The Perfect Enemy

By John Kaminski
skylax@comcast.net

Terrorists who can't be caught because they don't really exist or because they're CIA assets.

War is a sociological safety valve that cleverly diverts popular hatred for the ruling classes into a happy occasion to mutilate or kill foreign enemies.
— Ernest Becker

War provides the perfect cover for those waging it to commit crimes against not only enemies but also friends. Amid the patriotic flag waving and somber ceremony, the populace is cowed into distraction and for the most part will not see the chicanery and manipulation that not only created the conditions FOR the war, but also will not perceive that the purpose OF it is not to defeat the enemy, but to financially castrate and sociologically neutralize those who are actually helping to wage the war.

Such is the process by which those in power consolidate their advantage among their so-called friends.

The Christian Crusades of millenia past provide an apt example of this deceptive process. With no enemies nearby and a surfeit of armed and affluent noblemen itching for aggressive acts, kings and ministers of past empires dreamed up external threats by which to distract their powerful friends from contemplating revolution. Jerusalem and the dark-skinned Muslim realms have always been a popular target. The subsequent conflicts not only reaped new riches for the warmaking kingdoms, but also depleted the ranks and resources of those sent to fight, thereby lessening the potential political threat to the very people who dreamed up the wars in the first place. Two birds with one stone.

Those innocents killed in such cynical gambits now bear the unfortunate title of collateral damage, regrettable but necessary sacrifices to the selfishness of those in positions of power who seek to maintain it. So this world full of greedy humans continues to turn.

During war, citizens of the warmaking state may not question the motives of their leaders, lest they be accused of treason and summarily executed. Therefore, any state seeking permanent obeisance and minimal criticism from its citizenry will logically aspire toward a regimen of permanent war. It is supremely ironic that a majority of these citizens will wholeheartedly support such efforts, without realizing that it is the destruction of their own freedom that they are cheering.

However, real enemies are usually not so accommodating as to wish to engage in battle indefinitely. They are either are defeated and disappear as a viable social force, or, they kick butt and thereby ruin the plans of the manipulative attacker forever.

A shrewd superpower kingdom will cleverly avoid picking a fair fight, thereby eliminating, as nearly as possible, the undesirable surprise of an unexpected defeat. It will also defer toward states of relatively equal strength, establish diplomatic relations, and wait for an opportunity to screw them surreptitiously and without penalty.

Since the situation we face now is that one superpower outstrips in military might the next ten strongest nations, the need for it to be diplomatic is at an all-time low. It simply can do what it wants when it wants.

And yet, humans being what they are — wanting to be free, happy, honest and well-fed — even a superpower in this unchallenged position must construct fantasy scenarios to convince its people — no matter how amateurishly — that they are doing the right thing by supporting endless wars.

Today we hear all sorts of childish whimpering about the terrorist threat, even though a cursory examination of recent history would reveal that most of these threats have been deliberately created by the nation doing most of the complaining about these very threats.

And this epiphany can lead you to a very startling observation about the nature of the world as human civilization enters the 21st century following the appearance of the Divine Messiah most of this civilization pretends to worship.

It seemed for a time — two centuries, actually — that the United States of America was a good country, champion of justice, advocate of freedom, that sort of stuff. What was lost in the education of its own citizens, however, was the frequency with which it went to war, against interlopers who were invariably depicted as evil people on the wrong side of democratic progress.

A cursory perusal of this murderous American resumé will reveal that it has always been the aggressor in all these big fights, even though the official histories bend the facts to show the U.S. was fighting for freedom against one tyrant or another.

But as time passed and the world got smaller, it became obvious that the U.S. was running out of countries that it could call evil, declare war against, and then pulverize.

Besides, once a country had been seriously obliterated, it simply took too long to rebuild it into a serious enemy again.

Clearly, if the same cartel that has essentially been running this country for all of its 227 years was to stay in power, it had to devise a new formula for finding constant enemies to fight, thereby enriching its own coffers and keeping its own citizenry from noticing too much about the way it actually conducts its business.

So it devised a new system of actually creating its own enemies. It sponsored young malcontents to fight battles the served the purposes of the masters, provided them with weapons and support techniques, used them for awhile, and then seemingly cut them loose to develop on their own. Of course, all the while the progress of these young rebels was monitored by American intelligence agencies, for the purpose of determining exactly when they could be considered mature enough to reclassify them from a nominal ally fighting for U.S. interests into a nightmare threat fighting against U.S. interests.

The key element in making this process work was fabricating staged terror events that were actually perpetrated against our own citizens but then cleverly blamed on these various foreign provocateurs whom the U.S. had carefully nurtured and brought to maturity.

The U.S. learned this trick from Israel, which had successfully used the technique throughout Europe (principally in Germany) and specifically in Iraq in the 1940s, to convince its own people of the dangers posed by "enemies" it had previously supported, for the purpose of creating a hysteria to compel more Jews to move to Israel.

