Enemies by Design: Inventing the War on Terrorism

ENEMIES BY

DESIGN Inventing the W a r o n Te r r o r i s m GREG FELTON

Enemies by Design: Inventing the War on Terrorism Copyright © by Greg Felton All Rights Reserved and Published by Progressive Press, PO Box 126, Joshua Tree, Calif. 92252, under its Banned Books imprint www.ProgressivePress.com Length: 173,000 words ISBN 0-930852-56-7 EAN 978-0930852-566 First Printing: May 2005 Second Printing: April 2008 Printed in Malaysia Topics: Life of Osama bin Laden. Zionist influence on US politics. War on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine. 9/11 Terrorism: faked pretext for wars of aggression. Library of Congress Catalog information: LCCN 2005279562 Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Subjects: War on Terrorism, 2001Islamophobia--United States. Christian Zionism--United States. United States--Foreign relations--Arab countries. United States--Foreign relations--Middle East. Bin Laden, Osama, 1957LC Classification: Dewey Class No.:

HV6432 .F45 2005 973.931 22

Tab l e o f C o n t e n t s Preface

5

PART I OSAMA BIN LADEN 1. Saudi In heritance 2. The Outsider (19 57–1980) 3. The Mujahid (1980–1989) 4. The Dissident (19 89–1991) 5. The Exile (1991–1996) 6. American Jihad (1996–2000)

10 21 29 51 65 85

PART II Z I O N I Z AT I O N O F T H E U . S . 7. Unhol y Trinity 8. Housebreaking the U.S. 9. Invasi on of the Polic y Snatchers

105 133 161

P ART III A FGHANISTAN , P ALESTINE , I RAQ 10. The Tali ban and ‘Petr opoli tics’ 11. Oil f or One, and One for Oi l 12. Warm Jews; Cold Calculation s 13. Rogue State

182 204 235 259

P ART IV O NE N ATION UNDER PNAC 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Imperial Designs—Part I Imperial Designs—Par t II The Hos t and the Parasite Tortured Reasoning The Grand Decepti on

279 304 322 343 361

19. Epil ogue

388

Index of Names Bibliography

399 408

T

O

D

R

. A

L F R E D

M. L

I L I E N T H A L

Preface When I began this book in early November 2001, I did not envision the tome you are now holding. I had intended to research and write a short biography on Osama bin Laden to serve as a sober corrective to the hatemongering and bloodlust that passed for respectable journalism in the months following the Sept. 11, 2001, attack. When Saddam Hussein supplanted bin Laden as the evil Arab du jour in the spring of 2002, I feared that my book had been superseded by events. When Bush invaded Iraq in March 2003, I thought nobody would be interested in a book on bin Laden. As often happens in such circumstances this obstacle turned into an opportunity. Rather than focus narrowly on bin Laden and U.S. geopolitical machinations in Afghanistan, I realized I could place him and Hussein within the broader context of U.S. servility to the proIsrael lobby. This book, therefore, incorporates my initial research (Chapters I to VI and X to XI) as well as research into the cause and effect of the Zionization of the U.S. and the “war on terrorism.” In the latter context bin Laden and Hussein, despite their stark differences, exist less as people in their own right than they do as bogeymen conjured up by pro-Israel/anti-Arab media and governments. This is one meaning of the title “Enemies by Design”—these men were turned into supervillains because U.S. servility to Israel and the domestic Israel Lobby require such enemies. Bin Laden was a virtual non-entity until the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed in August 1998, after which he seemed to emerge parthenogenically from the head of President Bill Clinton as Public Enemy Number One. Saddam Hussein was America’s buddy in the Iran-Iraq War, as shown by the infamous 1983 handshake between Hussein and envoy Donald Rumsfeld. Only after the war, did Hussein become persona non grata for reasons that had nothing to do with terrorism or weapons of mass destruction. Hence, we come to the two great acts of violence perpetrated in the name of national security, and made possible by demonized images of Arabs—the assaults on Afghanistan and Iraq. We have been told that these attacks were waged in the name of fighting the “war on terrorism,” but this argument is impossible to take seriously. According to the American Heritage Dictionary (Fourth Edition, 2000), terrorism is defined as: “the unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.” Implicit in this definition is the unique equation of terrorism with violence committed against states, but not by states. Thus, the sanctioned definition begs the existence of “state terrorism” committed by the U.S. and Israel.

6

Enemies by Design

Terrorism cannot be the target of military policy because it is a tactic. To wage total war against an “ism” amounts to attacking a behavior. This is even more true of ideologies. War against communism or Islam, for example, amounts to waging war against people whose only crime is to hold different beliefs. In an earlier time, such wars were called persecutions or pogroms, and in fact these terms accurately define U.S. policy toward Iraq and Afghanistan, and indirectly against Palestine. In the name of rooting out an invisible enemy, the U.S. visits collective political punishment on civilians. In the name of fighting terrorism the U.S. commits a greater terrorism. As we will see in Chapter 13, Bush’s imperium represents the sixth and highest stage of the Zionization of the U.S., much of it committed after Ronald Reagan allowed a cabal of pro-Israeli Jews, evangelical Christians and neo-conservative ideologues to infiltrate his government in 1980. Today, that infiltration has achieved its zenith with the “war on terrorism.” To bomb an impoverished country like Afghanistan overtly to gain pipeline transit rights would be politically indefensible. Nor could Bush admit he invaded Iraq because his Zionist puppetmasters wanted to destroy the Palestinians’ major supporter in the region. Nevertheless, if these nations could be portrayed as “terrorist” or “terrorist-sponsoring,” Congress and the American public could support unilateral aggression, or at least not have the courage to challenge it. Thus, we have the demonization of bin Laden and Hussein; the slandering of Islam; racial profiling; and the arbitrary, unconstitutional arrests of Muslims at home and abroad. In a few short years, Bush has managed to destroy the international reputation of the U.S., commit fraud and mass murder, violate the Constitution, and rack up record budget deficits. Domestic and international protests against U.S. militarism easily surpass those of the Vietnam era, and traditional allies like France and Germany are vilified simply for challenging the divine right of the U.S. to bully the world. U.S. behavior since Sept. 11 has been so self-destructive that it fits historian Barbara Tuchman’s criteria of a folly: [a policy] must be perceived to be counter-productive in its own time, not merely by hindsight; a feasible alternative course of action must have been available; and it should be that of a group, not an individual ruler, and should persist beyond any one political lifetime.1 One of the follies Tuchman describes is the the U.S. entanglement in Vietnam. Even though the war ended in April 1974, the futility of U.S. policy was known less than a year into President John Kennedy’s administration. On Nov. 6, 1961, Asst. Secretary of Defense John T. McNaughton summarized U.S. aims in Vietnam for Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara: 1. Barbara W. Tuchman, The March of Folly from Troy to Vietnam (New York: Ballantine, 1984), p. 5.

Preface

7

(a) 70 percent—To avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat (to our reputation as a counter-subversion guarantor). (b) 20 percent—To keep [South Vietnam and adjacent territory] from Chinese hands. (c) 10 percent—To permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life. Also—to emerge from crisis without unacceptable taint from methods used. Not to “help a friend,” although it would be hard to stay out if asked.2 One can hear disturbing echoes of Vietnam in the U.S. quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan. On March 4, 2002, during a Washington press briefing to discuss the combat deaths of eight Americans in Afghanistan, Gen. Tommy Franks offered his prayers for the families of those killed “in ongoing operations in Vietnam.” He later corrected himself: “Vietnam was a long time ago, and not at all like what we’re seeing now.”3 Despite the reflexive denial, Franks’ Freudian slip betrayed the fact that open comparisons with Vietnam had become commonplace.4 Like the Vietcong, Islamist resistance fighters do not wear uniforms, march in formation, or fight on a battlefield. They wage a determined guerrilla insurgency against American overlordship and colonial puppet governments. The main similarity between the Vietnam War and the “war on terrorism” lies in their irrationality. In neither case did the U.S. understand the enemy or the needs of the native population, have a defensible political goal, make a distinction between civilians and combatants, or have any exit strategy. In each case, bull-headed incompetence generated a self-destructive dynamic: the longer it went on, the greater became the threat to the U.S. leadership and ego; the greater the insult, the deeper and more indiscriminate the military retaliation; the deeper the retaliation, the greater the ego investment; the greater the ego investment, the greater the potential insult; and so on. For all the similarities, though, one major distinction stands out—the Vietnam War was a folly committed in the name of the U.S.’ own selfinterest; the “war on terrorism” is a folly committed in the name of a foreign state’s self-interest. That state is Israel. How the U.S. became an instrument of Israeli foreign policy and how this subordination is responsible for the official bigotry toward Arabs and Muslims is the main theme of this book. Only from this perspective can the “war on terrorism” be fully understood. 2. The Pentagon Papers (New York: Bantam, 1971), pp. 255, 365. 3. Cited in Jonathan Weisman, “Battle is fiercest yet, and it won’t be last,” USA Today, March 5, 2002. 4. Among numerous sources see for example, Robert McNamara, “It’s just wrong what we’re doing,” interviewed by Douglas Saunders in the Globe and Mail, Jan. 24, 2004; Erich Marquardt, “Parallels Between U.S. Occupation of Iraq and U.S. Involvement in Vietnam,” Power and Interest News Report, Nov. 28, 2003; Patrick Cockburn, “Iraq’s resistance: A new Vietnam for the White House?” The Independent, July 2, 2003.

8

Enemies by Design

Before I build my case, though, I must first demolish the demonized images of Arabs and Muslims. Therefore, Part I primarily concerns the life and political development of Osama bin Laden. This story will be intertwined with various subthemes to present a fully rounded portrait of the man and the geopolitical landscape that shaped him. The main subthemes include: a brief history of political Islam and jihad; U.S. and British Arab policy; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; how the invasion was exploited by the U.S., Pakistan and Saudi Arabia; the Gulf War; and the rift between bin Laden and the Saudi royal family. Because of its essentially biographical structure, this part is more expository and less interpretive than the rest of the book. The constructive phase of my argument begins with Part II, which examines the theory and practice of neo-conservatism, evangelical Christianity and Jewish Zionism, and how the fusion of these three belief structures made the demonization of Arabs and Muslims acceptable. Particular attention is paid to the corrupting influence of philosopher Leo Strauss on U.S. liberal culture, and the profusion of Zionist “think tanks” that his ideas helped engender. Part III concerns the political analysis of U.S.-Israeli conduct in Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq, the beggaring of Iraq, and the origin of the “war on terrorism.” Part IV deals extensively with the Project for the New American Century, the pro-Israel pressure group that completed the Zionist usurpation of the U.S. government. At this point, I would like to acknowledge the following people for their generosity and invaluable assistance in helping me survive my first book. Rafeh Hulays gave me the original idea and edited early drafts of Part I. Gary Keenan offered much-needed moral support, and also helped with Part I. For the past three years, Muhammad Ali Khan has generously allowed me to post my writing on mediamonitors.net, thus helping me gain a large audience and the confidence to tackle a large project like this. Marc Ash and the team at truthout.com provided me with the most upto-date information about U.S. foreign policy on Iraq. Phyllis Ann Good proofread every chapter, helped with research, promoted the book, and was a constant source of inspiration. Paul de Rooij gave valuable criticism and helped shape the finished product. Mimi Adams was instrumental in lining up key interviews and review comments. Finally I need to thank Brenda Ceaser, my long-suffering wife who put up with this uninvited houseguest longer than should have been necessary. She lent her considerable artistic talents to creating the maps. Whatever shortcomings this book may have are solely my responsibility. New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada November 15, 2004 Eid Al Fitr & Palestinian Independence Day

Part I Osama bin Laden

N A L Y S E S A N D A R T I C L E S on Osama bin Laden’s life generally begin with his father and the foundation of the bin Laden construction empire. The reason is obvious: Since nobody is born a terrorist, people and events in bin Laden’s life must have turned him from a quiet, privileged Saudi youth into a champion of militant Islam.

The methodology, though seemingly logical, is biased and shortsighted. First, it assumes a conclusion (“Bin Laden is an evil, sick, America-hating terrorist”) and then looks for evidence to support it. That the evidence could lead to a different conclusion is not considered. Second, this arbitrary starting point fosters the illusion that the Sept. 11 attack was a unique phenomenon and a specific manifestation of bin Laden’s will. Such an approach excludes consideration of other causes for the attack. To avoid both of these shortcomings this book begins with a short, focused history of Saudi Arabia, without which it is impossible to render any informed opinion of bin Laden. Virtually every major influence on his life— religion, relations with the Saudi royal family, and the Western orientation of the Saudi government—can be traced to specific people and events that led to the founding of this desert kingdom. We begin with the 18th-century zealot who gave his name to Saudi Arabia’s intolerant, Wahhabi version of Islam.

1. Saudi Inheritance

11

WAHHABISM Sheikh Muhammad bin Abd al-Wahhab1 (1703-1792) was born in the village of Uyayna north of Riyadh in the Najd, a huge expanse in the centre of the Arabian Peninsula. Two great deserts mark its length—the an-Nafud in the north and the Rub’ al-Khali or Empty Quarter in the south. To the west lie the Hijaz Mountains; to the east, a narrow strip of Persian Gulf Coast. This hostile sea of sand is the only part of Arabia that never came under the direct rule of the Ottoman Empire. The fiercely independent nomadic and oasis-dwelling Bedouin peoples largely retained their insularity from the great Arab civilizations. In matters of religion, this would be most important. Al-Wahhab grew up exceedingly pious and was said to have memorized the Quran by age 10, and developed an exaggerated and reactionary affinity for the early salafi (pious) Islam of the time of the Prophet Muhammad and his family. All subsequent changes to the faith he condemned as bid’a (innovation) because they detracted from the singular focus on Allah (God) as an object of worship. Such practices included: invoking the name of any prophet, saint, or angel in a vow or prayer; calling upon such beings for intercession with Allah; or making pilgrimages to the tombs of saints. Yet, all these practices were widespread throughout the Muslim world at that time. During his 13 years of study in Iran and Iraq, al-Wahhab saw that the austere, simple monotheism of early Islam had all but disappeared, a fact that was confirmed by the deserted and neglected mosques. Islam, like all religions, had adapted and changed, but as far as al-Wahhab was concerned, Muslims who practiced this impure Islam had forsaken Allah. These Muslims, he decided, had to be made to see the sinfulness of their idolatry, and he made it his mission to reimpose the exclusive worship of Allah and obedience to Islamic law throughout the Muslim world. Upon returning from his scholastic travels, al-Wahhab delivered his call for a return to purity in the Najd village of Harimada. Despite opposition, including from his father, he attracted a following and earned himself a wide reputation. From here, he returned to his ancestral village and persuaded its ruler Uthman bin Hamd bin Muammar to embrace tawhid (unity), the worship of Allah alone. He promised Uthman that if he did he would soon rule in Najd and be crowned with eternal bliss. By this time, word of al-Wahhab’s revivalist movement had reached Sulaiman bin Muhammad bin Urai’ir, sheik of the eastern province of Hasa. He saw this new movement as a threat to Ottoman rule and ordered Uthman to kill al-Wahhab. Uthman could not bring himself to do this, but also could not afford to cross the sheik, so he banished al-Wahhab.

1. Full name: Sheikh Muhammad bin Abd al-Wahhab bin Sulaiman bin Ali bin Muhammad bin Ahmad bin Rashid al-Tamimi. The Arabic words “bin” and “ibn” both mean “son” or “son of” and are used interchangeably.

12

Enemies by Design

After crossing the desert on foot, al-Wahhab arrived at ad-Dariya in the northeast part of the Najd, centre of power of Sheikh Muhammad ibn Saud, the 18th chieftain of his line. During his stay, al-Wahhab held secret meetings for those who wanted to be tutored in tawhid. Among the devotees were two of Saud’s brothers. At their urging, ibn Saud agreed in 1744 to meet with al-Wahhab. Ibn Saud not only heard al-Wahhab talk of the need to purify Islam, but also an invitation to become leader of the Muslims. Ibn Saud accepted, thus forming the powerful Saudi-Wahhabi bond. It was a perfect match. Both men were Bedouins who wanted conquest— one religious, the other secular. Conquest would bring Ibn Saud more power and land at the expense of his Najd rivals, the ibn Rashids; and al-Wahhab and his followers would propagate their doctrinaire version of Islam with each conquest.

VARIANTS OF ISLAM European scholars and most Arabs today use the term “Wahhabi” to describe the followers of al-Wahhab, but the Wahhabi call themselves muwahhidun—strict monotheists; like tawhid, the word is derived from wahid, meaning one. In fact, they consider the term Wahhabi to be a sign of ignorance, because it implies membership in a sect, much as Muslims never call themselves Muhammedans. These muwahhidun consider themselves to be the only authentic Muslims. Those who do not agree—95 percent of Muslims—are looked on as infidels and mere “claimants to Islam.” The Wahhabi are especially contemptuous of the sufi (mystics), who seek higher knowledge and a closer personal connection to God through trances and communal ceremonies. Sufism also provoked opposition, most importantly from the extremist legal philosopher Ibn Taymiya (1268-1328 CE) who condemned many aspects of sufism as contrary to Sharia and tawhid. The term “sufi” is also used as a general epithet to condemn anyone who opposes Wahhabism or believes in intermediaries between man and Allah. Sufism derived from Islam circa 800 CE, and incorporates elements of other belief systems, like neo-Platonism. Sufism is especially strong in Egypt, Sudan, and on the Indian subcontinent. One cannot see in the Wahhabi any connection to the humanistic, tolerant, enlightened Muslims who preserved, enhanced and transmitted the knowledge of ancient Greece, without which modern science and the European Renaissance would not have been possible. Today, 85 to 90 percent of all Muslims are Sunni, so called because in addition to the Quran they base their faith on the Sunna (rule or custom), recommended conduct based on the Prophet Muhammad’s words and deeds or hadith (traditions) of the Prophet. Although the Wahhabi are Sunni, this book will use the term “Wahhabi” rather than muwahhiddun, because their

1. Saudi Inheritance

13

intolerant puritanism places them in a de facto state of war with virtually the rest of the Arab and Muslim world. During his life, Muhammad was known as rassul’allah (Messenger of God) because he received and recited revelations directly from Archangel Jibril (Gabriel). His death in 632 CE presented a problem for his family and followers because the question of how Islam would continue after Muhammad had not been dealt with. Creating a religious caliph (successor) was out of the question because Muhammad was considered to be the seventh and last of Allah’s prophets, which meant that the religious lineage died with him. That left only the possibility of continuing Islam through a political and administrative Caliphate based on the Sunna. In its early stages, the terms Arab and Muslim were virtually interchangeable, as were the political and religious lives of those living under the Caliphate. This centralized ethical institution spread rapidly throughout the Middle East, North Africa and Spain, bringing Islam to non-Arab peoples. The Caliphate reached its limit in 847 after only 225 years, after which time it disintegrated into smaller political and cultural units. The institution of Caliph would persist in vestigial form into the 20th century.2 In contrast to Sunni Muslims, Shi’ites (partisans) believe that Muhammad did choose a caliph—Ali, his cousin, son-in-law, and the last of the founding four elected caliphs. Shi’ites comprise 10-15 percent of all Muslims, and are the majority sect only in Iran and Iraq. Doctrinal hostility between the two sects is passionate, but recent attempts have been made to reconcile the two sects; in Lebanon, Hezballah (Party of God) has led the way.

SAUDI–WAHHABI SYMBIOSIS The Saudi-Wahhabi “army of purification” emerged out of the Najd in 1763 and dominated the peninsula on and off until 1889. It achieved consistent success until 1811, when it lost control of the Najd in a 10-year war against Muhammad Ali Pasha, the Ottoman viceroy in Egypt who was also regent of the all-important Hijaz. This region, running the length of the Arabian Peninsula’s western Red Sea Coast, contains Islam’s two holiest sites, Mecca and Medina, as well as the port of Jeddah and the lush Asir region in the southwest. Saudi-Wahhabi forces took Mecca in 1804 and Medina in 1805, but in 1812 Ali’s Egyptians drove them out of Mecca after a bloody battle. In 1818, they were forced to fall back on Riyadh, thus ending the first Saudi state. 2. “Islam,” World Civilizations, Washington State University. The end came in August 1923 when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk became the first president of Turkey. Although he retained Islam as the state religion, Atatürk abolished the caliphate and all Islamic institutions as part of a broad modernization program based on Western ideas of law and secular government. The six principles (isms) of “Atatürkism” would be: republicanism, nationalism, populism, statism, secularism and revolutionism, .

14

Enemies by Design

A second state, the Najd Sultanate, began in 1824, but it was little more than a minor principality, and controlled only a handful of villages. By 1833 the purification movement had peaked and began a long decline. In 1865, inter-tribal rivalry tore apart the Saudi dynasty, and Ottoman forces recaptured Riyadh 19 years later. In 1889, the Saudis were forced to flee the Najd and became penniless exiles in Kuwait. At the time, Kuwait was a British protectorate carved out of Iraq, so effectively ibn Saud was under British protection. Had the history of Arabia been allowed to unfold without foreign intervention, this might have been the last we heard of the Saudis: of the four major families outside of the Persian Gulf emirates, the Saudis were the least fit to rule—poor, violent, illiterate and lacking a noble lineage. The ibn Rashids, also Bedouin, were a class above the Saudis. As journalist and Saudi authority Saïd K. Aburish writes: The ibn Rashids belonged to the noble tribe of Shamar [in the northwest Najd region of Jamal Shamar], too big and too proud to depend on raids in the ibn Saud fashion. They were educated people refined enough to sign friendship treaties with the Sultanate of Turkey, and ample evidence exists that they conducted their court affairs in a civilized manner. To establish the differences between the ibn Rashids and the al-Sauds, all one has to do is examine contemporaneous pictures of the former looking regal and romantic and compare them with pictures of the disheveled ibn Saud and his barefoot children, including the present King Fahd looking desperately dusty and in need of a bath.3 The Hashemite dynasty in the west was, and is, the greatest and most important in the Arab world, and was the most deserving of rule. Sharif Hussein bin Ali, Emir of Mecca (1908–1916) and King of Hijaz (1916–1924), was the direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad—a 37th great grandson through his first son al-Hassan.4 The Hashemites had ruled Hijaz and been guardians of the Holy Mosques in Mecca and Medina continuously since 1201. The Idris dynasty also had a recognized descent from the Prophet, but was of insufficient stature to be a contender. Still, its members were civilized, and what Aburish said about them also sums up his views of the Hashemites: “They were educated people who lived in accordance with an Islamic tradition which preached equality, kindness and the rule of law, and they were people full of goodness and hospitality and opposed to illiteracy and violence.”5

3. Saïd K. Aburish, The Rise, Corruption and Coming Fall of the House of Saud (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), p. 17. 4. The current King of Jordan, Abdullah, is the great (x41) grandson of the Prophet. 5. Aburish, p. 17.

1. Saudi Inheritance

15

Despite the odds, the Saudis would prevail over the other families because of two factors. The first was the leadership of Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud—fourth generation great grandson of Muhammad ibn Saud, and future founder of Saudi Arabia.6 The second was the British. In January 1902, ibn Saud led a charge of 40 camelmen from Kuwait to recapture Riyadh, which since 1884 had been governed by the ibn Rashids, allies of the Ottoman Turks. Sir John Bagot Glubb, British soldier, author and chronicler of Bedouin language and culture, recounts the daring assault: Reaching their old family capital, Riyadh, the little group slipped into the town by night. The Rashidi governor slept in the castle but came out every morning after dawn. Ibn Saud lay hidden until the governor emerged. Then, rushing forward with his men, he killed him and seized the castle. This exploit roused the former supporters of his dynasty. They rallied to so magnetic a leader, and in two years of raids and skirmishes ibn Saud reconquered half of central Arabia.7 Ibn Rashid appealed to the Turks for assistance, and on June 15, 1904, their combined forces defeated ibn Saud, but failed to drive him from central Arabia. This failure would allow ibn Saud to regroup and mount his final assault. In 1913, he captured the eastern region of Al Hasa, and in 1921 extinguished ibn Rashidi rule in Jabal Shamar. By the end of 1926, ibn Saud had taken the entire Hijaz—Mecca fell bloodlessly in 1924, and Medina fell in 1925, ending 724 years of continuous Hashemite protectorship. Ibn Saud took Asir in 1926, and the next year named himself “King of al Hijaz and of Najd and its Dependencies.” In 1932, he renamed the lands for himself—the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

6. Full name: Abd al-Aziz ibn abd al-Rahman ibn Faisal ibn Turki abd Allah ibn Muhammad al-Saud. 7. Sir John Bagot Glubb, “Ibn Saud, Abdul-Aziz,” entry in Encyclopedia Britannica.

16

Enemies by Design

British betrayal The other factor that made Saudi rule possible was World War I and Britain’s imperial designs on Arabia. Until the war, Britain followed a policy of studied neutrality. Ostensibly, it cared only about maintaining the various legs of the imperial air route to India, and ensuring the safety of Indian Muslims making the hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca.8 By the 1890s, though, Britain was scheming to get its hands on Kuwaiti oil, and that meant it had a vested interest in maintaining stable Ottoman rule. According to Sir Louis Mallet, Britain’s ambassador to the empire in March 1914: If the Arabs are eventually successful in defeating the Ottoman armies the loss of the Caliphate would probably follow, where, shorn of a further large portion of territory and of the religious leadership, Turkish rule, as it exists today, would presumably disappear. Europe might then be faced with the question of a partition of the Turkish Empire which might easily produce complications of a serious nature, whilst it is

8. Private letter from Lord Kitchener to Sir William Lord Tyrrell, Sir Edward Grey MSS, Vol. 9, British Agency, Cairo, April 26, 1914 .

1. Saudi Inheritance

17

difficult to estimate what might be the effects on India of a prolonged struggle for the possession of the Caliphate.9 Even after Britain entered the war against Germany on Aug. 4, 1914, its attitude toward the Ottoman Empire didn’t change until the sultan formally sided with Germany and Austria-Hungary on Oct. 28. Now, Britain needed the help of Sharif Hussein’s Arabs to harass and divert the Ottomans so they could not aid Germany. This was an ironic request, given the nature of Britain’s first encounter with the Hashemites. On Feb. 5, 1914, Hussein’s son Abdullah met Lord Kitchener in Cairo to sound out British support for the Arabs, who were rebelling against increasingly bureaucratic Ottoman rule and attempts to reduce the authority of the Sharifate: When I asked him to tell me whether, in the event of a rupture, the Sharif could count upon any support from Great Britain, Kitchener replied negatively, on the plea that British relations with Turkey were friendly and that, in any case, the dispute was an internal matter in which it would not be proper for a foreign Power to intervene. I could not refrain from pointing out that those friendly relations had not prevented Great Britain from intervening in the dispute between Turkey and the Sheikh of Kuwait, which was likewise an internal matter. Kitchener laughed and rose to depart. As he was leaving, he said that he would make a point of reporting our conversation to his Government.10 Nevertheless, Hussein agreed to commit his army to the service of Britain provided that Britain support a post-war Hashemite Caliphate over all of Arabia bounded by: the 37th parallel in the north; Persia and the Persian Gulf on the east; the Indian Ocean on the south; and the Red Sea and Mediterranean Sea on the West. Subject to minor amendments, Britain’s High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, did just that, and signalled His Majesty’s approval to Hussein in a letter dated Oct. 24, 1915.11 Hussein lived up to his end of the bargain—the Ottomans never did aid Germany—but Britain had no intention of reciprocating. Six months before McMahon even wrote his letter, Britain had decided to carve up the Ottoman Empire to its advantage. In April, the government had commissioned its ambassador in Vienna, Maurice de Bunsen, to head a committee to look into the matter. The Bunsen report, issued two months later, determined essential

9. Dispatch from British Ambassador to Constantinople Sir Louis Mallet to Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Office 13871/4688/14/44 (No.193), Constantinople, March 18, 1914, . 10. Emir Abdullah’s account of his conversations with Lord Kitchener, transmitted with notes by Arab historian George Antonius, Jerusalem, May 1, 1936, . 11. The Hussein-McMahon Correspondence, Oct. 24, 1915, .

18

Enemies by Design

British spheres of influence, which included the Red Sea and Iraq, both of which Hussein claimed for the Caliphate. Iraq was deemed especially important for two reasons: a railway from Palestine to Basra on the Persian Gulf could become an alternate route to India, and suspected oil reserves around Mosul, 400 km. north of Baghdad, would be vital to keeping the now-oil dependent British navy afloat. Britain’s betrayal of Hussein and the promise of Arab independence were formalized in the clandestine Anglo-French Sykes-Picot agreement of May 1916, which carved up the Middle East into British and French spheres of influence. Britain didn’t want a partner in Arabia; it wanted a lackey to serve the Crown. As fate would have it, one such lackey was already on Britain’s payroll—ibn Saud. After losing to the Ottoman/ibn Rashidi forces in 1904, ibn Saud realized that Britain was the only power in the area capable of providing him with an income and armaments—the only two things he cared about. Even though supporting ibn Saud contradicted its pro-Ottoman policy, Britain established secret contacts and advanced him small sums to keep him “in reserve.” By 1911, when war seemed all but inevitable, the contacts and money increased.12 The decision to cultivate ibn Saud was not unanimous. In March 1914, Mallet wrote to Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey: “I have always felt that the policy we are pursuing towards ibn Saud is fraught with grave danger to the integrity of Turkey, and I was always personally strongly opposed to the interviews which took place between him and our officials.”13 In December 1915, the two sides signed a friendship and cooperation treaty that if nothing else confirmed the unsophistication and servility Britain was looking for. In exchange for arms, a monthly subsidy of £5,000 and an agreement to wage war on the ibn Rashids, ibn Saud turned his eastern and central Arabian lands into a British protectorate, over which he was made governor. After stalling for five years because he felt the subsidy was too small, ibn Saud launched his assault on Jabal Shamar, extinguishing ibn Rashidi rule as mentioned above. However, a more accurate assessment would be: Britain extinguished ibn Rashidi rule by using ibn Saud and his Wahhabi warriors. Three years before he aligned himself with British imperial interests, ibn Saud began forming his own elite army. He sent Wahhabi ulama (Islamic scholars and legists) among the Bedouin to convince them that the traditional nomadic way of life was “un-Islamic,” and that they had a religious duty to settle in hijrah (agricultural colonies) around desert oases. These hijrah ranged in population from 1,000 to 10,000, and provided all the necessities of

12. Aburish, p. 18. He dates first Saudi contact to 1865, the same year the dynasty fell into civil war, but nothing came of this contact. 13. Mallet to Grey, op. cit.

1. Saudi Inheritance

19

communal life: living quarters, mosques, schools, agricultural equipment and instruction, and arms and ammunition. Though designed to promote land reclamation, they were primarily Wahhabi indoctrination centers, where ibn Saud hoped to break the traditional nomadic tribal bonds and reinvent the Bedouin as a cohesive army. These new Wahhabi were called ikhwan (brethren) and became renowned for their ferocity and fighting skill. It is to them that ibn Saud owed his victories over the ibn Rashids and the Hashemites in the Hijaz. The ikhwan would eventually form the nucleus of the modern Saudi National Guard. But with victory came obsolescence. What the ikhwan didn’t know and couldn’t have known is that they were only an instrument of ibn Saud’s personal ambition. Once ibn Saud controlled the Hijaz, he had no further use for them. Ibn Saud cared solely only about forming a nation-state in Arabia and promoting his own economic interest.14

Civil war For the most part, the ikhwan remained on the hijrah, even though the resettlement scheme ultimately failed, and many were reduced to poverty. The more fanatical among them returned to raiding, and openly challenged ibn Saud. In 1926, three chieftains—ibn Humayd, al-Dawish, and ibn Hithlayn, accused ibn Saud of un-Islamic conduct for introducing bid’a: the telephone, telegraph, automobile, and sending his son to study in Egypt, a country of “infidel” Muslims. To placate them, ibn Saud took their grievance to the ulama, whom he controlled, but compromise was out of the question. The ikhwan would have to be destroyed as a fighting force. The end came in 1927 when the ikhwan destroyed an Iraqi force that had crossed into the neutral zone on the Arabian Peninsula. As the Saudi state expanded northward it encroached upon the artificially created Hashemite kingdoms of Transjordan and Iraq, both of which were British protectorates. Because national boundaries are un-Islamic, the ikhwan did not recognize them, even though ibn Saud negotiated the neutral zone with the British. Britain was trying to stabilize the region and was incensed by these renewed attacks. It bombed the Najd in retaliation and told ibn Saud to do something about the ikhwan. In October 1928, ibn Saud deposed the three rebel chieftains, but that only moved them to armed insurrection. Ibn Saud engaged them in a major battle with British air support on the plain of asSabalah in the east. The ikhwan suffered heavy losses, but the violence 14. As early as 1923, ibn Saud granted his first oil concession (Ahsa) to the Eastern and General Syndicate, a British investment group. The syndicate hoped to turn a profit by selling the concession but no British petroleum company was interested. The concession lapsed in 1928 and was declared void. Standard Oil of California took a concession in 1932 and made the first oil discovery in Saudi Arabia in 1938.

