As we approach the 13th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, it seems that despite the years, the thousands of military casualties, trillions of dollars spent and regime changes caused, we in the U.S. seem to have learned little and accomplished less.

On Sept. 13, 2001, Hillary Clinton proclaimed that, “Every nation has to either be with us, or against us. Those who harbor terrorists, or who finance them, are going to pay a price.” President George W. Bush proclaimed much the same thing, using almost the exact same words, to Congress a week later as he sought and obtained a use of force agreement from Congress that essentially gave him and subsequent presidents carte blanch to bomb whomever they chose, all in the name of fighting a “war on terror.” Funny, that “price” promised by Clinton and Bush apparently didn’t extend to our “ally” Saudi Arabia.

Soon after the invasion of Afghanistan in response to 9/11 — ostensibly to root out former CIA contract agent and U.S. ally (and Saudi Arabian national) Osama bin Laden (who we were told was responsible for the attacks) and unseat the Taliban that governed the country and harbored bin Laden — we were emphatically told by the Bush regime and the propaganda media that al-Qaida in Iraq and Saddam Hussein posed an “existential threat” to the U.S. and that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. This was the imprimatur Bush and the neocons used to rally Congress and Americans to the cause of perpetual Middle East war and regime change wherever and whenever in order to “spread democracy.”

Anyone in the Middle East and the African continent suddenly became a potential target of U.S. bombers and drone strikes… all for “humanitarian” reasons or to fight “terrorists” — terrorists that, it turns out, the U.S. and its “allies” were arming and training all along.

“We had to attack them there before they attack us here,” was a common refrain uttered by the Bush regime, his proxies, the propaganda media and, sadly, most Americans. It made for great theater and even greater sleight of hand. All this on the basis of a false meme: that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and there was a nexus between al-Qaida and Saddam. There was never a call to attack the real culprit: Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia provided 15 of the 9/11 hijackers (if you believe the official “story” as told by Washington) and much of the funding for the operation. This has been reported by such august “official” publications as The New York Times, and others. More details of the Saudi involvement are also likely what’s found on the 28 redacted pages of the Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry of 9/11 that Reps. Walter B. Jones (R-N.C.) and Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) are trying to have declassified — information the two men called “shocking.”

For most of the 18 months following the Afghanistan invasion, all we heard from the Bush regime was a rallying cry to justify a war on Iraq. The resulting fearmongering, with an assist from an al-Qaida beheading video (Daniel Pearl), got Americans rousingly on board with the attack that commenced in March 2003.

The U.S. has been bombing ever since. It’s bombed wedding parties and birthdays in Pakistan and U.S. citizens in Yemen. In order to “save” citizens in Libya, it bombed them. It helped assassinate Moammar Gadhafi. “We came, we saw, he died,” Clinton yucked when she learned of Gadhafi’s death.

It’s bombed people in Mali, Somalia and Algeria. According to the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, the drone campaign had killed at least 2,400 innocent civilians — including hundreds of children — by January 2014. Tens of thousands more died in Libya from NATO (read U.S.) bombs.

The result was a power vacuum in a once peaceful country that’s left hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Libyans dead or impoverished and caught in the crossfire of a sundry of militant groups vying for power. It also enabled the gunrunning operation through the Libyan consulate that got Ambassador Chris Stephens and three others killed.

Is anyone surprised that there are people in the world who bitterly hate the United States and its rulers?

Now ISIS, birthed by the U.S. in 2006 with an assist from Saudi Arabia and nurtured, aided and abetted by the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, is the new terror brand for the military-industrial complex. They are, we are told, an existential threat to America. They are, we are told, massing on our Southern border. And they have, we are told, “beheaded” two journalists and untold other Syrians and Iraqis.

ISIS, we are told, is the greatest threat to America since Nazi Germany. Fact: ISIS has only about 10,000 to 20,000 fighters. Many of those are simply “joiners” who have no particular loyalty and signed on because they wanted to be on the “winning team.”

The American public, just recently weary of perpetual war and having last year staved off a neocon- and Obama-proposed U.S. attack on Syria — which would have benefited the very group of al-Qaida-linked terrorists that have since become or joined with ISIS — is now clamoring for war with ISIS. This clamor is fueled by two suspicious “beheading” videos, one of which has been proven as staged if not completely faked and the other suspicious in both its similarity to the first and the fact that it was initially released by the same group responsible for the release of the fake video blamed in the Benghazi narrative by the Obama regime. Those facts, coupled with James Foley’s ties to the CIA front group USAID, make the beheading videos suspicious and likely false flag events designed specifically for the purpose of agitating the American public for war.

It is very difficult to get any truth in America from the politicians or the controlled media.

It is risky to believe anything official. The art of war is that all warfare is based on deception and that rulers must cultivate the appearance of moral rightness in order to rally the people and persuade them to fight. It works!

The government of the United States has reasserted its power over the American people. It is now stronger, much stronger, because of the threat of a “terrorist” attack. This threat, we are told, comes from ISIS, which the U.S. created and funded, and which, if it’s on U.S. soil in any form is here because the Obama regime opened up the border and invited it in. And now we stand poised to start all over in Iraq. And some in Congress want to give the president sanction to bomb some more?

Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken told CNN last week a new Iraq war would “probably go beyond even this administration to get to the point of defeat.” That means embarking on another Middle East misadventure without end.

The U.S. has been making war in the Middle East for 34 years. It’s enriched the globalists and the military-industrial complex, impoverished the people and earned the U.S. great, well-deserved enmity.

I want to candidly remind you that governments — all governments — need crisis, no matter how much lip service they give to the idea of “peace.” Crisis is a well-known Machiavellian strategy to gain and solidify political power and persuade public opinion.

Crisis provides the stage where governments can control all sides. At least they can arrange events to “naturally” unfold. Governments must have scapegoats and phony enemies. The people must have perceived threats to their security, and so naturally government is there to “protect.”

Governments must have enemies to the extent that they finance them. There can be no military budgets without perceived enemies.

Don’t be fooled again. The U.S. has nothing to gain by entering an Islamist religious war. When will the American people learn?