq seriously pursuing a nuclear weapons program, it was not in possession of any weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) except a few dozen aged 1980s era artillery shells and gravity bombs filled with mustard agent and aging nerve agents provided by none other than the USA in the 1980s as part of the aid to Iraq to fuel the war against Iran. There is a certain rich irony to this. Any so-called WMDs (low-level mustard chemical artillery shells scarcely qualify as actual WMDs) in Iraq were the direct result of American aid to Iraq, which we know included blister agents, blood agents, nerve agents, and biological weapons.
So the US invaded Iraq based on fabricated and falsified intelligence, which has since been established not only to have been false at the time it was presented but which the senior leadership knew was false when they presented it to the public to make the case for justifying their illegal war of aggression against Iraq.
2002 Becomes 2026 With the Same Old Lies
Now here we are in 2026, with the US having launched illegal and ill-advised strikes on Iran in the summer of 2025 to “neutralize Iran’s nuclear capabilities,” but even that wasn’t enough, because now we are being told we must pursue regime change and that Iran must “unconditionally surrender” and “never have nuclear weapons.” Iran was already not on track to have nuclear weapons, but these recent murderous assassination strikes might spur the next Iranian government to rapidly pursue such weapons, as it seems the American policy is clear: “Falsely claim a nation is pursuing nuclear weapons or already has them when they aren’t pursuing them and don’t have them, and then attack them while safe in the knowledge they don’t actually have such weapons.” The only long-term way to be safe from direct American attack is to actually have a nuclear arsenal with a credible delivery system and a second-strike capability, although this only secures one from direct attack; it doesn’t secure one from NGO subversion, color revolution incitement, coups, and other subversive treachery.
If Iran can withstand the unlawful and unjustified Israeli and American aggression, it will still have to contend with ongoing internal destabilization operations via NGOs and clandestine forces, and the American people will still have to bear the costs associated with yet another administration lying about WMDs to drum up support for a blatant war of aggression. At any rate, for the time being the American people are once more hurled into an unnecessary foreign conflict because of a WMD lie that just won’t die. I am almost 40 years old and have been hearing almost my entire adult life, “Iran is six months away from a nuclear weapon.” It is all so very tiresome. One would think that the West might at least have come up with some new lies instead of just using the same old flavors in new packages.
* a terrorist organization banned in Russia
Bryan Anthony Reo is a licensed attorney based in Ohio and an analyst of military history, geopolitics, and international relations
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