20

Enemies by Design

dragged on for months. The defection of a rebel faction later that summer allowed ibn Saud to encircle the insurgents and force them to surrender to the British in Kuwait in 1930. The fighting in Arabia was over, and in 1932 ibn Saud renamed his domain “Saudi Arabia.”

S U M M A RY The price of victory was ibn Saud’s increased dependence on the ulama. He needed their support not only to defeat the ikhwan but also to solidify his rule. Thus we come to the mutual hostage scenario that dominates Saudi Arabia. The ulama need the protection of the House of Saud, because the Wahhabi aren’t welcome anywhere else in the Muslim world. The House of Saud needs the ulama to provide it Muslim legitimacy, and to coerce the citizenry into obedience. Saudi Arabia is a totalitarian kingdom, which means that its citizens risk intimidation, torture, imprisonment or death if they dissent from Wahhabi doctrine or challenge the Saudi government in any way. The House of Saud cannot tolerate criticism because it has neither Muslim nor Arabic legitimacy. By rights, the Hashemites should be ruling the peninsula. The problem for the Saudis is that their pro-Western servility and proWahhabi dependency are mutually irreconcilable. Of the two, the latter is the more easily controllable because the King also carries the title of imam (spiritual leader), and so appoints the ulama. The Saudis above all need Western oil revenue to finance their un-Islamic self-aggrandizement, as well as Western military protection to maintain their rule, even at the expense of their own citizens’ welfare. This hypocrisy would result in a similar pattern of factors determining the path of Osama bin Laden’s life: • Ideological armies turning on their creators; • A zealot championing the cause of jihad (struggle) against the enemies of Islam; • A brotherhood of fighters; • Recreating the Caliphate; and • The Saudis colluding with their Western master (U.S.) to the detriment of other Muslims (Palestinians and Iraqis).

T H E S A U D I A R A B I A N P L U T O C R A C Y , proximity to the royal family is not just the key to success—it is success itself. The country’s immense petrochemical wealth and the revenue it generates are virtually the family’s private property: the Saudi royal family is the government; they control the press, and together with the ulama, they repress any political dissent or activism. N

Saudi Arabia is not so much a country as a private fiefdom in which the common people have no civil rights. For example, slavery was still officially legal in the kingdom until 1962. In that year the number of slaves totaled approximately 30,000—one for every 100 native Saudi Arabians.1 Only pressure from U.S. President John Kennedy, and the fear of growing domestic unrest, convinced then-King Faisal to abolish the practice. Still, the blanket manumission has not stopped the buying and selling of wives, or the virtual enslavement of immigrant workers, who have no legal protection from physical and financial abuse by their employers. In 1995, the number of these indentured immigrants numbered more than 3 million—one third of the native population.2 In Saudi Arabia, one’s power, influence and station in life depended not on merit or personal ambition, but who your father was and who his father was. Consequently, a genuine share in the country’s wealth was denied to non-members of the House of Saud. This was especially true of immigrants who not only had no Saudi genealogy, but no Saudi citizenship. Nevertheless, the bin Laden construction empire was founded by an illiterate Yemeni immigrant.

1. David Holden and Richard Johns, The House of Saud: The Rise and Rule of the Most Powerful Dynasty in the Arab World (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston), pp. 229-230. 2. Saïd K. Aburish, The Rise, Corruption and Coming Fall of the House of Saud (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), pp. 46-47; 90-91.

22

Enemies by Design

THE BIN LADEN EMPIRE The story of Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden’s remarkable rise from impoverished Yemeni longshoreman to international industrial Saudi tycoon reads like a Horatio Alger novel—but with a twist.3 Bin Laden did work hard and doubtless would have been a success on his own, but it was Saudi patronage that made him and his family rich and powerful. Like many Yemenis from the poor coastal province of Hadhramaut, bin Laden came to Hijaz by camel caravan in search of a better life. He arrived around 1930 and found work as a bricklayer for ARAMCO (the ArabianAmerican Oil Company), at the rate of one Saudi riyal, (US 21 cents) per day. More than likely, he would also have suffered discrimination as a Yemeni. Bin Laden worked hard and saved assiduously until he could start his own construction business. He started by taking on small jobs, all the while learning the fine art of lobbying for lucrative royal contracts. He managed to gain ibn Saud’s attention by undercutting the lowest bid to work on his palace in Riyadh. Ibn Saud was said to be so impressed that he granted bin Laden’s company contracts for other Saud palaces, the exclusive right to renovate and maintain the mosques at Mecca and Medina, and a monopoly on all construction of a religious nature. The Bin Laden company could thus claim the unique honor of renovating and maintaining all three of Islam’s holiest sites—the mosques in Mecca and Medina, as well as the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, until it came under Israeli occupation in 1967. In 1961, bin Laden landed the lucrative Medina-to-Jeddah highway construction project after a foreign bidder backed out. The bin Laden construction empire was now established, thanks to hard work and Saudi patronage. During the following decades, the company built tunnels, dams and thousands of miles of roads and evolved into a multinational conglomerate with interests in industrial and power projects, chemicals, airports, mining, telecommunications, manufacturing, media, retailing and trading. In all, the bin Laden empire is today worth $5 billion and employs 35,000 to 40,000 people. In temperament and personality, Muhammad bin Laden could not have been more unlike his patrons. He was unpretentious, generous, and a devout Muslim, but not to Wahhabi excess. A French engineer who worked with him in the ’60s remembered that bin Laden always left home with a wad of banknotes to hand out to the poor, because almsgiving is a fundamental duty of every Muslim.4 3. Horatio Alger was a 19th-century American novelist who wrote more than 100 books about young boys who achieved fame and wealth through honesty and hard work. 4. Jason Burke “The making of Osama bin Laden,” The Observer, reproduced at salon.com, Nov. 1, 2001.

2. The Outsider

23

“The family and the people who worked for him all loved him,” said Gerry Auerbach, a Texan who flew bin Laden’s private plane around Saudi Arabia from 1966 to 1967. “He had a sense of humor.” 5 Muhammad bin Laden’s success was not just measured in contracts and dollars. He became a trusted confidant and advisor to the House of Saud, and in this role he cemented the special relationship between the two families. In the late 1950s or early ‘60s, bin Laden developed a strong personal relationship with King Saud, whose extravagant spending habits caused an economic crisis, and generated calls from within the family for him to abdicate in favor of his brother Faisal. Bin Laden’s relationship with ibn Saud was a major factor in convincing him to relinquish power in 1964. After ibn Saud’s departure, bin Laden proved his loyalty to the new king Faisal by paying civil servant wages for six months, because the kingdom was broke. In gratitude, Faisal decreed that bin Laden must be involved in all construction contracts. The privileges of this special friendship would be passed down to bin Laden’s children, who played and studied with the children of the King and of the most prosperous Saudi families. Men of the bin Laden family often chaperoned the king’s sons and helped them get a start in business. In turn, bin Laden’s sons would strengthen their family’s personal ties at the Victoria College in Alexandria, Egypt, where their schoolmates included King Hussein of Jordan, the Khashoggi brothers and actor Omar Sharif. The illiterate longshoreman from Yemen and his family had become associate members of the royal family.

YOUNG OSAMA Throughout his life, Muhammad bin Laden is estimated to have had 10 or 11 wives—three official wives, and a fourth who was changed regularly. According to Islamic law, the maximum number of wives at any one time is four. In all, bin Laden sired 52, 54, 55 or 57 children, depending on the source. All three official wives were Saudi, but the fourth wife, Alia Ghanem, was not. She was a beautiful, stylish, sophisticated 22-year-old Syrian. She gave birth to her only child on March 10, 1957—Osama, Muhammad bin Laden’s 17th son. Muhammad treated all of his children equally and expected his sons to grow up quickly and display self-confidence, even at a young age. Out of pride for his laboring roots and to instill a work ethic, he kept the bag he brought with him from Hadhramaut in a trophy case in his palace’s main reception room. As the business empire expanded into more countries and

5. “Charming and well connected, bin Laden family network spans the globe,” American Press, Oct. 4, 2001.

24

Enemies by Design

industrial sectors, bin Laden’s children would share some of the managerial responsibility. Each of Muhammad bin Laden’s wives had her own house and lived with her own children, but he made a point of ensuring that all of his progeny developed a strong sense of daily religious and social obligation. In such a large household, children of a common mother would band together to influence their father and to compete against their half-siblings. Even today, the bin Laden brothers cluster into business groups according to the nationality of their mothers: the Syrian group, Lebanese group, Jordanian group and Egyptian group. Osama bin Laden had no such natural allies. We know almost nothing about Osama’s early life or personality, save what can be gleaned from second-hand accounts from family members and acquaintances. The common picture is that of a lonely, shy, polite and reserved boy. Certainly, his unique status as a double outsider—neither of his parents was Saudi—meant that he didn’t have the credentials to join the right royal circles, but whether this low socio-political status had anything to do with his subsequent career as a rebel is unclear. Throughout his life, Osama bin Laden never had direct relations with either the Saudi government or the royal family. All of his dealings were mediated through his brothers, and two sympathetic members of the royal family: Ahmed bin Abdul Aziz, deputy minister of interior and Abdul Rahman bin Abdul Aziz, deputy minister of defense. As for the bin Laden households, Carmen, the wife of Osama’s elder brother Yeslam, said Osama was never shunned or made to feel unwelcome as the only child of a foreign-born woman.6 The first great event in Osama’s life occurred in 1968, when Mohammad bin Laden and his pilot died in a helicopter crash in the mountains of southwestern Saudi Arabia. Upon their father’s death, Osama’s Britisheducated eldest brother Salem bin Laden took control of the family business. Eleven-year-old Osama inherited his share of the family fortune, $80 million, and was sent to live with his mother’s family in the Syrian port city of Ladhiqiah. His cousin, Suleiman al-Kateb, a 54-year-old English teacher, said Osama was a calm child who internalized his grief over his father’s death. Osama bin Laden later returned to Saudi Arabia and grew up inconspicuously. As this Nov. 1, 2001, excerpt from The Observer shows, he was just a normal, though privileged, teenager: In 1971, the family went on holiday en masse to the small Swedish copper mining town of Falun. A smiling Osama—or “Sammy” as he sometimes called himself—was pictured, wearing a lime-green top and blue flares, leaning on a Cadillac.

6. “The Political Scene—The House of Bin Laden,” Media 2000 Communications special report, .

2. The Outsider

25

Osama, then 14, and his older brother Salem had first visited Falun a year before, driving from Copenhagen in a Rolls-Royce flown in from Saudi Arabia. Oddly, they stayed at the cheap Astoria Hotel, where the owner, Christina Akerblad, recalled them spending the days out “on business” and the evenings eating dinner in their rooms. “I remember them as two beautiful boys—the girls in Falun were very fond of them,” she said. “Osama played with my two [young] sons.” Akerblad remembered the wealth she found on display when cleaning the boys’ rooms. “At the weekends we saw they used the extra bed in their rooms to lay out their clothes. They had lots of white silk shirts packaged in cellophane. I think they had a new one for every day—I never saw the dirty ones. They also had a big bag for their jewelry. They had emeralds and rubies and diamond rings and tie pins.” Nor was there any sign of incipient fervor in a bucolic summer at an Oxford language school in the same year. Bin Laden and his brothers befriended a group of Spanish girls and went punting on the Thames. Last month one woman showed a Spanish newspaper photos of herself and girlfriends—one in hot pants—with three bin Laden boys. Bin Laden, wearing flares, a short-sleeved shirt and a bracelet, looks like any other awkward teenager. His two older brothers look more assured. The young Saudi even once stayed on London’s Park Lane. He had forgotten the name of the hotel his Saudi parents had checked into, he told a reporter several years ago, but he recalled “the trees of the park and the red buses.”7 Osama returned every year to Ladhiqiah, but al-Kateb noticed that with each visit he became more and more pious. Osama developed a deep affinity for Islam not only because of his religious upbringing but also because of the many hajj (pilgrimages) his father hosted. These brought Osama and his siblings into contact with senior Islamic scholars and leaders of Muslim movements. Osama’s elder brothers maintained the tradition. During a 1974 visit, when Osama was 17, al-Kateb noticed that he began to let his beard grow, a trait he rightly attributed to the growing influence of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi culture. Osama was also spiritually moved by the commission granted to his father to refurbish the Holy Mosques that began in 1973. Also in 1974, some sources say 1975, Osama married his 14-year-old cousin, Najwa Ghanem. He was terribly timid around women, but he would eventually marry three more times.8

7. Burke, op. cit. 8. “Bin Laden was a quiet, shy child,” Middle East Online, Nov. 15, 2001

26

Enemies by Design

T E M P TAT I O N S O F T H E W E S T In the early 1970s, two upheavals in the Middle East would determine the future course of bin Laden’s life. The first was the October War. On Oct. 6, 1973, Egyptian and Syrian forces—supported by Jordan and Iraq and funded by Saudi Arabia—launched an attack on Israeli forces illegally stationed in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and Syria’s Golan Heights. The objective was to reclaim these lands, which Israel had seized in the 1967 War. The October War was short and a net territorial defeat for Israel. On Oct. 26, the United Nations negotiated a ceasefire on the Egyptian front with UN monitoring. Egypt regained full control over both shores of the Suez Canal as well as a strip of land along the first half of the western coast of Sinai. In 1974–75 a U.S.-led truce settlement left Syria with a small area of the Golan around the town of Quneitra. But the war had more far-reaching political repercussions because of President Richard Nixon’s decision to resupply Israel after it suffered heavy early losses.9 To punish the West, especially the U.S., the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) imposed an oil embargo on Oct. 17. Overnight, the price of a barrel of oil to the U.S. and its Western European allies rose more than 70 percent from $3 to $5.11. The following January, it rose to $11.65. Gasoline shortages and economic hardship plagued many Western economies, especially the U.S. The embargo ended in March 1974, but Middle Eastern economies had been irrevocably distorted. Saudi Arabia and other Arab states were suddenly flush with cash, and this wealth bought instant, overwhelming exposure to the licentious temptations of Western individualism. The effect was most pronounced in Osama bin Laden’s home of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia’s main port on the Red Sea and most cosmopolitan city. The growing influence of Western values also attracted leading Islamist intellectuals who came to universities and mosques to teach that the only defense against Western corruption was absolute and unconditional return to pure Islam, that is, Wahhabism. From 1976 to 1979, Osama bin Laden worked toward his degree in civil engineering at King Abdul Aziz University. Like all students, he was also required to take courses in Islamic studies, and it was here that he met leading exponents of the new Islamist revivalism, one of whom would become a major figure in Afghanistan: Sheik Abdullah Azzam.

9. On Oct. 6, 1973, 70,000 Egyptian troops attacked and overran 500 Israelis stationed on the Bar Lev Line in Egyptian territory along the Suez Canal. To the north, 1,100 Syrian tanks fought 157 Israeli tanks, capturing a key intelligence-gathering position, and a large part of the Golan Heights from Israel. In the first two days, Israel suffered 2,000 dead and 340 captured troops, as well as the loss of 49 planes and 500 tanks. On Oct. 13, the U.S. flew 550 sorties, carrying 50 new Phantom jets and $2.2 billion-worth of ammunition and equipment in two weeks—more than during the Berlin airlift of 1948-49.

2. The Outsider

27

Azzam was born in 1941 to a pious family in the Palestinian province of Jenin. His early education took him to Jordan and Damascus, where he earned a Bachelor’s degree in sharia (Islamic Law) in 1966. The following year he returned to join the jihad against Israel during the 1967 Six Day War. He continued his education at Cairo’s al-Azhar university, earning a master’s degree in Islamic law and later a doctorate. In the mid-1970s, Azzam abandoned the Palestinian cause because it he said it was too focused on nationalist goals and insufficiently committed to the religious essence of jihad. He then came to King Abdul-Aziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Azzam belonged to the Jamiat al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun (The Society of Muslim Brothers), founded in 1928 in Egypt by the Islamic scholar Hassan alBanna, who dedicated himself to rejuvenating Islam after the fall of the Caliphate in 1924. Members of the society believe that the government of a Muslim country should prepare its people to accept Islamic law, as set out in the Quran and Sunna, and that Islam should be an integral part of political life. Throughout the Muslim world, Islamist movements like this posed the greatest threat to traditional ruling Arab elites and new secularism, so they have existed underground. This is one reason why Azzam and others found sanctuary in the land of the Wahhabi.

INSURRECTION On Nov. 20, 1979, a band of 1,400 or so militant Islamists led by a selfstyled messiah (former national guardsman Juhayman ibn-Muhammad ibn Sayf al-Utaibi) seized the Holy Mosque in the name of restoring Islamic purity. Although the insurrection was defeated and left no lasting impression, it is significant because it marks the first time that Islamists joined the political opposition to the Saudi regime. In one sense it bore a resemblance to the earlier ikhwan movement—it was purely rejectionist, had no constructive recommendations, and lacked a comprehensive vision. On the other hand, it was motivated by specific political concerns—“the government’s adoption of deliberate policies aimed at spreading corruption and the promotion of Westernization through the media and through educational institutions.”10 The insurrection had special significance for the bin Laden family. Because bin Laden trucks have exclusive rights to enter the holy site to effect repairs, the insurrectionists used them to transport weapons into Mecca, knowing that the trucks would not be inspected. Osama’s brother Mahrous was arrested for his ties to radical Islamists, but was later freed, and no lasting harm was done to the Saudi-bin Laden special relationship.

10. “The Rise and Evolution of the Modern Islamic Reform Movement in Saudi Arabia,” Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia .

28

Enemies by Design

The insurrection was too extreme to secure a popular following, but Juhayman’s sermons against Westernization found a wide audience among intellectuals, including Osama bin Laden, and they forced the Saudi regime to take a hard look at its politics and lavish habits. Osama did not approve of the assault, nor of the people behind it. He was still both a devout Muslim and a loyal subject of the House of Saud. Like the brotherhood, he believed that a strong Islamic government was the only way to protect Saudi society from the evils of Westernization, and believed that the monarchy was best able to achieve it. The Juhayman Insurrection was only one of four significant events that shook the Muslim world toward the end of the 1970s. • Jan. 16, 1978—The Shah of Iran flees to the West; • Feb. 1, 1979—Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returns from exile in Paris to the establish the Islamic Republic of Iran; • July 16, 1979—Saddam Hussein becomes president of Iraq; and • Dec. 27, 1979—The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan to defend the puppet government of Nur Mohammed Taraki. It is hard to overestimate the significance of the Soviet invasion. A nonMuslim army invaded a Muslim country for the first time since World War II. Muslims from all over the Arab world joined the jihad, and Osama bin Laden found his professional calling.

E F O R E W E E X A M I N E the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and how it shaped Osama bin Laden, we need to understand the meaning of jihad, or struggle. It’s a multi-faceted concept on which even Muslims do not agree. However, one thing is certain—it does not mean “holy war,” which in Arabic would be rendered as al-harb al-muqaddasa (an oxymoron, since harb, with the root meaning of rage, is always used in a negative sense in the Quran). This common Western misinterpretation is likely born of opportunistic propaganda or a simplistic allusion to the Crusades, which were “holy wars”—wars of sanctified aggression.

Muslims do not force their faith on non-Muslims, because the Quran (2:236) says: “There is no compulsion in religion.” We know that Muslims show tolerance toward other faiths thanks to testimony from people like Christian missionary and historian Sir Thomas W. Arnold: [Of] any organized attempt to force the acceptance of Islam on the nonMuslim population, or of any systematic persecution intended to stamp out the Christian religion, we hear nothing. Had the caliphs chosen to adopt either course of action, they might have swept away Christianity as easily as Ferdinand and Isabella drove Islam out of Spain, or Louis XIV made Protestantism penal in France, or the Jews were kept out of England for 350 years. The Eastern Churches in Asia were entirely cut off from communion with the rest of Christendom throughout which no one would have been found to lift a finger on their behalf, as heretical communions. So that the very survival of these Churches to the present day is a strong proof of the generally tolerant attitude of Mohammedan 1 [sic] governments towards them.

1. Sir Thomas W. Arnold, The Preaching of Islam, A History of the Propagation of the Muslim Faith, (London: A. Constable & Co., London, 1896), p. 80.

30

Enemies by Design

Broadly speaking, jihad means “struggling” or “striving,” to purify the body of negative influences that impede one from following the way of God. For that reason, jihad is often followed by the phrase fi sabil Allah (in the way of God).2 The same idea of purification is true in the larger sense of purging negative foreign influences (armies) from the body politic (umma) of the Islamic world.3 According to Islamic scholar Douglas E. Streusand, traditional jurists interpret a military jihad as an emergency call to the whole community, but the decision to heed the call is up to each Muslim. The key points to bear in mind are that jihad is defensive, voluntary, and waged in the name of God. In a more extreme form, ultra-pious Muslims argue that jihad may be waged against any Muslim leader who does not rigorously apply the Sharia in its totality. Because jihad against a Muslim is contrary to the Quran, such a ruler would first be made “non-Muslim;” that is, declared to be an unbeliever. This is the view of ibn Taymiya, but it is in the minority, writes Streusand, because the vast majority of Sunni Muslims prefer to compromise Sharia doctrine to create a harmonious society rather than an Islamic tyranny. Still another version of jihad comes from the Sufi concept of “greater jihad”—an internal struggle against temptation and polytheism. As Streusand writes: Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali (1059–1111), probably the most important figure in Islam’s development after the prophet, describes the body as a city, governed by the soul, and besieged by the lower self. Withdrawal from the world to mystical pursuits constitutes an advance in the greater jihad. Conversely, the greater jihad is a necessary part of the process of gaining spiritual insight. By the eleventh century, sufism had become an extremely influential, and perhaps even the dominant, form of Islamic spirituality.4 Despite the differences in these three traditional models—limited war, rebellion against impiety, and moral enlightenment—jihad is always 2. Douglas E. Streusand, “What Does Jihad Mean?” Middle East Quarterly , September 1997. 3. The various contexts of jihad according to the Qur’an and Hadith are: • Recognizing the Creator and loving him most: • Resisting pressure of parents, peers, and society: • Staying on the straight path steadfastly: • Striving for righteous deeds: • Having courage and steadfastness to convey the message of Islam: • Defending Islam and the community: • Helping allied people who may not be Muslim: • Removing treacherous people from power: • Defending through preemptive strikes: • Gaining freedom to inform, educate and convey the message of Islam in an open and free environment • Freeing people from tyranny 4. Ibid., Streusand.

3. The Mujahid

31

understood as jihad fi sabil Allah. It can not be justified in the name of individual or national aggrandizement. Today, though, that view is now no longer absolute. Jihad in the modern world has taken on the additional form of an anticolonial national liberation struggle, like the Palestinian Intifada (shaking off) against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. As we saw in the last chapter, this modern interpretation does not find support among strict theocrats like Sheikh Azzam, who abandoned the Palestinian cause on this very point. Because jihad is based on voluntary commitment and subject to conflicting interpretations, the call to arms is rarely effective—a fact that should disabuse anyone of the notion that jihad means a concerted “holy war” directed at destroying Western culture. Moreover, doctrinal differences within Islam and conflicting national interests ensure that the Arab/Muslim world remains fractured and easily exploited.

O N E C O N F L I C T — T H R E E WA R S The jihad to expel the Soviet army from Afghanistan was illusive because the mujahedin (Islamic resistance fighters) were not the determinants of their own actions. They, and the Arabs who came to help expel the Communists, were pawns in larger geopolitical battles. In fact, the jihad was largely a foreign war in which Afghans were little more than cannon fodder. Osama bin Laden is a direct product of this foreign war, and so the motives of the major players must be treated in some detail.

Soviet Union The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan started much the same way that World War I broke out—a political assassination set off a chain reaction of military and political misjudgment. Once events were set in motion, the Soviet Union could not stop the momentum. The more it struggled to fix the problem, the more its war party pushed it into the mire of its own “Vietnam.” The analogy to the June, 28, 1914, assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the April 11, 1978, murder of Mir Akbar Khyber, a founder of Afghanistan’s Communist Party (the Peoples’ Democratic Party of Afghanistan or PDPA) and vocal critic of the government of President Muhammad Daoud Khan. His assassin is thought to have been the minister of the interior. Eleven days afterward, the PDPA assaulted the presidential palace, killing Daoud and most of his family. On April 25, Nur Mohammed Taraki, leader of the PDPA’s Khalq (People’s) faction, was named chairman of the Revolutionary Council and the President of the renamed Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The Soviet Union moved quickly to take advantage of the coup, which became known as the Saur (April) Revolution. The plan was to turn

32

Enemies by Design

Afghanistan into a communist-run buffer state between pro-American Pakistan and Islamic Iran, thereby enhancing Soviet security. In December, Moscow signed a new bilateral treaty of friendship and cooperation, and drastically increased its military assistance program. Under Daoud, Afghan-Soviet relations had been merely correct, because Daoud sought to carve out an independent foreign policy. Even though leftists helped him in 1973 to overthrow the monarchy of his cousin Zahir Shah—who was in Italy on a European visit—Daoud was not interested in sharing power. By the end of 1975, the two communists who had been appointed to cabinet posts had been purged, and the following year Daoud founded the National Revolutionary Party to control all political affairs. The next year, the Republic of Afghanistan’s new constitution established oneparty presidential rule. The assassination of Mir Akbar Khyber was seen as part of Daoud’s attempt to destroy the PDPA. After the coup, Taraki became president, and fellow Khalq member Hafizullah Amin became both prime minister and defense minister. Babrak Karmal, leader of the hard-line Parcham (Banner) faction was appointed deputy prime minister. Staunch Soviet support for Taraki is reflected in this May 31, 1978, political letter from Ambassador A. Puzanov in Kabul to the Soviet Foreign Ministry: Daoud expressed the interests and class position of bourgeois landowners and rightist nationalist forces, and therefore was not capable of carrying out a reformation “in the interests of the broad laboring masses,” primarily agricultural reform. In conditions of a worsening economic situation in the country and Daoud’s departure from the programmatic declaration of 1973, which led to “a constant growth in the dissatisfaction of broad strata of the population,” Daoud huddled ever more closely with the “domestic reaction,” which was supported by the ‘reactionary Islamic regimes” and by “American imperialism,” and followed a course toward the “strengthening of a regime of personal power.” … The Taraki government’s program (declaration of 9 May 1978) is worked out on the basis of the PDPA program of 1966. The main task is providing for the interests of the working population on the basis of fundamental perestroika [restructuring] of the social-economic structures of society, and “the liquidation of the influence of neocolonialism and imperialism.”… The situation in the country “overall is stabilizing more and more,” the government is controlling all its regions and is taking measures ‘to cut off… the demonstrations of the domestic reaction.’ The most important factor for the further strengthening of the new power will be the achievement of unity in the leadership of the PDPA and the government. But “the tension so far has not totally been cleared away.”

3. The Mujahid

33

The embassy jointly with a group of Party advisors is undertaking measures to overcome the disagreements in the Afghan leadership.5 Of course, Puzanov’s Marxist-Leninist sloganeering utterly ignored the largely rural, tradition-bound and fiercely independent Afghan people, who would never accept rule by atheistic communists. Puzanov did acknowledge the factional infighting within the PDPA, but could not appreciate how this would doom Soviet policy. The two Marxist factions were supposed to put their differences aside to form a government, but within months Taraki had exiled Parcham government members to ambassadorial posts (Karmal went to Czechoslovakia), and had others killed or imprisoned. Political infighting ensured that the PDPA would never form a stable government. A second threat to political stability was the mujahedin. Taraki’s reforms, such as women’s emancipation and land reform, trampled on centuries of Afghan rural tradition, and in June the mujahedin declared jihad against the Taraki government. Amin brutally suppressed popular riots and mutinies within the army, thus creating a state of war between the government and the people. Given this virtual absence of popular support, the Taraki regime increasingly looked to Moscow for protection and advice. In March 1979, the townspeople of Herat massacred hundreds of government officials and Soviet advisors who were introducing a women’s literacy program. The townspeople were joined by most of the Afghan army’s 17th Infantry Division. Taraki’s forces won the battle but at the cost of more than 5,000 dead, including 100 Soviets. That month, Taraki placed a desperate call to Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin. T A R A K I : The situation is bad and getting worse. K O S Y G I N : Do you have support among the workers, city dwellers, the petty bourgeoisie, and the white-collar workers in Herat? Is there still anyone on your side? T A R A K I : There is no active support on the part of the population. It is almost wholly under the influence of Shi’ite slogans -- follow not the heathens, but follow us. The propaganda is underpinned by this. K O S Y G I N : Are there many workers there? T A R A K I : Very few -- between 1,000 and 2,000 people in all. K O S Y G I N : What are the prospects? T A R A K I : We are convinced that the enemy will form new units and will develop an offensive. K O S Y G I N : Do you not have the forces to rout them? T A R A K I : I wish it were the case. …

5. “About the Domestic Political Situation in the DRA,” May, 31, 1978, The Soviet Union and Afghanistan, 1978-1989: Documents from the Russian and East German Archives—Cold War International History Project. (CWIHP), .

34

Enemies by Design K O S Y G I N : Hundreds of Afghan officers were trained in the Soviet Union. Where are they all now? T A R A K I : Most of them are Muslim reactionaries. We are unable to rely on them, we have no confidence in them….6

On March 20, 1979, Taraki met with Kosygin and other Politburo members, at which time Kosygin articulated the Soviet Union’s position toward Afghanistan: I would like to emphasize that the friendship between Soviet Union and the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan is not conditional, dictated by some temporary viewpoints, but calculated for ages. We have given and will continue to give you assistance in the fight against all enemies which act against you at the present time and against those enemies with which you may clash in the future.7 Taraki’s biggest enemy would turn out to be Amin, who also led the 1978 assault against Daoud. Amin, a militant Islamist, is said to have first gained notoriety in Kabul for spraying acid at the faces of young girls who went about unveiled. As defense minister, his brutal repression of dissent within the military and among the population alarmed the Soviets, who asked that he and Taraki cut back reforms to broaden their political base of support. But Amin ignored Moscow and maintained the repression, even though the PDPA’s survival increasingly became dependent upon Soviet military equipment and advisers. In frustration, Moscow sought out former members of the monarchy and other non-communists to moderate the government. It also kept the U.S. embassy informed of its actions, to avoid any misunderstandings.8 The Soviet Union was in an untenable position. It was blindly committed to a government that seemed only capable of waging terror on its own people and destroying itself from within. Retreat seemed impossible because of the potential loss of face and risk of Afghanistan’s Islamist insurgency expanding into the Central Asian Soviet republics. For better or worse, Moscow was stuck with Taraki. Until now, Moscow treated Taraki and Amin as a duumvirate; now, Amin had to go. In September, en route home from a Nonaligned Movement conference in Cuba, Taraki stopped off in Moscow to discuss Amin’s future. 6. “Transcript of telephone conversation between Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin and Afghan Prime Minister Nur Mohammed Taraki,” March 1979, Cold War, Episode 20, CNN, September 1998–April 1999, . 7. “Record of meeting of A.N.Kosygin, A.A.Gromyko, D.F.Ustinov and B.N.Ponomarev with N.M.Taraki,” March 20, 1979, in CWIHP, op. cit. Although the telephone conversation between Taraki and Kosygin is undated, it’s logical to conclude that it occurred before this meeting, given Kosygin’s reassuring tone. 8. “Afghanistan: The Making of U.S. Policy (1973-1990),” Digital National Security Archive, George Washington University, .

