Yaolee Chen

English 101

The Causes of the War in Afghanistan

(a processing paper)

Glenn Simshaw

 

     What threats to our national security the most is not Osama Bin Laden, and it’s not Saddam Hussein, it’s not Arafat Yasser, it’s not North Korea, it’s not Indonesia, it’s not Iraq, it’s not Venezuela, it’s not Arabia-Palestinians, it’s not Islamic fundamentalists, it’s not the terrorists, but it’s the Congress itself.  As we often heard from the media that the US is catching a terrorist, whose name is Osama Bin Laden in the name of a self-defense, the whole story is but an episode.  The decision of the Congress to war had made even before the attack of the World Trade Center in Clinton’s administration.  The war was officially declared on October 7, 2001 because President Bush hesitated to go to war at the beginning.  As the attack was on September 11th, 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 Media Control by the Congress, the Increasing Militant by the Congress, and the Increasing Investments on the United Nation.

     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 (Broder).  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( Brownstein), 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 (Remarks by President Clinton at the White House Correspondents’Dinner, Washington D.C., May 1, 1999).  What had 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.  The officers of aged believed that the best way to maintain the US power and influence in the world is to create “wars” (Kitfield); and they don’t leave the White HouseLake (254-255), they just preached the same old assertion in the time of voting for an important decision.

     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 growing up (Ivins).  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 5% of the American money.  A 4-years-college student, in average, owned the federal government 8,000 dollars before he or she graduated.  American people in general felt they were getting poor and poor. The problem was an unequal distribution, 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 see the global economic depression among the capitalism was the reason of cynicism. The Congress believed the cynicism would have been dropped if the American public were rich (The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press).  Therefore, how to improve the income for each American citizen (A Foreign Policy Agenda for the Second Term) was the key to the American ego as the greatest power in the world (Markets Go Global).   And the only way to end the depression was by the creating wars. Despising the facts that the Congress might have better way to help the American poor out, the only nation that was qualified to fight against the global economic depression was the US (Kahn).

     The Third Element was the Propaganda by the Congress.  In the 1990s, political reading materials in the White House often portrayed the foreign countries as the terrible places to go.  The following articles were about the foreigners spread out terrible virus throughout the international airports (World Airline Traffic and Load Factors Highest Ever in 1997) to increase the feelings of anti-foreigners in the White House.  An article in the Washington Post said,

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)

 Another article written in the Foreign Affairs said, “Air port 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”.  Because we don’t have a usual cause for the wars as the demand of the cheap oil was not a thing that the Americans could not live without; and it’s why, the terrorists was than became more terrible than they really were.  The members of the Congress were brainwashed by 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 had believed that the creating wars were the best way for the US economic reform.  Accordingly, a strengthening the military defense was the only way to win the war.  The US was one of the headquarters in the United Nation, which institution was for the peace of the world; yet, the Congress believed there were countries, which did not joint to the UN, might have the secret weapons that might threaten to the security of the US (A damaging Arms Control Defeat).  So the best way to win the wars was to increase the military defense (American Public Opinion and US Foreign Policy).  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)  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.

     The Fifth Element was the Media Control by the Congress.  The Congress in Clinton’s administration had decided not to let the American public joint to the political decision.  The Congressmen and the Congresswomen in general believed that few American citizens could make the right decision for the political issue (The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, op.cit.).  A report showed that most of the Americans knew the news from the TV (Hoge).  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 most of the adults would not cause a long-term memory in their brain (Ignatius).  Most of Americans were eating or doing others (Kovach) while watching TV, the important international news would be gone out of their brain for just a few days and the Middle East issues became the disconnected stories (Lake ch.6).  And they had no real answer for it.  So most of the Americans did not know our action in Afghanistan was an act of aggression till the day when Israelis invaded Palestinians on March 28th, 2002.  And since that day, the university students in California began to protest.  The Congress had purposely prevented the public to joint to the foreign affairs.  How to restrict the power of the Congress was then our right to protect the national security of the whole world because the American participation to the world affair could have prevented the wars in the Middle East.

 

 

     The Sixth Element was the using of the United Nation to run for the US oil interests.  In the 1990s, The US had increasingly sending military force in the United Nation in the name of peacemaker.  Yet, the money we spent on the UN troops was still cheap, about “the cost of a cup of coffee at Starbucks,” which was less than $1.22 per U.S. citizen.  The UN was, therefore, holding a slavery folder and calling the nations, which had joined to the United Nation, to run for the direction of the US interests.

 

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Conclusion

   These six elements had persuaded the Congressmen and the Congresswomen to create the wars in Clinton’s Administration.  The US did not find an excuse to create a war till the attack of the World Trade Center.  These six elements had brainwashed the members of the Congress.  By the time of the attack of the World Trade Center, the Congress had already decided to kill the people of Afghanistan as much as the US could.  The decision did not represent the voices of the Americans in majority because students, for example, did not know the US action in the Middle East was an act of aggression as a result of the media coverage.  Till the Israeli invasion in Palestine on March 28th, 2003, the students from the universities protested against the wars in California.  The White House declared the war and the war had threatened to the safety of every American citizen.  These six elements: the Political cause by the Congress, the Psychological Cause by the Congress, the Propaganda Cause by the Congress, the Media Control by the Congress, the Increasing Militant by the Congress, and the Increasing Investment on the UN, were the greatest enemy of the US security.  The US, as the greatest power in the world today, had the better choices to consul peace and to conduct trades without the using of military weapons, and with the helps from a restriction on these six elements I had listed above.