Putting George Bush’s “War on Terror” in Perspective

[Time for change]

George Bush’s “War on Terror” has been the central political fact in our nation through much of the 21st Century since September 11, 2001. And it threatens to be a major if not the major political issue through the 2008 elections. In any event, we know that Republicans are going to try to make it the central political issue.

I thought that all eight Democratic candidates did a fine job in the debates in South Carolina a few days ago. But I thought that two of them – Gravel and Kucinich – especially stood out as outstanding in providing some much needed perspective to George Bush’s so-called “War on Terror”.

Kucinich made it quite clear that he rejected the so-called “War on Terror” as a pretext for war; that he would make it a major priority of his as President to make the United States once again a law abiding member of the international community of nations; that arms reduction would be a major priority; and that diplomacy would once again become a major aspect of U.S. policy. Here is an excerpt:

The fact of the matter is that the global war on terror has been a pretext for aggressive war. As president of the United States, I intend to take America in a different direction, rejecting war as an instrument of policy, reconnecting with the nations of the world, so that we can address the real issues that affect security all over the globe and affect our security at home: getting rid of all nuclear weapons, the United States participating in the chemical weapons convention, the biological weapons convention, the small arms treaty, the landmine treaty, joining the International Criminal Court, signing the Kyoto climate change treaty.

The world is waiting for an American president who reaches out in a hand of friendship; who understands this is a complex world, but doesn't see the world in terms of enemies.
The minute that we have dichotomous thinking of us versus them, we lose the opportunity to be able to connect with people….

Gravel said something similar in a different way:

We have no important enemies. What we need to do is to begin to deal with the rest of the world as equals. And we don't do that. We spend more as a nation on defense than all the rest of the world put together. Who are we afraid of? Who are you afraid of, Brian? I'm not. And Iraq has never been a threat to us. We invaded them. I mean, it is unbelievable. The military industrial complex not only controls our government, lock, stock and barrel, but they control our culture.

Ok, Gravel’s statement that “we have no important enemies” wasn’t quite accurate. But more important in my opinion is that attitudes like that, if properly modulated, can become self-fulfilling prophecies – just like George Bush’s belligerent attitudes towards his numerous “enemies” have become self-fulfilling prophecies.

And with regard to Iraq, Bush’s so-called “front on our War on Terror”, Gravel made it quite clear that the war is a sham; it is un-winnable; the use of nuclear weapons against Iran should be “off the table”; and that another important reason why we should leave Iraq is that the Iraqis don’t want us there – a critically important point that I don’t recall hearing a U.S. politician make up until then. Here are some excerpts:

Well, first off, understand that this war was lost the day that George Bush invaded Iraq on a fraudulent basis. Understand that. Now with respect to what's going on in the Congress, I'm really embarrassed. So we passed -- and the media's in a frenzy right today with what has been passed. What has been passed? George Bush communicated over a year ago that he would not get out of Iraq until he left office. Do we not believe him?...

And I got to tell you, after standing up with them, some of these people frighten me -- they frighten me. When you have mainline candidates that turn around and say that there's nothing off the table with respect to Iran, that's code for using nukes, nuclear devices. I got to tell you, I'm president of the United States, there will be no preemptive wars with nuclear devices. To my mind, it's immoral, and it's been immoral for the last 50 years as part of American foreign policy…

(To Biden) You want to tell the Iraqis how to run their country. I got to tell you, we should just plain get out -- just plain get out. It's their country. They're asking us to leave. And we insist on staying there. And why not get out? What harm is it going to do? Oh, you hear the statement, "Well, my God, these soldiers will have died in vain." The entire deaths of Vietnam died in vain. And they're dying in vain right this very second. And you know what's worse than a soldier dying in vain? It's more soldiers dying in vain. That's what's worse.

