This country has been heading downhill for a long time and we only have ourselves to blame. When the attacks on the USS Cole happened, we were outraged. Blackhawk Down was a movie that hurt American Pride. When the attacks on the World Trade Center happened, nobody asked the right questions, we were all too mesmerized by the constant repetition of those planes hitting the towers over and over again. The American people wanted someone to pin it on, and the Bush Administration, after they finally had the guts to come back to Washington, gave us the perpetrators.

How quickly they had all 19 terrorists identified and their recent histories ready for publication. It didnâ€™t seem odd to anyone that while Bush was flying around in Air Force One, the only other airplanes that were in the air were members of Bin Laden family and members of the Saudi Royal Family. I was always told to be careful of the company you keep. It didnâ€™t surprise anyone that most of the members of the gang that supposedly did the hijackings were mostly Saudi citizens?

I watched Bush ratchet up the hysteria toward Iraq and Saddam. At that time even the Democrats were foaming at the mouth. I volunteered to go to Afghanistan but came down with cancer. Iâ€™m glad I didnâ€™t go. I would still probably be in the Army at 56 rears old, fighting in Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with any attack on America. I learned something back then, something that I knew at thirteen when I watched a â€œSpecial Reportâ€ on television while my mother was in the kitchen making dinner.

She walked into the living room near the end of LBJâ€™s speech. She asked me what was going on. I turned to her and said â€œitâ€™s war Mom, the government said that North Vietnamese patrol boats attacked American destroyers and now heâ€™s going to send the rest of the Army in there.â€ She asked me why would patrol boats attack destroyers? I told her so LBJ could send the Army in. I shook my head and went down to my room in the cellar and fumed, mad as hell at the government for blowing things out of proportion.

You might believe that Iâ€™m making this up, but I assure you that what Iâ€™m writing here is the truth. I absolutely knew then that it was ridiculous to believe that Vietnamese patrol boats tried to take on American Navy destroyers. The rest of the country didnâ€™t think it was unbelievable. In fact, Congress let LBJ have Carte Blanche to do exactly as he pleased. The same way 30 years later that Congress rolled over and did exactly the same thing over again with Iraq.

You see, at first itâ€™s that old â€œfight or flightâ€ instinct. Works every time. When Hitler invaded Poland, he said that the Polish Army had overrun a radio station on the border with Poland. The German Army took some old polish uniforms, put them on convicted criminals and shot them to death at the radio station. They had a newsreel of some old trucks with polish markings crashing through the fence and then had German commandoâ€™s in Polish Uniforms shoot civilians that were surrendering. The stage was set. Of course nobody asked how the German Army just happened to be there en masse, that was immaterial. The German citizens wanted blood, and they got it too. So much blood that even now Europeans donâ€™t have the thirst for the stuff they used to have.

Itâ€™s easy to scare Americans in this New Century. Just ell them that they are going to be attacked, over and over. Goebbles claimed that if the lie is outrageous enough and you repeat it often enough, it becomes the truth. â€œWe fight them there so that we donâ€™t have to fight them hereâ€. Even Barak Obama has tried to counter Hillary Clinton by claiming that he would attack Pakistan if he knew he could â€œchop of the head of al Qaedaâ€. Look, we donâ€™t know if Osama Bin Laden is alive. Iâ€™m sure that taking out a few terrorists isnâ€™t worth proving to the Pakistani People that we are so callous to bomb their country without asking, thereby causing more problems in Pakistan that could possibly topple Musshirif and bring on a government of Islamic fundamentalists just isnâ€™t worth it. He has gone from â€œnegotiatingâ€ with people to threatening them, isnâ€™t that odd?

Meanwhile Hillary Clinton, when mentioning dictators threw in Hugo Chavez. I thought that he was a democratically elected President of Venezuela? Just by that one â€œslipâ€ of the tongue you can see that if she is elected, that itâ€™s going to be business as usual for America. We still donâ€™t talk to Cuba, even though that country has been at peace for the longest time that I can remember in my lifetime. Iâ€™m tired of having official â€œenemiesâ€ that we are always trying to thwart and governments we are always trying to topple, and sanctions that we are always imposing. When will America take care of business at home?

Our infrastructure is crumbling beneath us. Estimates are it will cost one and a half trillion dollars to make it right. We have already spent almost a Trillion on this war in Iraq. Why not rebuild this country and put people back to work? These are the questions that people are asking. If we were making sure that oil money was going back into the peopleâ€™s pockets that live on top of the oil, instead of into transnational oil companies that America seems to revere, maybe we wouldnâ€™t have so many jihadists. Kuwait does a pretty good job of spreading their wealth around. How many Kuwaitiâ€™s are jihadists?

Our entire vision of the world is skewed. We are always searching for the antagonists, as if they must be there all of the time. We are either rewarding other nations or punishing them. It never stops and unless we change our mindset, it never will stop. Look at the Middle Eastern countries. These people have been carved up into artificial States, they have constantly been raped of their resources by corporate controlled governments and Big Oil Companies since the day the Ottoman Empire fell. We have been the cause of these terrorists. We are the ones that set up al Qaeda to fight the Russians. We supplied the Taliban. As long as they were on our side against the Russians, we didnâ€™t give a damn what they did. Now itâ€™s us they are after, and we wonder why. We are so morally opposed to these people now. We know why, we all do.

When the Shah was in power, we turned a blind eye to the way he treated his people. Is it any wonder that when they deposed this make-believe American imposed Shah that they attacked his benefactor? Not once did we take responsibility for what we did to the Iranian people. We were the ones that made Saddam a military power. The Iraqi people have NEVER benefited from the sale of their own oil. How long did we let that go on? In almost every case we ourselves are to blame for our bad relations with other nations. It comes out of our mindset of either play the game we want you to play, or we will punish you. This is how America has operated since the end of the Second World War. Itâ€™s about time that this way of doing business stops. We can always, like Theodore Roosevelt said, â€œspeak softly but carry a bug stickâ€. The only time that stick should be used however, is when American lives are at stake. At the moment though, not ten years down the road. Thatâ€™s fodder for another pre-emptive war. We must understand that we are but a member of this community of nations, not the worldâ€™s dictator. We need to replace suspicion with compassion. We need to replace ignorance with understanding. We must change who we are and what we stand for. This isnâ€™t a very nice country in the eyes of the world. Not only is our infrastructure collapsing around us, so is our attempt to shape the world in our image. What makes this world such an interesting place is because of the differences among nations. We are not the first great civilization, nor will we be the last great civilization (unless we destroy this planet). We need to be a part of this world again, not the principle player in our own playbook.

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Timothy V. Gatto

