“You asked for miracles, I give you the F.B.I.” So said Hans Gruber, one of the greatest movie villains of all time, played to perfection by the late Alan Rickman. Gruber and his gang are thieves posing as terrorists and need to defeat an electromagnetic lock protecting hundreds of millions of dollars in securities. Although they are unable to do so themselves, Gruber tells his hacker, Theo, not to worry.

What does Gruber know that Theo does not? He knows the U.S. federal government and what local cop Al Johnson calls their “universal terrorist playbook.” The F.B.I. arrives on the scene of the supposed terrorist hostage situation and immediately orders a reluctant city employee to shut down power for ten square blocks of Los Angeles in order to cut off power to the target building. The worker complies and power to the building and the electromagnetic lock protecting the securities is cut off.

One can’t help but laugh as the criminals gleefully charge into the vault to the tune of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. But it is no laughing matter that this is a perfect metaphor for U.S. foreign policy in general, and Middle Eastern policy in particular.

In the mid-1990s, Osama bin Laden effectively said the same thing as Gruber. Knowing he could never invade or otherwise fight the United States in its own hemisphere, he said he intended instead to provoke the U.S. into invading the Middle East where it could be defeated in a war or attrition, just as he and his fellow Mujahideen had previously defeated the Soviets. That provocation came on September 11, 2001.

It is unclear if Bin Laden was actually involved in the attacks. But they were certainly carried out by likeminded people and Bin Laden had no problem with allowing Americans to assume he was the mastermind. The attacks did just what Bin Laden hoped they would do – get the U.S. to run the “universal terrorist playbook,” meaning going to war in the Middle East where its soldiers could be killed more easily, and its finances drained.

Twenty-three years later, the big, dumb U.S. empire hasn’t learned a thing. In those two decades, federal government debt has skyrocketed from less than $6 trillion to over $30 trillion. Interest on the debt alone is now over $1 trillion per year. And what have American taxpayers, present and future, received for this enormous expenditure? The Taliban has been replaced with the Taliban. Iraq now has a Shiite government that is allied closely with Iran – the same Iran whose “influence in the region” Washington constantly warns against. Libya now has the most vibrant slave trade in African history.

The real tragedy here is success or failure in any of these endeavors doesn’t affect the lives of people living in the United States one way or another. It’s just a giant rip off that funnels trillions to connected defense contractors while allowing lifelong bureaucrats in the Administrative and Deep States to continue in the delusion that they’re running the world when instead they’re running the U.S. into the ground.

“Big Johnson” from Die Hard exemplifies these would be masters of the universe perfectly. He displays the precise combination of unbridled arrogance and cluelessness as he condescends to the local rubes while being played like a fiddle by Gruber as do the Tony Blinkens and Victoria Nulands of real-world D.C. Every faction in the Middle East has played the empire for its own ends while the empire stumbles around the region like a drunk looking for a brawl. Both Israel and its regional enemies have done so, often simultaneously. So have Washington’s supposed Islamic allies. The empire sees itself as James Bond; in reality its more like Lenny from Of Mice and Men. Puppies and pretty girls beware.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?