So, Kucinich and Gravel simply did an excellent job of providing some perspective to Bush’s “War on Terror”. But they didn’t have much time. The best summary of the “War on Terror” that I’ve seen was written by James Carroll in “House of War – The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power”. Here are some selected excerpts from the last couple of chapters in his book, which he wrote in response to the 9/11 attacks:


Paul Wolfowitz’s vision predated and set the stage for Bush’s War on Terror

In 1992 … Wolfowitz wrote a document called “Defense Planning Guidance”, which amounted to the first articulation of a new post-Cold War military strategy. The Pentagon’s “first objective” now was “to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival.” The United States would become the world’s permanent and preeminent military overseer, maintaining armed forces of such overwhelming superiority as to be beyond challenge… It was a vision that assumed not only the maintenance of America’s global array of bases but the expansion of it. Not only the maintenance of America’s huge defense budget but the expansion of it. Not only the maintenance of the nuclear arsenal, but the expansion of it. The defense industry would continue to boom.

Wofowitz foresaw the need for a new doctrine of “preventive war”, interventions aimed at removing the capacity of other nations to develop, much less use, weapons of mass destruction. Rather than allow other nations to compete with us in our capacity to wreak havoc on the world – or even to deter us from exercising our will – we would simply act preemptively. Instead of depending on treaties and international law to establish and protect order, the United States would impose that order on its own.

To illustrate this vision, and to define its corollary, the permanent need for a massive American military, the Wolfowitz vision of 1992 described in detail an imagined war against, yes, Iraq. And the justification for such a war was blatantly identified: the protection of U.S. access to “the region’s oil”…

The miracle that made Bush’s War on Terror Possible

All that Cheney and company needed to begin to realize their vision of world domination through overwhelming military superiority, with special emphasis on unfettered access to oil, was an overt justification for it. On {September 11, 2001}, like a gift from the gods, that justification fell from the heavens…

The abandonment of international law after 9/11

It was often said that everything had changed in 2001, but the terrorist attacks laid bare what the United States was already becoming. That Washington swatted aside the structures of international law as a way to respond to Osama bin Laden was prepared for by its habit, begun in the Reagan years, of dismissing international courts, ignoring treaties, and refusing to meet obligations to the United Nations and other transnational bodies…

The International Criminal Court, just coming into existence as America’s war on terrorism was mobilized, was an institutionalizing of ad hoc entities that had brought to justice genocidal culprits… The ICC, fulfilling the desire to replace revenge with adjudication, had its origin in the America-sponsored Nuremberg trials after World War II. Nothing embodied the genius of postwar American statesmanship more completely than this new court, and it would have been the best place to make world-historic cases against Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein, and anyone else who defied the norms of international order. George W. Bush, in one of his first acts as president, “unsigned” the ICC Treaty…

That the Pentagon regarded itself as a ready target of ICC prosecution seemed paranoid until revelations that American soldiers routinely abused prisoners in Iraq and that high Pentagon officials unilaterally rejected norms for the treatment of prisoners of war that had been set by the Geneva Convention. The jails of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were emblems of a new Pentagon lawlessness, but those revelations barely scratched the surface of a system of legally dubious incarcerations that involved more than eleven thousand detainees held in mostly secret locations around the world, places referred to in classified documents as “black sites”…

The incompetent handling of our war in Afghanistan

After 9/11… there were plausible reasons for targeted attacks against Al Qaeda training sites in Afghanistan, but they were superseded by the need for a bigger response… Instead of going after bin Laden’s cabal with an internationally coordinated law enforcement effort, nothing would do but a large-scale act of war… American bombers began raining destruction on the villages and towns of the most primitive country on the globe. Meanwhile, the elusive Al Qaeda slipped away… The demonized bin Laden himself disappeared. George W. Bush, with a sledgehammer the only tool in his bag, had brought it down on the table, aiming at the mosquito. The mosquito got away, but the table was destroyed…

Our war in Iraq is nothing but a gigantic scam and tragedy

Each of the reasons offered for the subsequent war against Iraq turned out, in succession, to be false. No weapons of mass destruction. No link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. No authentic U.S. concern for democracy… the ongoing American refusal to seriously reconsider its action, even as the justifications for the war were exposed, one after the other, as lies.

