The post-9/11 US ‘war on terror’, according to a Brown University study, resulted in 4.5 million deaths. For the aggressor, both its ethical and human cost is reflected in the number of US servicemen dying by suicide this century—four times that of combat casualties. Costing $8 trillion, the war collapsed the institutions of target nations and left them vulnerable to violent, puratanical actors. 

The US—the world’s largest weapons dealer and oil producer—is aided in its doctrinal regime changes by its 750 foreign military bases. The ally hosting the most number of such bases, Japan, includes in its history the US dropping an atomic bomb on its civilian population and, after observing the generational devastation, doing it again three days later.

Japan has been a close US ally ever since. That all of West Asia is not a Japanese story ruffles the influential US neoconservative (or neocon) lobby, which charted the ‘war on terror’ five years before the twin tower attacks, in the 1996 Operation Clean Break report—a recommendation for Israel-US to remodel West Asia. 

Neoconservatism is essentially a geosupremacist stance aimed at increased defence spending. It works off the idea that US military-intelligence must exist in hyper activation and defines as American interest the use of force to dismantle any principle, system or individual that deviates from a hegemonic vision that sees American supremacy as natural law.

The existence of the disobedient, whether democratic or despotic, is in the neoconservative interest. Without enemies, it will cease to exist. A steady supply of enemies enable agitating for more military spending—money which can return to assist their politics and enrich their lives, once in the coffers of favour-trading defence corporations.

They excel at creating a continuum of security risks in strategic regions of the world—to funnel insecure states into the clienthood of these firms. Over fifty members of congress (some part of defence commitees) and their famillies own stock in these companies. Defence firms are some of the biggest political donors and backers of think tanks aimed at influencing policy. There is a clean path from taxpayer to government to defence firm and back to establishment politics that the neoconservatives are trained to shepherd billions of dollars through.

Some variant of neoconservatism has dominated US foreign policy since before popular usage of the word. Throughout the 80-year-old history of the postwar ‘rules-based order’, the US has, for natural resources or ideological supremacy, waged cowboy wars, coups and occupations on territories ranging from Chile to Ukraine to The Philippines.

America has consistently sought refuge from such indicting facts with a moral posturing inverse to its track record.

Its interventions have required tending to citizen psychology on an equal magnitude. The cycle of conflict, regime change, military expansion and occupation—through successive postwar governments—has left a trail of state propaganda so vast that presidential candidates clamour to swear greater fealty to it.

Political adversaries are routinely accused of violating country and flag if they are interpreted as dovish, compelling them to save their campaigns by projecting an equal jingoism. A permanent fixture of US elections is the ‘security guy’, who seeks to monger about their opponent’s weakness on the matter by predicting the doom of empire, with the result that a US election is necessarily a patriot war between two security guys.

This political culture, exemplified by the neoconservatives, tries to maintain a permanent alienation between US citizens and the catastrophic effects of their foreign policy.    

Prior to 9/11, America already had a history of deadly and expansionist forays across West Asia. In addition, it had absorbed regional actors into its structural print and rooted out the outliers, ensuring pliancy and obscuring anti-American narratives. Channeling American exceptionalism and then a brute avoidance of culpability proved disastrous: institutionally erasing the discourse merely allowed it to be revived and repackaged in the hands of terrorists.      

Neoconservative leader and then president George W. Bush, giving reasons for the 9/11 attacks, did not speculate about any of that, instead deploying audacious propaganda effective to this day: ‘They hate our freedoms.’ America, according to Bush, reflected everything that conservative foreign societies and their extremists hate––to where they, at risk of an annihilating US response, will attack for that reason alone. This propaganda, deployed at the top level, assumed many forms once it percolated to the ground. 

As recently as during the Israeli and US attacks on Iran—22 years later—mutated variants of Bush’s propaganda find space in popular US programming. Iranian public realities are contrasted with lionised American ideals: the freedom to not wear a headscarf, the freedom to wear skirts, the freedom of speech, pursuit of individual liberties including those related to sexual preference and gender. The narrative is that Muslim hardliners with nuclear ambitions have evil designs on the US because they cannot bear to witness the unfolding of an advanced society.

