Chris Hedges: Osama Bin Trump

When the U.S. became the terrorists it claimed it was seeking to defeat, the country defeated itself. 

By Chris Hedges
ScheerPost

Donald Trump, whose war on Iran is the greatest strategic blunder in United States history, is not responsible for triggering the decline of the American empire, but he is responsible for its fatal denouement.

This is the end.

U.S. bases in the oil-rich Persian Gulf have been damaged or destroyed and I expect will not be rebuilt. U.S. allies, even those in Europe, are abandoning Washington. The decadence and immorality of American society, embodied in the vulgarity, stupefying ignorance and cruelty of Trump, are the defining characteristics of the Empire.

The Global South, horrified at the Empire’s flagrant disregard for international humanitarian law, including the enabling of genocide in Gaza, sees the U.S. as the enemy. Abu Ghraib Prison may have receded from our consciousness, but for the rest of the world, its images of U.S. soldiers and contractors sadistically humiliating and torturing imprisoned Iraqis has replaced the Disneyfied version of itself that America once exported. 

The war on Iran, which has disrupted the world’s oil supply, is rapidly pushing the global economy over the cliff.

The U.S. is going down. And it will bring many with it. 

Osama Bin Laden may be in a watery grave in the North Arabian Sea. Al-Qaeda may be a shadow of itself. But Bin Laden’s most fervent dreams have been realized in the last 25 years of gross miscalculations of the Empire — its squandering of trillions of dollars on military debacles and the ascendancy of our version of Ubu Roi, Donald J. Trump.

Rather than defeating supposed enemies, the U.S. has swelled their ranks. It and its colony, Israel, are the most reviled nations on the planet. Every advance by Iran in its asymmetrical war against the Empire is cheered across the globe.

The humiliating defeats, the diversion of resources and at least $8 trillion to mount one war after another, which has killed an estimated 4.5 to 4.8 million people, has hollowed the Empire out.

Its infrastructure is crumbling. Its democratic institutions are impotent. It survives on an unsustainable $ 40 trillion debt. The jewels of its democracy, including its education system, fair elections and a free press, are discredited and degraded.

An abandoned working class, crippled by economic insecurity and a government that steadily strips away social programs that keep those in distress afloat, is propagandized to believe the palpable decline is the work of traitors and enemies within. It has led Trump supporters to turn on the very institutions and ideals designed to sustain democracy. The usual targets of fascism — the “radical left,” Muslims, migrants, intellectuals, artists, people of color and journalists — are persecuted under laws such as The Espionage Act. 

Lies permeate the airwaves buttressing the self-delusion that once internal enemies are silenced, or eradicated, the glory days of the Empire, defined by hyper-nationalism, patriarchy, stable jobs and white supremacy, will return.

Violence against internal enemies along with election fraud are openly advocated by Trump and his court of sycophants, buffoons, grifters and Christian fascists. Attempting to bribe voters by promising them $5,000 if Republicans win the midterms, along with Trump’s contempt for the constitutional order, is the transparent admission that U.S. democracy is a farce.

George W. Bush, who was appointed to the presidency by judicial fiat, planted these seeds of lawlessness and impunity. Trump has brought them to floraison.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) goons, masked and offered the kind of impunity that allowed the torture and killing of innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorize U.S. cities. They carry out military-style raids against unarmed civilians that look no different than those the Empire carried out in Fallujah or the Helmand Province in Afghanistan. They are setting up a network of squalid internal concentration camps.

The tools of subjugation the Empire used abroad, including the stripping of civil liberties and the implementation of mass surveillance, were legalized at home with the passage of The Patriot Act, with its watchlists, informants and racial and religious profiling.

Empires in decay impose the tyranny familiar to those subjugated abroad on their own citizens.

I was in the Middle East when it all went wrong. Nearly all of the Muslim world was appalled by the attacks of 9/11. There were massive public expressions of solidarity, including candlelight vigils in Iran. If the U.S. had built on this empathy rather than demonizing Muslims and inflicting suffering and death on millions in the Middle East, the country would be far more secure today.

Instead, the U.S. drank deep from the poisonous elixir of nationalism. It foolishly believed it was attacked, as Bush said, because “they hate our freedoms,” not because of our support for the apartheid and genocidal state of Israel, our callous indifference to human life beyond our borders, including the killing of over a million people in Iraq by U.S. sanctions, and our propping up of brutal Arab dictatorships.

The wreckage the U.S. has left behind from its forever wars include the obliteration of whole cities, along with 940,000 direct deaths in post-9/11 war zones, 3.6 to 3.8 million indirect deaths and 38 million people displaced.

The hijackers chose massive death and destruction on a city skyline to send a message. They spoke the language the U.S. taught them. It is the message U.S. warplanes, missiles and drones have delivered from Vietnam to Iraq. Washington did not listen. It naively believed it could use its military to remake the Middle East in its own image.

The failure of the War on Terror is not simply a moral failure. It is a strategic failure. The U.S. refused to ask the obvious question. Why did many outside its borders feel so much hostility towards it that they were willing to kill themselves and thousands of U.S. citizens?

Those of us who dared to raise these questions 25 years ago were vilified as supporters of terrorism and silenced.

The only way to defeat terrorism is to isolate those who carry out acts of terror within their own societies. It is to build networks of understanding and solidarity. The U.S. did the opposite. It became the terrorists it claimed to be seeking to defeat. We did what Bin Laden wanted the U.S. to do — defeat itself. 

Trump is presiding over the last act.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR.  He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.

This article is from Scheerpost.

NOTE TO READERS: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, “The Chris Hedges Report.”

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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