Ironically, U.S. military actions, including the invasion of Iraq, were justified with the language of human rights… The true measure of humane treatment, of course, is taken by what happens on the ground in the countries at issue. In Afghanistan and Iraq, new levels of sectarianism, ethnic conflict, warlordism, drug trafficking, and radical Islamism were all evident in the broader context of destroyed infrastructure, widespread malnourishment, and obliterated civil society. Bush administration officials crowed that girls could at last attend schools ad equals, without acknowledging that, with rare exceptions… there were no schools for anyone to attend. The much touted elections in both countries were shams carefully managed by Washington… The two countries had been human rights nightmares before Bush’s wars, but the wars themselves – destroying cities and villages in order to save them – hardly represented improvements in the lives of ordinary people. Even under the best of outcomes – if, say, civil war could be avoided – Afghanistan and Iraq were going to be decades in recovering…

In Iraq, despite America’s overwhelming military might, there will be no winning, ever. Whether the U.S. occupation is terminated abruptly or is maintained for years, violence and mayhem will define Iraq indefinitely, while the rest of the Middle East copes with Iraqi-spawned waves of chaos. Radical Muslim holy warriors, meanwhile, have been multiplied by the American war, empowered by it, trained by it, and dispatched around the globe. When bombs went off in London in July 2005, subways and buses represented only another front in the unnecessary war George W. Bush began… Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the rest have on their hands the blood of those Londoners, the blood of each young American killed, and the blood of many thousands of Iraqis – all those who have died and will die in that misbegotten war…

The WOT, presumably undertaken to make us more secure, has made us much less secure

Preventing the spread of nuclear weapons… was the primary reason given for the Bush invasion of Iraq… Yet the concerns about weapons of mass destruction that justified the attack on Iraq, and may yet do so on Iran, are absurdly misplaced. When it comes to nuclear danger, Washington is by far the graver problem, beginning with its post-Cold War refusal to significantly downsize its own nuclear arsenal… to the Bush administration’s 2003 repudiation of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty and the 2004 deployment of missile defense, which motivated Russia and China to add “hair” to the hair trigger; to the Bush administration’s stated – and unprecedented – readiness to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states.

Under Donald Rumsfeld, the Pentagon embarked in 2002 on the stunning project of developing a new generation of nuclear weapons… The Bush administration’s attack dog, in charge of reviling the U.S. tradition of arms control as “decades of stillborn plans, wishful thinking, and irresponsible passivity, was the right wing ideologue John Bolton, whom Bush appointed (without Senate approval) ambassador to the United Nations in mid-2005…

The effect of all this… is to legitimize nuclear-based politics, giving other nations, friend and foe alike, compelling reasons to acquire a nuclear capacity, if only for deterrence, and prompting them to behave in similar ways. That pattern was fully evident in Iran and North Korea, beginning almost immediately after the launching of the Global War on Terror, and the pattern promises to show itself in “nuclear-capable states” like Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Australia, South Africa, and others that long ago renounced nuclear ambitions. Meanwhile, Russia, China, Israel, India, and Pakistan are all furiously adding to their nuclear arsenal. The Pentagon has become the engine of proliferation.

We come to what amounts to an ultimate betrayal by the national security establishment of its most solemn obligation, which is to provide for national security. The probing of questions about government failures before September 11, 2001, is meaningless when measured against the new jeopardy into which America was plunged by the war that Bush embarked upon… In late 2003, Donald Rumsfeld said, in an internal Pentagon memo, “We lack the metrics to know if we are winning or losing the Global War on Terror.” This odd assessment from a secretary of defense… actually reflects the Pentagon’s interest in an open-ended war. Permanent war means permanent martial dominance…

The story of the Islamist Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan is the great cautionary tale… Abdul Qadeer Kahn went from being hailed as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb to being revealed, in 2003, as a trader in nuclear secrets, with such clients as North Korea, Iran, Libya, and perhaps Saudi Arabia… Yet… the Bush administration could do little because it had held itself hostage to Pervez Musharraf, the military dictator of Pakistan and Bush’s putative all. Musharraf was disinclined to discipline Khan because, as the creator of the Islamist bomb, the scientist was a Pakistani national hero…