Bush’s messaging has endured for decades, harnessed to provide, in 2025, motivations to attack Iran. The set of shifting reasons offered for the attack include the idea that Iran naturally hates everything the US stands for. It stresses the Islamic government’s internal—apparently ideologically intolerable—repressions and unpopularity.

To use neoconservative language, to ‘take out’ a government over alleged unpopularity is insincere when coming from the US, where roughly 70 million people have voted for the defeated candidate in each of the last three elections.  

As seen with Iran, the allegation of hating American freedoms serves aggression as well—providing not just as an explanation for the US suffering aggression, but also a reason to carry it out without provocation.

However, there is a workaround. Bush’s messaging needs a single adjustment to become truthful. To replace the domestic freedoms he referred to with the geopolitical freedoms the US enjoys in reality would make his statement legitimate.

Within international law mandated by the UN charter, of which the US has positioned itself as the muscle and guarantor, American and Israeli military forays—brief, extended or permanent—are in innumerable instances illegal. The true and ‘blowback’-causing American freedoms are technically criminal freedoms. The freedom to hang presidents rests with the US alone. The freedom to violently abolish foreign political cultures, often against the will of its own allies and to visible commercial benefit, is the deadly exceptionalism the US practices in reality.

Regional populations overwhelmingly hate these freedoms. If mass casualties and engineered coups are exempted from institutional repercussions, those facts will not perish but instead find accommodation in sectarian actors. Some of these actors have sprung directly from American prisons in Iraq, where Bush’s intervention caused a million deaths over a lie.       

The root of current US-Iran tensions lies in Operation Ajax, the 1953 CIA overthrow of Iran’s democratically-elected president Mohammad Mosaddegh, followed by the installation of a monarchical police state. Done at the behest of BP, then known as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, it was aimed at the removal of Mosaddegh’s oil reforms. In other words, tensions began with, as always and without exception, the American freedom to tamper with nations.

These freedoms should now curtail. The neoconservative doctrine has proved disastrous. However, the recent 30,000 pound bombing of a nuclear facility proves that it is still influential. If American adventurism is to be relegated to a berserker past, the neoconservative lobby needs an immediate counterweight.

But not just the lobby, which is merely a supercharged form of a wider, bipartisan military-industrial complex. In 1961, during his last televised speech as US president, Dwight D. Eisenhower issued a public warning about this complex: ‘We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex system.’

He did not mention a section of any party because the complex consists of both parties and their attached firms. An election-proof ‘system’ which wages war and unrest, reconfigures unfamiliar societies, and, because wealth creation is the heart of the matter, keeps a deadly eye on what other countries have under the ground.

Nothing illustrates Eisenhower’s warning about exactly how dangerous and influential that system is than the fact that he embodied it; the plan to erase Mosaddegh was formulated and executed by the Eisenhower administration.

For centuries, domestic US propaganda has invoked the idea that some natural and geopolitical rights are unique to Americans. From ‘Manifest Destiny‘ to ‘leader of the free world‘, supremacist notions have pervaded US society to where a political class genuinely claims foreign societies should celebrate a globally invasive commercial watchdog. They see this as consistent with American rights, which are special, absolute and exceptional.

Indeed, for the military-industrial complex, supremacy is tied to the health of the nation, as demonstrated by an article written by Erik Prince, founder of private military company Blackwater, where he laments, ‘How did America go from winning the Cold War and becoming the sole global superpower in the 1990s to the state of disarray that we find ourselves in now?’

The true picture of disarray is reflected in the fact that Prince is actually a passionate opponent of neoconservatism. His article was aimed at lambasting them—for being too soft and not letting US private security hounds loose all over the world.

These supremacist leanings may linger longer, but their worst consequences can be mitigated now. The US is positioned closer than ever for at least a soft reorientation. The trope of the security guy in presidential politics has never been less popular. Large sections of the voting public are contrasting the spending on structural issues at home with the mammoth spending on foreign conflicts. This has turned the idea of winding down the interventionist mindset into an effective campaign promise.

The alienation between the US public and its foreign policy is rapidly shrinking. The war in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza—especially its tax-borne material cost—has brought about a sharper opposition to war. The time is ripe for breakaway democrats to give political expression to this change and begin to form a true, electoral-minded counterweight to the hawks.

No ads. No paywalls. No corporate control.
Just free articles for serious readers.
Support the fight against hegemony & oligarchy: