https://defense.info/highlight-of-the-w ... ast-laugh/
The letter, allegedly written by bin Laden’s #2, the late Ayman al-Zawahiri, was al-Qaeda’s justification for attacking America on 11 September 2001. In the letter, bin Laden declared that America was attacked because of the oppression of the Palestinians by Israel, made possible by America; for stealing the oil from Muslim countries; occupying Muslim lands with miliary forces; and, being hypocrites for preaching freedom and democracy but “for [the] white race only.” Bin Laden didn’t just blame American leaders, but also the American people who elect the oppressive governments, and whose taxes pay for the military that oppresses the Muslims.
Well, that’s because The Establishment hasn’t given them any reason to be trusted. The government and its media acolytes were the cheerleaders for the 2003 invasion of on Iraq which was based on lies: that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, and that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was cooperating with bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist group. The cost of the Iraq war: about $3 trillion according to Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel prize-winner in economics, 4,492 dead U.S. troops, and over 200,000 dead Iraqi civilians. (Total direct deaths of the post 9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen are about 940,000.)
Then there’s Afghanistan.
According to the Afghanistan Papers exposé senior American officials knew the U.S.-led NATO campaign was failing, but they kept it going for almost 20 years until the Taliban victoriously entered Kabul on 15 August 2021. The U.S. finally departed on 30 August, but not before an Islamic State suicide bomber killed 13 U.S. service members, 12 of them aged 25 and under. The cost: over $2 trillion, over 2,300 dead U.S. troops, and about 100,000 dead Afghan civilians, including opposition fighters, many of whom joined the opposition due to U.S. abuses.
In 2011, the U.S. led the attack on Libya and destroyed the functioning government that was cooperating with Washington, and kicked off a migrant wave that upended politics in Europe. U.S. troops are still in Syria because mumble-mumble terrorism, though the Islamic State was defeated in 2018. Then it was All Aboard! to fight the Russians in Ukraine, but then the U.S. political class and media dropped Ukraine when Israel was attacked by Hamas.
After all that pessimism, or maybe adding to it, young Americans have departed from their elders’ reflexive support for anything Israel does. According to a CNN poll, asked whether Israel’s response to the Hamas attack was fully justified, only 27 percent of Americans aged 18-34 agreed, as opposed to 81 percent of Americans over age 65. This is likely due to both existing distrust of the media and government, and what is known as “networked tribalism,” the rapid development of empathy and kinship with others via online media, resulting in maximalist thinking where opposing sides can’t even agree on basic facts.
In short, bin Laden predicted that America would impoverish itself while it created more enemies than it killed. The U.S. blew over $8 trillion on the post 9-11 wars, most of it borrowed from China, and its national debt will soon exceed $34 trillion dollars, but the leaders who lied to promote the wars won’t be around to pay the tab, leaving that to a resentful and disillusioned young Americans, fertile ground for extremist sentiment. And, hopefully, Washington will come to understand that most of the world failed to support its campaigns in Ukraine and Israel-Gaza because of its heedless waste of money and lives, most of them not American.
And knowing they were lied to may explain the failure of the military to attract enough qualified recruits, which is part of a long-term trend of “historically low faith in U.S. institutions” reported by Gallup. Who wants to be the cannon fodder in the next war fought for dubious “American interests” when you can be sure no one named Bush or Obama will be in that trench with you?
Gen Z members suffer from high levels of depression and anxiety and are most likely to report their mental health as being poor, according to the American Psychological Association. Poor mental health, a bad education, a lack of trust in institutions, and the sense their economic prospects are limited and the American Dream is out of reach, are what’s needed to create a population susceptible to thinking bin Laden was an anti-imperialist who had a point when he said, “Your law is the law of the rich and wealthy people.”
there are legitimate concerns in us on the question of who will fight all the wars for peace and liberate oppressed peoples inhabiting every square inch on earth, twitter users must be immediately discarded, peoples who have expertise in multiple areas such as politics, military strategy, armaments, logistics, deployment, medicine, sports and mass media entertainment are obviously the officer class of the next wars, plebian non-users will be enlisted for grunt work