How many Khans are out there, and how do Bush’s policies enable them to operate? This question acquired special urgency in 2005 when it became clear that the Bush administration, still at the mercy of Musharraf, was tacitly allowing the dramatic expansion of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal – as if the most dangerous post-9/11 moment of all had not been the 2002 nuclear standoff between Pakistan and India… The nuclear nightmare that roiled the dreams of a generation, not that long ago, is back. That it was not necessarily so makes this development a crime and an outrage…

The China factor

The compelling but rarely admitted purpose of shoring up American control of supplies of oil and natural gas was reflected in the job histories of Bush’s policy team (for example, Vice President Cheney’s Halliburton years)… As America’s Middle East wars of the first decade of the twenty-first century unfolded, the stated focus was on Arabs, Muslims, and the threat of terrorism, yet the overriding strategic issue remained the oil supply. And that meant Washington’s nervous gaze had to shift from the Persian Gulf to China, the world’s most rapidly expanding economy and America’s new rival. The inextricable link between the distant Asian nation and the Middle East is revealed in the fact that China’s largest source of foreign oil is Iran, and China’s dependence on Persian Gulf oil is expanding as fast as its economy, making it a direct oil competitor of the United States. In 2004, China and the United States together used one third of all the oil produced on earth, and their needs were growing exponentially.

China, meanwhile, was one nation with the capacity to demolish the neoconservative dream of a unipolar world under American dominance, and as such it became the object of sharp, sudden suspicion… Bush administration alarms, twinned with policies to match, consistently pushed this new Asian rival away from economic and political competition and toward military competition, including an arms race… belligerent posturing designed to intimidate adversaries only prompts belligerent posturing in return; posturing fuels escalation…risking another cold war, but with a new wrinkle. In addition to a hostile, nuclear-armed China, these policies could lead to the reemergence of Japan as a military power, now gone nuclear.

Concluding thoughts

We are now on a road to World War III. The United States under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney has opted for imperialistic conquest and the rules of the jungle in place of the rule of law. Consequently, we are a pariah nation, and much of the rest of the world has recognized that and is responding accordingly. That is the context in which George Bush conducts his so-called “War on Terror”. I love candidates like Gravel and Kucinich for having the courage to place that “War on Terror” in a perspective which Americans need to understand

[Time for change]

1. Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell on the need for peace

On the third to the last page of Carroll's book he talks about what those icons of the peace had to say in their 1955 manifesto:

"We have to learn to think in a new way. We have to learn to ask ourselves, not what steps can be taken to give military victory to whatever group we prefer, for there no longer are such steps; the question we have to ask ourselves is: what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must be disastrous to all parties."

[blondie58]

2. thanks for posting, Time for Change

this is one that I will definitely go back and read in detail at a later date. It is simply too much information to digest on this Sunday evening- after a week of vacation.

[warren pease]

3. The war on terror is just another fraudulent BushCo production

It has nothing to do with battling "terrorists." It has everything to do with replacing the Cold War as the primary method of social control. All through US history, political leaders have sought to protect their elite constituencies by directing rage and resentment properly aimed at these rich thieves toward an external threat.

The USSR was really the perfect "Evil Empire." Those in power -- the super rich, corporate heads and the politicos who serve them -- hated to see it go. They were, however, quick to squash any populist nonsense about a "peace dividend" by creating a world that had become more even dangerous without the USSR's ability to keep their own sphere of influence under control. That and the rise of nuclear weapons technology in many of the places the US needed to invade to secure control of Middle East oil.

But many groups at the bottom of the heap in the "land of opportunity" -- women, blacks, Hispanics, gays of all genders, and others -- had spent the '90s getting organized and demanding actual reforms, rather than the usual crumbs the powerful allow the rest of us to fight over.

But a gift from the gods to BushCo came in the form of a real, or simulated, terrorist attack. Immediately, the super patriots started plastering decals on their bumpers, attaching little flags to their antennas, carrying out vigilante operations against little brown people, and thumping their chests with national pride while bellowing USA! USA! USA!

