Americans who want to protect themselves from the possibility of Islamist terrorist attack would do well to learn a thing or two about the history of “their” country’s foreign policy in the Muslim world and then act to change that policy so that it poses less of a risk to Muslims abroad and U.S. citizens both at home and overseas. A recent news item in the Los Angeles Times reports that U.S. counterterrorism experts are newly concerned about a deadly terrorist attack on a clogged U.S. highway in the wake of the recent San Bernardino shootings. According to Los Angeles Times reporter Richard Winton:

“There are few places where Southern Californians feel more trapped than on a freeway in gridlocked traffic….One of the San Bernardino shooters and his longtime friend talked about taking advantage of this vulnerability by launching a terrorist attack on a clogged freeway using guns and pipe bombs, according to court records released last week. Syed Rizwan Farook and Enrique Marquez Jr. mapped out the attack plan of the 91 Freeway in detail and collected weapons and explosives in 2011 and 2012, only to abort the plot, the charges say.”

“Still, their outlandish alleged scheme has counterterrorism experts…alarmed …Officials said they had never uncovered an alleged terrorist plot involving freeways until now. But Los Angeles Police Department Deputy Chief Michael Downing, who oversees the counterterrorism bureau, said it’s a scenario officials have discussed and tried to address with a response plan. ‘It is “a nightmare that we worry about,’ Downing said.”

“The complaint does not specify the exact location but said the area lacked exits, which the pair believed would increase the number of targets. Marquez admitted to authorities that he would set up a position in the hills south of the freeway as Farook would throw pipe bombs into the eastbound lanes to stop traffic, the court papers said. Farook would then move among the stopped vehicles, shooting motorists.” (R. Winton, “A Freeway Terror Attack is “the Nightmare We Worry About,’ Law Enforcers Say,” Los Angeles Times, December 21, 2015. Special thanks to Iowa City photojournalist Atom Burke for altering me to this news item.)

A nightmare scenario of mass slaughter on a clogged highway? Who could imagine such a terrible thing? The U.S. military did more than imagine it in late February of 1991. It carried such a slaughter out” with weapons of mass destruction and a body count far beyond anything Farook and Marquez could ever have dreamed of attaining. I am referring to the hideous carnage wreaked by the U.S. military on Iraq’s notorious “Highway of Death,” where U.S. forces massacred tens of thousands of surrendered Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait on February 26 and 27, 1991. The Lebanese-American journalist Joyce Chediac testified that:

“U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours. ‘It was like shooting fish in a barrel,’ said one U.S. pilot. On …miles of coastal highway, Iraqi military units sit in gruesome repose, scorched skeletons of vehicles and men alike, black and awful under the sun…U.S. forces continued to drop bombs on the convoys until all humans were killed. So many jets swarmed over the inland road that it created an aerial traffic jam, and combat air controllers feared midair collisions…. The victims were not offering resistance…it was simply a one-sided massacre of tens of thousands of people who had no ability to fight back or defend.”

According to Wikipedia’s richly sourced account:

“The 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing’s A-6 Intruder aircraft blocked Highway 80, bombarding a massive vehicle column of mostly Iraqi Regular Army forces with Mk-20 Rockeye II cluster bombs, effectively boxing in the Iraqi forces in an enormous traffic jam of sitting targets for subsequent airstrikes. Over the next 10 hours, scores of U.S. Marine and U.S. Air Force aircraft and U.S. Navy pilots from USS Ranger (CV/CVA-61) attacked the convoy using a variety of ordnance. Vehicles surviving the air attacks were later engaged by arriving coalition ground units, while most of the vehicles that managed to evade the traffic jam and continued to drive on the road north were targeted individually. The road bottle-neck near the Mutla Ridge police station was reduced to a long uninterrupted line of more than 300 stuck and abandoned vehicles sometimes called the Mile of Death. .. journalist Robert Fisk …‘lost count of the Iraqi corpses crammed into the smoldering wreckage or slumped face down in the sand’ at the main site and [saw] hundreds of corpses strewn up the road all the way to the Iraqi border….Some independent estimates go as high as 10,000 or more casualties (even ‘tens of thousands’).”

Of course, Uncle Sam was only getting warmed up building its Iraqi and Muslim Body Counts in early 1991. Washington had yet to enforce the economic sanctions that killed at least a million Iraqis or to undertake the 2003 invasion that killed more than a million more and devastated Iraq beyond repair. It had yet to ravage the Iraqi city of Fallujah, as it did in 2004, using (among other things) radioactive ordnance that produced an epidemic of child leukemia there. It had yet to launch Barack Obama’s massive drone war across the Muslim world, recently described by Noam Chomsky as “the most extensive global terrorism campaign the world has yet seen.” It had yet to kill thousands upon thousands of innocent villagers and farmers in Afghanistan. It had not yet targeted a Doctors Without Borders hospital for repeated lethal bombing or undertaken the systematic torture and rape of Iraqi and other Muslims, including children, in places like Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and Bagram Air Force base.

What percentage of Americans could identify the actual Highway of Death – when U.S. terrorists with some of the greatest weapons of mass imperial destruction in history massacred thousands of defenseless recruits with frenzied impunity – in a pop quiz on American or world history? My guess is less than 1%, thanks to the highly effective propaganda function of “their” nation’s corporate media and “educational” systems. Those systems are doctrinally wedded to the “American exceptionalist” notion that Uncle Sam is an inherently noble and restrained power in the world.

“Our security,” Obama said during his first Inaugural Address, “emanates from the…tempering qualities of humility and restraint.” No responsible “mainstream” U.S. commentators dared to question the Orwellian language of the new president’s speech. Uncle Sam can do no evil in the eyes of properly indoctrinated and/or fearful U.S. media and educational “elites” (coordinators and operatives).

The same deafening media silence was heard when George H.W. Bush said the following less than a year after his airborne armed forces turned vast stretches of a purposely blocked Middle Eastern highway into an epic monument of one-sided imperial criminality: “A world once divided into two armed camps now recognizes one sole and pre-eminent power, the United States of America. And they regard this with no dread. For the world trusts us with power, and the world is right. They trust us to be fair and restrained. They trust us to be on the side of decency.”

The “American exceptionalist” whitewash remains in full force inside the U.S. today, rendering ongoing U.S. global terrorism all but completely invisible in the reigning national media and politics culture. U.S.-of-American citizens who want to understand “why they hate us” and where Islamist terrorism comes from are left to educate themselves on the reality of U.S. foreign policy past and present. Here are some useful and mostly readable books on U.S imperial policies within and beyond the Muslim world – volumes to consider purchasing with those Barnes & Noble gift cards so many Americans get for Christmas every year:

William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (Common Courage, 2005)

William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (Common Courage, 2008)

Noam Chomsky, The Chomsky Trilogy: The Prosperous Few/ Secrets, Lies/What Uncle Sam Really Wants (Odonian 1995)

Noam Chomsky, 9-11 (Seven Stories, 2011)

Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (Hill&Wang, 1992, Chomsky’s classic volume on 20th century U.S. imperialism up to and including the Persian Gulf War.)

Nick Turse, The Changing Face of Empire (Haymarket, 2012)

Nick Turse, Tomorrow’s Battlefield: US Proxy Wars and Secret Wars in Africa (Haymarket, 2015)

Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield (Nation Books, 2014)

Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (numerous editions).

Paul Street’s latest book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014).