I subject myself to daily emails from the Ludwig von Mises Center (www.mises.org) on economics issues. I put Lew Rockwell's excellent site in my RSS news reader as well. Rockwell's site is a bit more overtly political, even though he's the head of the Mises institute.
Today there was an essay by Bill Bonner, entitled "Fin de Bubble". It started off about economics, but strayed to the war in Iraq - which is almost inevitable these days. One line struck me, and I had one of those "Ah HAH!" moments like Dagny Taggart frequently enjoyed in Atlas Shrugged on her way to intellectual perfection.
This is the line:
"In other words, the strategy is working: terrorists are multiplying."
To back up, he was talking about the US Government lacking credible threats to justify spending trillions on defense expenditures after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I have tried to articulate this thought before myself - with less precision and eloquence. Along the lines of "Keep beating the bushes, and you're bound to piss off some birds." Bonner puts it in one sentence. POOF, cuts through the fog and debris and gets to the point: the US Government is manufacturing terrorists to keep itself in business. And it is doing so intentionally!
I want to emphasize that this is different -in a subtle fashion- than the USG's constant hysterical bleating about terrorists and terrorism.
The whole drumbeat put out by DC about "Threat Levels" and "Yellow" and "Orange" and all that crap is what H.L. Mencken was describing so long ago when he said,
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
~H. L. Mencken
Now our government has gone one step further. It seeks to replace imaginary specters with real flesh and blood men and women who want to kill us. Now Washington won't have to resort to exhortations and paranoid sounding ramblings. They'll be able to point to real people and really horrible events, and simply say - "See?"
I'm sure a lot of other people have already come to this conclusion. After all, FDR sacrificed 2,500+ sailors and soldiers at Pearl Harbor to be able to say, "See?"
Compare that to the Reichstag fire in Hitler's Germany. The Gulf of Tonkin "Incident", and the sinking of the Maine in Cuba. All of those were basically made up, or stretched to fit the agenda.
Today, the US literally creates antagonists so it has somebody to fight, and therefore to keep the warfare side of the welfare/warfare state going. The opponents to that warfare are virtually disarmed at the start, because REAL events and REAL atrocities and REAL antagonists can be trotted before the people to "prove" the case that the US faces REAL threats from virtually all quarters. So the government can say, "See?"
We've started this mess, and it's damned unlikely we'll be able to extract ourselves from it - gracefully or otherwise. It's easier on most of the actors to just keep up the status quo.
And that will create more and more REAL terrorists.
Nice feedback loop, eh?