Stick Around -- It Gets Worse (Or "The Hour Late")

"But you and I have been through that,
And that is not our fate.
So let us not talk falsely now,
For the hour is getting late."

-Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower

Let us at least be honest with one another.  After the Neo-Nazi-Cons defrauded the U.S. into a decade-long Iraqi misadventure -- to the tune of over $2 trillion, according to one Brown University study -- the Middle East is now worse than ever.  As if that was even possible.  Yet true to their seemingly inimitable ability to tamper in anything -- matched perhaps only by their mastery of wreaking death, destruction and discord, they are back.  Yes, they are back.

In 2002, when George W. Bush began hatching the Neocon plan to invade Iraq -- an invasion not just without justification, but without any perceivable national interest at all -- many drowned-out voices pointed out what later became inevitable.  Saddam Hussein was installed by the West.  You can repeat this fact to most of the flag-waving, chest-beating hoi polloi in America, and they won't even deny it.  But somehow it goes immediately down the memory hole.  Their brains switch channels back to the Newspeak of the day.  Utterances come back attempting some kind of purported justification, but it only makes you shake your head.  There is no answer, yet they still attempt one.  Mind reversion to radio pilot mode.

And not only was Saddam Hussein installed by the West, he was acting on their orders.  He was put there to hold a lid down on all of the ethnic and religious internecine tension that was forestalling the bloodiest most hellish of civil war.  It has been that way in the Middle East since time immemorial.  And there were never any laws visited upon the place long enough for any secular and national and transnational identity to take root.  The institutions were soon undermined by the need to keep the people down and continue to siphon that most precious of natural resources right from beneath their feet.

Couple that with what no American wants to hear and what only few can admit:  The West was using the people in that region for a half-century, literally stealing the greatest wealth of natural resources in history, flowing out easily in a black goo, to create a Western Christian, ultra-powerful society.  And the Have's in this game were keeping evil dictators in place with a very small share of the wealth and with arms to keep their people face-down.  Yes, you read that right.  These poor people's own natural resources were being used to put them in the position of the Have-Nots.  And they weren't happy about it.  Not one bit.

So all of those voices back in 2002, all of those voices telling the Chimp not to invade because there was no interest and no justification were also telling him that there was no end game.  Once the lid was lifted, once Pandora's Box was opened, all of the demons and hellish angels dwelling in those ancient ethnic and religious hatreds would be unleashed.  There would be the unraveling of what little nations were there.  It would be de-evolution of civilization on a cosmic scale.

And it would spread.  There would be not just the localized rivalries.  There was also the hatred that had been brewing and festering for decades.  Those people who had their oil taken from them -- oil that could have made them the Have's, if indeed they were not really the Have's all along.  And the wealth transfer that took place from the Middle East to the West was the actual reversing of the roles of the Have's and the Have Not's -- and all by virtue of calculated, ruthless Supremacy and Imperialism of the worst kind.

So let us not talk falsely now.  There is no need to make up new acronyms for the latest terrorism bugaboo.  You and I have been through that, and that is not our fate.  When we look closely, we know.  And the hour is, indeed, getting late.