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