3. The Mujahid

35

Amin learned of the stopover and had Taraki arrested upon his arrival on Sept. 16. He was secretly executed on Oct. 9. October 1979 was the pivotal month. A fact-finding mission on the state of Afghanistan by Gen. Ivan Pavlovsky determined the army’s morale and fighting ability to be low, and that 23 of Afghanistan’s 28 provinces had fallen to anti-government rebels. (By the end of the year, the 90,000-man Afghan army would be reduced to 40,000 and the officer corps halved by purges, executions and defections.) Also that month, Defense Minister Gen. Dimitri Ustinov began preliminary preparations for an invasion.9 As Gen. Valentin Varennikov, deputy head of the Soviet General Staff from 1979-84 and an architect of the invasion, told CNN in 1997: [The invasion] was supported first of all by Brezhnev ... [partly] because of Taraki’s murder. ... According to [Nikolai] Ogarkov, who was head of the General Staff, more than once he saw Brezhnev speaking in a very agitated way about Amin having acted very badly, and saying that the cruel murder of the general secretary [Taraki] and his comrade couldn’t be allowed. It was a very savage act, in our opinion; and apart from that, Amin not only killed Taraki, but what was worse, he didn’t meet Brezhnev’s proposals halfway….10 In late November, Amin’s demand that Puzanov be replaced as Soviet ambassador convinced the Politburo that military force and the elimination of Amin were necessary. On Dec. 12, the Politburo decided to invade. At 3 a.m. on Dec. 25, the main assault began. Two days later, the palace was taken after heavy fighting, and Amin and his closest aides were executed. Parcham leader Karmal, who had initiated contact with the Politburo member Yuri Andropov, was brought back from exile and installed as president. Varennikov summarized the tragic futility of Soviet policy: We didn’t set ourselves the task of conquering anyone: we wanted to stabilize the situation through our presence and help the warring parties to reconcile and stop the fighting. We wanted to station the garrisons in the main populated areas without engaging in combat activities. But my opinion is that, not without the participation of the CIA, certain forces provoked us—I mean the Afghan rebel forces, because they would attack us, they would kill our soldiers, they killed our military advisers…. [We] had to fight back against those who were killing us. And it became like a snowball: provocation, retaliation, and on and on and on. And that wave swept across the whole country. …11

9. Odd Arne Westad, “Concerning the situation in ‘A’—New Russian Evidence on the Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan,” CWIHP Bulletin 128-132, . 10. Interview with CNN in Cold War, Episode 20. 11. Ibid.

36

Enemies by Design

The United States Until the invasion, the U.S. paid little or no attention to Afghanistan. Because it shares a long border with the Soviet Union, successive administrations from Dwight Eisenhower to Jimmy Carter accepted Afghanistan as a Soviet buffer state. The State Department’s March 9, 1976, Annual Policy Assessment described it as “a militarily and politically neutral nation, effectively dependent on the Soviet Union.” The U.S. could afford to be calm because during this time it could project military power into South Asia from Iran. Iran became the linchpin of U.S. Middle East policy after 1953, when the CIA and MI6 destabilized the elected nationalist government of Muhammad Mossadeq and reinstalled the pro-Western, anti-Communist autocrat Shah Reza Muhammad Pahlevi. The linchpin broke in 1978, taking with it the U.S. government’s equanimity about Soviet influence in Afghanistan. The inability of the U.S. to cope with the ramifications of the fall of the shah would lead to profound policy blunders, including the massive, indiscriminate arming of the mujahedin. Like the Soviet Union, the U.S. suffered from geopolitical blindness. Under Shah Pahlevi, Iran seemed to be a stable outpost of American power and influence in the Persian Gulf. It gave the U.S. access to military bases and intelligence facilities, and the U.S. provided military assistance in return. The U.S. and Israel even helped create Pahlevi’s secret police, SAVAK, and provided training in terrorist and torture techniques. The image of Iran as an unflagging ally of America became an idée fixe, which meant that basic questions about Pahlevi’s rule were never asked, even though the country was collapsing from within. Discontent with Pahlevi grew in the early 1970s as oil revenues began to rise. The rich lived in opulence, the poor endured famine, and intellectuals were tortured in SAVAK dungeons. Pahlevi was scarcely more popular among his people than Taraki was among the Afghans. On Jan. 16, 1978, Pahlevi was forced to flee. With no domestic political opposition to speak of, the only alternative leaders were Iran’s ultraconservative Shi’ite Muslim clerics led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who was in Paris. If nothing else, the clerics’ unyielding anti-Westernism appealed to Iranians. On Feb. 1, 1979, Khomeini returned from 15 years in exile to proclaim the Islamic Republic of Iran. The end of the shah and of the mirage of Iranian stability should have been expected, but the U.S. was incapable of rational thought on the subject. As Time reported in its Jan. 7, 1980, “Man of the Year” cover story on Khomeini: The depth of its commitment to the Shah blinded Washington to the growing discontent. U.S. policymakers wanted to believe that their investment was buying stability and friendship; they trusted what they heard from the monarch, who dismissed all opposition as “the blah-

3. The Mujahid

37

blahs of armchair critics.” Even after the revolution began, U.S. officials were convinced that “there is no alternative to the Shah.” Carter took time out from the Camp David summit in September 1978 to phone the Iranian monarch and assure him of Washington’s continued support.12 America’s blindness would continue until the end. Despite repeated demands from the new Khomeini regime to return Pahlevi to Iran, the Carter administration allowed him into the U.S. to be treated for a liver condition, and froze Iranian assets in the U.S. In retaliation, 500 Iranians stormed the U.S. embassy compound in Teheran on Nov. 4, 1979, and took the employees hostage. Of the 90 hostages, 52 were held for the full 444 days.13 The collapse of Iran led the U.S. to re-examine its attitude toward Afghanistan within weeks of the Herat uprising. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was now telling Carter that the Soviet Union might use Afghanistan to penetrate into South Asia, and even influence Pakistan, the remaining ally of U.S. containment policy in the region. This scenario was nonsense since no change had occurred in the Soviet attitude towards Afghanistan, and the U.S. was being kept apprised of Soviet activity. Brzezinski’s motive was to provoke a conflict to ensnare the Soviet Union in its own “Vietnam.” In language that now seems eerily familiar, Brzezinski convinced the Special Coordination Committee of the National Security Council to be “more sympathetic to those Afghans who were determined to preserve their country’s independence.”14 The day after the first Soviet troops crossed the border, he wrote a memo to Carter that outlined the new “reality:” As mentioned to you a week or so ago, we are now facing a regional crisis. Both Iran and Afghanistan are in turmoil, and Pakistan is both unstable internally and extremely apprehensive externally. If the Soviets succeed in Afghanistan, and [blacked out] the age-long dream of 12. “Ayatullah Khomeini: The Mystic Who Lit the Fires of Hatred,” Time, Jan. 7, 1980. 13. The hostage-taking ended on Jan. 21, 1981, the day Ronald Reagan was sworn in, which was no coincidence. In the run-up to the 1980 election, the Reagan campaign team feared that Carter could score a political coup by securing the release of the hostages before the election. The possibility of such an “October Surprise” led Reagan campaign staff to commit one of the grossest acts in American history. Reagan’s campaign manager William Casey, who would become CIA director, ran an intelligence operation against Carter that involved stealing debate briefing books and questioning military and intelligence officers about the October Surprise. Richard Allen, head of the “October Surprise Working Group,” and Robert McFarlane—both of them future national security advisors—met with an emissary from the Khomeini regime in Washington in early October 1980 to delay the release of the hostages until after the November 1980 election. The moment Reagan was sworn in and the hostages were released, Iran’s assets were unfrozen, and a shipment of U.S. arms left Israel for Iran. In 1984, the U.S. would again involve Israel in an arms-for-hostages backroom deal with Iran that would lead to one of the greatest scandals in U.S. history. See Chapter 9. 14. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Adviser (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983), p. 427, .

38

Enemies by Design Moscow to have direct access to the Indian Ocean will have been fulfilled… [The] Iranian crisis has led to the collapse of the balance of power in Southwest Asia, and it could produce Soviet presence right down on the edge of the Arabian and Oman gulfs. Accordingly, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan poses for us an extremely grave challenge, both internationally and domestically.15

Carter, preoccupied by the hostage crisis, accepted Brzezinski’s opportunistic revisionism: The Soviet effort to dominate Afghanistan has brought Soviet military forces to within 300 miles of the Indian Ocean and close to the Straits of Hormuz, a waterway through which most of the world’s oil must flow. The Soviet Union is now attempting to consolidate a strategic position; therefore, that poses a grave threat to the free movement of Middle East oil…. Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.16 This last sentence would become known as “The Carter Doctrine,” but it was little more than bravado and bluster. The U.S. was in no position to engage the Soviets in Afghanistan, so Carter sought indirect methods to hinder “Soviet expansionism.” One such method was to increase covert aid to the mujahedin. Although such aid officially began in 1980, Brzezinski admitted in a 1998 interview that the CIA had been involved since the summer of 1979: According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the mujahedin began during 1980; that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, Dec. 24, 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, on July 3, 1979, President Carter signed the first directive for covert aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul.17 Carter and Brzezinski read into the Soviet invasion what they wanted, but it would take incoming president Ronald Reagan to distort U.S. Afghanistan policy into a full-blown crusade. Reagan viewed the world though a simplistic moral prism in which the U.S. was the bastion of virtuous Christian democracy, and the Soviet Union was the embodiment of atheistic evil. In a famous quote Reagan said: “No one who disbelieves in God and in an afterlife can possibly be trusted.”

15. Memo from Zbigniew Brzezinski to President Jimmy Carter, Dec. 26, 1979, Cold War, Episode 20, op. cit. 16. President Jimmy Carter, State of the Union Address, Jan. 21, 1980. 17. “The CIA’s Intervention in Afghanistan —Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski,” Le Nouvel Observateur, Jan.15-21 1998, .

3. The Mujahid

39

During his Feb. 16, 1985, State of the Union Address, Reagan made a statement that would later become known as “The Reagan Doctrine”—the rollback of the Soviet Union in the Third World: We must not break faith with those who are risking their lives--on every continent, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua--to defy Soviet-supported aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth… Support for freedom fighters is self-defense and totally consistent with the OAS and UN Charters.18 This last statement is, of course, highly specious—one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist—but it is in essence the same false reasoning that presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush would later use to justify the “war on terrorism,” a term that Reagan coined. In March 1985, Reagan signed National Security Directive 166 authorizing what would become the largest covert military operation in U.S. history. Until then, the U.S. had been content to fund opponents of the Communist government in Kabul; now the objective was to crush the Soviet Union. In all, the CIA would provide $3.5 billion to the mujahedin, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars drawn on a secret joint Swiss bank account with Saudi Arabia. By 1987, annual supplies of U.S. arms to the mujahedin, including Stinger missiles from 1986 onward, totaled 67,000 tons. U.S. involvement in Afghanistan was the Cold War continuation of the “Great Game” played by Britain against Russia for Eurasian domination, a cruel game paid in Afghan blood.

Pakistan Until the invasion, Pakistan did not enjoy warm relations with the U.S. In 1977, the Carter Administration reduced foreign aid because of Pakistan’s atomic bomb program and the repressive rule of its strongman Gen. Zia ulHaq, who came to power in a coup that year.19 Carter was the first and last U.S. president to predicate foreign aid upon an ethical principle—respect for human rights—and Zia clearly didn’t measure up. However, after Iran fell, ethics suddenly became a luxury Carter couldn’t afford, as the “Carter Doctrine” showed. Almost overnight, Pakistan was granted Most Favored Nation trading status, and Carter offered Zia hundreds of millions of dollars in economic and military aid, as well as 18. President Ronald Reagan, State of the Union Address, Feb. 16, 1985. The address speaks more to the Contras’ opposition to Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, than to the mujahedin and their jihad, but Reagan clearly places both on the same moral plane. 19. Zia declared martial law on July 5, 1977, on the pretext that President Zulfikar Ali-Bhutto’s ruling socialist Pakistan People’s Party had rigged the March 7 vote. Under the new proWestern régime, the private sector prospered, and Zia set about Islamicizing the country’s political, legal and economic structures. Zia cancelled elections planned for Oct. 15, and promised new ones within 90 days. They were indefinitely postponed, and Bhutto was executed.

40

Enemies by Design

protection against possible Soviet strikes. All Zia had to do was help train the mujahedin. The rabidly anti-Communist Reagan administration proved to be even more obliging. Zia obtained a six-year economic and military aid package that elevated Pakistan to the third largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid after Israel and Egypt. The facts that Zia was still pursuing a nuclear weapons program and had no intention of permitting democratic rule were irrelevant now that the U.S. had redefined Zia as a “freedom fighter.” Another instance of moral backsliding concerned U.S.-Pakistani relations over drug policy. In 1995, former CIA director of Afghan operations Charles Cogan admitted that the CIA sacrificed the drug war to fight the Cold War. Our main mission was to do as much damage as possible to the Soviets. We didn’t really have the resources or the time to devote to an investigation of the drug trade... I don’t think that we need to apologize for this. Every situation has its fallout....20 When the operation by the CIA/ISI (the Inter-Service Intelligence agency, Pakistan’s CIA) to fund the mujahedin began in July 1979, the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region grew opium only for regional markets, and produced no heroin. Within two years, it became the world’s top source of heroin, supplying 60 percent of U.S. demand. In 1979 Pakistan had virtually no heroin addicts; by 1981 it had 5,000; by 1985, 1.2 million. The CIA needed the drug revenue to fund the operation, so when the mujahedin seized territory, peasants were ordered to plant opium as a form of revolutionary tax. In Pakistan, Afghan leaders and ISI-protected local syndicates operated hundreds of heroin laboratories. All this time, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in Islamabad did not initiate a single major seizure or arrest.21 In this mutually exploitative scenario, Pakistan ostensibly had a free hand. The CIA provided weapons and funding, but the ISI controlled disbursement and the training camps. Despite repeated requests, the ISI didn’t allow official representatives from the CIA or Pentagon to have any 20. Alfred McCoy, “Drug fallout: the CIA’s Forty Year Complicity in the Narcotics Trade,” The Progressive, August 1997. The U.S. government didn’t really sacrifice anything, since it had long been involved in the region’s drug trade. On July 17, 1973, the National Security Council sent a memo to Henry Kissinger stating that the U.S. should not be concerned about Daoud’s coup d’état: “For the U.S., Daoud may be a little harder to deal with than was Prime Minister Shafiq or the King. He is likely to be more suspicious of U.S. motives, somewhat less co-operative, and a bit more pro-Soviet. Nevertheless, on the issues that affect U.S. interests—continued Afghan independence, stability in the region and narcotics—there is no reason to think he will reverse Afghan policies.” (Harold H. Saunders, Henry R. Appelbaum, “Coup in Afghanistan,” National Security Council Memorandum, July 17, 1973, ) (Spelling edited for consistency). 21. Ibid., McCoy.

3. The Mujahid

41

first-hand contact with the mujahedin, lest they find out that these “freedom fighters” were really anti-Western Islamic warlords who hated the U.S. as much they did the Soviet Union.22 When the pressure finally became too much to bear in the late 1980s, the ISI set up stage-managed tours so that American visitors would only see what the ISI wanted them to see. Pakistan’s training camps already existed before the Soviet invasion. They were started in 1973 to address an 80-year-old problem—the Durand Line. On Nov. 12, 1893, Sir Henry Mortimer Durand, Britain’s Foreign Secretary to India, forced the Emir of Afghanistan, Abdur Rahman Khan, to define his the country’s eastern border, placing more than half of Afghanistan’s Pashtuns within British India. Pashtuns make up half of the population of Afghanistan, and virtually all of its leaders have been Pashtun. When Pakistan (Punjab-Afghanistan-Kashmir-istan) was created out of the Muslim-Hindu partition of British India in 1947, the Durand Line defined Pakistan’s Western border. The Afghan government declared the boundary null and void, but the world paid not heed. Thus, a simmering sore point between the two countries would be the issue of “Pashtunistan”—a demand that Pakistan grant their Pashtuns autonomy, independence, or the right to join Afghanistan. When Daoud overthrew Zahir Shah in 1973, he made the Pashtunistan cause a central theme of his government. In response, Pakistan began developing subversive rebel Afghan forces. Mediation efforts by Iran and the U.S. helped defuse tensions by 1977, and during a visit to Islamabad in March 1978, Daoud and Zia reached an understanding: Zia would release Pashtun and Baluchi militants from prison, and Daoud would withdraw support for these groups and expel Pashtun and Baluchi militants taking refuge in Afghanistan.23 One of these militants was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Islamist Pashtun from northern Afghanistan, who wanted to unite Afghans of all ethnic groups under Islamic rule. Hekmatyar was a terrorist, major heroin manufacturer, and a liability to mujahedin unity, but to Zia he was the perfect instrument to be installed in Kabul once the fighting ended. As Robert Kaplan writes in Soldiers of God:

22. The principals in the relationship were ISI Director-General Gen. Akhtar Abdur Rahman, CIA Director William Casey, and Chief of Saudi Intelligence Prince Turki al-Faisal. On Aug. 17, 1988, Rahman, Zia and U.S. ambassador Arnold Raphael were among 33 who died when their Hercules C-30B suddenly crashed. Akhtar would be replaced by Gen. Hamid Gul. The charter of the ISI stipulates that its Director is a CIA appointee. To maintain the posture of “plausible deniability,” an imperialist intelligence service obligatorily employs proxies to do dirty work that would not pass muster with civilian oversight and public opinion. For the purpose, Pakistan is an ideal vassal, a creation of imperial divide and conquer on the subcontinent and dependent on protection from India. 23. Baluchistan is a province in Southwest Pakistan, straddling the southern border of Afghanistan.

42

Enemies by Design In addition to being a militant fundamentalist like Zia himself, Hekmatyar was a talented politician backed up by almost no grassroots support and no military base inside [Afghanistan]. He was therefore wholly dependent on Zia’s protection and financial largesse (courtesy of American taxpayers)….24

Because Hekmatyar was Zia’s man, he became the CIA’s favorite mujahid. The Soviet Union, the U.S. and Pakistan all had selfish motives for involving themselves in Afghanistan. Our world today is a direct product of this selfishness.

BIN LADEN AND THE MUJAHEDIN For Muslims worldwide, the Soviet invasion justified jihad both in the classical sense of jihad fi sabil Allah and in the modern sense of anti-colonial liberation, although the religious sense prevailed among those who came to fight. Osama bin Laden heeded Sheikh Abdullah Azzam’s call to jihad, and left for Pakistan on a secret orientation trip within two weeks after the Soviet tanks rolled in. Members of Jamiat-i-Islami (Society of Islam) met him at the port of Karachi and took him to Peshawar to see the refugees, meet the leaders of the mujahedin, and survey the organization. Peshawar was Jihad Central. Located near the Khyber Pass Afghan border crossing, the capital of Pakistan’s heavily Pashtun Northwest Frontier Province was a veritable mujahedin university town for Muslim volunteers. They came; they trained; they fought. The star attraction was Sheik Azzam, who was persuaded to relinquish his post as lecturer at Islamabad Islamic University to come to Peshawar. The decision was extraordinary because Azzam had always been dissuaded from fighting to concentrate on his teaching. Azzam helped set up a vast network to help the refugees and train the Arab volunteers. He inspired Arab youth with his calls to defeat the enemies of Islam. Jihad must not be abandoned until Allah (SWT) alone is worshipped. Jihad continues until Allah’s Word is raised high. Jihad until all the oppressed peoples are freed. Jihad to protect our dignity and restore our occupied lands. Jihad is the way of everlasting glory. Jihad and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences and no dialogues.25 Azzam would turn out to be the single greatest influence on bin Laden and the development of the international Islamist movement, but the mujahedin lacked infrastructure and organization to wage jihad effectively. Bin Laden would solve this problem. 24. Robert D. Kaplan, Soldiers of God (New York: Vintage, 2001), p. 69. 25. Cited in Abdullah Bin Omar, [trans. Mohammed Saeed], “The Striving Sheik: Abdullah Azzam,” Nida’ul Islam, July-September 1996, .

3. The Mujahid

43

Soon after he came to Pakistan, Osama bin Laden returned home to begin a massive fundraising and recruitment drive. His father supported the jihad, so when bin Laden joined, his family responded enthusiastically, but his presence was needed elsewhere first. The activity of East German, Cuban and Russian forces in communist South Yemen was causing much unease for the House of Saud, and bin Laden was asked to help organize mujahedin to bolster local Yemeni anti-Communist insurgency forces. The Saudi leadership may have had just cause to be concerned about the communist military threat, but the recent discovery of new oilfields on the undefined Saudi-Yemeni border might also have been a significant motive to get involved in South Yemen. Bin Laden acquitted himself well, and even took part in battles, but the operation was unsuccessful. Nevertheless, King Fahd was so impressed by bin Laden’s enthusiasm and commitment that he granted him the personal contract to expand the Great Mosque in Medina. Bin Laden respectfully declined, asking instead that his father’s company receive the contract and that the government support the Afghan jihad. Fahd accepted. Until 1982, bin Laden made one or two short trips a year to Peshawar to bring bulldozers and other heavy equipment from the bin Laden company to construct trenches, fortifications, housing, hospitals, tunnels and roads to connect eastern Afghanistan with Pakistan. Bin Laden blasted massive tunnels into the Zazi Mountains of Bakhtiar province for guerrilla hospitals and arms dumps, then cut a trail across the country to within 15 miles of Kabul.26 The shelters were necessary to protect the mujahedin from Soviet and Afghan government artillery. As a result, bin Laden bulldozers became prime military targets. After 1982, bin Laden began spending more time in Pakistan and by 1984, was spending eight months of the year away from Saudi Arabia. One of his first significant achievements was the establishment with Azzam of Bait alAnsar (Partisans’ House) in a rented house in the Peshawar suburb of University Town. At the time, volunteers who came to fight or train had no central point of repair, so the guesthouse served as an inn or headquarters where people could find funds, training, and logistical support. This excerpt from the Observer gives a sense of daily life: Conditions were Spartan—almost deliberately so. The volunteers, and bin Laden too, used to sleep a dozen to a room on thin pallets laid out on the hard floor of their offices. According to former associates, bin Laden used to sit up late into the night discussing Islam and Middle Eastern history. The young Saudi was yet to develop his radical ideology. Instead his views were a mixture of half-remembered history and heavily skewed, and often ill-informed, analyses of current affairs. Bin Laden was particularly angry about what he called the betrayal of 26. Robert Fisk interview with bin Laden, “Anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road to peace,” The Independent, Dec. 6, 1993.

44

Enemies by Design the Arabs by the British after the First World War. He also criticized the Saudi royal family, saying they had exploited the Wahhabi to gain power.27

By 1985, the same year that Reagan signed National Security Council Directive 166, the numbers of volunteers jumped sharply. Worldwide media coverage, the guesthouse, and improved transportation courtesy of bin Laden construction inspired thousands of Saudis and other Arabs to join the jihad.

“Al-Qaida”— fact and myth The influx of volunteers, which in 1982 was barely a trickle, was becoming a bureaucratic nightmare. Because the organization was informal, no record was kept of people’s comings and goings, making the total number passing through the guesthouse hard to estimate. Saudi dissident Dr. Saad alFagih, who was at the Bait al-Ansar with bin Laden, puts it at 30,000 to 40,000, of whom 70–80 percent came from Saudi Arabia. Visitors would typically show up at the guesthouse, spend a few weeks training or fighting, and then leave. Thus, when a relative inquired after a loved one, bin Laden found himself in the awkward position of having no information. He realized that he had to maintain a proper log of arrivals and departures of all people—mujahedin, charity workers, or visitors—as well as all traffic between the training camps and the house. Al-Fagih told Frontline that in 1988 bin Laden established a proper reporting procedure whereby anyone who came for whatever reason had to sign in and out of the guesthouse. That record, that documentation, was called the record of al-Qa‘ida. There’s nothing sinister about al-Qa‘ida. It’s not like an organization— like any other terrorist organization or any other underground group. I don’t think [bin Laden] used any name for his underground group. If you want to name it, you can name it “bin Laden group.”… “Al Qa‘ida” is just a record for the people who came to Peshawar and moved from there back and forth to the guesthouse. And moved back to their country.28 The stark contrast between al-Fagih’s definition and the accepted interpretation of al-Qa‘ida as “base” stems from the homonyms Qa‘ida and Qaid. Most Arabic words are derived from root verbs with three consonants. Qa‘ida (Q-ayn-D) means to sit and gives rise to a cluster of words around the primary meaning of “seat,” “foundation,” or “basis.”29 When combined with 27. Jason Burke, “The making of Osama bin Laden,” The Observer, Oct. 28, 2001. 28. “Interview with Dr. Saad al-Fagih,” Frontline—Hunting bin Laden, PBS, Sept. 13, 2001. 29. The consonant [‘ayn] is made by constricting the larynx and is very difficult for non-Arabic speakers to make. As there is no Latin letter for this sound, it is represented by an inverted comma. In Qa’ida the [‘ayn] carries a short [i] vowel, creating the quasi-diphthong [a’i]. In Qaid, the third letter is equivalent to [y] and the resulting diphthong is a long [i], which is hard for non-Arabic speakers to distinguish from [a’i].

3. The Mujahid

45

harb (“war”), it signifies “a military base of operations” (Qa‘ida harbiya). From this connotation arose the myth of the HQ of the terrorist network, AlQaida the Base. Qaid means to fasten or record, and gives rise to a cluster of meanings like “booking,” “registry,” or “enrollment.” This is the word al-Fagih uses to describe Al-Qaida the Log Book. In the beginning was a book, and no base, but one can't make war on a mere notebook, and this seems to be why the baseless but more sensational meaning of “base” prevailed. 30

A fateful partnership The year 1985 also saw Azzam’s recruitment center mushroom from a single storefront in Peshawar into a network of recruitment centres, mosques and Islamic centres, thanks to financing from his new partner, Osama bin Laden. Now called Maktab al-Khidamat (The Services Office), Azzam’s organization had a presence in more than 50 countries, including 37 U.S. cities, and was responsible for recruiting and training tens of thousands of Arab fighters. Of these, nearly half were Saudis, with others including more than 3,000 Algerians, 2,000 Egyptians, and hundreds of others from Yemen, Sudan, Pakistan, Syria, Palestine and other Muslim states. During the 1980s, bin Laden was still learning his way and kept a low profile. He was very much the junior partner. In 1986, bin Laden broke free of the Peshawar infrastructure to establish his own organization. Two years later he had more than six camps in Afghanistan, and even his own military command staffed with experienced Syrian and Egyptian military officers. According to al-Fagih, bin Laden not only showed poise and physical courage alongside Afghan fighters, but also directed Arabs in at least five heavy battles with the Red Army, the first of which was the battle of Jaji in the province of Baktia, 200 kilometres from Khost.31

30. One plausible explanation concerns the influence of non-Arabs. Pakistanis in the guesthouse might have associated bin Laden’s Qaid with Qa’ida, which in Urdu also means a beginning (“basic”) grammar book for students of Arabic. Second, the first mention of alQa’ida with respect to bin Laden came from the Western media, which is notoriously ignorant of Arabic language and culture. The BBC related that bin-Laden first used the term Al-Qaida after 9/11, taking his cue from the U.S. – this in an exceptional documentary aired Nov. 3, 2004, The Power of Nightmares - Part III: The Shadows In The Cave < http://207.44.245.159/video1040.htm >. It shows that AlQaida as an organization does not exist, and that the Islamist terror threat is a fantasy, from which both Islamists and neo-cons derive their political power. 31. Milt Bearden, the CIA’s former station chief in Pakistan from 1986 to 1989, depreciates the value of this battle and claims it was the only important one in which bin Laden fought. “The Soviets ran out of steam just before we ran out of supplies. There were perhaps 20 or 25 Saudi shaheeds [martyrs]…. [Bin Laden] spent most of the war as a fund-raiser, in Peshawar. He was not a valiant warrior on the battlefield.” (Mary Anne Weaver, “The Real bin Laden,” New Yorker, Jan. 24, 2000), .

46

Enemies by Design

In one engagement, bin Laden joined a force of 50 Arabs to repel a prolonged assault by Soviet helicopters and infantry. Mia Mohammed Aga, a senior Afghan commander at the time told the Observer that bin Laden was in the thick of the fighting: “I watched him with his Kalashnikov in his hand under fire from mortars and the multiple-barrelled rocket launchers. You never knew he was so rich or the commander of everyone,” said another veteran. “We used to all sit down together and eat like friends.”32 The Observer account continued: Over the next three years, bin Laden fought hard, often exposing himself to extreme physical danger. One leader of the hard-line Hezb-iIslami group said he remembered bin Laden holding a position under heavy bombardment after being surrounded by Soviet soldiers. At least a dozen other senior veterans, many of whom are now opposed to bin Laden, corroborate the accounts of his combat role. They all mention his lack of concern for his own safety. The devout boy was becoming a warrior.33

The “Peshawar Seven” The true nature of the mujahedin leaders could not have been further from Reagan’s “freedom fighter” delusion. These small militias were led by querulous, petty religious leaders and warlords. “The Peshawar Seven,” as they would come to be known, spent as much time fighting among each other as with the Russians.”34 The first two mujahedin leaders were Hekmatyar and Burhanuddin Rabbani. Hekmatyar came to Peshawar in 1973 to organize a well-trained group of mujahedin to fight the Daoud government because it included “infidel” Communists. In 1976 Hekmatyar broke with the Jamiat-i-Islami to form the radical Hezb-i-Islami (Party of Islam). He became Zia’s protégé from 1977 onward, because Zia thought his terrorist tactics could keep Daoud off balance if he chose to pursue his Pashtunistan policy. That same year, Rabbani, an ethnic Tajik, recruited Muslim youths to found the Jamiat-i-Islami, which carried out protests and Islamic dissident activities against Daoud. He fled Afghanistan after a government crackdown.

However, this view is contradicted by bin Laden’s combat experience in the Yemeni conflict and numerous first-hand accounts of his valour. 32. Burke, op. cit. 33. Ibid. 34. The following biographical sketches are based on the Digital National Security Archive and the essay Whither Afghanistan? The History and Politics of the Afghan War After the Soviet Withdrawal and Some Thoughts on the Future, National Security Caucus Foundation, Boston, Virginia, .

3. The Mujahid

47

The three moderate political leaders were Sibghatullah Mohjadedi, Maulawi Mohammed Nabi Mohammedi and Pir Sayed Ahmed Gailani. Mohjadedi, a Pashtun Sufi spiritual leader (pir), was a former teacher of Islamic law in Kabul with connections to the Afghan royal family and the PDPA. He founded the Jabha-i-Nejat-i-Milli (Afghan National Liberation Front). Pir Sayed Ahmed Gailani, Sufi spiritual leader and former Peugeot dealer, also with ties to the royal family, founded the Mahaz-i-Melli-i-Islami (National Islamic Front of Afghanistan). Mohammed Nabi Mohammedi was a parliamentarian in the 1960s who criticized secular influence in Afghanistan. He founded the Harakat-i-Inqilab-iIslami (Islamic Revolutionary Movement). The sixth leader was Yunus Khalis, an Islamist Pashtun, who owed his power to tribal connections in his home province of Nangarhar rather than to religious charisma. He fled in 1974 after writing a book critical of the Daoud regime. He formed his own Hizb-i-Islami after splitting from Hekmatyar’s party. The last member to join was Abdul Rasul Abu Sayyaf. Unlike the other six leaders, he was a Wahhabi financed by Saudi Arabia. An attempt was made to unite the six groups into the Ittehad-i-Islami Bi’rai Azad-i-Afghanistan (Islamic Union for the Liberation of Afghanistan) under Abu Sayyaf’s rule, but the plan failed due to infighting. Throughout the jihad, divisions between Islamists and traditionalists, and a general contempt for Hekmatyar and Pakistani meddling, rendered unity impossible. As Kaplan writes: Hekmatyar wanted personal power first, a mujahedin victory second… A spellbinding demagogue before a crowd, in private he was eerily soft spoken; his mouth flowed with honey that denied all bad intentions. Hekmatyar was forever calling press conferences, accusing the other parties of selling out to the Soviets while claiming credit for military operations that the other parties had carried out. It was a Peshawar truism that the split in the “hopelessly divided mujahedin”—as the media phrased it—was basically six against one. At times it seemed that the only issue all the factions of Westerners at the American Club could agree on was a hatred of Hekmatyar for “giving the mujahedin a bad name” in the outside world.35 Unfortunately, the other six leaders were over a barrel, because they depended on Zia for training, funds and weapons. Moreover, Zia could at any time have cut a deal with the Communist government in Kabul in exchange for their taking back the 3.5 million refugees on Pakistani soil. Putting up with Hekmatyar was the price the other six had to pay. 35. Kaplan, op. cit., p. 69.

