THE WAR ON TERROR

16.Thirty Three Billion dollar approved for war in Afghanistan.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, America required a new threat and new pretexts to continue its profitable Cold War policies (Eisenhower quote: beware of the Military Industrial Complex). Successive administrations began designing new threats to replace the now dead threat from Communism. Several options were considered, but most to the fore came: rogue states, Weapons of Mass Destruction and Islamic terror with Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda providing a stunningly, unexpected but extremely convenient ideological motivation for the Pentagon war planners after the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers. As we have seen initially unsuccessful attempts were made to link Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein, later to be replaced with similar false accusations of Weapons of Mass Destruction so as to create a pretext to invade the most oil-rich country in the world and simultaneously consolidate and further expand US global power. Every aggressor has a "pretext" of which we should be very aware before climbing on bandwagons.