President Trump, as usual, is missing the real lesson from the tragic shooting of two National Guardsmen in Washington. In light of what happened, Trump announced that the Pentagon (that’s still its official name) would call up 500 additional National Guard troops to Washington. The refugee program is also being reformed to prevent this from happening in the future. Just hours after the incident, the Trump administration announced it had stopped processing immigration applications from Afghanistan. The gunman, Rahmanulla Lakanwal, is an Afghan who was trained by the CIA to fight in one of the Taliban’s strongholds. Clearly, Lakanwal was acting in response to the collapse of large parts of the refugee program.
Trump’s move misses the real lesson. Throughout the 21st century, the United States has been at permanent war around the world. The American public doesn’t even know about many of them. We regularly bomb African countries. We are in a situation of permanent war in the Middle East. We are bombing the boat. In the process it tore apart fishermen on both sides of Latin America, with victims coming not only from Venezuela but also from Trinidad, Colombia, Mexico and Ecuador. Through this, we are creating Frankenstein at home and abroad. Lakanwal is one of them. All studies show that most terrorist acts in the United States are committed by right-wing people and groups, and a significant number of perpetrators serve in the military and are veterans. George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, is just one example of the chickens coming home to roost. Another is Timothy McVeigh, a Gulf War veteran and mastermind behind the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 167 people.
This is a debate we should be having, not a debate about retaliation from Trump and his MAGA minions. Unfortunately, we cannot expect the mainstream media, which is increasingly dominated and increasingly concentrated by the political right, to raise these issues.