Of course, now we see how Israel has used this staged terror formula to elicit world support for its illegal occupation of Palestine. And more vividly, we see how the staged terror events in New York City have driven a large part of Western Civilization into a new, crusade-like rage against the peoples of Islamic countries. Serious historians will note this has all been done before, but the general population contains few serious historians, so most people don't notice that the current War on Terror is simply a replay of the European royals' propaganda used to attack Middle Eastern peoples some eight hundred years ago, and ever since.

And lest you think all this is merely a flight of literary fancy, I bid you consider the careers of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, both of whom were catapulted into the public eye as fledgling CIA operatives, bin Laden as an Arab counterculture hero (and cheered on by his family) who rode to the rescue (with large amounts of cash) of the Afghani mujahadeen, accompanied by plenty of assistance from Ronald Reagan's CIA wheelerdealers; and Saddam as one of the triggermen in a 1968 coup in Iraq that was of course fueled by support from the, you-guessed-it, CIA. I probably need not mention that either one of these strategic CIA assets has ever been apprehended.

So for these folks to develop into threats against the world (and this is not to mention Panama's Manuel Noriega, who also followed the same progressive curriculum as a pawn in the South American drug game and good friend of the Bush family, only to later become the target of a massive American invasion), you begin to see the pattern.

The U.S. has really replaced client state enemies it first builds up with cash bribes and then converts into enemies with client personality enemies, whom it nurtures with military support, provokes with a no-win decision (whatever did happen to April Glaspie?), and then invades in a profitable fit of righteous retribution.

Are you getting the picture?

It's interesting reading some of the older stories about al-Qaeda, the so-called terror group founded by bin Laden in Afghanistan (and nurtured by Pakistani intelligence, which was covertly funded by the American CIA), and seeing how al-Qaeda fought side by side with American mercenaries in Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia and even Chechnya, but when they were conveniently needed as an excuse for going to war somewhere else (Afghanistan and Iraq), they were quickly converted into an enemy.

Clearly, al-Qaeda is connected to the CIA, but for purposes of stealing Iraq's oil reserves, the U.S. connected them to Iraq, and got a major assist from what used to be called the American free press, but now is called something else, something far worse.

I guess you could call al-Qaeda a multi-purpose CIA asset, good for either good or bad activities.

Al-Qaeda are claimed to the boogeymen who perpetrated 9/11 and were supposedly connected to Saddam.

And yet when you go to find out about them, they disappear in a cloud of undercover spy dust, with no leads suddenly unavailable as to where they might have disappeared. How utterly convenient. The real reason is because their controllers live at the Pentagon and other prestigious Washington addresses, not to mention a few palaces in Saudi Arabia that have ties to many American corporations.

Occasionally, the powers that be throw us a bone, like Moussaoui, or Richard Reid, just to try to prove there are actual terrorists out there. But how many more so-called terrorists have been allowed to slip away, under cover of CIA assistance? And, as in Yemen, how many more are prevented from being sought, lest they reveal their ties to the government in Washington?

Instead of having countries to blame for our ills, we now have mystical individuals — terrorists — who absolutely can't be found, except for those like Atta and the supposed hijackers who actually received training at U.S. military installations. Sound like a familiar technique?

For endless war, you must have an enemy who cannot be caught, who is completely vaporous, therefore necessitating nonstop aggressive emergency measures, variously colored alerts and tough talk for those who are unable to understand words.

The perfect enemy for a state that seeks endless war and seeks forever to pull the wool over the eyes of its own citizens for purposes of endless robbery and implementing slavery where freedom previously existed would be an enemy who cannot, under any circumstances, ever be caught. Osama and Saddam doubtless know this.

In the literal sense, this perfect enemy does not exist, which makes him perfect for a society determined to make war, because he will never be caught, and the war can continue forever.

The harder an enemy is to find and defeat, the better it is for those who seek to destroy that enemy. The CIA's creation of al-Qaeda is the perfect recipe for those billionaires whose objective is endless conflict from which to make more money. This is the new era in which we find ourselves.

It is the ultimate tilting at windmills, by which the elite who have always run America can perpetrate their vicious schemes of slavery, the gullible can continue to have their empty causes to cheer, and legitimate, God-fearing citizens can cower in fear while the very churches they support participate in the coverup that supports the tyrants who oppress them.

This is the way the world is, and has always been.

Only now it's worse, because the enemy is now a fabricated fiction, available for convenient blame in any and all disasters, no matter who actually perpetrated them.

And thanks to media shills who don't ask real questions, well-bribed legislators devoid of conscience, law enforcers who help their patrons cover up crimes, and judges who have no interest in real justice, there is no end in sight for this war on freedom.

John Kaminski lives on the coast of Florida and is the author of "America's Autopsy Report," soon to be published by Dandelion Books.