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.
This was the Amnesty International Annual Lecture hosted by TCD,
delivered by Noam Chomsky at Shelbourne Hall, the Royal Dublin
Society, January 18, 2006.
Noam Chomsky's most recent book is
Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11
World..
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