\n<\/p>\n
The year 2025 has come to an end, and along with it, the first quarter of the 21st century. Reflecting on the course of the past 25 years, it is hard to understate the extent to which global events have been shaped by the military excesses of the United States \u2013 not that the same cannot be said for the 20th century, too.<\/p>\n
Shortly after the new century kicked off, the US launched the so-called \u201cglobal war on terror\u201d under the enlightened guidance of President George W Bush, who offered the professional call to arms following the 9\/11 attacks of 2001: \u201cWe have our marching orders. My fellow Americans, let\u2019s roll.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to Bush, the US had undertaken to \u201cwage a war to save civilisation itself\u201d, which ultimately entailed pulverising various parts of the world and killing millions of people.<\/p>\n
On September 11, 2001, I was enrolled as a junior at Columbia University in New York City, the site of the World Trade Center attacks. However, as I was scheduled to study in Italy that fall, I was not in New York at the time but rather in Austin, Texas, where my family then resided.<\/p>\n
I spent the day at the office where I had been employed for the summer, watching apocalyptic replays of the incoming planes on a large projector screen set up by my colleagues specifically for that purpose.<\/p>\n
Outside, American flags began to proliferate across every available surface, as the country went about appointing itself the number one victim of terrorism in the history of the world \u2013 and never mind the quite literal terror the US had been inflicting on other nations for decades, from Vietnam and Laos to Nicaragua and Panama.<\/p>\n
That evening, I visited my boyfriend, whose three housemates were morosely gorging themselves on the living room floor amid copious buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken, which, they explained to me, was \u201ccomfort food\u201d meant to help assuage the pain of national tragedy.<\/p>\n
Suffice it to say that, for the countless civilians soon to be on the receiving end of US bombs, massive fast-food takeaway orders generally were not an available antidote.<\/p>\n
From Austin I flew to Rome via New York, where I watched on Italian television as my country went about \u201csaving civilisation itself\u201d by bombing the daylights out of Afghanistan. This exercise in mass slaughter paved the way for the Iraq War in 2003, a nation already well acquainted with the phenomenon; by 1996, it was estimated that half a million Iraqi children had perished on account of US sanctions.<\/p>\n
In a rare and presumably unintended moment of lucidity, Bush would remark: \u201cYou know, one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror.\u201d<\/p>\n
And while commander-in-chief Bush may have ultimately been better known for his grammatical incompetence than for his ability to strike existential fear into the hearts of Americans, he was flanked by other, more formidable creatures such as the recently departed Dick Cheney \u2013 aka \u201cthe Darth Vader of the administration\u201d and Bush\u2019s vice president \u2013 who were far more serious about manufacturing threats to justify war forevermore.<\/p>\n
Bush was succeeded as leader of the global superpower by premature Nobel Peace Prize recipient Barack Obama, who, in his final year in office alone, managed to drop no fewer than 26,172 bombs<\/a> on seven different countries.<\/p>\n