Yaolee Chen

English 101

Glenn Simshaw

The Causes of the War in Afghanistan

(an final paper) 

 

     What threats to our national security the most was the Congress itself.  As we often heard from the media that the US was arresting a terrorist, whose name was Osama Bin Laden in the name of a self-defense, the whole story was but an episode.  The decision of the Congress to war had made in Clinton’s administration, even before the attack of the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001.  The war was officially declared on October 7, 2001 because President Bush Jr. hesitated to go to the war at the beginning.  The time that the White House took to make the decision was less than a month.  My hypothesis was that the Congress had made such a decision to war even before the attack of the World Trade Center with its roots in Clinton’s Administration.  Six elements by the Congress persuaded the members in the Congress to make the decision in such a hurry.  They were the Political Causes, the Psychology Causes, the Propaganda Causes, the Increasing Militant by the Congress, Media Control by the Congress, and the using the United Nation to run for the US oil interests in the Middle East.

     The First Element was the Political Corruption in the White House.  In Clinton’s Administration, the Republicans and the Democratic in the White House didn’t talk to each other (Honh M. Broder, “Wuietly and Dexterously, Senate Republicans Set a Trap, “ New York Times, Oct. 14, 1999).  In a case like the negotiation Arab-Israeli peace in 1994, the members of the Congress obtained the information from reading the political publication, like Washington Post and Foreign Affair.  The Congressmen hating at each other( Ronald Brownstein, “New Appeals for a Return to Civility,” Los Angeles times, Feb. 15, 1999), when Clinton had to make a foreign policy decision, he found no help for his judgment (Morris).  Because the parties failed its function (Patterson), the United States became “lacked steadiness and [lacked] political will” (News conference by president Clinton, Washington, D.C., Oct. 14,1999).

     Still, some lazy Congressmen ignored the issues and avoided their duties purposely (John McCain, quoted in James Kitfiield, “A return to Isolationism” National Journal, Oct. 8, 1999).  What made the corruption of the White House worse was that too much old people occupied the offices for too long—Benjamin Gilman, Floyd Spences, Jesse Helms, and Strom Thurmond—have an average age of eighty (Lake 255) .  The officers of aged believed that the best way to maintain the US power and influence in the world was to create the “wars” (James Kitfield, “A Return to Isolationism”, National Journal, Oct. 8, 1999); and they don’t leave the White House (Lake 254-255), they just preached the same old assertion at the time of voting for an important decision.

     Therefore, the national security was threatened when the division of the two parties persisted in the Congress; and the consequences of the division was the allowing the unqualified old people to sit in the White House and to make to wrong national decisions.

     The Second Element was the Psychology Distress by the Congress.  In Clinton’s administration, the Congress had an illusion that the wars could help the American economy.  Since the 1990s, the United States had become the greatest power in the world.  The Internet Assess for example, an increasing world population depended on the American-Online Internet Assess (Cairncross 87).  But what happened in American domestic economy was despairing: an increasing number of the American poor were kept growing up (Molly Ivins, “Garbage Town,”Washington Post, Oct. 12, 1999).  The American middle-class, like teachers, nurse, firemen, policemen, were not able to afford their children to go to the colleges or the universities.  The reason was that the gaps between the rich and the poor were getting wider and wider; only 1% of the American rich held 95% of the American money.  In another word, the 99% of the American common people owned the only 5% of the American money.  A 4-years-college student, in average in 1994, owned the federal government 8,000 dollars before he or she could graduate.  The American people in general felt they were getting poor and poor. The problem was an unequal distribution of the wealth, and it was a problem of the Congress that the Congress should arrange the new economic policies to help the majority get out of their financial difficulties.  A Congressman thought the corruption in the White House was because that the US did not have wars in the Middle East for too long (Lake 255).

     While some other Congressmen believed that “wars” could make up economic depression (Politics Brief: Is There a Crisis?” The Economist, July 17, 1999), the Congress saw the global economic depression among the capitalism was the reason of cynicism. Once the economic depression was improved, the Congress asserted, more Americans would be willingly to participate the US political (The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press).  But this is misjudgment by the Congress.  The less and less Americans went to vote was because of the division in the White House that Congress failed the function of equal financial distribution to the Americans.

     The Congress asserted how to improve the income for each American citizen (“A Foreign Policy Agenda for the Second Term” remarks by Samuel R. Berger, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington DC, March 27, 1997) was the way to restore the American superego, the ego of that the US was the greatest power in the world (“Markets Go Global,” The Economist (The World Economy Survey), Sept. 20, 1997, p. 24).   And the only way to end the depression was by the creating wars: the only nation that was qualified to fight against the global economic depression was the US (Kahn, Impasse on Trade Delivers a Stinging Blow to Clinton, New York Times, Dec. 5, 1999).

     The Third Element was the Propaganda by the Congress.  In the 1990s, political reading materials in the White House often portrayed the foreigners were the carriers of the diseases (World Airline Traffic and Load Factors Highest Ever in 1997).  The following articles were about the foreigners spread out terrible virus throughout the international airports:

With some two million people crossing an international border every day—and 115.5 million visitors to the United States in 1996 alone—it is harder to shield and sequester ourselves from dangerous infectious diseases.  Any time, anywhere that anyone travels, invisible germs tag alone.  AIDs, which originated in Africa, became the number-one killer of American men aged fifteen to forty-five.  Mosquitoes capable of carrying dengue fever, viral encephalitis, and yellow fever journeyed to the United States in 1985 on tires imported from Asia.  (“Global Trade and Travel Import Health Threats, Report Warns,” Washington Post, June 22, 1997,p.A4)

Another article written in the Foreign Affairs said, “Airport malaria has entered the annals of public-health problems, as travelers pick up and take home diseases like gift shop souvenirs” (Garrett).  Infectious disease expert Laurie Garrett points out “Even before commercial air travel, swine flu in 1918-1919 managed to circumnavigate the planet five times in 18 months, killing 22 million people, 500,000 in the United States".  Articles like these often caused the feeling of the anti-foreigners in the White House.

