[Susan Breeding]

For a hegemonic empire like America, identifying a threat can be a tricky business, particularly when it comes in the form of a somewhat amorphous terror group instead of an easily defined country with simple boundaries. For the Bush administration it was simply a matter of substituting the country of Iraq for bin Laden's Saudi Arabia, and then making Iraq a target for regime change and the institution of wonderful ideals like liberty and democracy. It was Saddam and his evil forces who had to be destroyed on the pretext that they had weapons of mass destruction, that the country served as a breeding ground for terrorists and might be a threat to us in the future. Iraq as a substitute for Saudi Arabia must be attacked; Saddam as a substitute for bin Laden must be destroyed.

This recalls to some degree the similar philosophy of the burgeoning Roman Republic and those haunting words of Cato the Elder, who would end every speech with a version of Carthago delenda est (Carthage must be destroyed). Then, it being one of those first recorded best and worst of times, with a red-hearted army ready to make history for Rome in the best way and for Carthage in the worst of all possible ways, the Roman general Scipio Aemelianus took his troops and made it so. Indeed, the Punic Wars of Rome seem to have served as a kind of harbinger for what Bush and the USA adopted as a primary tactical philosophy of pre-emption, since Carthage actually posed no threat to Rome just as Iraq posed no threat to the USA after the al-Qaeda attacks. Now ancient and recent history resonate once more as some of our more stiffbacked warmongers have been calling for Daesh to be destroyed. Daesh delenda est. And then, once it is dealt with, supposedly scorched earth and all, they might also start thinking like Scipio and want to salt the battlefield (in some modern form) for good measure.

I suppose I can be called to task for comparing Carthage to a relatively amorphous terror group, especially since Carthage was actually destroyed and Iraq -- as a substitute for al-Qaeda and Wahabbist Saudi Arabia – was irreparably damaged but not destroyed in the same scorched earth/salted battlefield sense, with the result that al-Qaeda or some branch of it transmogrified or morphed into Daesh. In a more direct sense, perhaps, Gaza might be seen as a closer correlative to Carthage, an indirectly cautionary exemplum for the USA as an ally of Israel. But, more cautionary for the USA and Europe is using the pretense of imminent threat as an excuse for attacking countries who pose no actual threat or for bombing regions where terrorists are located, when the actual problem is more of a question of economic hegemony and mercenary profiteering, a matter of cynical cui bono and never one of preserving and protecting the higher aims of liberty, equality, or democracy.

However, now that Daesh has proven to be more of an actual threat to Europe, the parallel with Rome is more apt than ever, although the idea of destroying an amorphous terrorist group that hides itself among various civilian populations seems rather irrational. Daesh must be destroyed; but the question is, where is it? And what will have to be destroyed in order to root it out? The entire Levant? The entire Middle East? Then what? All Muslims living in western countries? It gets to be a reductio ad absurdum of really sinister proportions.

Rome also exhibited too much arrogance, to the point of hubris, as over time it became an empire gradually declining, with each reign becoming more and more willful, eccentric, and decadent... until at last, Rome fell. Can we say that the warmongers, the profiteers, and western leaders are now also arrogant and willful because there are no real checks and balances to keep them in line?

I am also reminded of Nietzsche's cautionary words to this effect: beware of fighting monsters lest you become one. Sometimes I think we came out of the war with Nazi Germany and somehow turned into a neofascist monster state as a result of that engagement. Now it looks as though it has turned into a never-ending cycle, like morphed shades of a rather grotesque eternal recurrence of empire, crusade, torture, terrorism, and scorched-earth warfare against peoples living in countries we wish to exploit.

Enough.