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The re-declared War on Terror
Amnesty International Annual
Lecture hosted
by TCD, delivered by Noam Chomsky at Shelbourne Hall, the Royal Dublin
Society, January 18, 2006.
By Noam Chomsky
"Terror" is a term that rightly
arouses strong
emotions and deep concerns. The primary concern should, naturally, be
to take measures to alleviate the threat, which has been severe in the
past, and will be even more so in the future. To proceed in a serious
way, we have to establish some guidelines. Here are a few simple ones:
(1) Facts matter, even if we
do not like them.
(2) Elementary moral
principles matter, even if they have consequences that we would prefer
not to face.
(3) Relative clarity matters.
It is pointless
to seek a truly precise definition of "terror," or of any other concept
outside of the hard sciences and mathematics, often even there. But we
should seek enough clarity at least to distinguish terror from two
notions that lie uneasily at its borders: aggression and legitimate
resistance.
If we accept these guidelines,
there are quite
constructive ways to deal with the problems of terrorism, which are
quite severe. It's commonly claimed that critics of ongoing policies do
not present solutions. Check the record, and I think you will find that
there is an accurate translation for that charge: "They present
solutions, but I don't like them."
Suppose, then, that we accept
these simple
guidelines. Let's turn to the "War on Terror." Since facts matter, it
matters that the War was not declared by George W. Bush on 9/11, but by
the Reagan administration 20 years earlier.
They came into office declaring
that their
foreign policy would confront what the President called "the evil
scourge of terrorism," a plague spread by "depraved opponents of
civilization itself" in "a return to barbarism in the modern age"
(Secretary of State George Shultz). The campaign was directed to a
particularly virulent form of the plague: state-directed international
terrorism. The main focus was Central America and the Middle East, but
it reached to southern Africa and Southeast Asia and beyond.
A
second fact is that the war was declared and implemented by pretty much
the same people who are conducting the re-declared war on terrorism.
The civilian component of the re-declared War on Terror is led by John
Negroponte, appointed last year to supervise all counterterror
operations. As Ambassador in Honduras, he was the hands-on director of
the major operation of the first War on Terror, the contra war against
Nicaragua launched mainly from US bases in Honduras. I'll return to
some of his tasks. The military component of the re-declared War led by
Donald Rumsfeld. During the first phase of the War on Terror, Rumsfeld
was Reagan's special representative to the Middle East. There, his main
task was to establish close relations with Saddam Hussein so that the
US could provide him with large-scale aid, including means to develop
WMD, continuing long after the huge atrocities against the Kurds and
the end of the war with Iran. The official purpose, not concealed, was
Washington's responsibility to aid American exporters and "the
strikingly unanimous view" of Washington and its allies Britain and
Saudi Arabia that "whatever the sins of the Iraqi leader, he offered
the West and the region a better hope for his country's stability than
did those who have suffered his repression" -- New York Times Middle
East correspondent Alan Cowell, describing Washington's judgment as
George Bush I authorized Saddam to crush the Shi'ite rebellion in 1991,
which probably would have overthrown the tyrant.
Saddam is at
last on trial for his crimes. The first trial, now underway, is for
crimes he committed in 1982. 1982 happens to be an important year in
US-Iraq relations. It was in 1982 that Reagan removed Iraq from the
list of states supporting terror so that aid could flow to his friend
in Baghdad. Rumsfeld then visited Baghdad to confirm the arrangements.
Judging by reports and commentary, it would be impolite to mention any
of these facts, let alone to suggest that some others might be standing
alongside Saddam before the bar of justice. Removing Saddam from the
list of states supporting terrorism left a gap. It was at once filled
by Cuba, perhaps in recognition of the fact that the US terrorist wars
against Cuba from 1961 had just peaked, including events that would be
on the front pages right now in societies that valued their freedom, to
which I'll briefly return. Again, that tells us something about the
real elite attitudes towards the plague of the modern age.
Since
the first War on Terror was waged by those now carrying out the
redeclared war, or their immediate mentors, it follows that anyone
seriously interested in the re-declared War on Terror should ask at
once how it was carried out in the 1980s. The topic, however, is under
a virtual ban. That becomes understandable as soon as we investigate
the facts: the first War on Terror quickly became a murderous and
brutal terrorist war, in every corner of the world where it reached,
leaving traumatized societies
that may never recover. What
happened is
hardly obscure, but doctrinally unacceptable, therefore protected from
inspection. Unearthing the record is an enlightening exercise, with
enormous implications for the future.