48

Enemies by Design

Jalalabad At the end of the Soviet-Afghan war, on Feb. 14, 1989, the Peshawar Seven announced the establishment of an Interim Government headed by Sibghatullah Mujadeddi. Shi’ite resistance groups and many key field commanders were excluded. The next day the Soviet occupation officially ended. Total Soviet dead have been estimated at 40,000 to 50,000, not counting suicides. The greatest suffering was born by the Afghan people, of whom one million died during the eight-year conflict and millions more fled as refugees, most of them to Pakistan. But the defeat of the Soviet Union did not mean an end to war. In fact, history generally treats the period 1979-1989 as The First Afghan War. With the jihad now redirected against the communist government in Kabul, led by Dr. Muhammad Najibullah, the Second Afghan War begins.36 The last major military engagement of the mujahedin against the communists would be the battle for Jalalabad (March–September 1989), and would demonstrate perhaps more clearly than any other event the true attitude of the U.S. toward the “freedom fighters.” The CIA convinced Pakistan that Najibullah’s control over Kabul could be broken by a threepronged assault against the cities of Jalalabad, Kunduz, and Qandahar. The mujahedin should be thrown at Jalalabad. According to veteran Afghan guerrilla leader Abdul Haq, this was a dreadful idea: “It’s dumb to lose 10,000 lives. There’s no way the mujahedin can take the city now. It’s surrounded by a river, mountains and minefields. And if we do take it, what’s going to happen? The Russians will bomb the shit out of us, that’s what.”37 Haq was a genuine hero of the Afghan resistance. He was wounded 16 times and lost a foot to a land mine in October 1987. Haq hated the ISI and the Peshawar Seven, both for their military planning and their embrace of militant Islam: “I don’t think we need it. Always in the history of Afghanistan the people have resisted any kind of force. The British learned this, and now the Russians have. If our people are forced into something they don’t want, the fighting will continue. What we need instead is a broad-based government.”38 Nevertheless, Pakistan did as the CIA wanted—it ordered the lightly armed mujahedin, including bin Laden, to stage a frontal assault on Jalalabad’s artillery defensive emplacements. As Haq predicted, the mujahedin were massacred. Speaking on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, Peter Gill of Britain’s Thames Television said the mujahedin badly underestimated 36. New Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev installed Najibullah in 1986 over dissatisfaction and impatience with Karmal’s leadership. Najib changed his name to Najibullah (Excellent, Noble of God) to give himself a religious air. 37. Kaplan, op. cit., p. 166. 38. Ibid., p. 167.

3. The Mujahid

49

the Afghan army’s defensive resolve, and as a result lost up to 10,000 fighters. However, this conclusion is based on the false assumption that the intent was to take Jalalabad. The moment the Soviet Red Army began to retreat, making the Persian Gulf “safe from invasion,” the mujahedin became a political liability. Pakistani Brig.-Gen. (Ret’d.) Mohammad Yousaf argues persuasively that the CIA wanted to deny the mujahedin outright victory, and sought to destroy it as a fighting force. As he wrote in his book Silent Soldier, the story of Gen. Akhtar Abdur Rahman, (Director-General of ISI from 1979-1987): This covert switch of objectives was marked by the removal of General Akhtar, by promotion, from ISI. From then on the strength of the jihad was on the wane; from then on it become more and more obvious to myself, and others, that our American allies had an objective that fell far short of a victory in the field. Had he remained in ISI, I feel certain that the Afghan war would have been won within months of the Soviet’s retreat. Like so many soldiers before him he was sacrificed by politicians for political expediency, only in his case it was political pressure from outside Pakistan that removed him, just at the moment when the mujahedin were poised to capture the fruits of victory.39 Support for the view that the mujahedin were being set up to be destroyed comes from Gill who described the battle for Jalalabad as a contest between the Soviet Union and the U.S. to fight to the last Afghan: “The saddest and commonest refrain in Afghanistan that the continuing war is less a conflict among the Afghans than a war of outsiders.”40 After Jalalabad, the mujahedin never again constituted a military threat. Azzam learned of the slaughter from bin Laden and other Arabs, and immediately set out to revivify the spirit of jihad, only this time against Pakistan and the U.S. Because of his stature, Azzam had become a danger to the regime in Islamabad. On Friday, Nov. 24, 1989, he and two of his sons were preparing to drive to mosque when a land mine beneath their car was detonated by remote control, killing all inside. The ISI was suspected in the blast but nobody was ever charged. With the death of Azzam, the Maktab al-Khidamat split into moderate and extremist factions, of which the latter followed bin Laden. It’s fair to say that the bin Laden organization would not have been possible without the Maktab al-Khidamat, because it allowed him to establish vital contacts in many different countries. Some of these Arabs were Palestinians who reinforced bin Laden’s sympathy for their plight. Demanding an end to Israeli occupation would become one of the cornerstones of bin Laden’s jihad against the U.S. 39. Brig. Gen. (Ret’d.) Mohammed Yousaf, “Introduction,” Silent Soldier: The Man behind the Afghan Jehad, 1998, published on-line at www.afghanbooks.com. 40. “Rebels Without a Cause,” MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, PBS, Aug. 29, 1989.

50

Enemies by Design

After the jihad, bin Laden returned home to Jeddah and the family’s construction business, partly because he had grown frustrated trying to stop internecine bickering among the mujahedin. He moved his family into a small apartment, and set about re-entering his former life, but he continued to raise money for the mujahedin and jihad. Even though the Afghan campaign was over, Muslims elsewhere in the world were living under oppression, and bin Laden believed they also deserved his help. He had developed a taste for jihad, but without the Soviet Union, he and his followers would need to direct their martial religious zeal against new targets.

N N O V E M B E R 1 9 7 9 , the Juhayman Insurrection, though ultimately a failure, raised uncomfortable questions about the House of Saud’s commitment to “pure” Islam. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan a month later, the Saudi government had a tailor-made foreign war to occupy its domestic religious zealots. The jihad was like a gift.

Like Pakistan and the U.S., Saudi Arabia funded, armed and trained a religiously motivated guerrilla army without regard for the local population or the war’s long-term ramifications. So long as it continued, the Saudi government could indulge the fantasy that it was a champion of Islam and patron of Osama bin Laden’s “Arab Afghans.” When the war ended, the mujahedin that were trained in bin Laden’s camps came home, and the Saudi government found itself evicted from its fool’s paradise. Contrary to first impressions, the jihad was really a no-win proposition: if the Saudis refused to heed the call, it risked exacerbating criticism about its piety; if it did heed the call, it risked creating more zealots for its domestic Islamic opposition. However, the pros and cons of participation were not debated because the decision had been made in Washington, D.C. The Carter and Reagan administrations needed Saudi money to wage their proxy war against the Soviet Union, and the Saudis could not refuse. In the end, the burden of victory and the Gulf War would focus an unwanted critical light on the Saudi government’s Islamist credentials. When one considers that the Saudi government runs its domestic and foreign affairs according to man-made laws, lives in most un-Islamic wastefulness, and aligns itself with the enemies of Islam, it is in fact the very model of the impious leadership that it claims should be overthrown. Consequently, the hero of the jihad had outlived his usefulness the moment he returned home.

52

Enemies by Design

J I H A D V S . “ R I YA D H P O L I T I K ” For reasons first discussed in Chapter I, ibn Saud treated the Wahhabi only as a means to a political end—creating a nation-state and living opulently off the revenue from oil revenues. Tending to the needs of Saudi citizens or oppressed Muslims in other lands was not considered important. In the mid-1930s, the U.S. supplanted Great Britain as ibn Saud’s patron. This change was due to two factors: Chicago businessman Charles Crane brought drinking water to the Saudi interior—something the British could not do—and the U.S. government appealed to ibn Saud’s greed. Britain had insisted that ibn Saud spend some of his oil revenue on improving the lot of ordinary Saudis—medical care, housing, education—to pre-empt revolutionary tendencies from upsetting British imperial interests. This paternalistic attitude was standard imperial policy, and helped raise living and literacy standards in countries under British rule. The U.S., on the other hand, cared only about cheap oil, and so absolved ibn Saud from any formal moral or fiduciary responsibility towards his own people. This suited ibn Saud fine, and in return he gave ARAMCO (The Arab-American Oil Company) the right to exploit the kingdom’s vast oil fields. Journalist Saïd K. Aburish aptly calls the Saudi-U.S. relationship “The Brutal Friendship:” The overall results of America’s hands-off policy were disastrous. There was not a single hint as to how the huge oil revenues should be spent and not a penny of the $400 million paid to ibn Saud between 1946 and 1953 was used for development. In 1946, the country’s record of expenditure showed a mere $150,000 for building schools and $2 million for the royal garage. And ibn Saud’s sons followed his ways. The crown prince built a palace for $10 million, then razed it when he disliked the way it looked and built one for $30 million. Another prince drove a Cadillac until the petrol ran out, then gave it away and bought another with a full tank.1 Such profligate spending would lead to the 1964 abdication of King Saud, generate popular resentment for the monarchy, and force the Saudis into greater dependence on the U.S. The brutal friendship intensified under the Cold War-obsessed Reagan administration. King Fahd uttered little more than a peep of protest against Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, bought billions of dollars worth of unnecessary military hardware to keep U.S. arms producers happy, and deposited more than $100 billion in U.S. banks and government securities instead of spending it on his own people. In addition, Reagan used his Saudi “friendship” to procure $1 million per month in illegal funding for the contras, a CIA-funded and created rebel force 1. Saïd K. Aburish, The Rise, Corruption and Coming Fall of the House of Saud (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), pp. 38, 40.

4. The Dissident

53

opposed to the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The Boland Amendment to the 1973 War Powers Act prohibited the U.S. from providing military equipment, training or support to anyone for the purpose of overthrowing the Government of Nicaragua. The proposal to exploit outside foreign sources of funding was raised by Reagan’s national security advisor Robert McFarlane in February 1984. In 1985, the Saudis doubled their contributions. In all, they gave $32 million to the Contras, thus allowing the government to circumvent the Boland Amendment.2

Pan-Arabism and Nasser Perhaps the most destructive ramification of the brutal friendship has been the creation of political Islam, commonly labeled militant Islam, or Islamism. Although it is widely portrayed as a virulently anti-Western movement, it was in fact created by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia to defend Western interests. 3 After World War II, political instability was rife throughout the Middle East, as Arabs rebelled against pro-Western monarchies and foreign influence. The path to political reform essentially pointed in two directions— communism or pan-Arabism. Though communism was a priori unacceptable to the U.S., pan-Arabism was little better. In the early 1940s, Syrian intellectuals Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din alBitar founded the Harakat al-Ba’ath al-Arabi (Movement of the Arab Resurrection). Through the revolutionary transformation (inqilab) of the intellectual, economic and social aspects of society, Ba’athists hoped to create one Arab nation based on secularism, socialism, and pan-Arab union extending from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf. Unlike the theocratic Islamic Caliphate, this decidedly modern, nationalist movement included all peoples of the Middle East, regardless of ethnic origin, tribe or religion. However, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia had no more interest in promoting a strong, united Arab world than did the British in the 1920s. The U.S. built its Middle East around Israel, the Shah’s Iran and Saudi Arabia—the most antiArab, pro-Western, repressive regimes imaginable. For its part, the House of 2. “The Boland Amendment”, Dec. 8, 1982; Lawrence E. Walsh, Final Report of the Independent Counsel For Iran/Contra Matters, Aug. 4, 1993, . The relation between the Reagan administration, Saudi money, the contras and the Middle East is of course notoriously convoluted and illegal, and beyond the scope of this book. Suffice to say that from October 1984 to October 1986, the Reagan government with Israeli complicity, sold weapons and spare parts to Iran, both to raise funds for the contras and to barter the freedom of hostages being held in Lebanon. The scandal nearly brought down the Reagan government and resulted in criminal proceedings against high administration officials, many of whom were pardoned by Reagan’s successor George Bush. One such convicted felon, Elliot Abrams, now serves in the government of George W. Bush. 3. As we saw, the Islamist Wahhabi dynasty itself was installed with British aid. In the 19th century, the British Arab Bureau had hit on Islamism as a means to deflect anti-imperialist nationalism by making Muslims pariahs incapable of forming alliances with Britain’s rivals. See Webster Tarpley, 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA (Progressive Press, 2005).

54

Enemies by Design

Saud could not allow the Arab world to join together and present a challenge to its artificially created privileged position. The greatest champion of pan-Arabism was Gamel Abdel Nasser. In 1952, as a colonel in the Egyptian army, he led a coup that overthrew the country’s pro-Western monarchy. He immediately set about negotiating the end of Britain’s 72-year presence in Egypt, and in 1956 became Egypt’s president. Nasser’s political system, Arab socialism, took aim at the old culture of Western privilege. He confiscated 243,000 hectares (2.43 million square meters) of farmland from a small group of rich landowners, and nationalized banks and industries. In response, the U.S. and Britain withdrew promised financial support for the planned Aswan High Dam. That led Nasser on July 26 to nationalize the Suez Canal, so that he could finance the dam through the collection of shipping tolls. That move led Israel, Great Britain and France to attack Egypt three months later on the pretext of re-opening the canal to all traffic, but Israel also wanted to punish Nasser for his support of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. The United States and the USSR demanded an immediate cease-fire, and the British, French, and Israelis withdrew immediately. A United Nations resolution worked out by Canada’s Foreign Minister Lester Pearson established the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF), which stationed troops along the frontier between Israel and Egypt, and at Sharm el-Sheikh on the southern tip of the Sinai peninsula, thus ensuring quiet for 10 years. The “Suez Crisis” added tremendously to Nasser’s standing in the Arab world. By standing up to the West, he was without doubt the paramount leader of the Arab world. As such, he posed a direct threat to the Saudis. Nasser was young, educated, charismatic and well-liked among the Arab masses—in short, he was everything King Saud was not. Nasserism found fertile ground throughout the Arab world. On February 21, 1958, Egypt and Syria formed the United Arab Republic (UAR), with Nasser as president. To make the union possible, the Syrian Ba’ath Party agreed to disband, leaving political control almost exclusively in Egyptian hands. The following month Nasser dissolved all Syrian political parties, including the Communist Party, and dismissed pro-Soviet army officers. However, the UAR would not last. Syria’s resentment at its subordinate status led to a break-up on Sept. 29, 1961, when radical members of the Ba’ath Party re-established Syria’s independence. Nasser nevertheless retained the name UAR to inspire Arabs. He died in September 1970, and the next year the country was renamed the Arab Republic of Egypt. In Iraq, meanwhile, a revolution led by Gen. Abdel Karem Qassem and local communists led to the murder of the pro-American Iraqi royal family of King Faisal II on July 14, 1958. Qassem became the first prime minister of the new republic of Iraq—the presidency was shared among a three-member sovereignty council, comprised of Sunni, Shi’ite and Kurdish leaders.

4. The Dissident

55

Although pan-Arabism had many supporters in the country, Qassem was not among them. Nevertheless, he was executed in February 1963 in a CIAbacked Ba’athist coup. The events in Iraq encouraged anti-government forces in Lebanon. Fearing a coup, the Christian-led government of President Camille Chamoun appealed to Eisenhower for troops to guarantee the regime’s security. Eisenhower reluctantly agreed and sent in the marines.

Rise of political Islam The period 1958-1960 marks the beginnings of a co-ordinated U.S.-Saudi effort to promote political Islam specifically to defeat Nasser. The CIA in Beirut and Cairo, together with ARAMCO, which had its own department, began promoting and funding various groups, especially Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood initially supported the 1952 revolution that brought Nasser to power, but it was quickly outlawed and thousands of its members were imprisoned. Its leader was the ideologue and prolific author Sayyid Qutb, a professional teacher who dedicated himself to ridding Egypt of Western influences. From 1948–1950, Qutb lived in the U.S. studying educational curricula, and came away with even greater contempt for the West’s worship of materialism and lack of spirituality. He believed that a revolutionary vanguard should establish Islamic rule in Egypt and then impose Islamic law on the country, which after 1952 he judged to be under the sway of an un-Islamic nationalist ideology. Qutb was arrested in 1954 on charges of attempting to overthrow the government. After spending 10 years in a Cairo prison, he was released because of poor health and the intercession of Iraqi president Abdul Salam Arif. He was again arrested and hanged in 1966 on conspiracy charges. Qutb and his writings—24 books on religion, education as well as novels—inspired many of the radical Islamic movements of the 1970s and ’80s and generations of Egyptian and Arab intellectuals, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s most trusted colleague. In 1962, after the minor setback of the Syrian secession from the UAR, pan-Arabism received renewed strength from a pro-Nasser revolution against Yemen’s monarchy. Whether Nasser approved of it is debatable, but he couldn’t refuse to support it. However, a Nasserite government on the Arabian peninsula was something the Saudis and Americans could not tolerate. Saudi foreign minister Prince Faisal supported the deposed monarchy and with American support sponsored armed resistance to the new republican regime. One of Faisal’s tactics was to establish the World Muslim League to undermine Nasser by promoting Saudi Arabia’s Islamic identity. This, combined with U.S. exaggerations of a communist threat in the Middle East, marks the moment when the brutal friendship drove a wedge between Arab

56

Enemies by Design

politics and religion and gave sanction to Islamist movements. As Aburish wrote in The Rise, Corruption and Coming Fall of the House of Saud: [This] open subordination of Arabism to Islam gained the wholehearted support of America. An open campaign which accused Nasser of being anti-Islamic followed, and so did attacks on Nasser’s backer, the USSR, for its treatment of its Muslims. This coincided with a generous Saudi aid programme to Jordan and a move by Faisal to create a special relationship with the only Muslim country capable of providing him with military help, Pakistan… To historians, promoting Islam was a dangerous long-term solution, but in American terms it was a broader, sounder approach than the previous efforts of the CIA’s cryptodiplomats.4 The Yemeni adventure would prove fatal for Nasser. The Soviets couldn’t match the anti-Nasser Saudi/American aid. At the same time Nasser was maintaining 100,000 elite troops in Yemen, he also had to cope with resistance from Jordan and Iraq; a civil war in neighbouring Sudan; and assisting anti-French rebels in North Africa. Nasser’s dream of a unified Arab world collapsed when Israel routed Egyptian forces in the June 1967 War.5 In the wake of his defeat, Islamist movements gathered strength and became the dominant voice of Arab political opposition. Thus, we see in bin Laden, Hamas and other Islamist organizations, the end result of U.S., Saudi and Israeli efforts to destroy the democratic pan-Arab movement. For the Saudi government, the more it ties the country to the U.S. military-industrial complex, the more it disadvantages its own people. This estrangement in turn intensifies popular resentment towards the monarchy and support for political Islam, leading to greater repression and further dependency of the House of Saud on the U.S. for its survival.

THE GULF WAR In the spring of 1990, bin Laden still believed that the Saudi government’s commitment to Islam was principled, and that it would support jihad wherever necessary, but events in Yemen demonstrated otherwise. Negotiations to unite North and South Yemen had been underway since 1981, when the government of the Yemen Arab Republic (North) and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (South) signed a draft unification constitution. Sana’a in the YAR would become the political capital, and Aden in the PDRY would be the economic capital. The new Yemen,

4. Aburish, op. cit., pp. 160, 161. 5. See Chapter 10. Nasser’s dream was not new. In the 1830’s and 1840’s, Muhammad Ali Pasha of Egypt bid to industrialize his country and unite it with Arabia and Syria. For challenging mercantilist hegemony he was deposed by a Anglo-Austrian military intervention.

4. The Dissident

57

announced on May 22, would be a parliamentary democracy with a mixed economy and Islam as the official religion. Bin Laden, as a disciple of ibn Taymiya, naturally considered the new government to be un-Islamic and deserving of overthrow on grounds of impiety. However, the Saudi government wanted no part of bin Laden’s agitation. Jihad in Afghanistan was one thing; jihad in the Arab world did not serve the interests of “Riyadhpolitik.” To rein in bin Laden, the government confiscated his passport. Bin Laden finally broke with the kingdom over the Saudi government’s conduct before, during and after the 1990 Gulf War. 6 When the Shah fell, so did his U.S.-built army, which was dependent on U.S.-made spare parts. The suddenly weakened state of Iran’s army gave Iraqi President Saddam Hussein an opportunity to redress an old grievance: the Shatt al-Arab waterway that separates the two countries. The old border ran along the Iranian bank, but in 1975, Iraq had agreed to split it down the middle in exchange for the Shah’s promise to stop funding Iraq’s Kurdish rebels. With the mullahs now in charge of Iran, Hussein saw an opportunity to return to the status quo ante, and to remove the cause of the Iran-supported Shi’ite insurgency that had been threatening to plunge Iraq into civil war. Also, Hussein might pick up the oil-rich western Iranian region of Khuzestan as a bonus. The U.S. saw in Hussein’s plans a chance to exact revenge against Iran, and egged him on. Diplomatic relations were established with Baghdad in the person of Ambassador April Glaspie. Until this time, the U.S. had no formal representation, because Iraq was friendly with the Soviet Union and a declared foe of Israel. Now, the U.S. hoped to exercise diplomatic influence, and supplant the Soviet Union as Hussein’s main military supplier. The U.S. began sending Iraq covert military aid, and when Iraq toned down its criticism of Israel, trade credits and intelligence followed. The U.S. also encouraged Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to offer aid. Consequently, on Aug. 5, 1980, Crown Prince (now king) Fahd welcomed Saddam Hussein to Riyadh for a state visit. This was an extraordinary event. It was the first time Hussein had been invited since he came to power in 1979 as the head of the Ba’ath Party, and was the first invitation for any Iraqi president. The Saudis then encouraged Hussein to invade Iran, as President Carter wanted. Alexander Haig, Ronald Reagan’s first Secretary of State, said that 6. With the support of some Gulf States, the Yemeni Socialist party tried to redivide the country on May 5, 1994, but two months later they were defeated by the unification army. After this defeat, the communists fled the country. Some observers believe that bin Laden never broke with the Saudis or the CIA; a report in Le Figaro that a CIA case officer visited him in hospital in July 2001 is often cited. Both versions could be partly right; there seems to be more than one “bin Laden,” especially on tape after 9/11. Whether witting or not, double agent or dupe, or even still alive, he remains a prime propaganda asset in the campaign to demonize Muslims and Arabs.

58

Enemies by Design

during a 1981 visit to the kingdom, Fahd claimed that Carter, desperate to pressure Iran over the stalled hostage talks, gave Hussein the green light to invade. For its part, Kuwait lent Hussein US$13 billion. Haig also said Fahd was very enthusiastic about President Reagan’s foreign policy, and agreed in principle to fund arms sales to the Pakistanis and other states in the region. Fahd also promised to help the U.S. economy through a policy of “no drop in production” of petroleum.7 Iraq’s land and air invasion of western Iran began on Sept. 22, 1980. By the end of the year the Shatt al-Arab city of Khorramshahr was in Iraqi hands, but victory was short-lived. Hussein underestimated the tenacity of Iranian resistance, and by 1982 he had been forced to give back all Iranian territory he had occupied. Now the initiative shifted to Iran. Khomeini’s forces recaptured Khorramshahr in 1983, and began to make inroads into Iraq. Hussein’s gamble now looked like a blunder. The spectre of an Iranian victory now hung over the Persian Gulf. The Persian Gulf States, usually wary of appearing to be too friendly with the U.S., now climbed aboard the American military bandwagon, despite the obvious un-Islamic implications. In 1985, in the face of increasing Iranian territorial gains, the New York Times reported that Oman “has become a base for Western intelligence operations, military maneuvers and logistical preparations for any defense of the oil-producing Persian Gulf.”8 By the time the war ended on Aug. 20, 1988, the heavily armed Iraqi military had grossly distorted the balance of power in the Persian Gulf. As was the case in Afghanistan, U.S. foreign policy manufactured an enemy. Iraq emerged from its misbegotten war with Iran politically and economically devastated. Hussein desperately needed oil revenue to rebuild, but found that Kuwait was hampering his efforts. First, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates were producing beyond the OPEC limits, thus depressing the world price of oil, and directly affecting how much revenue Iraq could earn. Second, Hussein charged Kuwait with illegally tapping the Rumailah oil field that straddles the two countries. During the Iran-Iraq war, Iraq stopped producing from its side of the field, though Kuwait continued. Third, Iraq wanted Kuwait to forgive the US$13 billion in loans. Given that Iraq was now US$80 billion in debt and fought the Iranians by itself,

7. Robert Parry, “Saddam’s Green Light,” The Consortium, Jan. 31, 1996, The Consortium for Independent Journalism, Arlington, Va. 8. Judith Miller and Jeff Gerth, “U.S. Is Said to Develop Oman as Its major Ally in the Gulf,” New York Times, March 25 1985, pp. A1, A8.

4. The Dissident

59

Hussein thought his request to be reasonable, especially since Kuwait’s economy was strong.9 In this excerpt from an interview with Frontline, Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz explained Iraq’s economic dilemma. F R O N T L I N E : July 17th, President Hussein appeared on television, and accused Kuwait of waging economic warfare. Why such a strong stand? Why threaten war? A Z I Z : Well, that was not the first time President Saddam Hussein spoke about a war being waged against Iraq. In the final session of the Arab summit, that was held late May 1990.... he said I would like to make a short statement. He said, “In the last few months, some Arab countries have increased their oil production superficially, without any economic reason. This has led to a drop in our revenues. Each dollar less in price means to us one billion in revenues for a year. We have fought a very long war, it was a very costly one and in this war we defended your security. If you do not mean waging a war against Iraq, please stop it.” That was said clearly and in a very responsible and quiet manner in the presence of King Fahd, Sheik Jaber of Kuwait, Sheik Said of the Emirates and all the leaders of the Gulf including also Mubarak and the other Arab leaders who attended that summit. F R O N T L I N E : What did the Kuwaitis do? A Z I Z : They did nothing. And he asked King Fahd, to help end this silly game which was hurting Iraq very severely, and he sent the Deputy Prime Minister to King Fahd to urge him to arrange a limited summit between himself, I mean President Saddam Hussein, King Fahd, Sheik Said and Sheik Jaber in order to discuss this question of the over production by Kuwait and the Emirates. So, we did our best to warn them in a friendly, brotherly, responsible manner that they were hurting Iraq very badly and we wanted them to stop, stop this game. F R O N T L I N E : And by July 17th? A Z I Z : By July 17th, nothing had changed. Nothing has changed. The Kuwaitis acted in an arrogant, irresponsible provocative manner and that led to the deterioration of the situation. F R O N T L I N E : When was the possibility of putting troops into Kuwait first discussed? A Z I Z : Kuwait never occurred in the mind of the leadership ‘til the end of June 1990. We still hoped that our efforts would succeed. The 9. Kuwait’s policy of economic hardball is eerily reminiscent of the way the U.S. treated Great Britain and France after World War I (down to the detail of war profiteering by the Bush dynasty). The U.S. demanded repayment of loans made to fight the war, but the exhausted British and French economies were simply unable to comply. As a result, Britain and France imposed onerous reparations obligations on the nascent German democracy. This strain in turn led to the collapse of the Weimar Government and the rise of Hitler’s Nazi Party, which grew strong exploiting German resentment over reparations payments.

60

Enemies by Design summit ended sometime the first half of June, the Deputy Prime Minister went to see King Fahd and he promised to do something, he didn’t keep his promise. By the end of June we started to realize that there is a conspiracy against Iraq, a deliberate conspiracy against Iraq, by Kuwait, organized, devised by the United States. So when we came to that conclusion then we started thinking of how to react against the future aggressors on Iraq.10

The conflict between Iraq and Kuwait became very public, and in 1990 bin Laden was giving speeches and lectures warning of an impending attack. Bin Laden detested Hussein, because he was a secular Arab leader and therefore a political and religious threat to Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden used his ties to the Saudi government to present Defense Minister Prince Sultan with a 10-page document outlining a self-defense plan that included building fortifications and reinforcing Saudi forces with “Afghan Arabs.” After all, if they could defeat the Soviet Red army, Hussein’s army should be a pushover. He made the same appeal to intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal, and added that the mujahedin could also spearhead a jihad in Kuwait. Unbeknownst to bin Laden he faced two problems: the Saudis did not want an army of devout mujahedin running around stirring up Islamic passion and, most importantly, the Saudi and U.S. governments were still allied with Iraq against Iran. Bin Laden’s immense popularity, heroic stature and commitment to jihad had become liabilities.

Invasion On Aug. 2, 1990, 150,000 veterans of the Iran-Iraq War overwhelmed the inexperienced 20,000-man Kuwaiti army, and had annexed the whole country by Aug. 9. That this came as a surprise is incredible because the U.S. knew Hussein was planning to attack, and went out of its way not to dissuade him. President Bush sent a clear message to him through Glaspie that the U.S. sympathized with Hussein’s quest for higher oil prices and that it took no position on matters between Arab states. In Dangerous Liaison, Andrew and Leslie Cockburn neatly summarize this position: [The] transcript of U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie’s last interview with the Iraqi president, on July 25, [1990,] which was unchivalrously taped and subsequently released by Saddam, indicates a curiously complacent American attitude in the face of his bellicose rhetoric. The U.S., Glaspie told him, took no position on Iraq’s border dispute with Kuwait and wanted better relations with Iraq. On July 28, President Bush was briefed by William Webster, director of the CIA, on Iraq’s threatening moves toward Kuwait. Saddam, Webster said, was going to invade Kuwait in order to seize the Rumailah oil fields that straddled the border, as well as two islands, Warba and Bubiyan, that lie close to the 10. “Interview with Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz,” Frontline—The Gulf War, PBS, Jan. 9, 1996.

4. The Dissident

61

Iraqi coastline. Bush’s reaction was low-key. He cabled Saddam, saying that the U.S. was concerned about Iraq’s threats to use force against its neighbors, but also reiterating that the U.S. wanted better relations with Iraq. On July 31, two days before the Republican Guard chased the Emir of Kuwait into temporary exile, Assistant Secretary of State John Kelly stressed to a congressional committee that the U.S. had no commitment to defend Kuwait.11 In fact, a candid exchange with journalists on Sept. 2 outside the U.S. embassy in Baghdad suggests that the U.S. actually approved of the invasion. J O U R N A L I S T : You encouraged this aggression—his invasion. What were you thinking? A M B A S S A D O R G L A S P I E : Obviously, I didn’t think, and nobody else did, that the Iraqis were going to take all of Kuwait. J O U R N A L I S T : You thought he was just going to take some of it? But, how could you? Saddam told you that, if negotiations failed, he would give up his Iran (Shatt al Arab waterway) goal for the whole of Iraq, in the shape we wish it to be. You know that includes Kuwait, which the Iraqis have always viewed as an historic part of their country! America green-lighted the invasion. At a minimum, you admit signaling Saddam that some aggression was okay—that the U.S. would not oppose a grab of the al-Rumailah oil field, the disputed border strip and the Gulf Islands (including Bubiyan)— the territories claimed by Iraq? (Ambassador Glaspie says nothing as a limousine door closes behind her and the car drives off.)12 Bin Laden looked like a prophet and the Saudi government looked inept. It could have prevented the conflict by compelling the Kuwaitis to adhere to production limits, or by offering aid to Hussein. Instead of paying attention to Hussein, they fixated on Iran. Within days of the attack, bin Laden again tried to sell the government on the “Arab Afghans.” He wrote a letter to King Fahd describing what defensive measures the kingdom could take. As he awaited a response, he received news that appalled him—Fahd had agreed to allow Western troops onto Saudi soil. On Aug. 6, 1990, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney gave Fahd the hard sell: pointing to satellite maps, he showed 200,000 Iraqi troops along the Saudi border. Cheney stated that the U.S. had to mobilize immediately to protect the kingdom from Hussein: 11. Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, Dangerous Liaison (Stoddart: 1991), p. 353. Transcript of April Glaspie’s meeting with Saddam Hussein, July 25, 1990, . Further evidence of American acquiescence comes from John Bulloch and Harvey Morrris, Saddam’s War: The Origins of the Kuwait Conflict and the International Response, (Faber & Faber, 1991), . 12. Ibid., Glaspie.

