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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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