These are a few of the
relevant facts, and they definitely do matter. Let's turn to the second
of the guidelines: elementary moral principles. The most elementary is
a virtual truism: decent people apply to themselves the same standards
that they apply to others, if not more stringent ones. Adherence to
this principle of universality would have many useful consequences. For
one thing, it would save a lot of trees. The principle would radically
reduce published reporting and commentary on social and political
affairs. It would virtually eliminate the newly fashionable discipline
of Just War theory. And it would wipe the slate almost clean with
regard to the War on Terror. The reason is the same in all cases: the
principle of universality is rejected, for the most part tacitly,
though sometimes explicitly. Those are very sweeping statements. I
purposely put them in a stark form to invite you to challenge them, and
I hope you do. You will find, I think, that although the statements are
somewhat overdrawn--purposely -- they nevertheless are uncomfortably
close to accurate, and in fact very fully documented. But try for
yourselves and see.
This most elementary of moral truisms is
sometimes upheld at least in words. One example, of critical importance
today, is the Nuremberg Tribunal. In sentencing Nazi war criminals to
death, Justice Robert Jackson, Chief of Counsel for the United States,
spoke eloquently, and memorably, on the principle of universality. "If
certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes," he said, "they are
crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does
them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct
against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against
us....We must never forget that the record on which we judge these
defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To
pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips
as well."
That is a clear and honorable statement of the
principle of universality. But the judgment at Nuremberg itself
crucially violated this principle. The Tribunal had to define "war
crime" and "crimes against humanity." It crafted these definition very
carefully so that crimes are criminal only if they were not committed
by the allies. Urban bombing of civilian concentrations was excluded,
because the allies carried it out more barbarically than the Nazis. And
Nazi war criminals, like Admiral Doenitz, were able to plead
successfully that their British and US counterparts had carried out the
same practices. The reasoning was outlined by Telford Taylor, a
distinguished international lawyer who was Jackson's Chief Counsel for
War Crimes. He explained that "to punish the foe--especially the
vanquished foe--for conduct in which the enforcing nation has engaged,
would be so grossly inequitable as to discredit the laws themselves."
That is correct, but the operative definition of "crime" also
discredits the laws themselves. Subsequent Tribunals are discredited by
the same moral flaw, but the self-exemption of the powerful from
international law and elementary moral principle goes far beyond this
illustration, and reaches to just about every aspect of the two phases
of the War on Terror.
Let's turn to the third background issue:
defining "terror" and distinguishing it from aggression and legitimate
resistance. I have been writing about terror for 25 years, ever since
the Reagan administration declared its War on Terror. I've been using
definitions that seem to be doubly appropriate: first, they make sense;
and second, they are the official definitions of those waging the war.
To take one of these official definitions, terrorism is "the calculated
use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are
political, religious, or ideological in nature...through intimidation,
coercion, or instilling fear," typically targeting civilians. The
British government's definition is about the same: "Terrorism is the
use, or threat, of action which is violent, damaging or disrupting, and
is intended to influence the government or intimidate the public and is
for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, or ideological
cause." These definitions seem fairly clear and close to ordinary
usage. There also seems to be general agreement that they are
appropriate when discussing the terrorism of enemies.
But a
problem at once arises. These definitions yield an entirely
unacceptable consequence: it follows that the US is a leading terrorist
state, dramatically so during the Reaganite war on terror. Merely to
take the most uncontroversial case, Reagan's state-directed terrorist
war against Nicaragua was condemned by the World Court, backed by two
Security Council resolutions (vetoed by the US, with Britain politely
abstaining). Another completely clear case is Cuba, where the record by
now is voluminous, and not controversial. And there is a long list
beyond them.
We may ask, however, whether such crimes as the
state-directed attack against Nicaragua are really terrorism, or
whether they rise to the level of the much higher crime of aggression.
