Uncle Sam's Wars and Anesthesia

The media often repeats that the U.S. administration has lost its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq because it could not maintain control after the invasions, but the truth is the complete opposite. Measuring the failure or success of U.S. military operations is not based on the extent of control over the management of the occupied country as much as it is measured by the achievement of the geopolitical objectives of those operations.

This point is argued by the world-renowned American linguist, Noam Chomsky. In his book “What Uncle Sam Really Wants,” he responds to those who say that America failed in the Vietnam War by arguing that whether you are on the left or right, the situation of mass destruction and division with which Vietnam was left after the war was to such a great extent that you could not have found it on a map of Asia.

Given what is happening now in the Arab world, the Great Middle East Project requires a restructuring of the maps of the Muslim world from Morocco to Mandanau and the shooting down of all the forces within this area. For example, the occupation of Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond was part of their intention to encircle Iran who would then “voluntarily” choose to fulfill American plans. Perhaps the relatively good aspect of the project pertains to how the project cannot pay for itself or its means: “What we do not realize is that the whole bulk will not leave.”

The same logic besieges Egypt with the destruction of Libya to the north and the tribal conflict in Sudan in the south. Similarly, the U.S. suffocates the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia across its southern boundaries with Yemen being converted into a burning area, as was the case with its northern border with Iraq. If we look carefully at this behavior, the military finds its roots in European colonialism and continued with the U.S. military’s role in the Cold War, which ended the European colonies in Africa. No longer are the old colonial forces needed for the classic occupation model. Local administrations immediately and permanently assess the situation in order to create enough strategic chaos and instability to ensure the loyalty of the political parties to reduce the chances of an international and domestic public opinion coup and assure them that they did not come for the occupation but to rid the people of those countries from totalitarian regimes.

From this perspective, the continuous talk in the media about U.S. defeats becomes a kind of effective anesthesia to keep public opinion in a coma, mixing the thrill of a “comfort after the victor,” with a necessary trance relying on the illusions of a failed American project. Perhaps the clearest example of the success on the level of Arab public opinion is the ratification by the masses of the myth of “spontaneous” revolutions and the denied link of each of these to the U.S. administration, despite the clear evidence and documents linking them to the failures of the American projects in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The adverse effects of this psychological result — known as “soft power” — include the hysterical joy in the American “savior” and swelling as it is draped in victory and freedom.