the Institute of Unlearning, editorial 10

As the War on Terror begins to return its All-Seeing Eye to the familiar confines of Iran, we are left with yet another glaring example of how this whole farce of a war is littered with hypocrisy. Like the War on Drugs, Americans are led to believe that the "enemy" is a multi-faceted boogeyman lying in the shadows just beyond the glaring lights of our defense and intelligence agencies. A moment of lapse on our part could lead to great tragedy at home once again. What Americans need to see more clearly this time around is that the enemy lies within US borders, and to be frank, has been there comfortably for quite some time.

Much of the fomenting anti-American sentiment in Iran goes back to the 1950s, when the US, through the CIA, toppled the rule of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq, who wanted to do something "silly" like making sure Iran controlled its own oil supply instead of Great Britain and the US. The Shah, Reza Pahlavi, was placed back in firm control and Iran once again became the pawn of the Western Powers. As understandably anti-American sentiments grew, a revolution placed the Ayatollah Khomeni in power in 1979. The legacy of this revolution led to the US becoming friends with Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. Donald Rumsfeld was particularly instrumental in helping Iraq secure arms and looked the other way as Saddam brutalized his people, until it became convenient to challenge him in '91 and again in '03.

Now our ever-so-bright intelligence sources are telling us how repressive the "regime" in Iran is and that they now have WMD capability that threatens "our freedom". To be sure, the US will use the CIA and possibly more forceful measures to make sure the Iranian people will have the chance to "elect" their own freedom loving leaders, like the exile-in-waiting Mr. Pahlavi, son of the most recently deposed Shah.

But let's not stop there. Our Spanish-speaking neighbors in central and South America know all too well the effects of US terrorist sponsored activity. The US has constantly harassed Guatemala for trying to institute socialist reforms and the same was true for Chile when Salvador Allende was elected president, only to be removed on September 11th, 1973 (hmmmmmm). We have supported drug dealing regimes in Panama and Columbia, using the pretext of the Drug War to eliminate competition in those regions, not to eliminate drug manufacturing.

Nowhere has our support for terrorism been more obvious than in Fort Benning, Georgia, where the US runs its notorious School of the Americas. The name was changed a few years back to the now more Orwellian doublespeak of The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. There, the US military trains foreign police, troops and citizens in the art of suppressing democracy and protecting corporate power. We are supposed to believe that because the school offers an 8 hour course in human rights that all is well and good. How many hours are spent on crowd control, combat and torture techniques?

The Institute of Unlearning believes that if the United States is truly serious about ridding the world of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction then there is only one effective way to do that. The United States must be willing to lead by example by destroying its own stockpiles of WMDs, closing down terrorist fronts like the CIA and the Fort Benning "security" school, and punishing corporations and financial institutions that funnel money to hundreds of terrorist cells yearly. Otherwise, we are guilty of the "do as I say, not as I do" maxim that so fails to inspire right action in others.

Of course, the Institute also believes that the present system will never agree to such reasoned courses of action. This is why the unlearner must hold our world to this standard until the current system is shaken loose from it. Perhaps then a more equitable, human-loving system will emerge in its place.