The concept of aggression was defined clearly enough by Justice Jackson
at Nuremberg in terms that were basically reiterated in an
authoritative General Assembly resolution. An "aggressor," Jackson
proposed to the Tribunal, is a state that is the first to commit such
actions as "Invasion of its armed forces, with or without a declaration
of war, of the territory of another State," or "Provision of support to
armed bands formed in the territory of another State, or refusal,
notwithstanding the request of the invaded State, to take in its own
territory, all the measures in its power to deprive those bands of all
assistance or protection." The first provision unambiguously applies to
the US-UK invasion of Iraq. The second, just as clearly, applies to the
US war against Nicaragua. However, we might give the current incumbents
in Washington and their mentors the benefit of the doubt, considering
them guilty only of the lesser crime of international terrorism, on a
huge and unprecedented scale.
It may also be recalled the
aggression was defined at Nuremberg as "the supreme international crime
differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself
the accumulated evil of the whole"--all the evil in the tortured land
of Iraq that flowed from the US-UK invasion, for example, and in
Nicaragua too, if the charge is not reduced to international terrorism.
And in Lebanon, and all too many other victims who are easily dismissed
on grounds of wrong agency--right to the present. A week ago (January
13), a CIA predator drone attacked a village in Pakistan, murdering
dozens of civilians, entire families, who just happened to live in a
suspected al-Qaeda hideout. Such routine actions elicit little notice,
a legacy of the poisoning of the moral culture by centuries of imperial
thuggery.
The World Court did not take up the charge of
aggression in the Nicaragua case. The reasons are instructive, and of
quite considerable contemporary relevance. Nicaragua's case was
presented by the distinguished Harvard University law professor Abram
Chayes, former legal adviser to the State Department. The Court
rejected a large part of his case on the grounds that in accepting
World Court jurisdiction in 1946, the US had entered a reservation
excluding itself from prosecution under multilateral treaties,
including the UN Charter. The Court therefore restricted its
deliberations to customary international law and a bilateral
US-Nicaragua treaty, so that the more serious charges were excluded.
Even on these very narrow grounds, the Court charged Washington with
"unlawful use of force"--in lay language, international terrorism--and
ordered it to terminate the crimes and pay substantial reparations. The
Reaganites reacted by escalating the war, also officially endorsing
attacks by their terrorist forces against "soft targets," undefended
civilian targets. The terrorist war left the country in ruins, with a
death toll equivalent to 2.25 million in US per capita terms, more than
the total of all wartime casualties in US history combined. After the
shattered country fell back under US control, it declined to further
misery. It is now the second poorest country in Latin America after
Haiti--and by accident, also second after Haiti in intensity of US
intervention in the past century. The standard way to lament these
tragedies is to say that Haiti and Nicaragua are "battered by storms of
their own making," to quote the Boston Globe, at the liberal
extreme of American journalism. Guatemala ranks third both in misery
and intervention, more storms of their own making.
In the
Western canon, none of this exists. All is excluded not only from
general history and commentary, but also quite tellingly from the huge
literature on the War on Terror re-declared in 2001, though its
relevance can hardly be in doubt.
These considerations have to
do with the boundary between terror and aggression. What about the
boundary between terror and resistance? One question that arises is the
legitimacy of actions to realize "the right to self-determination,
freedom, and independence, as derived from the Charter of the United
Nations, of people forcibly deprived of that right..., particularly
peoples under colonial and racist regimes and foreign occupation..." Do
such actions fall under terror or resistance? The quoted word are from
the most forceful denunciation of the crime of terrorism by the UN
General Assembly; in December 1987, taken up under Reaganite pressure.
Hence it is obviously an important resolution, even more so because of
the near-unanimity of support for it. The resolution passed 153-2
(Honduras alone abstaining). It stated that "nothing in the present
resolution could in any way prejudice the right to self-determination,
freedom, and independence," as characterized in the quoted words.
The
two countries that voted against the resolution explained their reasons
at the UN session. They were based on the paragraph just quoted. The
phrase "colonial and racist regimes" was understood to refer to their
ally apartheid South Africa, then consummating its massacres in the
neighboring countries and continuing its brutal repression within.
