http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/money-trail-links-the-war-on-terrorism-to-the-global-financial-crisis-20100829-13xjr.htmlThere has been much comment on the links between Osama bin Laden and the GFC (I was tickled to hear that the GFC acronym for the Global Financial Crisis is an Australian invention). Osama has been the driving force behind international Islamic terrorism, and aside from his primary focus on Saudi Arabia, he has had a fierce secondary target of Western Capitalism.
So comes the GFC, and we begin to see the connections between the 'War on Terror' and the teetering bankruptcy of Western Capitalist Nations.
This article above, by Loretta Napoleoni, is about a book on the subject she has written.
I feel she has established a valid thesis, with some bits I was not aware of. However I would have to reserve my view on the causes of the GFC. There are many causes that have nothing to do with terrorism. And those causes are significant.
However, she does draw a cogent argument of how the Twin Towers and American Outrage manipulation fed directly to the GFC.
The part I was not so aware of, and she does not outline completely in this article, is how to finance the post 11/9 War on Terror, interest rates had to be held down. I think everyone now knows of the calamitous consequences of low interest rates that produced the Sub-Prime Mortgage bubble, but most commentators point to the Dot-com and other economic crises for that.
So the War of Terror was another factor in creating the ground for the Sub-Prime blowout. You could argue it is all connected, and that is fair enough, but currently, it appears to me that GW Bush just put the icing on the cake through his government's absolute incompetence ... and the rest is history.
Now Obama is trying to salvage the situation. But again it currently appears to me that he doesn't have the power to turn around the ship of state, the ship of other states, the US and world economic magnates, nor the embedded attitudes that have been fostered by years of dedicated influence by Right-wing manipulators. So he tries to walk both sides, and neither work.
But this book outlines one fact, that the attack on the Twin Towers has had a devastating impact on the power of all Western Democracies and Russia. It has marked the turning point - Asian and South American economies are now rising, and a huge power shift is upon us. But not the attack itself - it is the response that has really done the damage. And it's not over yet.
Nonetheless, this theses sidelines the real underlying cause of the 'demise of the West'. It has been a psychological issue that has caused the problem, and it appears too few commentators are effective in addressing this. Western Civilisation is sick. Islamic Civilisation doesn't have the answer. A new cultural paradigm is required, but I don't see it. The very basis of it's acknowledgement has been destroyed.
We have become severed from an intuitive knowledge of why we exist and how we should exist. We are a species isolated.