     Again, the threat of the national security began from the division of the Congress, and it increased the numbers of the American poor nationwide.  Then, the Congress pointed out its finger at the Africans and the Asians, and the Congress waited for another excuse to create the wars since the Gulf War in 1991.  Articles like these were often seen in the Washington Post and the Foreign Affairs in the late 1990s.

     The Fourth Element was the Increasing Militant by the Congress.  In Clinton’s administration, the Congress believed that a strengthening the military defense was the only way to win the war: if we did not improve our weapons, the other countries, which did not sign the peace treaty with the UN, would (A damaging Arms Control Defeat).  Unavoidably, the US had to create some powerful weapons in order to win the war (American Public Opinion and US Foreign Policy).  As a matter of the facts, the strengthening the military defense was an international trend.  The Congress did not care how much fighters might be killed by the wars.  Surveys showed in May 1999, the Program on International Policy Attitudes found that if NATO understood a more extensive operation in Kosovo and American troops were killed, only a minority would want to end the operation, while most would want to persist and would even favor  “beefing up forces or striking back hard” (Ne Kosovo Study Finds Public Shows More Tolerance of Possible Fatalities Than Assumed). Once, the wars began there was no safety for every single American citizen, including our lives and our properties because there was no way to guarantee that the US must win the wars.  Therefore, the Congress was planning a scheme threatening to the American security.  

     The Fifth Element was the Media Control by the Congress.  The easiest way to create the wars was by not telling its people because once the people were told, they would do the protests, ask the president to veto it, to restrict the power of Congress, and to make the wars preventable, or to hinder the Congress to wars.  The Congressmen and the Congresswomen in general believed that American citizens could not make the right decision for the political issue (The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press).  A report showed that most of the Americans knew the news from the TV  (Kovach McLaughin Group?)  The media under the control by the Congress had purposely cut the 50 minutes of the news report into 15 minutes, as a psychological testing showed that a 15 minutes report for the adults would not cause a long-term memory in their brain (Ignatius, “Serial Hysterics,” Washing Post, Sep. 15, 1999, p.A25).  As most of he Americans were eating or doing others (Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, “Warp Speed: America in the Age of Mixed Media,” The Century fun, 1999) while watching TVs or listening to the radios, the important international news would be gone out of their brain forever in just a few days if the news did not bother to their daily activities; and the Middle East issues became the disconnected stories to the majority of the American people. For most of the Americans, they did not know our action in Afghanistan was an act of aggression. When Israelis invaded Palestinians on March 28th, 2002, only some of the university students in California began to protest.  The Congress had purposely prevented the public to the joint into the foreign affairs.  It started from the division in the Congress, and it caused the American poverty national wide.  And then the Congress planned to create wars to improve the economic depression global wide; unavoidably, the strengthening defense for the US and the media coverage to the American public followed up.   

      The Sixth Element was the using of the United Nation to run for the US oil interests.  No new UN peace operations were approved from 1978 to 1988 (John Hillen, “Picking Up UN Peacekeeping Pieces: Knowing When to say when,” Foreign Affairs, July-Aug. 1998).  But, in the 1990s, The US had increasingly sending military force in the United Nation in the name of peacemaker (Hotl 12).  President Bush clearly saw the United Nations’ potential to advance American interests.  He pledged to “explore new days to ensured adequate American financial support for UN peacekeeping” (Holt 13). Presidents Bush Senior and Clinton both have recognized that peacekeeping efforts serve our interests and respond to the best instincts of the American people.  Yet, the money we spent on the UN troops was still cheap, in 1999, about “the cost of a cup of coffee at Starbucks,” which was less than $1.22 per U.S. citizen (The United Nations, Jan. 2000).  The UN was, therefore, holding a slavery folder and calling for the nations to run on the direction of the US interests: “Trade will continue, with less rather than more regulation thanks to the delay Seattle brought about.  Fewer rules will mean more power to the already powerful, at the expense of poorer nations “(Impasse on Trade Delivers a Stinging Blow to Clinton, New York Times, Dec. 5 1999). 

.     The threaten to the US security began from the division of the Congress that the Republicans and the Democratic would not talk to each other, and it hindered the decision making by the president Clinton.  The corruption of the White House led to the Americans of the middle class and of the working class to the withdraw of the political participation.  “[T]he time [that the Americans] devoted to foreign new on US networks dropped from 45 percent in the 1970s to 13.5 percent by 1995” (James F. Hoge, Foreign News: Who Gives a Damn?).  And in 1999, the media often used “sequential hysteria” psychology to make the audiences learn nothing for the international news.  By the time of the attack of the World Trade Center, the Congress had equipped itself with strong military forces and had gained the support from the UN to run for the wars.  What really threatened to the US security was not a single terrorist Osama Bin Laden, but it was the idea of the wars that came from the US Congressmen and the congresswomen.  How to restrict the power of the Congress was, actually, the essential step for the national security.