Evidently, the US and Israel could not condone resistance to the
apartheid regime, particularly when it was led by Nelson Mandela's ANC,
one of the world's "more notorious terrorist groups," as Washington
determined at the same time. Granting legitimacy to resistance against
"foreign occupation" was also unacceptable. The phrase was understood
to refer to Israel's US-backed military occupation, then in its 20 th
year. Evidently, resistance to that occupation could not be condoned
either, even though at the time of the resolution it scarcely existed:
despite extensive torture, degradation, brutality, robbery of land and
resources, and other familiar concomitants of military occupation,
Palestinians under occupation still remained "Samidin," those who
quietly endured.
Technically, there are no vetoes at the General
Assembly. In the real world, a negative US vote is a veto, in fact a
double veto: the resolution is not implemented, and is vetoed from
reporting and history. It should be added that the voting pattern is
quite common at the General Assembly, and also at the Security Council,
on a wide range of issues. Ever since the mid-1960s, when the world
fell pretty much out of control, the US is far in the lead in Security
Council vetoes, Britain second, with no one else even close. It is also
of some interest to note that a majority of the American public favors
abandonment of the veto, and following the will of the majority even if
Washington disapproves, facts virtually unknown in the US, or I suppose
elsewhere. That suggests another conservative way to deal with some of
the problems of the world: pay attention to public opinion.
Terrorism
directed or supported by the most powerful states continues to the
present, often in shocking ways. These facts offer one useful
suggestion as to how to mitigate the plague spread by "depraved
opponents of civilization itself" in "a return to barbarism in the
modern age": Stop participating in terror and supporting it. That would
certainly contribute to the proclaimed objections. But that suggestion
too is off the agenda, for the usual reasons. When it is occasionally
voiced, the reaction is reflexive: a tantrum about how those who make
this rather conservative proposal are blaming everything on the US.
Even
with careful sanitization of discussion, dilemmas constantly arise. One
just arose very recently, when Luis Posada Carriles entered the US
illegally. Even by the narrow operative definition of "terror," he is
clearly one of the most notorious international terrorists, from the
1960s to the present. Venezuela requested that he be extradited to face
charges for the bombing of a Cubana airliner in Venezuela, killing 73
people. The charges are admittedly credible, but there is a real
difficulty. After Posada miraculously escaped from a Venezuelan prison,
the liberal Boston Globe reports, he "was hired by US covert
operatives to direct the resupply operation for the Nicaraguan contras
from El Salvador"--that is, to play a prominent role in terrorist
atrocities that are incomparably worse than blowing up the Cubana
airliner. Hence the dilemma. To quote the press: "Extraditing him for
trial could send a worrisome signal to covert foreign agents that they
cannot count on unconditional protection from the US government, and it
could expose the CIA to embarrassing public disclosures from a former
operative." Evidently, a difficult problem.
The Posada dilemma
was, thankfully, resolved by the courts, which rejected Venezuela's
appeal for his extradition, in violation of the US-Venezuela
extradition treaty. A day later, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller,
urged Europe to speed US demands for extradition: "We are always
looking to see how we can make the extradition process go faster," he
said. "We think we owe it to the victims of terrorism to see to it that
justice is done efficiently and effectively." At the Ibero-American
Summit shortly after, the leaders of Spain and the Latin American
countries "backed Venezuela's efforts to have [Posada] extradited from
the United States to face trial" for the Cubana airliner bombing, and
again condemned the "blockade" of Cuba by the US, endorsing regular
near-unanimous UN resolutions, the most recent with a vote of 179-4
(US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau). After strong protests from the
US Embassy, the Summit withdrew the call for extradition, but refused
to yield on the demand for an end to the economic warfare. Posada is
therefore free to join his colleague Orlando Bosch in Miami. Bosch is
implicated in dozens of terrorist crimes, including the Cubana airliner
bombing, many on US soil. The FBI and Justice Department wanted him
deported as a threat to national security, but Bush I took care of that
by granting him a presidential pardon.
There are other such
examples. We might want to bear them in mind when we read Bush II's
impassioned pronouncement that "the United States makes no distinction
between those who commit acts of terror and those who support them,
because they're equally as guilty of murder," and "the civilized world
must hold those regimes to account." This was proclaimed to great
applause at the National Endowment for Democracy, a few days after
Venezuela's extradition request had been refused. Bush's remarks pose
another dilemma. Either the US is part of the civilized world, and must
send the US air force to bomb Washington; or it declares itself to be
outside the civilized world. The logic is impeccable, but fortunately,
logic has been dispatched as deep into the memory hole as moral truisms.
