The threat posed by US terrorism to the security of nations and
individuals was outlined in prophetic detail in a document written more
than two years ago and disclosed only recently. What was needed for
America to dominate much of humanity and the world’s resources, it said,
was “some catastrophic and catalysing event – like a new Pearl Harbor”.
The
attacks of 11 September 2001 provided the “new Pearl Harbor”, described
as “the opportunity of ages”. The extremists who have since exploited
11 September come from the era of Ronald Reagan, when far-right groups
and “think-tanks” were established to avenge the American “defeat” in
Vietnam. In the 1990s, there was an added agenda: to justify the denial
of a “peace dividend” following the cold war. The Project for the New
American Century was formed, along with the American Enterprise
Institute, the Hudson Institute and others that have since merged the
ambitions of the Reagan administration with those of the current Bush
regime.
One of George W Bush’s “thinkers” is Richard Perle. I
interviewed Perle when he was advising Reagan; and when he spoke about
“total war”, I mistakenly dismissed him as mad. He recently used the
term again in describing America’s “war on terror”. “No stages,” he
said. “This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There
are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do
Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq . . . this is entirely the wrong way
to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we
embrace it entirely and we don’t try to piece together clever diplomacy,
but just wage a total war . . . our children will sing great songs
about us years from now.”
Perle is one of the founders of the
Project for the New American Century, the PNAC. Other founders include
Dick Cheney, now vice-president, Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary,
Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defence secretary, I Lewis Libby, Cheney’s chief
of staff, William J Bennett, Reagan’s education secretary, and Zalmay
Khalilzad, Bush’s ambassador to Afghanistan. These are the modern
chartists of American terrorism.
The PNAC’s seminal report, Rebuilding America’s Defences: strategy, forces and resources for a new century,
was a blueprint of American aims in all but name. Two years ago it
recommended an increase in arms-spending by $48bn so that Washington
could “fight and win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars”. This
has happened. It said the United States should develop “bunker-buster”
nuclear weapons and make “star wars” a national priority. This is
happening. It said that, in the event of Bush taking power, Iraq should
be a target. And so it is.
As for Iraq’s alleged “weapons of mass
destruction”, these were dismissed, in so many words, as a convenient
excuse, which it is. “While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides
the immediate justification,” it says, “the need for a substantial
American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime
of Saddam Hussein.”
How has this grand strategy been implemented? A series of articles in the Washington Post,
co-authored by Bob Woodward of Watergate fame and based on long
interviews with senior members of the Bush administration, reveals how
11 September was manipulated.
On the morning of 12 September
2001, without any evidence of who the hijackers were, Rumsfeld demanded
that the US attack Iraq. According to Woodward, Rumsfeld told a cabinet
meeting that Iraq should be “a principal target of the first round in
the war against terrorism”. Iraq was temporarily spared only because
Colin Powell, the secretary of state, persuaded Bush that “public
opinion has to be prepared before a move against Iraq is possible”.
Afghanistan was chosen as the softer option. If Jonathan Steele’s
estimate in the Guardian is correct, some 20,000 people in Afghanistan paid the price of this debate with their lives.
Time and again, 11 September is described as an “opportunity”. In last April’s New Yorker,
the investigative reporter Nicholas Lemann wrote that Bush’s most
senior adviser, Condoleezza Rice, told him she had called together
senior members of the National Security Council and asked them “to think
about ‘how do you capitalise on these opportunities'”, which she
compared with those of “1945 to 1947”: the start of the cold war.
Since
11 September, America has established bases at the gateways to all the
major sources of fossil fuels, especially central Asia. The Unocal oil
company is to build a pipeline across Afghanistan. Bush has scrapped the
Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions, the war crimes provisions
of the International Criminal Court and the anti-ballistic missile
treaty. He has said he will use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear
states “if necessary”. Under cover of propaganda about Iraq’s alleged
weapons of mass destruction, the Bush regime is developing new weapons
of mass destruction that undermine international treaties on biological
and chemical warfare.
In the Los Angeles Times, the
military analyst William Arkin describes a secret army set up by Donald
Rumsfeld, similar to those run by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and
which Congress outlawed. This “super-intelligence support activity” will
bring together the “CIA and military covert action, information
warfare, and deception”. According to a classified document prepared for
Rumsfeld, the new organisation, known by its Orwellian moniker as the
Proactive Pre-emptive Operations Group, or P2OG, will provoke terrorist
attacks which would then require “counter-attack” by the United States
on countries “harbouring the terrorists”.
In other words,
innocent people will be killed by the United States. This is reminiscent
of Operation Northwoods, the plan put to President Kennedy by his
military chiefs for a phoney terrorist campaign – complete with
bombings, hijackings, plane crashes and dead Americans – as
justification for an invasion of Cuba. Kennedy rejected it. He was
assassinated a few months later. Now Rumsfeld has resurrected
Northwoods, but with resources undreamt of in 1963 and with no global
rival to invite caution.
You have to keep reminding yourself this
is not fantasy: that truly dangerous men, such as Perle and Rumsfeld
and Cheney, have power. The thread running through their ruminations is
the importance of the media: “the prioritised task of bringing on board
journalists of repute to accept our position”.
“Our position” is
code for lying. Certainly, as a journalist, I have never known official
lying to be more pervasive than today. We may laugh at the vacuities in
Tony Blair’s “Iraq dossier” and Jack Straw’s inept lie that Iraq has
developed a nuclear bomb (which his minions rushed to “explain”). But
the more insidious lies, justifying an unprovoked attack on Iraq and
linking it to would-be terrorists who are said to lurk in every Tube
station, are routinely channelled as news. They are not news; they are
black propaganda.
This corruption makes journalists and
broadcasters mere ventriloquists’ dummies. An attack on a nation of 22
million suffering people is discussed by liberal commentators as if it
were a subject at an academic seminar, at which pieces can be pushed
around a map, as the old imperialists used to do.
The issue for
these humanitarians is not primarily the brutality of modern imperial
domination, but how “bad” Saddam Hussein is. There is no admission that
their decision to join the war party further seals the fate of perhaps
thousands of innocent Iraqis condemned to wait on America’s
international death row. Their doublethink will not work. You cannot
support murderous piracy in the name of humanitarianism. Moreover, the
extremes of American fundamentalism that we now face have been staring
at us for too long for those of good heart and sense not to recognise
them.
With thanks to Norm Dixon and Chris Floyd
