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September 12, 2004
REVIEW: America on the warpath
THE many books that have appeared on the American war on Islamist terrorism (including the report of the 9/11 Commission) have tended to focus on the administrative and intelligence failures and shortcomings that prevented the government from foreseeing and, possibly, forestalling the twin towers attack. What did the CIA, NSA, FBI, etc. know about Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden? Did US spies, human and electronic, give any forewarning of what they were up to, did the Administration pay proper heed, who said what to whom and when? The two books reviewed here, while they also go over this ground, go beyond it to deal with the ‘root cause’ questions generally skirted in other writings — that is, what motivates Al Qaeda, what exactly are its aims and objects, why did Bush shift the target from Al Qaeda to Iraq?
Anonymous, identified as a ‘senior US intelligence official’ is an angry man — angry at careerism, caution and petty jealousies in the intelligence agencies, the pusillanimity of high officials and political leaders. “We are fighting a worldwide Islamic insurgency,” he says, a defensive jihad that is enjoined upon each and every Muslim as a personal duty when Muslims, Muslim lands or faith are under foreign attack. (He explains that this is different from an offensive jihad to conquer new lands and spread Islam and which can only be declared by a Caliph).
Having said this, he derides the notion that Muslims are fighting against western values and freedoms or out of ‘a nihilistic rage against the modern world’. There are a lot of western things that Muslims don’t like such as coed schools, pornographic movies, gay rights, atheists, interest-charging banks but, says Anonymous, they don’t go about killing people on that account.
They hate the US because they see it lined up against Muslim causes everywhere. “US policy supports oppression and often, aggression by Hindu India in Kashmir, Catholic Filipinos in Mindanao, Orthodox Russian Christians in Chechnya, Uzbek ex-Communists in Uzbekistan” he affirms, and goes on to quote from an Islamist tract on Internet (Internet, he says, is a potential ‘cyber-caliphate’ that is binding the Ummah across geographical boundaries): “Independence is permissible for East Timor but taboo for Kashmir; independence is permissible for Christian Georgia but taboo for Chechnya; independence is permissible for crusader Croatia but taboo for Bosnia.”
Anonymous criticizes America for overlooking India’s ‘Israel-like’ refusal to obey UN resolutions on Kashmir, the Indian Army’s savagery in Kashmir, the government-condoned Gujarat killings. Bin Laden is no fanatic, he says, out to destroy America and its freedoms but a brilliant, calculating, patient foe whose aim is to alter such American policies.
If America refuses to review its failed policies towards the Muslim world, then it should be prepared to launch a war of annihilation against the Muslim world — a war that will involve killing and displacing Muslim populations in large numbers, destroying their roads, irrigation systems, power plants, crops in the fields, fertilizer plants.
He does not propose this apocalyptic scenario as a realistic policy; his purpose rather is to emphasize the necessity of reviewing US policies towards the Muslims and, in particular, in the Middle East. He feels that the America-Israel relationship “drains American resources, earns Muslim hatred and serves no vital US national interest”. All praise, he says ironically, to Israel and its supporters in America for “binding the American Gulliver to the tiny Jewish state and its policies” so that the US government stands, often alone, behind Israel’s refusal to obey UN resolutions, to sign the non-proliferation treaty and allows it to proceed with developing and deploying weapons of mass destruction.
How this nexus works is illustrated in Pretext for War whose author James Bamford was also an intelligence official before he turned to journalism. Long before 9/11, three American scholars prepared a paper for Israeli prime minister Netanyahu entitled ‘Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,’ in which they suggested how “Israel can shape its strategic environment”. The centrepiece of their recommendations was that Saddam Hussain be replaced by an amenable leader for, they wrote, “whoever inherits Iraq dominates the entire Levant strategically”. After Iraq would come Syria.
In order to justify it to America, a preemptive attack on that country would be launched on the pretext of destroying its drug and counterfeit infrastructure and WMD programme; Israel’s war could thus be shown to be all about protecting America’s own interests. Bamford finds it extraordinary that this trio of former — and future — senior American officials “were acting as a sort of American privy council to the Israeli prime minister”. In the event, Netanyahu rejected the plan and the neo-cons were given a “chilly reception” during the elder Bush’s presidency.
But when Bush junior became president, the trio, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, were given top positions in the defence department and found a very receptive atmosphere for their ideas and proposals. In between they had not wasted time: Perle commanding “a tiny army of Semitophiles on Capitol Hill” worked away to create “a seamless bond between Israel’s interests and America’s military and foreign policy”. Feith who had opposed the Camp David accords, urged Israel to repudiate the Oslo peace process and launch a full-scale war against the Palestinians. Wurmser headed a special intelligence unit in the defence department that was basically a propaganda cell, designed to produce evidence to support the pretexts for war against Iraq; it worked in close coordination with a similar unit in Sharon’s office. Nor indeed, did Sharon make any secret of what he wanted: at a time when European governments were opposing the war and in Washington too doubts were being voiced about its wisdom, one of Sharon’s senior aides declared, “Any postponement of an attack on Iraq at this stage will serve no purpose. It will only give Saddam more of an opportunity to accelerate his programme of weapons of mass destruction.” “As expected,” Bamford observes wryly, “Sharon’s call . . . increased pressure on Congress, which often bows to Israel’s wishes, to vote in favour of the Bush war resolution.”
Bush got his resolution and his war but, concludes the author, “the fact that several of the key players most aggressively pushing the war had originally outlined it for the benefit of another country, years earlier, raises the most troubling conflict-of-interest questions”.
Not many do raise such questions, for “America’s political and social landscape”, Bamford says, “is littered with the battered individuals... who dared to question the value to US national interests of the country’s overwhelmingly one-way alliance with Israel”. The influence wielded by AIPAC (Washington’s pro-Israel lobby) in American elections is unquestionable but Anonymous considers that Israel’s hold on American public opinion goes beyond politics; in their attitude to Israel, he says, Americans feel far too much guilt, for no good reason, at too high a cost.
This is true to some extent of the West as a whole with its long history of anti-semitism, culminating in the Nazi holocaust. A month ago a young woman lodged a complaint with the Paris underground railway’s police against a group of Arabs and Blacks who, she alleged, had roughed up her baby and herself, painted swastikas on her abdomen, called her a “dirty Jew” (which she is not). Before the police could investigate the allegations, the media covered the event with screaming headlines, and within hours the minister of the Interior received the young woman to express the government’s sympathy and President Chirac himself issued a statement condemning the alleged attack. The next morning during questioning by the police, the woman confessed that she had made up the whole thing.
A Pretext for War — 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies
By James Bamford
Doubleday. Available with Liberty Books (Pvt) Ltd, 3 Rafiq Plaza, M.R. Kayani Road, Saddar, Karachi
Tel: 021-5683026
Email: libooks@cyber.net.pk Website: www.libertybooks.com
ISBN 0385506724
420pp. Rs1,200
Imperial Hubris — Why the West is Losing the War on Terror
By Anonymous
Brasseys Inc, Dulles, Virginia
ISBN 1574888498
309pp. US$27.50
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