The
Bush doctrine that "those who harbor terrorists are as guilty as the
terrorists themselves" was promulgated when the Taliban asked for
evidence before handing over people the US suspected of
terrorism--without credible evidence, as the FBI conceded many months
later. The doctrine is taken very seriously. Harvard international
relations specialist Graham Allison writes that it has "already become
a de facto rule of international relations," revoking "the sovereignty
of states that provide sanctuary to terrorists." Some states, that is,
thanks to the rejection of the principle of universality.
One
might also have thought that a dilemma would have arisen when John
Negroponte was appointed to the position of head of counter-terrorism.
As Ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s, he was running the world's
largest CIA station, not because of the grand role of Honduras in world
affairs, but because Honduras was the primary US base for the
international terrorist war for which Washington was condemned by the
ICJ and Security Council (absent the veto). Known in Honduras as "the
Proconsul," Negroponte had the task of ensuring that the international
terrorist operations, which reached remarkable levels of savagery,
would proceed efficiently. His responsibilities in managing the war on
the scene took a new turn after official funding was barred in 1983,
and he had to implement White House orders to bribe and pressure senior
Honduran Generals to step up their support for the terrorist war using
funds from other sources, later funds illegally transferred from US
arms sales to Iran. The most vicious of the Honduran killers and
torturers was General Alvarez Martínez, the chief of the
Honduran armed
forces at the time, who had informed the US that "he intended to use
the Argentine method of eliminating suspected subversives." Negroponte
regularly denied gruesome state crimes in Honduras to ensure that
military aid would continue to flow for international terrorism.
Knowing all about Alvarez, the Reagan administration awarded him the
Legion of Merit medal for "encouraging the success of democratic
processes in Honduras." The elite unit responsible for the worst crimes
in Honduras was Battalion 3-16, organized and trained by Washington and
its Argentine neo-Nazi associates. Honduran military officers in charge
of the Battalion were on the CIA payroll. When the government of
Honduras finally tried to deal with these crimes and bring the
perpetrators to justice, the Reagan-Bush administration refused to
allow Negroponte to testify, as the courts requested.
There was
virtually no reaction to the appointment of a leading international
terrorist to the top counter-terrorism position in the world. Nor to
the fact that at the very same time, the heroine of the popular
struggle that overthrew the vicious Somoza regime in Nicaragua, Dora
María Téllez, was denied a visa to teach at the Harvard
Divinity
School, as a terrorist. Her crime was to have helped overthrow a
US-backed tyrant and mass murderer. Orwell would not have known whether
to laugh or weep. So far I have been keeping to the kinds of topics
that would be addressed in a discussion of the War on Terror that is
not deformed to accord with the iron laws of doctrine. And this barely
scratches the surface. But let us now adopt prevailing Western
hypocrisy and cynicism, and keep to the operative definition of
"terror." It is the same as the official definitions, but with the
Nuremberg exception: admissible terror is your terror; ours is
exempt..
Even
with this constraint, terror is a major problem, undoubtedly. And to
mitigate or terminate the threat should be a high priority.
Regrettably, it is not. That is all too easy to demonstrate, and the
consequences are likely to be severe.
The invasion of Iraq is
perhaps the most glaring example of the low priority assigned by US-UK
leaders to the threat of terror. Washington planners had been advised,
even by their own intelligence agencies, that the invasion was likely
to increase the risk of terror. And it did, as their own intelligence
agencies confirm. The National Intelligence Council reported a year ago
that "Iraq and other possible conflicts in the future could provide
recruitment, training grounds, technical skills and language
proficiency for a new class of terrorists who are `professionalized'
and for whom political violence becomes an end in itself," spreading
elsewhere to defend Muslim lands from attack by "infidel invaders" in a
globalized network of "diffuse Islamic extremist groups," with Iraq now
replacing the Afghan training grounds for this more extensive network,
as a result of the invasion. A high-level government review of the "war
on terror" two years after the invasion `focused on how to deal with
the rise of a new generation of terrorists, schooled in Iraq over the
past couple years. Top government officials are increasingly turning
their attention to anticipate what one called "the bleed out" of
hundreds or thousands of Iraq-trained jihadists back to their home
countries throughout the Middle East and Western Europe. "It's a new
piece of a new equation," a former senior Bush administration official
said. "If you don't know who they are in Iraq, how are you going to
locate them in Istanbul or London?"' ( Washington Post).
