US and Its Imagined Enemy

Anyone who reads the history of the United States will find that the country — after emerging victorious from World War II in 1945 as one pole of a divided world, set against the Eastern bloc, which it fought through decades of Cold War, and after standing alone as the world’s sole superpower with the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 — has fed on savagery and a monopoly on brute force.

Decade after decade, the U.S. decided the fate of peoples with no say over their own destiny — the peoples of the Third World, which the American narrative, in its classification of peoples, regards as the White House’s backyard.

The U.S. has also fed on conjuring up a common enemy for itself and for the “civilized” world. That enemy could be internal, as with the Native Americans, about 50 million of whom were exterminated within its borders by every means available.

Or it could be external, as with the countries Washington classifies as rogue or evil states — “the axis of evil.” By Washington’s own description, such states threaten U.S. national security first and international peace second, and against them it drums up fabricated charges like the collapse of human rights and freedoms, or the menace of weapons of mass destruction said to threaten the international community — all according to the State Department’s narratives.

Those narratives preached the need to be rid of the rulers of these “evil” countries by waging war, marshaling the world and public opinion against them, as happened in Iraq (Operation Desert Storm) under George H.W. Bush and, after him, George W. Bush.

Those wars brought down Iraq’s nation-state, its army and all of its foundations and the landmarks of its civilization. Before that came Vietnam, Somalia, Afghanistan, Venezuela and Lebanon. Today, the delusion is playing out again, this time against Iran, with the same arguments and pretexts that mired the U.S. in the Iraqi quagmire. And God only knows whose turn comes next if American colonial savagery, backed without pause by Zionist savagery, continues.

Against the backdrop of the 1991 Gulf War, in the second decade of the third millennium* and under Republican President George W. Bush, America deluded itself into believing that Iraq, with its vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and its million-strong army, posed a grave threat to U.S. national security and, with it, to international peace.

Therefore, Iraq had to be brought under control through invasion: destroying that arsenal, if it existed, and dismantling the army. In truth, those cheap lies were exposed over time. There was no arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, and no threat to any country in the world. It was a grand illusion, one that had taken root in the minds of the U.S. administration’s decision-makers, an administration far from immune to the influence of the Zionist lobby in America.

More than two decades after the 2003 invasion, Iraq still suffers from an accumulated tangle of political, economic, social and security crises born of the American delusion, which led to a string of humanitarian disasters like those that came before, such as in Vietnam in the 1970s. The examples repeat, one after another, and the saga of illusion rolls on — this time with Iran.

*Editor's note: The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq took place in the first decade of the third millennium. George W. Bush was president from 2001 to 2009.