62

Enemies by Design We had about a two-hour session, at the end of which there was a short conversation between King Fahd and his associates, the Crown Prince, the Foreign Minister, and then he turned back to me after about five minutes of discussions in Arabic and said through the interpreter, through Prince Bandar, that they were prepared to go ahead to accept the U.S. forces in the Kingdom.13

What Cheney did not tell Fahd and other members of the royal family was that the satellite pictures were fakes, and that Hussein had pulled 10,000 troops out of Kuwait that same day. Iraq did make a few minor breaches of the border, but Hussein had assured the Saudis that he had no designs on their country. Riyadh’s anxiety was not assuaged, but the U.S. had no proof that Hussein intended to invade Saudi Arabia. However, the U.S. did want a pretext to station troops in the Persian Gulf to guard over “its” oil assets and neutralize Hussein’s U.S.-made army. A week after Iraq occupied Kuwait, Operation “Desert Shield” began. Some 400,000 American troops and 200,000 troops from dozens of countries, including the Arab world, gathered in the kingdom. Other countries offered logistical, financial, medical, naval, or air support. In all, more than 48 countries took part. The stated intent of “Desert Shield” was to protect Saudi Arabia from Iraqi aggression, but it was obvious the real objective was to drive Iraq out of Kuwait. On Nov. 29, 1990, the UN Security Council passed a resolution authorizing member states to use “all necessary means” against Iraq if it did not leave by Jan. 15, 1991. When the deadline came and went, the Western coalition attacked, and “Desert Shield” became “Desert Storm.” The war was over in five weeks.14

FALLOUT The ulama were appalled that Fahd, as Custodian of the Holy Sites, would place the defense of the kingdom in the hands of Western infidels who cared only about Arab oil. Nevertheless, Fahd desperately needed them to issue a fatwah (a formal legal or religious judgment) to legitimize his decision. 13. “Interview with Richard Cheney,” Frontline—The Gulf War, PBS, Jan. 9, 1996. In fact, this was not the first time that the Saudis offered their bases to the Americans. A secret U.S. report was leaked indicating that Saudi Arabia had agreed to allow the United States to use bases during the Iran/Iraq war if needed. Bernard Gwertzman, “Saudis To Let U.S. Use Bases in Crisis,” New York Times Sept. 5, 1985, pp. A1, A10. 14. The term “war” is somewhat of a misnomer, because Iraq was so thoroughly outmatched. Coalition aircraft flew 100,000 sorties and carpet-bombed whole sections of southern Iraq, causing soldiers to surrender by the thousands. On Feb. 24, the coalition sent in the ground troops; two days later, Hussein announced his intention to leave Kuwait. By the end, Iraq sustained between 20,000 and 35,000 casualties; the coalition suffered 240 killed and 776 wounded, 60 percent of whom were Americans. Given the rapidity of the Iraqi surrender, it is worth wondering how many Iraqi lives could have been saved had the ground war started earlier.

4. The Dissident

63

To solve the impasse, Fahd held discussions with Grand Mufti Sheikh AbdulAziz bin Baz. The result of the discussions produced an absurdity that brought the office of the Grand Mufti into disrepute. Bin Baz issued a fatwah on behalf of the ulama, in support of Fahd’s decision, but cited no Islamic precedent from the Quran or hadith. Instead, he declared the American presence justifiable on the grounds of “necessity.” Even if Fahd’s decision were militarily “necessary,” this co-optation of the ulama made the Wahhabi religious leaders look like servants of the government, and this perception gave greater strength to the Islamist opposition like the Shi’ites and the Islamic Revolutionary Party. Bin Laden said as much: After this, government began to strike with the cane of bin Baz every corrective program which the honest scholars put forward. Further, it extracted a fatwah to hand over Palestine to the Jews, and before this, to permit entry into the country of the two sacred mosques to the modern day crusaders under the rule of necessity. Then it relied on a letter from him to the minister for internal affairs and placed the honest scholars in the gaols. The confidence of the people and the youth in bin Baz was therefore shaken… whilst the confidence of the people in the working scholars, particularly those in the prisons, had been increased.15 Despite Fahd’s decision, bin Laden was still determined to bring the mujahedin to the defense of the kingdom, but this time he decided to appeal directly to religious scholars and Muslim activists.16 He secured a fatwah from a senior scholar declaring that every Muslim had a duty to be trained and ready to defend Islam: Bin Laden even offered his training facilities in Afghanistan, and 4,000 Saudis eagerly joined. Bin Laden also gave speeches condemning the presence of foreign armies in Saudi Arabia and Iraq’s aggression. In one speech he said: When we buy American goods, we are accomplices in the murder of Palestinians. American companies make millions in the Arab world with which they pay taxes to their government. The United States uses that money to send $3 billion a year to Israel, which it uses to kill Palestinians.17

15. Interview with Nida’ul Islam magazine, October–November 1996, . 16. The two most outspoken critics were the renowned scholars Sheikh Safar ibn AbdulRahman al-Hawal and Sheikh Salman al-Audah. Each was careful to avoid direct criticism of the House of Saud or the ulama, but their condemnation of Fahd’s decision and Bin Baz’s fatwah was unmistakable. See The Gulf Crisis and the Islamic Revival, . 17. Cited in Yossef Bodansky, Bin Laden—The Man who declared War on America (New York: Forum, 1999), p. 30.

64

Enemies by Design

Despite his anger, bin Laden remained a loyal Saudi and avoided any criticism of the royal family. He fully believed that King Fahd acted out of haste and panic, and that when the emergency was over he would expel the foreigners and return to the Islamic path. Other Islamic leaders weren’t so circumspect. Sheikh Tamimi, for one, said the royal family had forfeited its claim to be the Custodians of the Holy Sites, and that confronting the “infidel” U.S. was more important than coming to the defense of Kuwait.18 But the government was not of a mind to draw fine distinctions between pro-Saudi and anti-Saudi criticism—it would not tolerate any opposition to the presence of Western troops or bin Baz’s fatwah. Bin Laden now found himself confined to Jeddah, and twice summoned to receive warnings about his speeches and activities. The royal family didn’t know what to do with him. On the one hand it threatened to cancel his lucrative construction contracts and seize his property. They intimidated his extended family and even sent the National Guard to raid his farm outside of Jeddah. Bin Laden, who was not at home at the time, fired off a letter of protest to Prince Abdullah, who apologized and promised to punish those responsible. On the other hand, Saudi intelligence wanted to maintain close relations with bin Laden, both to ensure that he didn’t take his immense popularity and organization over to the anti-Saudi Islamists, and also to have him use his “Afghan” network to drum up support for the government. Bin Laden, though, was getting fed up with Saudi Arabia. The end of the Gulf War did not mean an end to the presence of Western troops as bin Laden had hoped. Despite Cheney’s assertion that the troops would not stay in the kingdom one minute longer than necessary, the U.S. showed no signs of packing up. Given this continuing affront to Islam and his virtual status as a prisoner in his own country, bin Laden decided to leave, but to do that he had to get around the travel ban. Interior Minister Prince Nayef was the obstacle, but one of bin Laden’s brothers was close to the deputy minister, Prince Ahmed. While Nayef was outside the kingdom, bin Laden’s brother secured travel permission from Ahmed, on the grounds that Osama had to attend to business matters in Pakistan. In April, bin Laden sent a letter to his brother declaring his attention not to return and offering his apologies to him and the royal family. Osama bin Laden would spend the rest of his life in exile as a Saudi dissident and a wanted man.

18. Ibid.

O O N A F T E R P A K I S T A N , Osama

H E

L A N D E D

I N

bin Laden crossed into Afghanistan to avoid the risk of being turned over to the Saudis. Nevertheless, Saudi and Pakistani intelligence agents pursued bin Laden across the border and tried several times to assassinate him. Timely tip-offs from sympathetic sources allowed bin Laden to avoid capture. What was worse was the Afghan civil war. This time, the Afghan mujahedin were not only fighting Najibullah’s communist regime, but also each other. Bin Laden could not abide the sight of Muslims fighting Muslims, so he tried to mediate among the various factions, but to no avail. The combination of Afghanistan’s political instability and the threats to his life convinced bin Laden that he had to leave. In late 1991, he flew to Sudan, because the new Islamic government was admitting Muslims or Arabs to enter the country without a visa. Bin Laden could not have picked a more compatible country to hole up in. Sudan was emerging as a major sponsor of Islamist movements, thanks to the leadership of the charismatic Dr. Hasan Abdullah Dafa’allah al-Turabi. Bin Laden’s difficulties with the Saudi royal family were not public knowledge at this time, so Turabi had no inkling why bin Laden happened to arrive when he did. He simply welcomed the wealthy Saudi as an honored guest. Even in his new location, bin Laden continued to receive frequent directives from the Saudi government warning him against speaking out. The House of Saud had good reason to fear embarrassment from bin Laden, especially since it was, and still is, locked in a dispute over the succession.1 1. King Fahd is in poor health, and the heir to the throne is Fahd’s half-brother Crown Prince Abdullah. Although this succession is not contested, the question of who will follow Abdullah is a matter of intense rivalry. Fahd’s six full brothers all belong to the Sudairi clan (named after their mother Hassa bint Ahmad al-Sudairi), and consider Abdullah to be an outsider.” The

66

Enemies by Design

Dynastic squabbling aside, the real cause of the embarrassment was the government’s own ineptitude. Had it not harassed bin Laden and made him a virtual prisoner in Jeddah, he would not have had cause to flee to Pakistan. Furthermore, had the Saudis (with U.S. support) not attempted to assassinate bin Laden in Afghanistan, he would not have felt the need to flee to Sudan, and even here they again tried to kill him in a Khartoum mosque. From 1992 to 1994, the Saudis also tried to freeze bin Laden’s assets and confiscate most of his property, but by that time most of his money, more than $250 million, was in foreign banks. Bin Laden may or may not still have access to his share of the family’s multi-billion-dollar fortune. The House of Saud’s hamfisted bullying pushed bin Laden deeper into the milieu of political Islam.

T U R A B I A N D T H E G R E AT C O M P R O M I S E On June 30, 1989, Col. (later Lt.-Gen.) Omar Hassan Ahmad al Bashir came to power in a coup, as had every Sudanese leader since the country emerged from the colonial shadow of Britain and Egypt in 1954.2 The Islamic Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) for National Salvation suspended the constitution, abrogated press freedoms, and dissolved all political parties and trade unions. Turabi, as leader of the National Islamic Front, spent six months as a political prisoner. However, Bashir reorganized the NIF and incorporated Turabi’s ideology, which raised suspicions that Turabi’s imprisonment was for show.3 The RCC ruled Sudan until it dissolved itself in October 1985, after which it appointed Bashir President of the Republic and transferred to him most of its powers. Three years later, Bashir and Turabi established their

Sudairi Seven” are King Fahd, Sultan (Second Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense), Abd al-Rahman (Deputy Minister of Defense), Nayif (Minister of the Interior), Salman (Governor of Riyadh Province), Ahman and Turki. Moreover, Defense Minister Prince Sultan al-Sudairi, one year younger than Abdullah and second in line, is manoeuvering with his brothers to have his son Bandar, currently U.S. ambassador, succeed Abdullah. Abdullah would have the right to name his successor without regard to seniority, but any attempt to bypass Sultan would almost certainly set off a power struggle. Abdullah commands the 57,000-member National Guard, but the leadership of the 105,000-strong Armed Forces is clearly aligned with Sultan. Abdullah, the son of ibn Saud and Al Fadha bint Asi al-Shuraim, is a problem for the Sudairis because he puts the interests of the Saudi people ahead of catering to the U.S. Although Abdullah values Saudi Arabia’s relationship with the U.S., he wants it to be based more on equality than subservience. Thus, the Sudairis could not afford to have bin Laden enhancing Abdullah’s reputation by pointing out the current king’s conspicuously un-Islamic conduct during the Gulf War. 2. Sudan achieved full independence in 1956. 3. See Gregory Sanders, Dr. Hasan Al-Turabi—His Political Philosophy in Context of Religion and Progress, Nov. 12, 1998 .

5. The Exile

67

Islamic state.4 Although Bashir was the new head of state, the real leader was generally thought to be Turabi.5 Turabi, born into a conservative Sunni Muslim family in Eastern Sudan in 1932, provides an interesting contrast to the other great influence on bin Laden’s life, Sheikh Abdullah Azzam. Both men were great theorists of Islamic revolution, and each fought with words rather than with weapons. Each also belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood, and dedicated himself to recreating the Caliphate. Unlike Azzam, though, Turabi had studied outside the Muslim world, earning a master of laws from the University of London. This exposure to the West gives Turabi’s version of Islamic rule an uncharacteristically modern outlook. He blended Islamic sharia with Western ideas of democratic equality to create what might be termed “Islamic democracy.” Turabi’s embrace of democratic thought is most evident in his support for the rights of women, whom he believes to be fully entitled to work, hold public office, serve in the military, and even attend mosques without being segregated: “Segregation of women is definitely not a part of Islam. This is just conventional, historical Islam. It was totally unknown in the model of Islam or the text of Islam. It is unjustified.”6 But Turabi’s version of democracy is a curious, contradictory mix of totalitarianism and tolerance. On international matters, he says the world order should be pluralistic, diverse and fair to Muslims, yet he calls the UN’s standards of human rights Western-based impositions. Turabi praises Islam as an ethical political order that can free all people from Western imperialism. Of course, this argument has a familiar ring to it. It was used by Marxist-Leninists who believed that world Communism would liberate the working classes. “The international dimension of the Islamic movement is conditioned by the universality of the umma (community of believers) and the artificial irrelevancy of Sudan’s borders,” said Turabi.7 Turabi’s acceptance of state-to-state relations as a temporary political condition highlights the fundamental schism between modern Sunni and Shi’ite doctrines of Islamic revolution. In the Sunni doctrine, as defined by Qutb, the re-establishment of the Caliphate is predicated on the prior success of national Islamic revolutions. Shi’ites, on the other hand, consider the 4. In the wake of the coup, the northern parties joined the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Army (SPLA) to form the National Democratic Alliance. 5. The relationship between Turabi and Bashir began to sour in December 1999, when Bashir declared a state of emergency and dissolved Parliament. At the time, Turabi was speaker. According to a party official, Turabi was asked to explain a “memorandum of understanding” with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, which called for joint “peaceful resistance” against Bashir’s regime. Turabi was arrested on Feb. 21, 2001, on charges of organizing a coup. 6. “Islam, Democracy, the State and the West”— World and Islam Studies Enterprise (WISE) roundtable discussion with Dr. Hasan Turabi, held May 10, 1992, in Tampa, Fla., Middle East Policy (Vol. 1, No. 3, 1992), pp. 49-61. 7. Ibid.

68

Enemies by Design

nation-state to be un-Islamic by definition, and therefore they actively support any anti-statist Islamic movement, even against Arab states. Turabi’s great achievement would be the reconciliation of revolutionary Sunni and Shi’ite Islam under one banner. The momentous event occurred at the inaugural Islamic Arab People’s Conference in Khartoum in late April 1991. The IAPC, founded to challenge the Saudi-founded Organization of the Islamic Conference, had as its objectives the liberation of the Noble Sanctuary Jerusalem from Zionist occupation, promotion of Arab solidarity, and defending the ideals of peace, equality and humanity as described in the Quran, the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. By its next meeting in 1993, the IAPC would be renamed the Popular Arab and Islamic Conference (PAIC) to indicate it was not restricted to Muslims. The timing of the conference is significant, coming as it did a scant two months after Iraq was routed in The Gulf War. The presence of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf during and after the war, and the willing collaboration of Saudi Arabia and other Arab states in the American-led attack, gave Turabi his unifying cause. What he did was place ibn Taymiya’s jihad against impious leaders into Qutb’s modern, political context. Turabi said Islamic movements should declare jihad against pro-U.S. Arab governments not because they weren’t Islamic, but because they were collaborationist. In one stroke, Turabi defended the integrity of Muslim nation-states while supporting the Shi’ite notion of jihad against impious nation-states. The conference produced the first international revolutionary Sunni Islamic movement, the Popular International Organization (PIO), and a formal working relationship between Khartoum and Tehran. Iran would provide funds, training and organizational assistance, and Sudan would serve as Iran’s beachhead in Africa, allowing it to export Iranian influence into black Africa and the Maghrib (North Africa).

TURABI BANKS ON BIN LADEN’S HELP On July 5, a financial scandal almost scuttled the new Khartoum-Tehran partnership. The Bank of England shut down the Bank of Credit and Commerce International because its poor accounting practices and tenuous solvency threatened the stability of other banks. Incorporated in Luxembourg, run by Pakistanis, and funded by Saudi and Gulf Arabs, the BCCI provided a host of clandestine “services” to Islamist groups, including Turabi’s.8

8. Abu Dhabi’s ruling family owned 77.4 percent of the bank. In June 1994, 11 of the 12 former BCCI executives accused of fraud were convicted in Abu Dhabi, given prison sentences and ordered to pay compensation.

5. The Exile

69

According to the December 1992 report by U.S. senators John Kerry and Hank Brown to the Committee on Foreign Relations: BCCI’s criminality included fraud by BCCI and BCCI customers involving billions of dollars; money laundering in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas; BCCI’s bribery of officials in most of those locations; support of terrorism, arms trafficking, and the sale of nuclear technologies; management of prostitution; the commission and facilitation of income tax evasion, smuggling, and illegal immigration; illicit purchases of banks and real estate; and a panoply of financial crimes limited only by the imagination of its officers and customers. Among BCCI’s principal mechanisms for committing crimes were its use of shell corporations and bank confidentiality and secrecy havens; layering of its corporate structure; its use of front-men and nominees, guarantees and buy-back arrangements; back-to-back financial documentation among BCCI controlled entities, kick-backs and bribes, the intimidation of witnesses, and the retention of well-placed insiders to discourage governmental action.9 Among the Islamist banks associated with BCCI were the Jordan Islamic Bank, the Dubai Islamic Bank, Taqwa Bank of Algeria and the Faysal Islamic Bank in Khartoum, all of which were controlled by the International Muslim Brotherhood. In the United States, those involved with BCCI included Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, former Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford and former president Jimmy Carter. It should be noted that the BCCI was not just a bank for Islamists. The CIA used the bank’s “special services” to launder drug and Iran-Contra money, and to finance the mujahedin during the Soviet-Afghan war. From 1981 to 1988, the CIA holding company Argin Corporation laundered $25 million via Shakarchi Trading Company, a Zurich-based currency-trading firm, principally involved in gold bullion trading that was caught up in the BCCI scandal. Funds from Argin and the CIA’s own accounts at BCCI were distributed to the mujahedin via Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), which then used it to buy U.S., Egyptian and Chinese weapons. With the downfall of BCCI, Turabi asked bin Laden to create a replacement financial network. He agreed and set up a series of bank accounts to funnel money to Islamic movements. For example, Iranians and Gulf Arabs deposited $12 million into an account at the Faysal Islamic Bank, whence the funds were redirected to Algeria to help the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) fight an election. Bin Laden’s financial dealings also led him to collaborate with his close friend Ayman al-Zawahiri to establish a banking network in the name of the

9. Sen. John Kerry and Sen. Hank Brown, The BCCI Affair—A Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, December 1992, 102nd Congress 2nd Session. The citation comes from the executive summary, .

70

Enemies by Design

Brotherhood Group.10 The group’s task was to obscure the origin of the Islamists’ funding from Western security authorities. The group’s core financing came from 150 wealthy Gulf Arabs who also had a legitimate business presence in the U.S. In addition to financial help, bin Laden also helped Turabi in a more constructive way. Among the major infrastructure projects he undertook were a road linking Khartoum to Port Sudan (built by his al-Hijra construction company), an airport near Port Sudan, and Islamist training centers in northern Sudan, the largest two being al-Shambat and al-Mazraah, designed for Tunisians, Algerians, French and Belgians. This may not have been the first time bin Laden aided Turabi’s National Islamic Front. In 1990, he is said to have arranged for hundreds of mujahedin to travel to Sudan to fight alongside the NIF against non-Muslim guerrillas. According to a retired Sudanese intelligence agent who knew bin Laden, hundreds more came over in the next few years. Many of them became instructors at his training camps.”11 On Sept. 19, 2001, Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, a bin Laden associate turned government witness, said bin Laden’s businesses dealings included Taba Investments, the Wadi al Aqiq holding company, Laden International import-export company, a bakery, a furniture company, a cattle-breeding operation, the al-Ikhlar Co., which made honey and other sweets, and the Blessed Fruits farming business.12 Though bin Laden was in business to make money, profit was not the major concern, testified al-Fadl in broken English: “He say our agenda is bigger than business. We are not going to make business here, but we need to help the government and the government help our group, and this is our purpose.”13

10. Zawahiri, an upper-class Cairo pediatrician, became a member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad in 1981, and on Oct. 6 of that year he helped lead the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat. Zawahiri served three years in prison, and subsequently tried to assassinate current President Hosni Mubarak. He has been sentenced to death in absentia. “Zawahiri, once again, was a key part of the Sadat assassination, and afterwards was protected by London. The world needs to remember Sadat’s widow, Jehan Sadat, recalling in a television interview after 9/11 that Zawahiri, a murderer of her husband, had lived in London for years after that crime, while extradition to Egypt was always refused by the UK. The guess here would be that Zawahiri is a double agent working for MI-6, while Bin Laden is indeed a fanatical, deluded patsy and dupe.” Webster Tarpley, 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA (Progressive Press, 2005). Sadat was likely eliminated because he made peace with Israel at Camp David to help re-elect Carter, in return for Carter’s personal, spoken promise of a Palestinian state. Carter was then brought down by the October Surprise - Iran hostages intrigue. With both parties to the promise out of power, the US-UK-Israel axis was quit of the bargain. Tragically, all Carter could do was to set up his Carter Peace Center and occasionally sermonize on justice for the Palestinians. 11. Frank Smyth and Jason Vest, “One Man’s Private Jihad,” Village Voice, Aug. 19–25, 1998. 12. “Bin Laden Draws on Global Financing,” Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Sept. 19, 2001. 13. Ibid. This citation is from 1992.

5. The Exile

71

In the simplest terms, this purpose was the eviction of Western forces from the Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia. In late 1992, though, the Islamists faced a new intrusion.

SOMALIA By the fall of 1992, 500,000 Somalis had died from famine and hundreds of thousands more faced starvation. International famine relief efforts were mounted, but anarchy and civil war hampered efforts and threatened the lives of the workers. In response, U.S. President George Bush authorized the dispatch of U.S. troops to protect the workers, if necessary with military force. On Dec. 3, 1992, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 794 authorizing a U.S.-led multinational force (Operation “Restore Hope”) “to use all necessary means to establish a secure environment for humanitarian relief operations in Somalia as soon as possible.” (In August, the United States in coordination with the Disaster Assistance Response Team at the U.S. Agency for International Development, had begun airlifting emergency supplies from Mombasa, Kenya, under Operation “Provide Relief.”) The famine was caused by fighting which grew out of Cold War geopolitics. In 1969, a military coup brought Maj.-Gen. Mohammed Siad Barre to power. He aligned himself with the Soviet Union, which expected him to export revolution throughout East Africa. Barre nationalized industry and invaded Ethiopia, but the Soviets backed Ethiopia instead, and the Somalis lost the war badly. Ethiopia then backed Somali dissident groups, which led to civil war and the partition of the country among feuding warlords. Turabi looked upon East Africa, including the Horn of Africa, as fertile ground to export his Islamic philosophy. Somalia, Kenya, Chad, Tanzania, and Uganda all had Islamic parties, and by the fall of 1992 the Somali Islamic Union party was growing. Consequently, the U.S. and UN presence in Somalia was seen as a threat, not only to Islam but also possibly to Sudan’s Islamic government. Bin Laden prevailed upon Sheikh Tariq al-Fadli to return from his London exile to lead the assault. Bin Laden had met al-Fadli in 1980 when they fought in the failed Saudi-sponsored Yemeni jihad. Plans were then quickly drawn up to attack the U.S. forces, which were based in the port of Aden, across the Gulf of Aden from the fighting in the north. Islamists belonging to the Yemen Islamic Jihad organization planted bombs in the Aden Hotel and the Golden Moor Hotel, known to house U.S. servicemen. The attack left three Americans dead and five wounded, but a planned rocket attack on a U.S. transport aircraft at the airport was thwarted. Nevertheless, the operation was judged a success. According to Robert Gersony, a consultant to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, 300,000 to 500,000 Somalis arrived in eastern

72

Enemies by Design

Ethiopia from northern Somalia between the onset of hostilities in May 1988 and January 1989. 14 On Jan. 27, 1991, Barre’s Socialist-Islamic Revolutionary Party (SRSP) was overthrown by the rival United Somali Congress.15 In October, Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid and interim president Ali Mahdi Mohammed began fighting for control of Mogadishu.16 Mahdi’s faction supported an Italianstyle democracy, and was supported by Europe; Aidid favored traditional tribal government. When Aidid declared his faction to be the legitimate national government, Mahdi declared war.

Blundering into the Islamist strategy The Somali National Alliance and the Somali Islamic Union Party threw their support behind the pro-Islamist Aidid. Augmenting their numbers were fighters from a dozen mostly Muslim countries, many of them battlehardened veterans of the Afghan jihad. Bin Laden provided logistical support—funding, communications, construction—and appointed Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri as senior field commander. Their strategy was to draw the U.S.-led force into a Vietnam-style quagmire and to portray it as an imperial colonizer. It worked to perfection, aided in large part by the overweening colonial mentality of the U.S. and the UN. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali wanted the UN to establish a visible leading presence in Somalia, but UN representative Sahnoun argued against a major show of force. I knew how sensitive the situation in Somalia was and urged them not to send troops until the conditions for that had been negotiated. The warlords had been against any UN military force from the beginning and even community leaders had been suspicious. But I had persuaded the community leaders that 500 troops were needed to stop looting and banditry at the port and the airport—really a police force rather than an army. Then in New York, when the 500 soldiers were not even operational, they started making statements about sending 3,000 troops to Somalia. This made the Somalis very nervous—they started asking me what the hell I was up to. “You told us you were going to send 500; these 500 have not even come and you want to send 3,000 more. Are you plotting to put Somalia under UN trusteeship?”17

14. Robert Gersony, “Why Somalis Flee: Conflict In Northern Somalia,” Cultural Survival Quarterly, Vol. 13 (4), (1993), pp. 45–58. 15. Barre tried twice to regain power but left the country in 1992. He died in exile in Lagos, Nigeria, on Jan. 2, 1995. 16. Mohamed Sahnoun, “Flashlights over Mogadishu,” New Internationalist No. 262, December 1994. 17. Ibid.

5. The Exile

73

For his caution, Sahnoun was fired and his interventionist successors declared Somalia to be in a state of anarchy, and in need of a UN force to disarm the population. The tragedy of the UN involvement is that BoutrosGhali was more interested in headlines than in helping. He rejected a role in a Djibouti-sponsored peace conference on the grounds that the political issues were too complex, but now was ready to commit a major military force. The reason had little to do with Somalia and everything to do with the UN’s ego. In the summer and fall of 1992, pictures of starving Somalis (about one quarter of the population) began to be broadcast, and Boutros-Ghali saw this as an implicit challenge to the UN’s moral authority. In the end, the UN had 30,000 troops in Somalia, but they were completely rejected by the population. At least 6,000 people died in clashes between UN forces and Somalis. As for the U.S., the intervention degenerated into a self-destructive vendetta against Aidid. On June 5, 1993, UN troops attempted to shut down Radio South Mogadishu for broadcasting Aidid’s anti-UN propaganda. Aidid’s forces repelled the attack and killed 24 Pakistani troops. Because of these casualties, Aidid was branded a war criminal, and the U.S. set out on an expensive, bloody, five-month campaign to capture him. This obsession would bring ignominious defeat. On Oct. 3, U.S. forces received a tip that Aidid was meeting with two of his senior lieutenants in a house next to the Olympic Hotel in Mogadishu. At 3:30 p.m., 17 Black Hawk helicopters and a ground convoy arrived at the building, but came under immediate fire. The tip had been a ruse to lead the Americans into an ambush. The convoy scurried back to base under fire with many dead and no sign of Aidid. For 17 hours, 90 Rangers were pinned down under withering fire. In all, 18 Americans were killed and 84 wounded.18 Among the Somalis, 300 died and 700 were wounded, mostly civilians who died in indiscriminate U.S. bombing. Three days later, President Clinton abandoned the hunt for Aidid, and declared that the U.S. would withdraw most of its troops by March 31, 1994.19 With the ambush and U.S. withdrawal, the Islamists could now claim to have defeated the world’s two greatest military powers. For bin Laden, the Somali campaign reinforced his belief that his “Afghans” could also evict the U.S. from Saudi Arabia. In a March 1997 interview with CNN’s Peter Arnett, he proudly described the role they played in Somalia: Resistance started against the American invasion, because Muslims do not believe the U.S. allegations that they came to save the Somalis. A man with human feelings in his heart does not distinguish between a child killed in Palestine or in Lebanon, in Iraq or in Bosnia. So how can we believe your claims that you came to save our children in Somalia 18. Other sources state that the firefight lasted 12 hours and that the number of U.S. wounded totaled 77 (Frontline—Ambush in Mogadishu, PBS, Sept. 29, 1998.) 19. Aidid proclaimed himself president in 1995 after the UN troops left. He died on Aug. 1, 1996, of a heart attack related to bullet wounds suffered during the conflict.

74

Enemies by Design while you kill our children in all of those places? With Allah’s grace, Muslims over there cooperated with some Arab mujahedin who were in Afghanistan. They participated with their brothers in Somalia against the American occupation troops and killed large numbers of them. The American administration was aware of that. After a little resistance, the American troops left after achieving nothing. They left after claiming that they were the largest power on earth…. If the U.S. still thinks and brags that it still has this kind of power even after all these successive defeats in Vietnam, Beirut, Aden, and Somalia, then let them go back to those who are awaiting its return.20

R I YA D H On April 9, 1994, the Saudis, possibly at the urging of the U.S., made their opposition to bin Laden public. The House of Saud took the extraordinary step of stripping bin Laden of his citizenship, on the grounds of “irresponsible behavior and his refusal to obey instructions issued to him.”21 Nevertheless, the Saudis had not given up on diplomacy to earn bin Laden’s co-operation. “As regards the contacts with the Saudi government, I would like to state that the Saudi government initiated contacts during the last period in the Sudan,” said bin Laden. “They sent several delegations to enter into negotiations aimed at convincing me to keep silent on the unjust American occupation of the land of the two mosques.”22 After a long silence, bin Laden issued a long response, stating that he did not need to be defined as “Saudi” and denying that the House of Saud had the right to determine who may or may not live on the Arabian Peninsula. Moreover he joined with Islamic scholars and activists to form the Organization of Advice and Reform, a political group that issued around 17 communiqués attacking the Saudi regime, but stopped short of advocating violence.23 The committee was a peaceful, moderate organization but its members were jailed, tortured and some fled. It was after this that many in Saudi Arabia concluded that violence was the only way for change. That violence came around 11:30 a.m. on Nov. 13, 1995, when a white van loaded with 45 pounds of compound C-4 (SEMTEX) exploded in a parking lot adjacent to the Riyadh headquarters of the Office of the Program Manager – Saudi Arabian National Guard.24 A few moments later an antipersonnel mine exploded.