Last
May the CIA reported that "Iraq has become a magnet for Islamic
militants similar to Soviet-occupied Afghanistan two decades ago and
Bosnia in the 1990s," according to US officials quoted in the New
York Times.
The CIA concluded that "Iraq may prove to be an even more effective
training ground for Islamic extremists than Afghanistan was in Al
Qaeda's early days, because it is serving as a real-world laboratory
for urban combat." Shortly after the London bombing last July, Chatham
House released a study concluding that "there is `no doubt' that the
invasion of Iraq has `given a boost to the al-Qaida network' in
propaganda, recruitment and fundraising,` while providing an ideal
training area for terrorists"; and that "the UK is at particular risk
because it is the closest ally of the United States" and is "a pillion
passenger" of American policy" in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is
extensive supporting evidence to show that -- as anticipated -- the
invasion increased the risk of terror and nuclear proliferation. None
of this shows that planners prefer these consequences, of course.
Rather, they are not of much concern in comparison with much higher
priorities that are obscure only to those who prefer what human rights
researchers sometimes call "intentional ignorance."
Once again
we find, very easily, a way to reduce the threat of terror: stop acting
in ways that--predictably--enhance the threat. Though enhancement of
the threat of terror and proliferation was anticipated, the invasion
did so even in unanticipated ways. It is common to say that no WMD were
found in Iraq after exhaustive search. That is not quite accurate,
however. There were stores of WMD in Iraq: namely, those produced in
the 1980s, thanks to aid provided by the US and Britain, along with
others. These sites had been secured by UN inspectors, who were
dismantling the weapons. But the inspectors were dismissed by the
invaders and the sites were left unguarded. The inspectors nevertheless
continued to carry out their work with satellite imagery. They
discovered sophisticated massive looting of these installations in over
100 sites, including equipment for producing solid and liquid
propellant missiles, biotoxins and other materials usable for chemical
and biological weapons, and high-precision equipment capable of making
parts for nuclear and chemical weapons and missiles. A Jordanian
journalist was informed by officials in charge of the Jordanian-Iraqi
border that after US-UK forces took over, radioactive materials were
detected in one of every eight trucks crossing to Jordan, destination
unknown.
The ironies are almost inexpressible. The official
justification for the US-UK invasion was to prevent the use of WMD that
did not exist. The invasion provided the terrorists who had been
mobilized by the US and its allies with the means to develop WMD --
namely, equipment they had provided to Saddam, caring nothing about the
terrible crimes they later invoked to whip up support for the invasion.
It is as if Iran were now making nuclear weapons using fissionable
materials provided by the US to Iran under the Shah -- which may indeed
be happening. Programs to recover and secure such materials were having
considerable success in the '90s, but like the war on terror, these
programs fell victim to Bush administration priorities as they
dedicated their energy and resources to invading Iraq.
Elsewhere
in the Mideast too terror is regarded as secondary to ensuring that the
region is under control. Another illustration is Bush's imposition of
new sanctions on Syria in May 2004, implementing the Syria
Accountability Act passed by Congress a few months earlier. Syria is on
the official list of states sponsoring terrorism, despite Washington's
acknowledgment that Syria has not been implicated in terrorist acts for
many years and has been highly cooperative in providing important
intelligence to Washington on al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist
groups. The gravity of Washington's concern over Syria's links to
terror was revealed by President Clinton when he offered to remove
Syria from the list of states sponsoring terror if it agreed to
US-Israeli peace terms. When Syria insisted on recovering its conquered
territory, it remained on the list. Implementation of the Syria
Accountability Act deprived the US of an important source of
information about radical Islamist terrorism in order to achieve the
higher goal of establishing in Syria a regime that will accept
US-Israeli demands.
