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
