The moral of Omar Mateen is that there will be no early end to the disastrous “War on Terror”, which is painfully damaging our culture and causing us to waste hundreds of billions of dollars on a massive and useless military. These are the fruits of “hegemonisn” or “exceptionalism”, promoted so assiduously ever since the end of the Cold War. With the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the military-foreign policy-industrial-intellectual complex lost its reason for being and became an answer in search of a problem. Unfortunately, it found one in a compulsive involvement in Middle Eastern affairs, in significant part at the prompting of our “allies” Israel and Saudi Arabia, but in larger part, I would say, for the desire of something “glorious” to do. George H. W. Bush initiated the First Iraqi War to make manifest America’s power and glory, and not incidentally to win the next election. He failed, but to date no American president has been able to resist the “thrill” of combat.
Now it seems we are at the mercy of lone terrorists, who know that they can strike terror simply by dedicating their individual murders to ISIS. We can only hope that Donald Trump will not be strengthened by this.