Turning to another domain, the Treasury
Department has a bureau (OFAC, Office of Foreign Assets Control) that
is assigned the task of investigating suspicious financial transfers, a
central component of the "war on terror." In April 2004, OFAC informed
Congress that of its 120 employees, four were assigned to
tracking the finances of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, while
almost two dozen were occupied with enforcing the embargo against Cuba.
From 1990 to 2003 there were 93 terrorism-related investigations with
$9000 in fines; and 11,000 Cuba-related investigations with $8 million
in fines. The revelations received the silent treatment in the US
media, elsewhere as well to my knowledge.
Why should the Treasury
Department devote
vastly more energy to strangling Cuba than to the "war on terror"? The
basic reasons were explained in internal documents of the
Kennedy-Johnson years. State Department planners warned that the "very
existence" of the Castro regime is "successful defiance" of US policies
going back 150 years, to the Monroe Doctrine; not Russians, but
intolerable defiance of the master of the hemisphere, much like Iran's
crime of successful defiance in 1979, or Syria's rejection of Clinton's
demands. Punishment of the population was regarded as fully legitimate,
we learn from internal documents. "The Cuban people [are] responsible
for the regime," the Eisenhower State Department decided, so that the
US has the right to cause them to suffer by economic strangulation,
later escalated to direct terror by Kennedy. Eisenhower and Kennedy
agreed that the embargo would hasten Fidel Castro's departure as a
result of the "rising discomfort among hungry Cubans." The basic
thinking was summarized by State Department official Lester Mallory:
Castro would be removed "through disenchantment and disaffection based
on economic dissatisfaction and hardship so every possible means should
be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba in order to
bring about hunger, desperation and the overthrow of the government."
When Cuba was in dire straits after the collapse of the Soviet Union,
Washington intensified the punishment of the people of Cuba, at the
initiative of liberal Democrats. The author of the 1992 measures to
tighten the blockade proclaimed that "my objective is to wreak havoc in
Cuba" (Representative Robert Torricelli). All of this continues until
the present moment.
The Kennedy administration was
also deeply
concerned about the threat of Cuban successful development, which might
be a model for others. But even apart from these standard concerns,
successful defiance in itself is intolerable, ranked far higher as a
priority than combating terror. These are just further illustrations of
principles that are well-established, internally rational, clear enough
to the victims, but scarcely perceptible in the intellectual world of
the agents.
If reducing the threat of terror were a high
priority for Washington or London, as it certainly should be, there
would be ways to proceed--even apart from the unmentionable idea of
withdrawing participation. The first step, plainly, is to try to
understand its roots. With regard to Islamic terror, there is a broad
consensus among intelligence agencies and researchers. They identify
two categories: the jihadis, who regard themselves as a vanguard, and
their audience, which may reject terror but nevertheless regard their
cause as just. A serious counter-terror campaign would therefore begin
by considering the grievances , and where appropriate, addressing them,
as should be done with or without the threat of terror. There is broad
agreement among specialists that al-Qaeda-style terror "is today less a
product of Islamic fundamentalism than of a simple strategic goal: to
compel the United States and its Western allies to withdraw combat
forces from the Arabian Peninsula and other Muslim countries" (Robert
Pape, who has done the major research on suicide bombers). Serious
analysts have pointed out that bin Laden's words and deeds correlate
closely. The jihadis organized by the Reagan administration and its
allies ended their Afghan-based terrorism inside Russia after the
Russians withdrew from Afghanistan, though they continued it from
occupied Muslim Chechnya, the scene of horrifying Russian crimes back
to the 19 th century. Osama turned against the US in 1991 because he
took it to be occupying the holiest Arab land; that was later
acknowledged by the Pentagon as a reason for shifting US bases from
Saudi Arabia to Iraq. Additionally, he was angered by the rejection of
his effort to join the attack against Saddam.