20. “Transcript of Osama Bin Ladin interview by Peter Arnett,” CNN, late March 1997, . 21. Mary Anne Weaver “The Real bin Laden,” New Yorker, Jan. 24, 2000. For URL, See Chapter 3, note 30. 22. “Rahimullah Yousafsai interview with Osama bin Laden (Part II),” ABC, Dec. 28, 1998. 23. Frontline—Hunting bin Laden, PBS, Sept. 13, 2001. 24. 1995 Patterns of Global Terrorism, Office of Co-ordination for Counterterrorism, U.S. State Department, April 1996, .

5. The Exile

75

According to the Saudi Ministry of the Interior, six people were killed and 60 others suffered injuries, most of them minor. Four of the dead were Americans. The U.S. State Department said seven people died in the blast, five of whom were American, and 42 were injured. At least three groups claimed responsibility, including the Islamic Movement for Change, the Tigers of the Gulf, and the Combatant Partisans of God. Because no C-4 was missing from military inventories, the Saudis believed the bombers were working for a foreign government, like Iran or Sudan. However, a spokesman for the Pentagon said the bombers were likely ideologically driven Saudis. In the end, four Saudi nationals confessed to the bombing and were executed. In a May 1998 interview with John Miller of ABC, bin Laden admitted at least an indirect role in the attack: We have roused the nation and the Muslim people and we have communicated to them the fatwahs of our learned scholars who the Saudi government has thrown in jail in order to please the American government for which they are agents…. We have communicated their fatwahs and stirred the nation to drive out the enemy who has occupied our land and usurped our country and suppressed our people and to rid the land of the two Holy Mosques from their presence. Among the young men who responded to our call are Khalid Al Said and Abdul Azeez [Fahd Nasser] and Mahmud Al Hadi and Muslih Al Shamrani. We hope Allah receives them as holy martyrs. They have raised the nation’s head high and washed away a great part of the shame that has enveloped us as a result of the weakness of the Saudi government and its complicity with the American government…. Yes, we have instigated and they have responded. We hope Allah grants their families solace.25 The Riyadh bombing was proof that the war to liberate the Middle East had reached Saudi Arabia, and that the Saudi government faced a strong, committed underground Islamist movement.

CONCOCTING THE BIN LADEN MYTH All that can be said with any degree of certainty about the Sudan phase of bin Laden’s life is that he established some businesses; was a public relations headache for the Saudi government; helped Turabi out of a financial and logistical jam; and supported attacks on U.S. forces in Yemen, Somalia and Saudi Arabia. Apart from this, accounts of his activities in Sudan must be treated with skepticism. At this time bin Laden had not yet been linked to the Riyadh bombing, and didn’t register on the U.S. radar. The only country that wanted him dead was Saudi Arabia, principally for reasons of image. Nevertheless, this is when 25. John Miller interview with Osama bin Laden, May 1998 in Hunting Bin Laden, op. cit. Omitted from the quote is reference to the bombing in Dhahran the following year. That will be taken up in Chapter 6.

76

Enemies by Design

the myth of Osama bin Laden as the great demiurge of international Islamist terrorism begins. Take, for example, the strange case of bin Laden’s relationship with the Shamal Islamic Bank in Khartoum.

The Shamal Bank According to the official version, bin Laden and some rich Sudanese merchants loyal to Turabi helped capitalize the bank to the tune of $50 million. To date, no evidence for this charge has been brought forward. It is merely asserted. On the Shamal Bank’s official website (www.shamalbank.com) bin Laden is nowhere mentioned in the who’s who of the bank’s founders, directors or shareholders going back to 1985.26 It states that bin Laden’s involvement was limited to two accounts for the al-Hijra Construction & Development Co. Ltd. (opened on March 30, 1992) and a 1993 U.S. dollar account opened in the name of the Saudi-registered Wadi al-Aqiq Holding Co. That account was closed two years later. Moreover, the Shamal Bank’s acting general manager Ismail Mohamed Osman made no mention of the alleged $50 million capitalization in an interview with the Financial Times: Bin Laden contacted us as a businessman, and opened a foreign currency account in the name of the al-Hijra company [Al-Hijra Construction, which built roads for the Sudanese government]. He never came himself to the bank. The foreign account was replenished from outside Sudan, mainly from Gulf States and from America, through bank transfers. Over three or four years, probably $1 million went through these accounts.27 On Sept. 26, 2001, the $50 million claim emerged in the testimony of Sen. Carl Levin before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee. He cited a 1996 State Department fact sheet that claimed that bin Laden helped establish a bank in the Sudan in 1991 called the Al Shamal Islamic Bank, allegedly providing it with initial capital of $50 million. He also cited an article dated March 16, 2000, in the Indigo Publication’s Intelligence Newsletter stating that bin Laden remains the leading shareholder of the bank. Levin not only misstates the year the Shamal Bank was founded (1990), but makes bin Laden out to be one of the bank’s founders. Moreover, the statement “initial capital of $50 million” is demonstrably false since the bank started business with approximately $3.9 million in paid-up capital. The Indigo newsletter’s claim that bin Laden was the largest shareholder of Shamal Bank as of March 2000 is unsupported by any evidence. 26. According to the website, the banks founders are the Northern State Government (Sudan); Al Baraka for investment & development, Jeddah; Sheikh Salih Abdallah Al Kamil, Jeddah; Sheikh Omer Abdallah Kamil, Jeddah; and Faisal Islamic Bank (Sudan). 27. Finance Watch/Inner City Press, Dec. 3, 2001, .

5. The Exile

77

Nevertheless, a Sept. 26, 2001 CNN/Money Magazine story “Bin Laden linked to BCCI” dutifully regurgitated Levin’s testimony, claiming that “a bank established by bin Laden” was involved in the BCCI scandal. The story goes on to state that this “tidbit of information” had been overlooked by U.S. investigators for as long as 10 years because at the time bin Laden was not identified with terrorist attacks on the U.S. This tidbit of retrospection implies that the U.S. might have had the information as far back as 1991, even though bin Laden opened his al-Hijra accounts in 1992. Levin based his allegations on an Aug. 14, 1996, State Department document that merely asserted the following: “Bin Laden and wealthy NIF members capitalized Al-Shamal Islamic Bank in Khartoum. Bin Laden invested $50 million in the bank.”28 The likely source for this statement is Yossef Bodansky, a former senior terrorism consultant to the U.S. Departments of Defense and State. In his 1999 book, Bin Laden: the Man Who Declared War on America, he repeats the same $50 million claim in virtually the same way, and with no attribution. That bin Laden used the al-Hijra and Wadi al-Aqiq accounts to finance Islamist operations is generally accepted. For example, an airplane was purchased in 1993 with money “wired from the Wadi al Aqiq account at al Shamal bank via Bank of New York to a Bank of America account held in Dallas, Texas by Essam al Ridi. Al Ridi, an Egyptian flight instructor who met bin Laden in Pakistan in 1985, flew the plane to Khartoum.”29 However, if the $50 million story were remotely true, it would have some evidentiary basis, not just rumor and unsubstantiated assertions. Yet, as we shall see, this is the method used to create the demonized myth of bin Laden. Although Bodansky claims to have conducted extensive interviews with “numerous officials, mujahedin, terrorists, commanders, émigrés, defectors and otherwise involved individuals from all sides of the conflict,”30 he said he refused to name his sources out of concern for their safety. Such secrecy is understandable in some instances, but the total absence of footnotes calls into question the veracity of his information and the credibility of his book, especially when he makes controversial or questionable assertions. For example, he credits bin Laden with building the al-Ruseiris Dam (Sudan’s largest), the al-Rahad Kiananah canals, numerous airports and military installations, and the 310-mile al-Tahaddi (“defiance”) military road. 31 Abdelwahab el-Affendi, a former Sudanese diplomat and now a senior research fellow at the Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of 28. State Department Fact Sheet On Bin Laden, Aug. 14, 1996, . Note that this URL designates a U.S.–Israeli source, so the credibility of the $50 million figure is immediately suspect. 29. Financial Times, Nov. 29, 2001. 30. Yossef Bodansky, Bin Laden: The Man who Declared War on America (New York: Forum, 1999), p. xxi. 31. Bodansky, op. cit., p. 46.

78

Enemies by Design

Westminster, says these claims are nonsense. For example, he pointed out that the al-Ruseiris Dam was built in the 1960s, and the most recent work on it was a project to reinforce its capacity, for which the Jeddah-based Islamic Development Bank approved a US$8 million equipment loan. The Saudis control the bank, although officially it reports to all OIC countries. It is therefore far-fetched, he said, to claim that bin Laden exercised any influence to have the loan approved.32 Regarding the road construction, the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army was in control of the roads into Juba at this time. As a result, the roads fell into disrepair for want of regular maintenance. Also, a 1998 Oxfam report does not mention a road between Khartoum and Juba—only access by air and Nile barge.33 In addition, el-Affendi said the road described above is geographically impossible. “The road goes north, then suddenly jumps to Waw, and then from there to Juba,” he said. “I know some people believe bin Laden and his hosts to be miracle makers, but they would find it difficult to pull this one off.” He said the Iranians have tried to build the “Peace Road” to Juba since the early 1990s, but not much progress has been made. In a 1998 interview, Turabi credited Bin Laden with building only a road in northern Sudan and the Khartoum Airport—no mention of the dam, terrorist bases or the southern or northern roads.34 Another factor undermining Bodansky’s credibility is his position as a contributing expert for the Ariel Center for Policy Research. The membership of this Israel-based organization reads like a who’s who of arch-Zionists and anti-Arab polemicists.

INVENTING AL-QAIDA Few myths about bin Laden are as pervasive as the one concerning his leadership of “the al-Qaida terrorist network.” In language similar to that of Saudi dissident Dr. Saad al-Fagih, former U.S. State Department official and terrorism expert David Long told the New Yorker that “the bin Laden Group” more accurately resembles an informal brotherhood: [It’s]… not a terrorist organization in the traditional sense. It’s more a clearing-house from which other groups elicit funds, training, and logistical support. It’s a chameleon, an amoeba, which constantly changes shape according to the whims of its leadership, and that leadership is Osama bin Laden. If you were to kill Osama tomorrow, the Osama organization would disappear, but all the networks would still be there.35 32. Correspondence with the author. 33. “Drought in Sudan,” Emergency Briefing—The South of Sudan, Oxfam, May 1998, . 34. “El-Torabi: World media made Bin Laden symbol of Islamic struggle,” Arabicnews.com, Sept. 12, 1998, . 35. Mary Anne Weaver, “The Real bin Laden.” New Yorker. For URL, see Ch III, note 30.

5. The Exile

79

Groups in the brotherhood include: GIA (Armed Islamic Group) (Algeria); Islamic Jihad and Islamic Group (Egypt); Islamic Movement for Change, the Tigers of the Gulf, and the Combatant Partisans of God (Saudi Arabia); and Abu Sayyef Group (the Philippines), as well as an undetermined number of freelance cells. Each group runs its own show with or without bin Laden’s assistance. For example, on Feb. 26, 1993, a bomb exploded with the force of 1,200 lbs. of explosives in the underground parkade of the World Trade Center in New York causing six deaths, 1,042 injuries and nearly $600 million in property damage. The key figure responsible for making the explosive, Ramzi Yousef, was said to have stayed at the Bait al-Ansar, thus giving rise to the notion that he was affiliated with bin Laden.36 In a May 1998 interview with ABC’s John Miller, bin Laden rejected the charge that he had anything to do with the attack: After the explosion that took place in the World Trade Center, Ramzi Yousef became a well known Muslim figure. Muslims have come to know him. Unfortunately, I did not know him before this incident. I, of course, remember who he is. He is a Muslim who wanted to protect his religion jealously from the oppression practiced by America against Islam. He acted with zeal to make the Americans understand that their government was attacking Muslims in order to safeguard the AmericanJewish interests.37 Given that bin Laden freely admitted to knowing the Riyadh bombers, his denial of knowing Yousef would seem genuine. Thus, one must at least consider the possibility that bin Laden was not behind the bombing, especially since no evidence to the contrary has been produced, and the name “al Qaida” never came up. The same is true of the plan to assassinate Clinton, which was attempted by the Philippine Islamist Wali Khan. Bin Laden said: [Wali Khan] was among the most courageous Muslim young men. He was a close friend and we used to fight from the same trenches in Afghanistan. We fought many battles against the Russians until they were defeated and put to shame and had to leave the country in disgrace. As to what you said about him working for me, I have nothing to say. We are all together in this; we all work for Allah and our reward comes from him. As to what you said about the attempt to assassinate President Clinton, it is not surprising. What do you expect from people 36. On March 4, 1994, Muhammad Amin Salameh, Nidal Ayyad, Mahmud Abouhalima, and Ahmed Ajaj were convicted for their roles in the attack, and on April 25, 1994, each received a 240-year prison term and a $500,000 fine. Yousef fled to Pakistan soon after the attack, but was arrested on Feb. 7, 1995, and deported to stand trial. Moreover, skeptics point to evidence that the 1993 WTC bombing was an FBI false flag operation. 37. < www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/who/interview.html>.

80

Enemies by Design attacked by Clinton, whose sons and mothers have been killed by Clinton? Do you expect anything but treatment by reciprocity?38

The collective “we” is important, for it encapsulates the collective spirit of bin Laden’s group, for want of a better name. Any attack against American or Israeli interests is looked upon as a selfless act of bravery against the enemies of Islam. As Mark N. Katz, professor of government and politics at George Mason University concludes in his largely critical review of Bodansky’s book: As the events of September 11 have shown, bin Laden is a serious threat and an accurate understanding of him and his network is a necessity. Exaggerating the unity and power of the forces behind him and not paying sufficient attention to the important differences among various Muslim actors, though, does not help us in undertaking this vitally important task.39

Chechnya/Dagestan A good example of the Islamist movement’s decentralized nature is the Chechen/Dagestani jihad. On Sept. 6, 1991, Dzokhar Dudayev, leader of the Chechen Autonomous Republic in the Soviet Union and veteran of the war in Afghanistan, declared Chechnya’s independence from Russia. Muslims in Southern Russia, especially Chechens, had good reason to want to be rid of Russian rule. Stalin deported the Chechens en masse to Central Asia on charges of being Nazi sympathizers.40 The most specific figures come from the Danish Support Committee for Chechnya, which says 387,229 Chechens and 91,250 Ingush were known to have been loaded onto the trains; fewer than 400,000 survived. In 1957, during Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign, the Chechens were allowed to return home, but found Russian “settlers” living on their land. At the time of Dudayev’s declaration, however, the new Russian government was seized by insurrectionist problems of its own, and so did not launch a concerted effort to remove Dudayev until November 1994.41 The move provoked calls for a jihad, which received wide support. The Gulf States, long-time backers of the mujahedin, wanted to repay the Soviet Union for its support of Iraq during the Gulf War, and the Arab masses resented its 38. Ibid. 39. Mark N. Katz, “Bin Laden Biography Raises Doubts,” Eurasianet.org, Oct. 27, 2001, . 40. Thomas B. Larsen, Danish Support Committee for Chechnya, . 41. Beginning in October 1990, President Mikhail Gorbachev, architect of perestroika [restructuring] and glasnost [openness], had come under attack from hard-line Communists. The much heralded consumer benefits of his economic reforms failed to materialize and the country’s gross national product actually shrank by 10 percent in the first half of 1991. Moreover, the devolution of centralized control allowed pent-up ethnic and nationalist sentiments to evolve into secessionist movements (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Armenia, Georgia, Ukraine and Moldavia).

5. The Exile

81

support of Serbia against Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo. According to Pakistani sources, Chechens and other foreign nationals received training in military camps in Afghanistan such as Kargha-1, about 12 kilometres north of Kabul.42 After a bitter, inconclusive war that cost 80,000 casualties and made hundreds of thousands homeless, hostilities ended in August 1996 when both sides signed a peace treaty and pledged to renounce violence, but it did not last. On Aug. 7, 1999, an Islamist group that fought in the Chechen war took the jihad eastward to Dagestan, a large autonomous region bordering oil-rich Azerbaijan and Caspian Sea. The aim was to unite Chechnya and Dagestan into an independent Islamic state. The main field commanders in Dagestan are Shamil Basayev, who leads the Chechens and “Khattab,” a 35-year-old Jordanian (some say Saudi Arabian) of Chechen descent, who leads the 2,000-man “Islamic Army of Dagestan.” “Khattab,” whose real name is Habib Abd al-Rahman, is in every sense a product of the Afghan infrastructure that bin Laden helped establish with American, Saudi and Pakistani assistance. He gave up a future as a surgeon in 1987 at age 18 to fight the Soviet Union. When Khattab expresses his passion, you might think you were listening to bin Laden. When a New York Times reporter asked him about the 1995 attack on the U.S. military housing compound in Saudi Arabia, he said: “There is no difference between the American Army and the Russian army. They seized our territory, and Muslims have the right to seek such a solution.”43 The Chechen/Dagestani jihad falls into the category of a modern national liberation struggle. Moreover, it is a local phenomenon, even though many Islamists began training months earlier at secret bases in Muslim countries like Pakistan, Sudan and Afghanistan. It cannot be categorized as an example of “international Islamic terrorism.” Nevertheless, some make this argument by charging that bin Laden is the jihad’s leading financier. According to Russian intelligence reports, bin Laden recently gave $30 million to Basayev and Khattab. Ben Venzke, a senior consultant with Pinkerton Global Intelligence Services in Arlington, Va., said bin Laden used a secret e-mail network to raise funds, and also made a weeklong visit to a training camp in the Chechen village of Serzhen-Yurt just before the Aug. 7 insurrection.44 42. Vinod Anand, “Export of Holy Terror to Chechnya From Pakistan and Afghanistan,” Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses, June 2000, . 43. Carlotta Gall, “Muslim Fighter Embraces Warrior Mystique,” New York Times, Oct. 17, 1999. 44. Dave Montgomery, “Bin Laden helped bankroll Dagestan war, expert says,” San José Mercury News, Sept, 10. 1999. The first time bin Laden set up his own organization was the aforementioned Organization of Advice and Reform in 1994, but it did not progress much further than a one-man London office. Later, he announced the establishment of the

82

Enemies by Design

On Sept. 1, 2004, hundreds of schoolchildren and adults were taken hostage in a middle school in the town of Beslan, in North Ossetia. The terrorists from Chechnya and neighboring autonomous regions demanded that Russian troops be removed from Chechnya and that local regional officials be brought to the school. The crisis ended when Russian elite troops stormed the school two days later, but at the cost of hundreds of lives. Whether the standoff would have ended peacefully will never be known, but the horrific bloodshed was blamed on Russian overreaction. On Sept. 6, the foreign ministers of Israel and Russia signed an agreement in Jerusalem to step up intelligence cooperation and declared terrorism to be the biggest challenge facing the international community. Each country is in a political war with restive Muslim populations, so it is not surprising that each would hide behind the bogeyman of “international terrorism.” Russia clearly has a motive to discredit the Chechen insurgency as a form of international terrorism rather than an indigenous independence movement. However, observers like Prof. Michel Chossudovsky or Webster Tarpley point to U.S. support for Chechen leaders and Al-Qaeda involvement in Afghanistan and Bosnia as indications that the U.S. uses “synthetic terrorism” as a geopolitical weapon against Russia in the great power struggle over spheres of influence. International terrorism is sponsored by the U.S. The absurd comments of Israeli foreign Minister Silvan Shalom typify the world’s libeling of Muslim resistance movements: The terror that hit Russia is no different to the terror that hit New York, Tel Aviv or Madrid. Israel and Russia share interests to cooperate against terrorism. Today we discussed ways to do so. The international community must unite against terrorism, must raise a united front against the murder of children.45 This last sentence is most revealing because the international community is united against the murder of Palestinian children by Israeli soldiers, but Israel harasses and slanders the UN and its agencies whenever they bring up the subject of compliance with international law.46

International Front for the Struggle against Jews and Crusaders, but it also fizzled. Abdelwahab el-Affendi, “Curing the public ‘ignorance’: All those myths about ‘Al-Qaeda’ and the ‘Afghan Arabs,’” Daily Star (Lebanon), Nov. 24, 2001. (After the Beslan atrocity, Putin accused the U.S. and U.K. of supporting secessionists in Chechnya, as they had in Afghanistan. This is in line with the thesis that Islamic fundamentalism is a creature of U.S.- U.K. policy. In “Putin Exposes US-UK Terror Strategy Behind School Atrocity; Russian Press Blasts Anglo-Saxon Terrorist Controllers,” .) 45. “Israel, Russia agree to united front in ‘war against terrorism,’” Agence France Presse, Sept. 6, 2004. 46. See “Israeli commander accused of machine-gunning child,” Irish Examiner, Oct. 11, 2004.

5. The Exile

83

OUT OF AFRICA The end of bin Laden’s stay in Sudan came in May 1996. Again, the reader has a choice of starkly different explanations. According to Bodansky: In early 1996, bin Laden threatened to withdraw his financial assets from Sudan, even though such a withdrawal would have ruined the economy. With the Saudi pressure and economy-saving inducements, Turabi, Bashir and bin Laden worked out arrangements for his original departure from Sudan. Bin Laden’s departure was not the hasty expulsion Bashir and Turabi sought to portray. Bin Laden’s plane flew out of Khartoum Airport and immediately landed in Wadi Sayna airport, a few miles away. Sudanese Intelligence then moved him to a secret location in Darfur Province in western Sudan, where there is a vast terrorist-training infrastructure. There bin Laden and his aides organized his forces and assets to be transferred to Pakistan and then on to Afghanistan over a period of a few weeks.47 Yet El-Affendi dismisses this scenario as pure fiction: Bin Laden was made to feel so unwelcome that he proposed to leave to relieve pressure on Khartoum. He was, I believe, hoping to be told he need not do so. He was optimistic that Khartoum would stick by him, given what he had done to assist Sudan. He was shocked when told that was a good idea. He had no clue that Khartoum was negotiating behind his back to hand him over to the Americans or the Saudis. He left a very bitter and angry man. He called in his loans to the government, which were in the region of tens of millions of dollars, mainly for road building, but the insolvent regime had no money to pay him, and bin Laden was asked to take some agricultural products in exchange. This angered him even more. ‘How do they expect me to market grain and other stuff while I am on the run?’ he exclaimed angrily to one of his confidants. Bin Laden had no assets to speak of in Sudan, so a threat to withdraw them was neither made nor could it have been effective if he had. He would have needed government consent to do that. What he had was loans and some minor investments (farms, construction equipments, etc.) Bin Laden therefore arranged his own departure. His entourage was hardly more than 50, and many had left long before he did. Darfur has no infrastructure to speak of, either civil or military, and the government hardly controls the towns in that lawless part, where banditry and armed robbery are endemic.48 47. Bodansky, op. cit., p. 186. The Darfur crisis is another imperialist proxy war, instigated by the CIA through provocateur John Garang . As Sudan has a moderate, progressive but nationalist Arab leadership, with reported oil resources in the South, it is a model target for a classic destabilization and secessionist breakup. 48. Correspondence with the author.

84

Enemies by Design

Of the two versions, El-Affendi’s must be seen as the correct one. Corroborating evidence comes from an Oct. 4, 2001, Washington Post story that dispels any notion that bin Laden’s departure was amicable. The offer dates to a Feb. 6, 1996, dinner at the home of Sudan’s Foreign Minister Ali Othman Taha. Concerned about deteriorating relations with the U.S., Taha asked U.S. Ambassador Timothy Carney what Sudan could do to improve matters. Carney had a long list that included evicting bin Laden from Sudan and his base of operations. After weeks of trying to convince the Saudis to take him, Sudan’s thenMinister of Defense Maj.-Gen. Elfatih Erwa said: “In the end they said, ‘Just ask him to leave the country. Just don’t let him go to Somalia.’ We said he will go to Afghanistan,’ and they said, ‘Let him.’”49

49. Barton Gellman, “Sudan offered to turn bin Laden over to the Saudis in ‘96,” Washington Post (printed in the Seattle Times), Oct. 4, 2001.

S A M A B I N L A D E N was now stateless, full of confidence in the power of jihad, but not considered a terrorist. In the Hindu Kush he was geographically inaccessible, and the Taliban provided the unstinting political protection that Turabi could not. There was nothing the U.S. or Saudi Arabia could do. Their ineptitude caused bin Laden to flee Saudi Arabia for Sudan, and then to flee Sudan for Afghanistan. As a former U.S. intelligence official remarked in 1998: “Both countries may look back on this as the stupidest move since the Germans sent Lenin back to Moscow.”1

As if to correct their error, the Saudis tried to lure bin Laden with promises of a dignified return complete with restored passport and personal property, if only he would declare his support for the House of Saud. Whether this offer was legitimate or a ruse to trap him is irrelevant, since bin Laden had no intention of accepting. He responded by saying he didn’t need to be defined as a Saudi, and that the government had no right to say who could or who could not live on the Arabian Peninsula.2 The return to Afghanistan in May 1996 was a watershed event, because from here we can date the start of the U.S.-made myth of bin Laden as the demiurge of international terrorism. Bin Laden hadn’t changed; only his targets did.

KHOBAR About a month after bin Laden arrived in Afghanistan, an explosion rocked King Abdul Aziz Airbase near Dhahran. Around 10 p.m. on June 25, 1996, a diesel tanker loaded with at least 5,000 pounds of plastic explosives 1. Robin Wright, “Saudi Dissident a Prime Suspect in Blasts,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 14, 1998. 2. Ibid.

86

Enemies by Design

was driven within 80 feet of the eight-story al-Khobar dormitory where 100 U.S. Air Force personnel were housed. A few minutes later, the explosion, equivalent to 20,000 lbs. of TNT, blew off the side of Building 131, leaving a 35 x 85-foot crater. Buildings as far as three miles away also suffered blast damage.3 The Khobar bombing was the worst attack against overseas U.S. personnel since the Oct. 23, 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 marines, sailors and soldiers. U.S. sources said 19 servicemen were killed and 270 wounded in the Khobar blast, but Saudi officials said 386 were injured, including 147 Saudis.4 The U.S. had to have suspected something was going to happen. U.S. Ambassador Raymond Mabus said the embassy had been receiving faxes from radical Islamist groups for three months warning U.S. and British military personnel to leave Saudi Arabia before July. In a public statement, the Islamic Movement for Change vowed “to exert all available means to evict these foreign forces." It was one of the three groups that claimed responsibility for the Riyadh bombing seven-and-a half months earlier.5 To Americans, the idea that the attacks on the World Trade Center, Riyadh and Khobar could be considered acts of self-defense is absurd. They must be deemed mindless acts of terrorism. Anger, revenge and commiseration are the only appropriate emotional responses, because those who would do harm to the U.S. must by definition be driven by hatred and envy. By indulging this conceit, Americans absolve themselves from having to understand their attackers. To do so would imply that the attacks might be rational, even moral in some sense, and this cannot be admitted. To this day, the vast majority of Americans have never heard that the attack on the Beirut marine barracks was in retaliation for an offshore bombardment by the battleship USS New Jersey that destroyed Arab villages in Lebanon’s Shouf mountains. After the Khobar blast, the U.S. government wrapped itself in the mantle of victimhood, as shown by President Bill Clinton’s remarks: “The explosion appears to be the work of terrorists. If that’s the case, like all Americans I am outraged by it. The cowards who committed this murderous act must not go unpunished… Our condolences and our prayers go out to the victims, families and their friends.”6 3. Federal Bureau of Investigation press release, June 21, 2001, . 4. “Christopher Tours Saudi Bomb Wreckage,” CNN, June 26, 1996. However, in its June 30, 1998, Special Report on Terrorism, the Chicago-based Emergency Research and Response Institute (ERRI) put the casualty numbers at 19 servicemen killed and at least 300 others injured, . 5. Ibid., ERRI. 6. President Clinton’s Remarks, CNN, June, 26, 1996.

6. American Jihad

87

What Clinton does not say is that many Muslims consider the lingering U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia to be an occupying force and an insult to Islam. To underscore this point, Secretary of State Warren Christopher pledged that the bombing would not deter the United States from pursuing its mission in Saudi Arabia, but what that mission could be in mid-1996 is a mystery.7 The U.S. had promised King Fahd that its forces would not stay one moment longer than necessary, and since “Desert Storm” had been over for more than five years, the U.S. and other Western forces should have already left, just as the Islamic Movement for Change demanded.8 One does not have to sympathize with bin Laden to reject Clinton’s depiction of the Khobar bombing as a cowardly terrorist act. From the Islamists’ perspective, it was a legitimate act against a foreign occupier and the Saudi government that refused to evict it. The brutal friendship had created another enemy for the U.S. If that fact weren’t plain enough, bin Laden would soon spell it out in unambiguous language.

D E C L A R AT I O N O F W A R From his new sanctuary in Khorasan, bin Laden wrote a 12-page epistle entitled Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places—Expel the Infidels from the Arab Peninsula. The essence of the Declaration of War is best summed up in this passage: After Belief [imaan] there is no more important duty than pushing the American enemy out of the holy land. No other priority, except Belief, could be considered before it; the people of knowledge, ibn Taymiya, stated: “To fight in defense of religion and Belief is a collective duty; there is no other duty after Belief than fighting the enemy who is corrupting the life and the religion. There is no precondition for this duty, and the enemy should be fought with one’s best abilities. If it is not possible to push back the enemy except by the collective movement of the Muslim people, then there is a duty on the Muslims to ignore the minor differences among themselves; the ill effect of ignoring these

7. See CNN June 26, 1996 op. cit. 8. At an Aug. 8 press conference, Pres. George Bush strongly indicated that the U.S. military commitment was designed specifically to address the Iraqi military build-up, though not in such plain English: T e r e n c e H u n t , Associated Press: “Is this an open-ended commitment? I mean, could this drag on for years?” Th e P r e s i d e n t : “Nothing is open-ended, but I’m not worrying about that there at all. I’m worrying about getting them there and doing what I indicated in our speech in there is necessary: the defense of the Saudis and trying through concerted international means to reverse out this aggression.” President George Bush’s Press Conference, The Bush Library, Aug. 8, 1990, .

88

Enemies by Design differences, at a given period of time, is much less than the ill effect of the occupation of the Muslims’ land by the main Kufr [infidels].”9

Replace “pushing the American enemy out of the holy land” with “pushing the Soviet enemy out of Afghanistan” and you have the essential mission of the mujahedin, whom the Reagan administration funded and supported with $3 billion. Now that the jihad was directed at the U.S., bin Laden, the once-virtuous “freedom fighter,” overnight became the “evil terrorist.” The Declaration of War is divided into five exhortations, throughout which citations from the Quran, invocations to God, and references to liberating the holy sites frequently recur. The first is a general address to the umma (community of believers) and an outline of the grounds for the American jihad: a history of injustices and violence committed by the “Zionist-Crusader alliance;” the complicity of the Saudi regime and the security forces in these injustices; and the persecution and humiliation of loyal Saudi Muslims who opposed the government’s conduct before and during the Gulf War. After establishing the religious and political necessity of jihad, bin Laden instigates the umma to put aside their private quarrels and unite to evict the U.S. from Saudi Arabia. The second is addressed to Saudi Arabia’s security and military forces to incite them to support the mujahedin. For the first time, bin Laden attacks King Fahd directly: The King said that: “The issue is simple, the American and the alliance forces will leave the area in few months.” Today, it is seven years since their arrival and the regime is not able to move them out of the country. The regime made no confession about its inability and carried on lying to the people claiming that the American will leave.10 The third, only a few paragraphs long, is an exhortation to Muslims on the Arabian Peninsula to boycott American goods: It is incredible that our country is the world’s largest buyer of arms from the USA and the area’s biggest commercial partner of the Americans who are assisting their Zionist brothers in occupying Palestine and in evicting and killing the Muslims there, by providing arms, men and financial support.11 The fourth is addressed to the youth of Islam, to whom bin Laden entrusts the execution of the jihad:

9. Osama bin Laden, Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying The Land of the Two Holy Places, Oct. 23, 1996, p. 4, . 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid.