That the US defense system had just failed in its most basic mission should be a source of national pride illustrates the absolute mindlessness of the super patriots. But they didn't have to do a damn thing except keep shopping. No sacrifices required; no tax increases; no shortage of basic commodities to support the war effort. That's the kind of war even the most selfish and self-absorbed American can get behind. And as long as was the usual poor and black kids who got killed, no skin off their asses.

There were, however, consequences for arguing against the official story. People were beaten; some lost jobs; others were dismissed from their churches or social groups – those failing to show the proper level of support for BushCo and its phony war felt the sting of the social control enabled by 9/11 and, subsequently, by the Iraq carnage.

And while these operations moved the US militarily closer to the strategically critical oil fields of the middle east, they also created a McCarthy-like hysteria that resulted in huge majorities in both parties signing on to the most through, across-the-board dismantling of basic rights and freedoms ever attempted here. Stalin couldn't have done a better job of silencing dissent while creating the legal apparatus to punish those few who spoke out anyway.

So that's what I think the war on terror is all about: A rationale for the usual imperialist resource grab oversees, and consensus for the imposition of a well-planned national security state at home.

Plans like that aren't created overnight; it takes years to put all the pieces together -- a body of legislation so huge that it's ludicrous to think it was created in a few weeks after 9/11; establishment of systems and bureaucracies necessary to enforce that legislation; near-total control of mass media; timidity of the alleged opposition party; and a compliant populace drunk on patriotism, spared any personal sacrifice and immune to critical thinking.

So was 9/11 really an attack by Islamic terrorists? Or was it an attack by the rich and powerful, through its eager tools in BushCo, to gain public consensus for stealing oil and squashing dissent?


Reasonable questions, I think, given that 9/11 is the key that opens all the other doors.

wp

[Time for change]

4. Reasonable questions indeed

I agree with the good majority of what you said. You'd probably enjoy reading Carroll's "House of War" if you haven't read it yet -- He makes a number of the points that you made.

And regarding your reasonable questions, did you check out my link in the section "The miracle that made Bush's War on Terror possible"?

[Time for change]

5. "House of War"

Carroll's whole book is excellent -- a detailed account of how the Pentagon, since its erection in 1943, has taken over much of American life by becoming a self-perpetuation war machine. And how all previous presidents, until the present one, have at least made some attempt to resist the urging of the military for more war.

[bananarepublican]

6. 'Operation Northwoods' for instance...

I also recall that about 6 mnths or so ago there was a story about a JFK doodle which included the term 'conspiracy' and '911'. It could well be that as soon as the chicken-hawks nested in numbers within the selected Bush Administration... 911 was allowed to fly the coop(sp?).

[Time for change]

7. Yes, operation Northwoods

The military wanted to simulate a terrorist attack sponsored by Cuba, against an American passenger plane (and there were other variations as well), in order to justify another invasion of Cuba, this time a full invasion backed by the full power of the US military. JFK's Secretary of defense, Robert McNamara vetoed the plan.

JFK also had other major plans to promote peace, such as enunciated in his speech at American University just a month or two before his assassination.

I don't know who killed him, but I know it wasn't Oswald -- the medical evidence that he was shot in the front of the head (in the direction of the grassy knoll, NOT the book depository) is overwhelming: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=5449636

My guess is that there were a lot of people who were not at all happy with his plans for diplomacy to deal with the Cold War.

[Time for change]

8. Here's the link

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods

[warren pease]

11. Haven't read the book yet, but I'll pick it up...

And I think the conclusions I -- and I assume you as well -- have developed are simply based on motive, means and opportunity, and an impartial reading of the evidence. The motive, as usual, is money -- billions and possibly trillions of dollars for arms manufacturers, fossil fuels companies and special favorites of the House of Bush, such as Halliburton.