In the most extensive scholarly
inquiry into
the jihadi phenomenon, Fawaz Gerges concludes that after 9/11, "the
dominant response to Al Qaeda in the Muslim world was very hostile,"
specifically among the jihadis, who regarded it as a dangerous
extremist fringe. Instead of recognizing that opposition to Al Qaeda
offered Washington "the most effective way to drive a nail into its
coffin" by finding "intelligent means to nourish and support the
internal forces that were opposed to militant ideologies like the bin
Laden network," he writes, the Bush administration did exactly what bin
Laden hoped it would do: resort to violence, particularly in the
invasion of Iraq. Al-Azhar in Egypt, the oldest institution of
religious higher learning in the Islamic world, issued a fatwa, which
gained strong support, advising "all Muslims in the world to make jihad
against invading American forces" in a war that Bush had declared
against Islam. A leading religious figure at al-Azhar, who had been
"one of the first Muslim scholars to condemn Al Qaeda [and was] often
criticized by ultraconservative clerics as a pro-Western reformer,
ruled that efforts to stop the American invasion [of Iraq] are a
`binding Islamic duty'." Investigations by Israeli and Saudi
intelligence, supported by US strategic studies institutes, conclude
that foreign fighters in Iraq, some 5-10% of the insurgents, were
mobilized by the invasion, and had no previous record of association
with terrorist groups. The achievements of Bush administration planners
in inspiring Islamic radicalism and terror, and joining Osama in
creating a "clash of civilizations," are quite impressive.
The senior CIA analyst
responsible for
tracking Osama bin Laden from 1996, Michael Scheuer, writes that "bin
Laden has been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war
on us. None of the reasons have anything to do with our freedom,
liberty, and democracy, but have everything to do with U.S. policies
and actions in the Muslim world." Osama's concern "is out to
drastically alter U.S. and Western policies toward the Islamic world,"
Scheuer writes: "He is a practical warrior, not an apocalyptic
terrorist in search of Armageddon." As Osama constantly repeats, "Al
Qaeda supports no Islamic insurgency that seeks to conquer new lands."
Preferring comforting illusions, Washington ignores "the ideological
power, lethality, and growth potential of the threat personified by
Osama bin Laden, as well as the impetus that threat has been given by
the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Muslim Iraq, [which is] icing
on the cake for al Qaeda." "U.S. forces and policies are completing the
radicalization of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been
trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since the early
1990s. As a result, [Scheuer adds,] it is fair to conclude that the
United States of America remains bin Laden's only indispensable ally."
The
grievances are very real. A Pentagon advisory Panel concluded a year
ago that "Muslims do not `hate our freedom,' but rather they hate our
policies," adding that "when American public diplomacy talks about
bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than
self-serving hypocrisy." The conclusions go back many years. In 1958,
President Eisenhower puzzled about "the campaign of hatred against us"
in the Arab world, "not by the governments but by the people," who are
"on Nasser's side," supporting independent secular nationalism. The
reasons for the "campaign of hatred" were outlined by the National
Security Council: "In the eyes of the majority of Arabs the United
States appears to be opposed to the realization of the goals of Arab
nationalism. They believe that the United States is seeking to protect
its interest in Near East oil by supporting the status quo and opposing
political or economic progress." Furthermore, the perception is
understandable: "our economic and cultural interests in the area have
led not unnaturally to close U.S. relations with elements in the Arab
world whose primary interest lies in the maintenance of relations with
the West and the status quo in their countries," blocking democracy and
development.
Much the same was found by the Wall Street Journal when
it surveyed the opinions of "moneyed Muslims" immediately after 9/11:
bankers, professionals, businessmen, committed to official "Western
values" and embedded in the neoliberal globalization project. They too
were dismayed by Washington's support for harsh authoritarian states
and the barriers it erects against development and democracy by
"propping up oppressive regimes." They had new grievances, however,
beyond those reported by the NSC in 1958: Washington's sanctions regime
in Iraq and support for Israel's military occupation and takeover of
the territories. There was no survey of the great mass of poor and
suffering people, but it is likely that their sentiments are more
intense, coupled with bitter resentment of the Western-oriented elites
and corrupt and brutal rulers backed by Western power who ensure that
the enormous wealth of the region flows to the West, apart from
enriching themselves. The Iraq invasion only intensified these feelings
further, much as anticipated.
There are ways to deal
constructively with the threat of terror, though not those preferred by
"bin Laden's indispensable ally," or those who try to avoid the real
world by striking heroic poses about Islamo-fascism, or who simply
claim that no proposals are made when there are quite straightforward
proposals that they do not like. The constructive ways have to begin
with an honest look in the mirror, never an easy task, always a
necessary one.
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