6. American Jihad

89

While some of the well-known individuals had hesitated in their duty of defending Islam and saving themselves and their wealth from the injustice, aggression and terror, exercised by the government, the youths (may Allah protect them) were forthcoming and raised the banner of jihad against the American-Zionist alliance occupying the sanctities of Islam. Others who have been tricked into loving this materialistic world, and those who have been terrorized by the government choose to give legitimacy to the greatest betrayal, the occupation of the land of the two Holy Places.12 The final exhortation is a call to all Muslims to liberate the holy sites, and includes a stinging denunciation of ibn Saud for allowing the al-Aqsa mosque in al-Quds (Jerusalem) to fall into Zionist hands: In … AD 1936 the awakened Muslim nation of Palestine started their great struggle, jihad, against the British occupying forces. Britain was impotent to stop the mujahedin and their jihad, but their devil inspired that there is no way to stop the armed struggle in Palestine unless through their agent King Abdul Aziz, who managed to deceive the mujahedin. King Abdul Aziz carried out his duty to his British masters. He sent his two sons to meet the mujahedin leaders and to inform them that King Abdul Aziz would guarantee the promises made by the British government in leaving the area and responding positively to the demands of the mujahedin if the latter stop their Jihad… I feel still the pain of al-Quds in my internal organs. That loss is like a burning fire in my intestines.13 Whether the presence of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia constituted an attack on Islam is a matter of debate—not every Arab or Arab government agreed— but the Declaration of War cannot be written off as a mindless call to violence. It is a deliberate, cogently argued indictment of the world’s disregard for the welfare of Muslims, written by a devoutly religious man: It should not be hidden from you [God] that the people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-Crusader alliance and their collaborators, to the extent that the Muslims’ blood became the cheapest and their wealth as loot in the hands of the enemies. Their blood was spilled in Palestine and Iraq. The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon, are still fresh in our memory. Massacres in Tajikistan, Burma, Kashmir, Assam, the Philippines, Fatani, Ogaden, Somalia, Eritrea, Chechnya and in BosniaHerzegovina took place, massacres that send shivers in the body and 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. pp. 6, 10. Al-Aqsa is integral to Islam because it here that Muhammad, the seventh and final prophet, led all prophets in prayer, and then ascended to heaven to receive God’s commandment to pray five times a day. Al-Aqsa is also the first qibla [direction of prayer], because in the early years of Islam, Muslims prayed toward Jerusalem. Muhammad later received a revelation from Archangel Jibril [Gabriel] telling him that the congregations should pray east towards Mecca, instead of west towards Jerusalem.

90

Enemies by Design shake the conscience. All of this and the world watched and heard, and not only didn’t respond to these atrocities, but also with a clear conspiracy between the USA and its allies and under the cover of the iniquitous United Nations, the dispossessed people were even prevented from obtaining arms to defend themselves… Terrorizing you, while you are carrying arms on our land, is a legitimate and morally demanded duty.14

Qana The above-mentioned Qana massacre typifies the double standard that animates Islamist animosity towards the West, in particular the U.S. On April 18, 1996, Israeli forces bombed the UN refugee compound in Qana during its “Grapes of Wrath” offensive against Shi’ite Hezballah bases in Southern Lebanon. More than 800 Lebanese fled the bombardment that killed and mutilated more than 100 Lebanese civilians, including infants. The UN investigation conducted by Maj.-Gen. Frank van Kappen of the Netherlands determined that the attack was deliberate, given that two Israeli helicopters and a drone reconnaissance aircraft were overhead at the time and would have warned of the presence of civilians. Van Kappen asked Israel to offer evidence to refute the charges, but did not receive any documents. Shortly after the massacre, Robert Fisk, Middle East correspondent for the Independent, wrote: Not since Sabra and Chatila had I seen the innocent slaughtered like this. The Lebanese refugee women and children and men lay in heaps, their heads or arms or legs missing, beheaded or disemboweled. There were well over a hundred of them. A baby lay without a head. The Israeli shells had scythed through them as they lay in the United Nations shelter, believing that they were safe under the world’s protection. Like the Muslims of Srebrenica, the Muslims of Qana were wrong.15 “Grapes of Wrath” was ostensibly a response to a Hezballah rocket attack on an Israeli patrol, but the patrol in question was planting antipersonnel mines and roadside explosives in UN territory. The Israelis gave UN representatives a map showing the location of the devices near the village of Henniyeh, about five miles from Qana. However, a separate minefield near the village of Bradchit had already been sown, and a plastic explosive device along the road had killed a Lebanese teenager the previous month. That death prompted the Hezballah attack. Despite incontrovertible evidence that Israelis had planted the device, 14. Ibid. To this list, bin Laden included the suffering of Iraq to date: “More than 600,000 Iraqi children have died due to lack of food and medicine, and as a result of the unjustifiable aggression (sanction) imposed on Iraq and its nation. The children of Iraq are our children. You, the U.S.A., together with the Saudi regime are responsible for the shedding of the blood of these innocent children. Due to all of that, whatever treaty you have with our country is now null and void.” 15. Robert Fisk, “Massacre in sanctuary; Eyewitness,” The Independent, April 19, 1996.

6. American Jihad

91

Foreign Minster Shimon Peres denied that Israelis had been in the Bradchit area. On the day of the Qana massacre, Israeli troops were in Bradchit and Henniyeh laying mines.16 Bin Laden condemned the massacre as an act of international terrorism, and his demand for justice and trials for the Israelis responsible is consistent with international law. Unfortunately for bin Laden, the U.S. controls the UN and Israel controls the U.S., as Fisk observed: A U.S.-Israeli cover-up immediately took place. However, unexpected hard evidence, including a videotape of the attack, convinced UN investigators that the attack was premeditated. Severe pressure was brought on UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali not to release the report to the Security Council or the public. However, after watering it down as best he could, Boutros-Ghali was forced to release the report, some UN officials going so far as to indicate they would resign if he did not do so. Shamefully, though, the UN Security Council has refused to act on the report or to hold the Israelis accountable. Of course the American veto threat and tremendous pressures upon Boutros-Ghali and member states at the UN was behind this further demonstration of UN impotence and cowardice.17 Israel has never been punished or held accountable for this atrocity; in fact, the U.S. rewarded Israel with money, sophisticated weaponry and intelligence-gathering technology: • Access to real-time satellite data for detecting ballistic missile launchers; • $200 million for Israel’s Arrow missile project; • $25 million to perfect the Nautilus Tactical High-Energy Laser system that can destroy small rockets such as the short range Katyushas; • F-15-I fighter-bombers, the latest version of the world’s leading warplane by McDonnell Douglas; • AMRAM air-to-air missiles, America’s most advanced weapon for aerial combat; • Additional access to technology such as super-computers; • Training Israelis to become astronauts; • Budgeting the first $50 million promised in March 1996 “to fight terrorism;” • Formal signing of an anti-terrorism cooperation agreement calling for sharing of information, resources, technology and training; • Formal signing of a “statement of intent” creating a working group to explore ways to bolster Israel’s military defense; and 16. Robert Fisk, “The Deadly Secret that Led to Bloodbath at Qana,” The Independent, June 1, 1996, re-printed in Mid-East Realities. 17. Robert Fisk, “Qana massacre coverup successful,” The Independent, July 2, 1996, reprinted in Mid-East Realities.

92

Enemies by Design • Formation of a high-level steering committee to develop new ways of enhancing bilateral security cooperation, including possibly a formal defense treaty between the U.S. and Israel.18

Polite vs. impolite terror With the U.S. forces lingering in Saudi Arabia five years after the end of hostilities, the time had come to “liberate” the land of the holy sites from “infidel” occupation. Bin Laden’s depiction of the brutal friendship and the dependent nature of the Saudi regime was spot on: The crusader forces became the main cause of our disastrous condition, particularly in the economical aspect of it due to the unjustified heavy spending on these forces. As a result of the policy imposed on the country, especially in the field of oil industry where production is restricted or expanded and prices are fixed to suit the American economy ignoring the economy of the country. Expensive deals were imposed on the country to purchase arms. People are asking, “What is the justification for the very existence of the regime, then?”19 Had the U.S. removed its military from Saudi Arabia as promised, the Riyadh and Khobar bombings would not have occurred; the Declaration of War would not have been issued; and Osama bin Laden would be just an Islamist with a big bank account. Of course, this scenario is utterly implausible. As we know, the U.S. did not send in its military to defend Saudi Arabia against a putative Iraqi threat, but to establish a military presence to safeguard access to Persian Gulf oil. Even if the U.S. had the ability to respect and appreciate Islamic sensitivities, paranoia and economic self-interest precluded it from appreciating the disaster to come. Thus the Riyadh and Khobar bombings—or bombings like them—were inevitable. Notwithstanding the substance of bin Laden’s case against the U.S. “occupation,” the bellicose language in the Declaration of War was enough to convince Americans that bin Laden was a maniac, and that Islam was a religion of violent fanatics. These anti-Muslim stereotypes were set in rhetorical granite on Feb. 23, 1998, when the London-based Al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper published a fax signed by bin Laden and four others on behalf of a group calling itself the World Islamic Front. In the statement, the signatories present a fatwah against the United States that concluded: All these crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on God, his messenger, and Muslims…. On that basis, and in compliance with God’s order, we issue the following fatwah to all Muslims: The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim 18. The Qana massacre, Ibid. 19. Declaration, op. cit.

6. American Jihad

93

who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim….20 The fatwah foreclosed any possibility that U.S. attitudes towards the Persian Gulf and Islamists would be governed by diplomacy. The most damning aspect of the fatwah was not its message but its language, especially the invocation to kill American civilians. When the U.S. commits violence in its own name or in the name of Israel, it employs euphemisms like “defending democracy,” “liberation,” “fighting terrorism” or “rolling-back communism.” Islamists, though, don’t share this squeamishness for honest, violent speech. They are candid about what they intend to do, but by eschewing euphemism, bin Laden and his followers placed themselves beyond the pale of polite, “civilized” society and became depicted as “evil.” By the same token, the perceived legitimacy of the U.S. was dramatically enhanced. If bin Laden did not exist, the U.S. would have had to invent him. Yet the issue of good and evil is moot. The number of Muslims killed by the polite terrorism of the U.S. and Israel far exceeds the number of Israelis and Americans killed by the Islamists’ impolite terrorism. Nevertheless, bin Laden would henceforth be damned because of what he said, more than for any specific act he may have committed.

THE EMBASSY BOMBINGS On the morning of Friday, Aug. 7, 1998, a truck bomb exploded in a parking lot at the rear of the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. The blast killed 213 people, including 44 embassy employees—12 Americans and 32 Kenyans. Ten Americans and 11 Kenyans were seriously injured. An estimated 200 Kenyan civilians were killed and 4,000 were injured by the blast in the vicinity of the embassy. Nine minutes later, another truck bomb exploded in the U.S. embassy in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. No Americans were among the 11 killed, but many were among the 85 injured. In all, the two blasts killed 243 people, injured more than 4,000, and caused serious damage to buildings in the compounds and the surrounding areas. Both U.S. chanceries withstood the blasts but were rendered unusable.21 This time, though, the U.S. was not content simply to utter denunciations. Despite having no physical evidence to link bin Laden to the attacks, Clinton selected two sites allegedly affiliated with him to receive 20. “Bin-Laden, Others Sign Fatwa To ‘Kill Americans’ Everywhere,” Al-Quds al-Arabi, reprinted in English by ERRI, Feb. 23, 1998, . 21. Report of the Accountability Review Boards on the Embassy Bombings in Nairobi and Dares-Salaam on Aug. 7, 1998 ; James C. McKinley Jr., “Security Flaws Left Nairobi Embassy Open to Attack,” New York Times, Sept. 9, 1998.

94

Enemies by Design

America’s wrath—one in Afghanistan, one in Sudan. As a former U.S. intelligence official put it: “It was all rather biblical. The president was very specific: he wanted two targets for the two embassies that were bombed.”22 On Aug. 20, within hours of the U.S. reprisal attacks, Clinton addressed the nation to explain what was done and why. The speech consists of three interwoven justifications that betray not only the political and moral baselessness of the reprisals—and the “war on terrorism” in general—but also the moral and political validity of bin Laden’s Declaration of War.

The military justification Our forces targeted one of the most active terrorist bases in the world. It contained key elements of the bin Laden network’s infrastructure and has served as a training camp for literally thousands of terrorists from around the globe. We have reason to believe that a gathering of key terrorist leaders was to take place there today, thus underscoring the urgency of our actions. Our forces also attacked a factory in Sudan associated with the bin Laden network. The factory was involved in the production of materials for chemical weapons. Under Operation “Infinite Reach” the military fired 60 Tomahawk cruise missiles at six alleged terrorist camps near the cities of Khost and Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan. Of the four camps near Khost, two were operated by Pakistan, which lost five ISI officers and 20 trainees in the attack. In all, 21 people were killed, including three women and two children—but no “terrorists.” It turns out that the meeting Clinton mentioned took place a month earlier. Bin Laden and other mujahedin were nowhere near the camps. In the end, the U.S. expended $79 million-worth of satellite-guided cruise missiles to destroy an obstacle course, field barracks and a few tents.23 The other target was the $100 million al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, which was deemed to be a site for the manufacture of Empta, a precursor agent in the manufacture of VX nerve gas. The “evidence” for this charge is a soil sample taken near the plant by a CIA operative; however, no independent evidence has substantiated the U.S. government’s claim. This is not surprising because Empta is chemically similar to certain pesticides found in the area, and is highly reactive. A test done during the following February found no evidence of Empta or its breakdown product Empa.24

22. Cited in Mary Anne Weaver, “The Real bin Laden,” New Yorker, Jan. 24, 2000. For URL, see Ch. III note 30. 23. Ibid. According to Frontline, the number of missiles was 75. Other sources put the total number of camps at four. 24. James Risen and David Johnston, “Experts Find No Arms Chemicals at Bombed Sudan Plant,” New York Times, Feb. 9, 1999. The number of missiles fired at the plant is either six (Weaver) or 13 (Frontline).

6. American Jihad

95

Senior Pentagon officials also alleged that al-Shifa was part of Sudan’s military-industrial complex, to which bin Laden was known to have made financial contributions.25 However, the U.S. has not proven any connection between bin Laden and the plant. Such a connection would not have even been possible, because several months before the attack the plant was sold to Saleh Idris, a millionaire Saudi national born in Sudan. In May 1999, the U.S. unfroze Idris’s assets, thereby tacitly admitting that it had no case against him. Officially, government spokesmen refused to apologize to Idris, to admit that the attack had no merit, even though at the time senior security and intelligence personnel demonstrated that insufficient evidence existed to justify an attack.26 In fact, the State Department was preparing a report to that effect, but Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had it stifled. In July 2000, Idris filed a $50 million compensation lawsuit against the U.S. government. “I have never met nor spoken with Mr. Osama bin Laden nor with any agent of his,” he told the BBC.27 But biblical-style retribution, not rational evaluation of scientific data, was uppermost in Washington’s mind. As Clinton said in the address: “[The] risks from inaction to America and the world would be far greater than action, for that would embolden our enemies, leaving their ability and their willingness to strike us intact.” By making a virtue out of necessity, Clinton only proved that the decision to attack was militarily and politically irrational.

The legal and political justification Afghanistan and Sudan have been warned for years to stop harboring and supporting these terrorist groups. But countries that persistently host terrorists have no right to be safe havens… With compelling evidence [sic] that the bin Laden network of terrorist groups was planning to mount further attacks… I decided America must act. America has battled terrorism for many years. Where possible, we’ve used law enforcement and diplomatic tools to wage the fight. The long arm of American law has reached out around the world and brought to trial those guilty of attacks in New York, in Virginia, and in the Pacific… But there have been and will be times when law enforcement and diplomatic tools are simply not enough, when our very national security is challenged, and when we must take extraordinary steps to protect the safety of our citizens. In trying to make a legal case for bombing Afghanistan and Sudan, Clinton did the opposite, saying, in effect: “If the U.S. can get what it wants through diplomacy and adherence to international law—fine, but when push comes to shove the U.S. will get what it wants by force—international law be damned.” 25. Vernon Loeb and Michael Grunwald, “U.S. fails to provide evidence against bin Laden,” The Washington Post, Aug. 20, 1998. 26. Tony Karon, “Did U.S. Bomb Sudan in Error?” Time, Oct. 27, 1999. 27. “US sued over Sudan strikes,” BBC News July 27, 2000.

96

Enemies by Design

What qualifies as “law” is a good question. The U.S. to date had not attempted to indict bin Laden, and had no firm evidence linking him to the 1992 attempted bombing of U.S. troops in Yemen, the 1993 attacks on U.S. troops in Somalia, or the 1995 Riyadh bombing. Moreover, federal law enforcement officers were not even close to bringing criminal charges against bin Laden or anyone else related to the embassy bombings.28 The only country that has made any serious effort to prosecute bin Laden is Libya. In their book Ben Laden: la vérité intérdite [Bin Laden: the Forbidden Truth], French investigative reporters and intelligence experts Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié published a confidential March 16, 1998, memo from Libya’s interior minister to Interpol charging bin Laden in the 1994 murders of German intelligence agents Silvan Becker and his wife. Bin Laden wanted to settle in Libya in the early 1990s, but Moammar Qaddafi refused to admit him. Enraged by this refusal, bin Laden supported al-Muqatila, a radical Islamist group comprised of 20 Libyan veterans of the Afghan jihad who considered Qaddafi to be an infidel. Together with British intelligence, al-Muqatila tried to assassinate Qaddafi in 1996.29 Dasquié said the London-based Islamic Fighting Group (IFG), the most powerful Libyan dissident organization, has been linked directly to bin Laden. Qaddafi even demanded that Western police institutions, such as Interpol, pursue the IFG and bin Laden, but he never obtained their cooperation. Interpol ignored the arrest warrant because of British collaboration with al-Muqatila, which has since been placed on the U.S. list of terrorist groups. Concerning the bombing and international law, the Charter of the United Nations states that if a dispute arises between member states that cannot be settled by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means (Article 33), the dispute shall be referred to the Security Council (Article 37). Given the gravity of the embassy bombings, such an appeal stood a good chance of earning the sympathy of other council members. However, the UN was set up to regulate affairs among nation-states, and the perpetrators of the Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam bombings were stateless. Nevertheless, under Article 34 the Security Council has the right to investigate any dispute, if asked. Since Afghanistan and Sudan, as member-states of the UN, played no role in the bombings, America’s unilateralism must be deemed to be an aggressive act by a rogue state, and therefore a crime under international law.

28. Ibid., “U.S. fails to provide evidence against bin Laden,” The Washington Post, Aug. 20, 1998. 29. Cited in “U.S. efforts to make peace summed up by ‘oil,’” an interview with the Irish Times, Nov. 19, 2001.

6. American Jihad

97

Further evidence of the illegal nature of the attack comes from Clinton’s failure to inform the government of Pakistan that cruise missiles would violate Pakistani air-space en route to Afghanistan. The only Pakistani told was Gen. Jehangir Karamat, who was hosting a dinner for Gen. Joseph Ralston, the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As Mary Weaver recounted in the New Yorker: Around 10 o’clock in the evening, as the two men were having dinner, Ralston looked up from his chicken tikka, checked his watch, and informed his host that in ten minutes some sixty Tomahawk cruise missiles would be entering Pakistan’s airspace… “It was a ‘This is happening as we speak’ kind of conversation,” an American intelligence official told me. “Ralston was there, on the ground, to make absolutely certain that when the missiles flew across Pakistan’s radar screen they would not be misconstrued as coming from India and, as a consequence, be shot down.” The intelligence official paused for a moment, and then said, “This is one hell of a way to treat our friends.”30

The moral justification The groups associated with [Osama bin Laden] come from diverse places but share a hatred for democracy, a fanatical glorification of violence, and a horrible distortion of their religion to justify the murder of innocents. They have made the United States their adversary precisely because of what we stand for and what we stand against. A few months ago and again this week, bin Laden publicly vowed to wage a terrorist war against America, saying—and I quote—“We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians. They’re all targets.” Their mission is murder, and their history is bloody. In recent years they killed American, Belgian, and Pakistani peacekeepers in Somalia… This will be a long, ongoing struggle between freedom and fanaticism, between the rule of law and terrorism. We must be prepared to do all that we can for as long as we must. America is and will remain a target of terrorists precisely because we are leaders; because we act to advance peace, democracy and basic human values; because we’re the most open society on earth; and because, as we have shown yet again, we take an uncompromising stand against terrorism. Before it was destroyed, the al-Shifa plant produced 50 percent of Sudan’s medicine, including 90 percent of the drugs to fight malaria, diarrhea, diabetes, tuberculosis and other treatable diseases, as well as anti-parasitic drugs for livestock. In January 1998, the factory won a $199,000 contract to ship 100,000 cartons of the anti-parasitic drug Shifazole to Iraq under UN sanction. White cartons of the antibiotic were scattered in the rubble.31 After the attack, Sudan was forced to import these drugs at considerable cost. As a result, many thousands of Sudanese civilians would die needlessly. 30. Ibid., Weaver. 31. “Questions remain about Sudan factory,” USA Today, 1999.

98

Enemies by Design

Even if the need for a retaliatory attack had been defensible, the quality of intelligence that selected these targets vitiates any claim that the bombing had any connection to justice. It amounted to bombing for its own sake against two of the world’s poorest countries, a true act of terrorism. The only beneficiary was bin Laden. As Dr. Saad al-Fagih told Frontline: After the American attack on Sudan and Afghanistan it became almost shameful to criticize bin Laden. People inside Saudi Arabia and in other Arab countries were full of anger towards America, and whoever can antagonize America would provide a fulfillment to their desire of discharging their anger. The American strike with the associated remarks by Clinton and American officials proved that bin Laden is a big challenge to America. In the mind of the average Arab and Muslim bin Laden appeared as the man who was able to drive America so crazy that it started shooting haphazardly at unjustified targets…. Those who had reservations of the African bombings thought that this arrogance of the Americans is much worse than the embassy bombings. Their view was that while bin Laden or others can make “executive” mistakes because of their difficult circumstances, logistics and communication, America is not supposed to do this mistake, unless it is done on purpose.32

INDICTMENT Three months after the embassy bombings, the U.S. District Court (Southern District of New York) brought down an indictment against bin Laden, charging him with conspiracy to kill Americans, among other things. Yet the indictment was a political document, not a legal one, and based on the same guilt-by-association nonsense as Clinton’s address was. The New York Times description of the indictment makes this clear: American officials say that so far firsthand evidence that could be used in court to prove that [bin Laden] commanded the bombings has proven difficult to obtain. According to the public record, none of the informants involved in the case have direct knowledge of bin Laden’s involvement. For now, officials say, federal prosecutors appear to be building a case that his violent words and ideas, broadcast from an Afghan cave, incited terrorist acts thousands of miles away. In their war against bin Laden, American officials portray him as the world’s most dangerous terrorist. But reporters for The New York Times and the PBS program Frontline, have found him to be less a commander of terrorists than an inspiration for them… “We can’t say for sure what was going on” with him from 1991 to 1996—most of the years covered in the indictment—one senior official said.33 32. Hunting bin Laden Sept. 13, 2001, op. cit. 33. Tim Weiner, “U.S. Case Against bin Laden in Embasy [sic] Blasts Seems to Rest on Ideas,” New York Times, April 13, 1999.

6. American Jihad

99

The Times story generally accords with bin Laden’s own interpretation of the bombings, which he articulated in the first of a four-part interview with ABC on Dec. 12, 1998. ABC N E W S : You have been charged with masterminding the bombings of the two U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Are these charges true? O S A M A B I N L A D E N : Praise be to God, the Cherisher and Sustainer of the Worlds. Peace and blessings be upon Prophet Muhammad, his companions and his kin. Let me begin by stating that we, in the World Islamic Front for jihad against Jews and Crusaders, have, by the grace of God Almighty, issued a crystal clear fatwah calling on the Nation to carry on jihad aimed at liberating Islamic holy sites, and the Ancient House (The Holy Ka’aba), and Al-Aqsa Mosque and all Islamic lands. By the grace of God, Praise and Glory be to him; this Nation, the Nation of Muhammad, God’s peace and blessings be upon him, has responded to this appeal and this instigation. We will continue this course because it is a part of our religion, and because God, Praise and Glory be to him, ordered us to carry out jihad so that the word of God may remain exalted to the heights. If the instigation for jihad against the Jews and the Americans, in order to liberate Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the Holy Ka’aba, is considered a crime, let history be a witness that I am a criminal. ABC N E W S : You warned that Americans would die. Then, two months later, the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar As Salaam were bombed. Were these bombings because of your fatwah (decree) against America? B I N L A D E N : By the Grace of God, Praise and Glory be to him, we have repeatedly issued warnings over a number of years. Following these warnings and these calls, anti-American explosions took place in a number of Islamic countries. Most probably, these acts came about as a result of such calls and warnings. But only God knows the truth. ABC N E W S : If the targets of jihads are Americans, how can the deaths of so many Africans be justified? B I N L A D E N : This question pre-supposes that it is me who carried out these explosions. My answer is that I understand the motives of the brothers who carry out acts of jihad against the enemies of the nation, namely the Americans and their supporters… [R]adio reports said that most of those killed were members of the American Embassy in Nairobi, which housed the largest CIA center in the African continent. We do understand what happened. Many people were saddened by the death of some innocent people outside the embassy building.34

34. “Terror Suspect—An interview with Osama bin Laden,” ABC News, Dec. 28, 1998.

100

Enemies by Design

The day after the bombings, Sheikh Omar Barkri, bin Laden’s spokesman in London, gave an interview to Knight-Ridder Newspapers in which he said bin Laden had no connection to The Islamic Army for Liberating the Holy Sites, the group that claimed responsibility for the bombings: “Bin Laden was not the mastermind behind it. This was definitely not one of his projects. He endorsed it, but he did not order it. He is not a coward. If he had ordered this, he would take responsibility for it… This is a new group, and you can expect a lot of freelance groups to come up. But it is not a bin Laden organization.”35 On Oct. 13, 2000, the guided-missile destroyer USS Cole was docked in Aden to refuel en route to the Persian Gulf. At 12:15 p.m., a small harbour boat armed with explosives was steered into its side. The ship, built to withstand a pressure of 51,000 pounds per square inch, sustained a 30 x 40 foot gaping hole, and extensive flooding. Seventeen sailors were killed and 39 were injured. The response was predictable: Clinton and other administration officials denounced the attackers as “cowardly,” vowed revenge, and tried to link the bombing to bin Laden. According to CNN: “The officials said the evidence suggests some suspects in the Cole attack… were in contact with bin Laden operatives in East Africa. The officials would not be more specific.”36 In contrast, the BBC offered sober speculation on bin Laden’s involvement and took what might be called a swipe at the U.S. obsession: Kuwait’s respected newspaper, Al-Rai al-Aam, printed an alleged telephone conversation with Mr. Bin Laden. The paper quotes him as saying that neither he nor his followers have any intention of striking civil or military installations in any Arab country. The world of militant Islamists is a shadowy and confusing one with no shortage of fanatics prepared to die in order to strike at U.S. and Israeli interests. If Osama bin Laden’s denial is confirmed, it removes the most obvious suspect and makes the job of U.S. detectives that much harder.37 By the time of the Cole bombing, bin Laden had spent two years on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s “10 Most-Wanted” list and been placed under criminal indictment without benefit of evidence. Yet just eight years earlier he did not even register on the U.S. terrorist radar. These years span the entire presidency of Bill Clinton, who is responsible for turning bin Laden into a demonized celebrity. Larry Johnson, deputy director of the U.S. State Department Office of Counterterrorism (1989-1993), explained the folly of the Clinton administration’s response to bin Laden:

35. Joyce M. Davis, “Bin Laden asks Muslims worldwide to retaliate against the United States,” The Charlotte Observer, Aug. 22, 1998. 36. “U.S. finds link between bin Laden and Cole bombing,” CNN, Dec. 7, 2000. 37. Frank Gardner, “Bin Laden ‘denies’ Yemen blast,”, BBC News, Nov. 13.

6. American Jihad

101

They’re grossly exaggerating the problem. They are hyping it… Instead of saying “terrorism’s rising,” (it’s not); “Terrorism is spreading,” (it’s not); “More people are dying from terrorism,” (not the case); they should be saying: “There’s one individual out there that really doesn’t like us, and he’s made it his mission in life to kill Americans, and we’ve gotta deal with him.” But we need to have a voice of reason in that process instead of putting ourselves out crying “wolf,” because this is essentially what’s taking place right now. They call it “the administration that cries ‘wolf.’”38 One month after the Cole bombing, Clinton’s reign expired, and his successor, former Texas Governor George W. Bush, would intensify the U.S. obsession with bin Laden. In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 bombings, government spokesmen and media pundits routinely spoke of “before Sept 11/after Sept. 11,” and “the first war of the 21st century” as if the old world had ended, and in its place arose a new world in which traditional certainties and moral beliefs no longer applied. The dropping of the atomic bomb, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the rise of the WorldWideWeb are three events that can be said to have changed the world, because each brought about fundamental, permanent change to our moral and political frame of reference. The Sept. 11 bombings did not. These attacks, and Bush’s subsequent bombardment of Afghanistan, merely continued and exacerbated a pattern of behavior that Clinton started: • Blame bin Laden for any attack against Americans; • Denigrate him and his followers as evil and cowardly; • Portray the attacks as a senseless assault on democracy and the American way of life; • Fuel public hatred for Islam; • Use that hatred to justify an attack on Afghanistan; • Blacken the U.S. already bad reputation in the Arab world; and • Enhance bin Laden’s prestige. This paradigm represents the essential dynamic of the “war on terrorism:” demonization of Arabs and Muslims fuels popular and political consent for militarism; militarism fuels attacks against the U.S.; and these attacks fuel even more militarism.

38. “Interview with Larry Johnson,” Frontline—Hunting bin Laden, PBS, Sept. 13, 2001. The Bush administration would turn gross exaggerations of terrorist threats and crying “wolf” into official official government policy and a re-election platform.

102

Enemies by Design

S U M M A RY So far, we have seen how the geopolitical conditions that led to Bush’s attack on Afghanistan can be traced to events in the 1970s. The U.S.’ willful blindness about Shah Reza Pahlevi’s rule and subsequent support for him in exile provoked the February 1979 Shi’ite Revolution in Iran. The loss of the Iranian foothold caused the Carter administration to disregard its own intelligence, overreact to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and fund the mujahedin. Meanwhile, Ayatollah Khomeini’s Shi’ite revolution led the U.S. to prod Iraqi president Saddam Hussein into attacking Iran. The ensuing and inconclusive Iran-Iraq War left Iraq devastated and in dire need of money to rebuild. Kuwait’s refusal to adhere to production quotas depressed the world price of oil, thus provoking Hussein. His decision to mobilize Iraqi forces for an attack on Kuwait unnerved Saudi Arabia, and gave the U.S. a pretext to base troops on the peninsula. This act, more than any other, turned Osama bin Laden into an anti-Saudi/anti-U.S. mujahid, although the effect would not be felt immediately. From May 1996, when bin Laden issued his Declaration on War until the embassy bombings of August 1998, the U.S. still hardly noticed him. After the bombings, capturing or killing bin Laden became the top priority; the pipeline would have to wait until the Taliban could be ousted. Thus began the absurd scenario of the U.S. allying itself with the very people it wanted the Taliban to defeat. When George W. Bush came to the White House under questionable circumstances, the U.S. changed priorities again. Despite the rhetoric about the “war on drugs” and the “war on terrorism,” oil was back on top. From February to August 2001, the U.S. government did everything possible not to offend the Taliban. The FBI’s investigations into bin Laden’s role in the USS Cole bombing were obstructed, and field reports of suspicious Arab flight school students were ignored. In August 2001, U.S. coercion failed, and the decision to bomb Afghanistan into submission was set in motion. The Sept 11 attack provided the ideal casus belli, and the pre-existing demonized imagery of Osama bin Laden, Arabs and Islam made the bombing politically acceptable. To appreciate how the U.S. government could behave with such wanton disregard for the rule of law and human decency, a philosophical digression into the origins of this warped mindset is required.