The means is a little more involved. If you subscribe to the controlled demolition hypothesis, a fair amount of explosives would have had to be brought into the buildings (including WTC #7) and placed to destroy key support systems -- internal columns, elevator shafts and so forth. That much activity raised some eyebrows, as witnesses to the 9/11 collapses said immediately after the events, but the official story drowned them out within minutes. And the alleged means, driving airliners into the towers and somehow doing enough structural damage to the entire buildings to bring them down, is simply insufficient. Also insufficient is the ridiculous fairy tale that the alleged pilots learned how to handle large jets through their training on Cessnas. That's the equivalent of learning to drive on a VW bug and, fresh from the DMV with your first license, immediately stepping into the cab of a semi pulling a 50-foot trailer.

The opportunity was there as long as people assumed extraordinary activities, such as placement of explosives, were just normal events devoid of any significance. And that's how most people see things; they don't stop and analyze if every single thing is part of a grand pattern to kill or injure them -- and those who do are called paranoid schizophrenics and are afflicted by a very serious mental disorder.

And then you ask who benefits? Well, certainly not Al Qaeda. They didn't even claim responsibility until they were identified as the perps on US media, at which point they probably said, what the hell, might make some use of all this. It certainly wasn't the people of the US, because just a month down the road they would be robbed of many of the freedoms BushCo claims to stand for. It wasn't the rest of the world, since BushCo painted a giant bullseye on the rest of the planet.

Nope. It was the arms industry. It was the rich elites, who had already been given enormous tax rewards, and who benefited yet again because the fix was in, social controls were back in place and the rest of us were again diverted from tearing their oppressive throats out. And it was the investor class, which loves deficits because the feds borrow money from them in the form of T-Bills and pay the interest with tax revenue extracted from those who lack the correct set of write-offs -- continuing the steady transfer of wealth upward. Whoever sold American and United short the previous week made out like a bandit. And of course it was BushCo, whose legitimacy was coming under some fire by the summer of 2001 and whose approval numbers were already well below 50 percent. The WTC falls over and BushCo's approvals jump to 90 percent or higher, since he was marketed by every paper, radio station and TV news featherhead as a strong leader, a war president, the right guy for the times.

So BushCo gained a new legitimacy that only now is starting to erode, despite six years of bungling, suppression, genocide -- and placing this country and the rest of the world at greater risk of nuclear conflict than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

Good work, boys. Here's another trillion for your efforts.



wp

[Time for change]

12. Yes, our corporate news media has way too much power

Most people are in the habit of getting their news from tv or other corporate media outlets, and they're incapable of coming to their own conclusions. As you say, the truth often gets drowned out.

But I see that starting to change. Most people are in favor of impeaching our current administration, even though our corporate media hardly ever talks about it. The internet is doing wonders to combat the propaganda. And also, certain journalist employees of the corporate media, who have the integrity to speak truth to power (like Keith Olberman) help quite a bit.

[slipslidingaway]

9. Thanks! and kick. n/t

[Time for change]

10. Americans support full due process rights for terrorism suspects

Despite the fact that George Bush has decided that neither the Geneva Conventions nor other international laws nor US laws apply to HIS prisoners, and despite very little coverage of this outrage by our corporate media, the good majority of Americans still support full due process rights for terrorism suspects:

http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/btjusticehuman_rightsra/228.php?nid=&id=&pnt=228&lb=brusc

[jmondine]

13. Fight the propaganda

The "Decider in Chief" and his cronies have always been careful to use the phrase, "War on Terror" rather than "War on Terrorism". In the grand scheme of things, this doesn't seem like a very big distinction, but the choice of phrase is important. In addition to being more succinct, the former is also more intentionally vague, deflecting criticism that you can't wage war against a tactic.

Also, it makes it more personal. Few of us have ever experienced terrorism first hand, but almost all of us have experienced moments of terror. By waging a "War on Terror", the inference is that the neocons can somehow save us from ever experiencing this particular emotion again.

And that's what makes the saying so patently absurd. As impossible as it is to wage war against a tactic, it's even more ridiculous to wage war against an emotion. And what makes it truly Orwellian is that terror is the primary emotion created by the trauma and violence of war. They've basically committed us to an endless loop, a vicious cycle of constantly spiralling warfare and paralyzing fear.

From now on, if anyone speaks the words "war on terror" to me, I plan to counter with the following:

War IS Terror.

I invite anyone who feels the same to join me.