6. American Jihad

103

Part II Zionization of America

O M A T T E R H O W S T R O N G the oil industry’s influence in Washington might seem, especially over the last 10 years, it is nothing compared to the coercive and corrosive power of Israel’s U.S. agents—the domestic Jewish Lobby.

Here’s a sampling of observations from the past half-century: • Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, 1957: “I am very much concerned over the fact that the Jewish influence here is completely dominating the scene and making it almost impossible to get Congress to do anything they don’t approve of. The Israeli embassy is practically dictating to the Congress through influential Jewish people in the country.” • Sen. William Fulbright, 1973: “The Israelis control the policy in the Congress and the Senate… somewhere around 80 percent of the senate of the United States is completely in support of Israel—of anything Israel wants.” • Adm. Thomas Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1983: “I’ve never seen a president—I don’t care who he is—stand up to them [the Israelis]. It just boggles your mind. They always get what they want. The Israelis know what’s going on all the time. I got to the point where I wasn’t writing anything down. If the American people understood what grip those people have on our government, they would rise up in arms. Our citizens don’t have any idea what goes on.”1 Obedience to Tel Aviv is enforced by the Lobby and its Christian allies, who embrace an obscurantist reading of the Old Testament. Under the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, active prejudice against Arabs and Muslims in the name of the “war on terrorism” would become official policy at home and abroad. This is the essence of what Osama bin Laden called the “Zionist-Crusader alliance” against the Muslim people.2 1. Media and Political Power of Israel in the U.S, . 2. See Chapter 6, note 12.

106

Enemies by Design

The main focus of Part II concerns the philosophical development of this alliance and of neo-conservatism. These three ideological movements came together during the post-Vietnam War malaise to mount a surreptitious coup d’état and pervert the U.S. republican foundations.

CHRISTIAN ZIONISM Although Zionism is commonly associated with Jews and Theodore Herzl’s 1896 book Der Judenstaat [The Jewish State], Christians were the first modern Zionists. To all intents and purposes the founder of the movement was the renegade Anglican cleric John Nelson Darby (1800–1882). In 1826, Darby was ordained deacon of the parish of Calary in County Wicklow, Ireland. The next year he abandoned the Church, declaring: “‘The Church is in ruins… the entire nature and purpose of the Church has become so perverted that it is diametrically opposed to the fundamental reason for which it is instituted.”3 The cause of Darby’s anger was the separation of Church and State and the dual loyalties he had to respect. The bishop instructed Darby that every Catholic he managed to convert had to swear an oath to the reigning monarch, who was the head of the Church of England. Darby considered such an act “unscriptural, and derogatory to the glory of Christ.”4 After breaking from the Church, Darby and other apostates formed a fellowship known as the Plymouth Brethren, which propagated an ultraliteralist, pessimistic world view known as “premillennial dispensationalism” or “chiliasm,” from chilioi, the Greek word for thousand (also written as kilo). According to Darby, the history of man can be divided into five “dispensations,” each defined as a period of rule by God’s agents: Noah, Moses, Aaron, kings (David, Solomon, Rehoboam, Jeroboam and Manasseh) and Spirit (Jesus). The key factor of Darby’s chiliasm lies in the role he assigns to “Israel” in connection with the Second Coming. He accepted as literally true the myth that God bequeathed the land of Palestine exclusively to the Jews, and that He will one day gather them from all over the world to dwell therein. The church’s only function was to aid the return of God’s “chosen people” to the Holy Land. Once the nation of Israel was reconstituted, Christian believers would be “raptured” up to heaven before the onset of a seven-year tribulation, during which time the “antichrist” would rule. After defeating the antichrist in a great apocalyptic battle at Meggido (Armageddon), Jesus would return as King of the Jews and reign on Earth for 1,000 years from his throne in the temple. Jews would follow a separate path to salvation. 3. Stephen Sizer, John Nelson Darby (1800-1882), The Father of Premillennial Dispensationalism, . 4. Ibid.

7. Unholy Trinity

107

For eccentrics like Darby, the need to reconstitute biblical Israel was a pressing matter because the rapture was thought to be imminent. This expectation of imminent rapture occurs periodically throughout history, but the upheavals and uncertainty caused by the American and French revolutions during the last quarter of the 18th century gave it greater impetus. As the calendrial odometer turned from 1799 to 1800, millennial hysteria convinced the Millerites (precursors of the Seventh-Day Adventists) that the end-times were indeed coming. The movement’s founder William Miller even predicted that Jesus would return in 1844. Darby travelled and preached his apocalyptic message throughout Europe and North America for 60 years. In this excerpt, we see the essence of the anti-Arab bigotry that drives Israel and the U.S.: The first thing, then, which the Lord will do will be to purify His land (the land which belongs to the Jews) of the Tyrians, the Philistines, the Sidonians; of Edom and Moab, and Amon — of all the wicked, in short from the Nile to the Euphrates. It will be done by the power of Christ in favor of His people re-established by His goodness. The people are put into security in the land, and then will those of them who remain till that time among the nations be gathered together.5

Chiliasm comes to the United States In the U.S., Darby managed to convert a generation of Christian leaders, two of whom were responsible for the rapid growth of chiliasm, and hence Christian Zionism. The first of these was businessman-cum-preacher William Eugene Blackstone (1841–1935). After the Civil War in 1866, he claimed to have heard a calling from God to evangelize Darby’s dispensationalism. He did this largely in two ways. The first was through the publication in 1878 of his book Jesus is Coming, which profoundly influenced the Christian church. The second was through his intense preoccupation with Jews, the reconstitution of “Israel,” and the rapture. On Nov. 24-25, 1890, Blackstone chaired the Conference on the Past, Present and Future of Israel at the First Methodist Episcopal Church in Chicago. This followed his own work as co-founder of the Chicago Committee for Hebrew Christian Work, essentially an endeavor to proselytize among Chicago’s Jews. Conference participants included some of the best-known Jewish and Christian community leaders. Out of the conference came resolutions—decrying the oppression of Russia’s Jews, for example—but also a call for world leaders to allow Jews to return to Palestine.6

5. J.N. Darby, “The Hopes,” The Collected Writings, Prophetic I, Vol. II, p. 380, cited in Ibid. 6. William E. Currie, God’s Little Errand Boy, 1987, .

108

Enemies by Design

The culminating event of the conference was the Blackstone Petition of 1891—a memorial signed by 413 U.S. Christian and Jewish leaders. The petition was sent to President Benjamin Harrison urging him to persuade various European governments “to secure the holding at an early date, of an international conference to consider the condition of the Israelites and their claims to Palestine as their ancient home, and to promote, in all other just and proper ways, the alleviation of their suffering condition.”7 The petition failed because American Jews had no interest in Zionism. The best evidence of this came at the Paris Peace Conference on March 4, 1919. Congressman Julius Kahn handed President Woodrow Wilson a statement co-written by three prominent Jews—Dr. Henry Berkowitz, of Philadelphia, Max Senior of Cincinnati, and Professor Morris Jastrow Jr. of the University of Pennsylvania. It read in part: We raise our voices in warning and protest against the demand of the Zionists for the reorganization of the Jews as a national unit, to whom, now or in the future, territorial sovereignty in Palestine shall be committed. This demand not only misrepresents the trend of the history of the Jews, who ceased to be a nation 2000 years ago, but involves the limitation and possible annulment of the larger claims of Jews for full citizenship and human rights in all lands in which those rights are not yet secure. For the very reason that the new era upon which the world is entering aims to establish government everywhere on principles of true democracy, we reject the Zionistic project of a “national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.”… As to the future of Palestine, it is our fervent hope that what was once a “promised land” for the Jews may become a “land of promise” for all races and creeds, safeguarded by the League of Nations which, it is expected, will be one of the fruits of the Peace Conference to whose deliberations the world now looks forward so anxiously and so full of hope. We ask that Palestine be constituted as a free and independent state, to be governed under a democratic form of government recognizing no distinctions of creed or race or ethnic descent, and with adequate power to protect the country against oppression of any kind. We do not wish to see Palestine, either now or at any time in the future, organized as a Jewish State.8 The second major disciple of Darby was Rev. Cyrus Ingerson Scofield (1843-1921), largely because he wrote The Scofield Reference Bible. Published in 1909 and revised in 1917, it became the Bible of Christian Zionism, and was the single greatest disseminator of Darby’s dispensationalism. In 1890, while 7. The Blackstone Memorial, 1891: Presented to the president of the United States in favor of the restoration of Palestine to the Jews, . 8. A Statement to the Peace Conference by prominent U.S. Jews, annex to Roselle Tekiner, Samir Abed-Rabbo and Norton Mezvinsky, eds., Anti-Zionism–Analytical Reflections (New York: Amana Books, 1988), .

7. Unholy Trinity

109

a pastor in Dallas and head of the Southwestern School of the Bible—now the Dallas Theological Seminary—Scofield began a comprehensive bible course through which he spread the dispensationalist message to tens of thousands of students. In 1914, the Chicago-based Moody Bible Institute, named for evangelist Dwight Lyman Moody, took over the course, thus making Scofield’s Bible the dominant influence at the two institutions.

Zionist Jews and Christians unite Dispensationalism was, and is, a non-standard belief, and many Christians rightly condemn it as rigid and intolerant, but these defects made it ideal for uniting Zionist Jews and Christians after the 1967 war. Christian Zionists saw Israel’s victory as biblical prophecy in action. In July of that year, L. Nelson Bell, Billy Graham’s father-in-law and editor of Christianity Today wrote: “That for the first time in more than 2,000 years Jerusalem is now completely in the hands of the Jews gives the student of the Bible a thrill and a renewed faith in the accuracy and validity of the Bible.”9 Bell and other Christian Zionists could point to various passages in the Old Testament, such as: And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God.10 If any of thine be driven out unto the outmost parts of heaven, from thence will the LORD thy God gather thee, and from thence will he fetch thee. And the LORD thy God will bring thee into the land which thy fathers possessed, and thou shalt possess it; and he will do thee good, and multiply thee above thy fathers.11 The New Testament picks up this theme, although to a much lesser degree and without any specific reference to the Old Testament: “And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.”12

Jews rediscover the Nazi holocaust The significance of the 1967 War on the mentality of U.S. Jewry cannot be overestimated. Until this time, Israel was at best an afterthought in Jewish minds, and a political inconvenience, if not an embarrassment for American Jewish elites. 9. Cited in Donald Wagner, “Evangelicals and Israel: Theological Roots of a Political Alliance,” The Christian Century (Nov. 4, 1998), pp. 120-1026, . 10. Genesis 17:7-8. 11. Deuteronomy 30: 4-5. 12. Matthew 24:31.

110

Enemies by Design

In the immediate post-war era, these elites—particularly the American Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League—wanted to avoid any association with Israel for fear they and their members could be accused of harboring a dual loyalty. They fell lockstep behind U.S. government foreign policy, even to the extent of attacking Jews who wanted to speak about the Nazi holocaust. Today such conduct would be reflexively denounced as “anti-Semitic,” yet Jewish leaders did this to their co-religionists in the name of conformism and political opportunism. Professor Norman Finkelstein’s explanation of this mindset deserves to be cited at length: American Jewish elites “forgot” the Nazi holocaust because Germany—West Germany by 1949—became a crucial postwar American ally in the U.S. confrontation with the Soviet Union. Dredging up the past served no useful purpose. With minor reservations (soon discarded), major American Jewish organizations quickly fell into line with U.S. support for a rearmed and barely de-Nazified Germany… The Final Solution was a taboo topic of American Jewish elites for yet another reason. Leftist Jews, who were opposed to the Cold War alignment with Germany against the Soviet Union, would not stop harping on it. Remembrance of the Nazi holocaust was tagged as a Communist cause. Strapped with the stereotype that conflated Jews with the Left… American Jewish elites did not shrink from sacrificing fellow Jews on the altar of anti-Communism. Offering their files on alleged Jewish subversives to government agencies, the AJC and the ADL actively collaborated with the McCarthy-era witchhunt. The AJC endorsed the death penalty for the Rosenbergs, while its monthly publication, Commentary, editorialized that they weren’t really Jews…. Anxious to boost their anti-Communist credentials, Jewish elites even enlisted in, and financially sustained, right-wing extremist organizations like the All-American Conference to Combat Communism, and turned a blind eye as veterans of the Nazi SS entered the country.13 In a cruel irony, the very people being repressed in the name of the political interests of Jewish elites were the same people who were sold out by the Zionist elites in Nazi Germany. To paraphrase George Orwell, “all Jews are equal, but some Jews are more equal than others.” As late as 1961, the Nazi holocaust was still virtually invisible in our political culture. Only three scholarly works had been published: Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York, 1961); Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York, 1959); and Ella Lingens-Reiner, Prisoners of Fear (London, 1959). After the 1967 War, Israel became, in the words of Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, “the religion of American Jews.”14

13. Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry—Reflections on the exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London: Verso), pp. 14-15. 14. Ibid., p. 7 and note 5; p. 21.

7. Unholy Trinity

111

Finkelstein said this is when the Nazi holocaust (a specific historical event) mutated into The Holocaust (an ideology). For Jewish elites, it had become yet another way to ingratiate themselves into the circles of power. Because of its victory, Israel was no longer perceived as weak, which meant that jumping on board to support U.S.-Israeli “unity” was no longer risky; it was religiously and politically expedient. The Holocaust could now be discussed openly and used instrumentally to attack Israel’s critics because the stigma of dual loyalty had vanished. If Jewish elites were thrilled by Israel’s victory, the vast majority of U.S. society wasn’t. Israel’s occupation of Palestine alienated mainline Protestant, Orthodox and Catholic Christians, as well as liberal Jews. Leading Protestant clergyman Henry P. van Dusen compared Israel’s assault to the Nazi blitzkrieg, where the aim was annihilation, not victory.15 Some Orthodox Jews to this day even deem the State of Israel to be a blasphemy. Within this community, a group called Neturei Karta, Aramaic for “Guardians of the City” (Jerusalem), has since 1938 been fighting to keep Judaism separate from Zionism: Judaism believes in One G-d who revealed the Torah. It affirms Divine Providence and, accordingly, views Jewish exile as a punishment for sin. Redemption may be achieved solely through prayer and penance. Judaism calls upon all Jews to obey the Torah in its entirety including the commandment to be patriotic citizens. Zionism rejects the Creator, His Revelation and reward and punishment. Among its fruits are the persecution of the Palestinian people and the spiritual and physical endangering of the Jewish people. It encourages treasonous, dual loyalty among unsuspecting Jews throughout the world. At its root, Zionism sees reality as barren and desacralized. It is the antithesis of Torah Judaism…16 Jews are not allowed to dominate, kill, harm or demean another people and are not allowed to have anything to do with the Zionist enterprise, their political meddling and their wars.17 Because Zionism violates basic tenets of Mosaic tradition, Jewish elites had difficulty expanding their power within their own community, and so were forced to seek support among Zionist Christians, even though the goal of evangelicalism is opposed to Judaism. This perverse religious marriage of convenience would not have amounted to much on its own. It needed a political connection to effect real change. That assistance came from the “neo-conservative” revolution and the legacy of its spiritual progenitor, Leo Strauss. 15. Peter Grose, Israel in the Mind of America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), p. 310. 16. Judaism vs. Zionism, Neturei Karta . 17. What is the Neturei Karta? in Ibid.

112

Enemies by Design

T H E G R E AT N E O - C O N A RT I S T Leo Strauss, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, was a reactionary moralist at a time when U.S. culture was growing increasingly progressive and egalitarian.18 As a Jewish German who escaped Hitler’s Reich, Strauss judged egalitarianism to be a threat to America’s liberal democracy because of what he saw happen to the feeble Weimar Republic. In the name of imposing equality on the country, Strauss thought, the U.S. was losing its creative essence and moral fiber. Without radical change, America would be vulnerable to attack from totalitarian regimes. To save the U.S., Strauss said egalitarianism and secular government had to be replaced by a regime dedicated to imposing traditional political and religious views. The fact that these views would be based on the prejudices of the leaders did not bother Strauss, who considered egalitarianism itself to be a prejudice, and an inferior one at that. Strauss felt that the key to bringing about this new value-based order lay in the rediscovery of pre-modern philosophy. He considered Athens and Jerusalem to be the twin pillars of reason and revelation upon which all the values of Western society were built, but he saw modern philosophers undermining these pillars by working hand-in-glove with government to serve the appetites of the lowest common denominator—the masses. As a result, philosophers were undermining the aristocratic virtues that made philosophy the noblest pursuit of the human mind—tradition, heroism, creativity and excellence. Instead, egalitarianism and historical relativism bred a climate in which past virtues and morality were denigrated as old and inferior, and present norms were ennobled as modern and superior. Without objective order and traditional morality, Strauss said, the U.S. was sinking into nihilism. The solution, he said, lay in the re-separation of philosophy and philosophers from government. He believed he found the key example in the trial of Socrates. 18. The following summary of Leo Strauss’s philosophy is compiled from: Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953); Karl Jahn, “Leo Strauss and the Straussians,” ; Jim Lobe, Leo Strauss’ Philosophy of Deception, May 19, 2003, ; Neil Robertson, Leo Strauss’s Platonism ; Peter Berkowitz, “What Hath Strauss Wrought?—Misreading a political philosopher,” Weekly Standard, June 2, 2003. See also “NeoCon family tree” in Tarpley, op. cit., p. 365. “Appraising the cabal of neo-con Straussians running the Bush administration, [Norman] Finkelstein suggests they use their political mensch, Machiavelli, as ideological babble to cover their single interest, power. ‘They appropriate anything which justifies their greed, which justifies their power. Straussians, my behind.’” .20. Nietzsche held Christianity in contempt, but esteemed Judaism as strong and masculine. This is an important note because a common libel against him is that he was anti-Jewish, and that Adolf Hitler is the real manifestation of the Übermensch (Superman). The ascription of anti-Jewish prejudice should be directed at his sister Elizabeth and his publisher. Nonetheless, Nietzsche’s values did foreshadow fascism.

7. Unholy Trinity

113

Strauss’s connection of nihilism with Socrates is not original. Friedrich Nietzsche argued that Socrates’ dialectical method of reasoning undermined peoples’ belief in religion and the Homeric myths, thus leading ultimately to the relativistic, scientific world of the Enlightenment. Nietzsche (1844-1900) belongs to the late Romantic period, which arose towards the end of the 19th century. The Romantics—in art, literature, music and philosophy—brought creativity, emotion, genius, spiritual truth and transcendent imagination to the forefront of European society in reaction to the formalistic, logical world of the Enlightenment, which left no room for the genius, the hero, or the exceptional individual. Nietzsche was deeply spiritual, and he condemned the Enlightenment for rationalizing God to death, because without God, he said, morality and absolute value had no meaning. To redefine value and morality, Nietzsche posited der Übermensch (“The Superman”)—a gentle, cultured leader like the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who would live a life “beyond good and evil”—not bound by the “slave” Christian morality that teaches people to fear death, repress their natural desires, destroy their taste and respect for heroism, and make them afraid to trust their own will.20 Although there seems to be a fair amount of agreement between the two, Strauss reads into Socrates something entirely different. Whereas Nietzsche saw Socrates as the despoiler of Western philosophy, Strauss saw in him the possibility of its renewal, and the trial provides the example. The democratic government of Athens charged Socrates with impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens. Strauss believed the charges to be valid, but only because Socrates made the error of taking his philosophy into the marketplace, where it upset the authorities and undermined faith in the gods. For Strauss, the lesson of the trial was that philosophers must keep higher truths to themselves, not only to save their lives, but to keep the public from losing faith in religion and traditional values. Therefore, Strauss argued that only those equipped to rule should be privy to higher moral truths, and that the government should use religion instrumentally to keep the public in line. Strauss, it seems, fancied himself a latter-day Plato who thought that the U.S. could become an ideal Republic run by Philosopher Kings and protected by Guardians. Plato, to his credit, understood that his ideal society could never exist; it could only be contemplated.19 This lesson is utterly lost on Strauss because, unlike Plato, he wasn’t interested in justice; he was trying to manufacture a case against moral relativism. It should seem axiomatic to any reasoned mind that an authoritarian, preEnlightenment governing model like the Republic could not be applied to an Enlightenment-based political society without doing great violence to that society’s liberal character, yet this is precisely what Strauss believed the U.S. had to do. 19. Republic, Book IX, lines 593-4, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns eds. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 819.

114

Enemies by Design

Because Strauss’s obscurantist anti-modernism gave rise to “neoconservatism,” and hence the Zionist usurpation of the U.S., it needs to be critiqued at some length. The next ten pages concern Strauss’s use and abuse of the philosophical ideas of Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke to lend verisimilitude to his eccentric concept of governance. The reader might find this section heavy going, but there’s no easy way to do it.

Maligning Machiavelli Strauss’s attack on modernity and the Enlightenment can be sourced to Machiavelli, the Renaissance Florentine who gave us our foundations of political science and Realpolitik. During his time (1469-1527) Italy was a patchwork of feuding city-states subject to frequent foreign invasion. To end the carnage, Machiavelli argued that Italy needed to unite under a strong leader. Such a leader had to reject the traditional idea of a governing ethos and do whatever was necessary, even practice deceit and cruelty, to ensure the security and survival of the society: The gulf between how one should live and how one does live is so wide that a man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done leans the way to self-destruction rather than self-preservation. The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous. Therefore, if a prince wants to maintain his rule, he must learn how not to be virtuous and to make use of this or not according to need…This is because, taking everything into account, he will find that some of the things that appear to be virtues will, if he practices them ruin him, and some of the things that appear to be vices will bring him security and prosperity.20 For his impolitic candor, irreligion and embrace of political power, Christian Europe, especially Tudor England, equated Machiavelli with Satan. However, anti-clerical theorists and followers of the emerging scientific method of inquiry eagerly embrace Machiavelli’s amorality. If nature could be understood free from biblical sophistry, then so could man and society. Machiavelli’s humanistic redefinition of statecraft led to the Enlightenment, which has given us our political values. With politics now based on reason instead of theology, God was rationalized into irrelevance, and philosophers started to participate in society. Machiavelli was at heart a republican who wanted justice and order, and in his writing we find the foundations for liberal, republican government.21 20. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, in The Prince and the Discourses (New York: Random House, 1950), p. 56. 21. “A people that governs and is well-regulated by laws will be stable, prudent and grateful, as much so, and even more, according to my opinion, than a prince, although he be esteemed wise…We furthermore see that cities where the people are masters make the greatest progress in the least possible time and much greater than such as have always been governed by princes... As to the people’s capacity of judging of things, it is exceedingly rare that, when they

7. Unholy Trinity

115

For Strauss, this was Machiavelli’s unpardonable sin, because republicanism puts government in the hands of the people: Machiavelli’s admiration for the political practice of classical antiquity and especially of republican Rome is only the reverse side of his rejection of classical political philosophy. He rejected classical political philosophy, and therewith the whole tradition of political philosophy in the full sense of the term as useless.22 One cannot take seriously Strauss’s charge that Machiavelli rejected classical philosophy, since one is hard-pressed to find any reference to it in either The Prince or The Discourses. This is to be expected, since Machiavelli was concerned with the practice of leadership, not the theory. Further evidence that Strauss neither respected nor understood Machiavelli comes from this disparaging comment: “When trying to understand the thought of Machiavelli, one does well to remember the saying that [Christopher] Marlowe was inspired to ascribe to him: ‘I… hold that there is no sin but ignorance.’ This is almost a definition of the philosopher.”23 The fact that he would consider a Tudor English playwright to be a legitimate critic of Machiavelli speaks volumes about Strauss’s credentials as a philosopher.

A Hobbes of a different color Strauss believed he found the remedy for Machiavelli’s republicanism in the social contractarianism of Thomas Hobbes, who, like Machiavelli, was a philosopher of peace and an analyst of power. Hobbes (1588-1679) believed that man in “the state of nature” (outside of society) lived a nasty, short, brutish life, because each person is driven by natural appetites and is in mutual competition for power and prestige. Since all men are endowed with reason, Hobbes said, they would naturally want to leave this violent, competitive world, to live in peace. To achieve this end, they must surrender their right of self-defence and erect a sovereign power to rule over them. Such a sovereign would be the embodiment of peace and order to whom the people would owe absolute obedience. In his seminal 1651 work Leviathan, Hobbes sets out the need for a sovereign in language—albeit slightly archaic—that is virtually indistinguishable from that of Strauss: hear two orators of equal talents advocate different measures, they do not decide in favour of the best of the two; which proves their ability to discern the truth of what they hear. And if occasionally they are misled in questions of courage or seeming utility, so is a prince also many times misled by his own passions, which are much greater then those of the people.” Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius, Book I, Ch. LVIII, in Ibid., pp. 263, 264. 22. Ibid. p. 178. 23. Strauss, Natural Right and History, p. 177.

116

Enemies by Design

The final cause, end, or design of men (who naturally love liberty, and dominion over others)… is the foresight of their own preservation, and of a more contented life thereby; that is to say, of getting themselves out from that miserable condition of war which is necessarily consequent, as hath been shown, to the natural passions of men when there is no visible power to keep them in awe, and tie them by fear of punishment to the performance of their covenants…. For the laws of nature, as justice, equity, modesty, mercy, and, in sum, doing to others as we would be done to, of themselves, without the terror of some power to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our natural passions, that carry us to partiality, pride, revenge, and the like. And covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all. The only way to erect such a common power, as may be able to defend them from the invasion of foreigners, and the injuries of one another, and thereby to secure them in such sort as that by their own industry and by the fruits of the earth they may nourish themselves and live contentedly, is to confer all their power and strength upon one man, or upon one assembly of men, that may reduce all their wills, by plurality of voices, unto one will. This done, the multitude so united in one person is called a COMMONWEALTH; in Latin, CIVITAS. This is the generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather, to speak more reverently, of that mortal god to which we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and defense.24 There is much to admire in Hobbes’s clarity and logic, but his view of society is too mechanistic. In the name of peace, citizens must not only surrender their arms, but also their liberty and right to dissent. As we know today, such absolute obedience to authority is the hallmark of totalitarian regimes. Hobbes’ sovereign-ruled state might very well be peaceful, but it is the kind of peace that democracies abhor. Then, again, Hobbes never pretended to be a democrat. According to Strauss, Hobbes set philosophy back on course by merging natural law with realism to create the entirely new political doctrine of “natural right:” What Hobbes attempted to do on the basis of Machiavelli’s fundamental objection to the utopian teaching of the tradition, although in opposition to Machiavelli’s own solution, was to maintain the idea of natural law but to divorce it from the classical idea of man’s perfection.25

24. Thomas Hobbes, “Of Commonwealth,” Leviathan (London: Pelican, 1980), pp. 223, 227.

25. Strauss, p. 180.

7. Unholy Trinity

117

Strauss’s justification for this position consists of the following deductive reasoning. • If natural law is derived from the need for self-preservation, as Machiavelli said, then self-preservation is the root of all justice and morality. • Morality equals self-preservation, which is fundamental and inalienable. • Morality, therefore, is a right, not a duty. • All duties are derived from morality. • Duties are binding only to the extent they do not threaten the morality. • There are only perfect rights, and no perfect duties. • Since morality is a right, the function and limits of civil society must be defined according to man’s natural rights, not natural duties. • The state’s function is to safeguard the natural right (morality) of each citizen. • The power of the state finds its highest expression here and nowhere else.26 This argument is plainly unsound. For one thing, Machiavelli said nothing about natural law being derived from self-preservation; in fact, he denied the value of any overarching ethos, as we saw above: “The gulf between how one should live and how one does live is so wide that a man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done leans the way to self-destruction rather than self-preservation.” Second, the conclusion “morality is a right” is a contradiction. Third, the concept of “perfect rights” begs the existence of perfection. Fourth, the link between morality and the function of the state is not proven, and as such the deductive relation between moral right and natural right is baseless. Strauss gives us a perverse caricature of Machiavelli so that he can manufacture plausibility for an authoritarian doctrine of natural law. On the other hand, he gives us an unrealistically sympathetic view of Hobbes so that he can import authoritarianism into the U.S. democratic tradition: If we may call liberalism that political doctrine which regards as the fundamental political fact the rights, as distinguished from the duties, of man and which identifies the function of the state with the protection or safeguarding of those rights, we must say that the founder of liberalism was Hobbes.27 As the following two excerpts show, Strauss’s views on the divinely guided natural liberty of men, laissez-faire economics, and defense against foreign invasion are virtually lifted from Leviathan. 26. Ibid. p. 181.

27. Ibid.

118

Enemies by Design

Liberty identical to God’s will God, that seeth and disposeth all things, seeth also that the liberty of man in doing what he will is accompanied with the necessity of doing that which God will and no more, nor less. For though men may do many things which God does not command, nor is therefore author of them; yet they can have no passion, nor appetite to anything, of which appetite God’s will is not the cause… And this shall suffice, as to the matter in hand, of that natural liberty, which only is properly called liberty.28

The state has no place in the economy

A freeman is he that, in those things which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to do what he has a will to…. For seeing there is no Commonwealth in the world wherein there be rules enough set down for the regulating of all the actions and words of men (as being a thing impossible): it followeth necessarily that in all kinds of actions, by the laws pretermitted, men have the liberty of doing what their own reasons shall suggest for the most profitable to themselves…. The liberty of a subject lieth therefore only in those things which, in regulating their actions, the sovereign hath pretermitted: such as is the liberty to buy, and sell, and otherwise contract with one another; to choose their own abode, their own diet, their own trade of life, and institute their children as they themselves think fit; and the like.29

Classical liberalism started out as a movement against church authority, which means that Machiavelli is its true founder, but Strauss could never admit that. All he cared about was exploiting Hobbes’ concepts of the minimalist state and negative freedom—all citizens are deemed to be free by nature and any external constraints on personal or economic freedom, like laws or regulations, are deemed to be assaults on liberty. Strauss conflates freedom, liberty and license, thus stripping each of them of any meaning. In his mind, “liberty” becomes a synonym for unbridled selfinterest and survival of the fittest. The distinction between this and genuine liberty is best made by Mortimer Adler: Liberty is freedom exercised under the restraints of justice so that its exercise results in injury to no one. In contrast, licence is freedom exempt from the restraints of justice and, therefore, injurious to others in infringing their freedom as well as violating other rights. When no distinction is made between liberty and licence, the freedom of the strong can destroy the freedom of the weak. For the freedom of any one individual to be compatible with an equal measure of freedom on the part of all others, the freedom of each must be limited and limited

28. Hobbes, p. 263. 29. Ibid., pp. 262, 264.

7. Unholy Trinity

119

precisely for the purpose of preventing the freedom of one from encroaching upon or destroying the freedom of others.30

Taking liberties with Locke Adler’s concept of limited freedom is the essence of American liberal republicanism. The man who articulated this vision was the Puritan English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704). Thomas Jefferson was said to have plagiarized Locke’s Second Treatise of Government while drafting the Declaration of Independence. This is undoubtedly a facetious overstatement, but the beginning of the second paragraph of the Declaration embodies the essence of Lockean democracy: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.31 Locke belongs to the same social contractarian tradition as does Hobbes, but he has an entirely different understanding of freedom and the nature of the social contract. Hobbes speaks of a lawless negative freedom; Locke speaks of positive freedom in which citizens legislate rules to govern themselves. Hobbes speaks of obedience to an absolute ruler; Locke despises absolutism, and holds that a sovereign power must rule with the consent of the governed. Since Strauss was sympathetic to Hobbes, one might have expected him to attack Locke with the same vigor as he did Machiavelli, but of course he couldn’t. To attack Locke outright would have meant attacking the moral and spiritual foundation of the U.S. Instead, Strauss had to undermine the main lines of Locke’s political theory to recast the man as a lapsed Hobbesian. Thus, Locke suffered the fate of all whom Strauss co-opted to justify his “natural law” doctrine: if the political theory didn’t fit, it would be made to fit. In the next section, one must keep in mind Hobbes’ definition of Commonwealth: “that mortal god to which we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and defense.”

The problem of religion For Strauss, all political authority must devolve from doctrinaire Christianity and belief in God, else it is relativistic, base and worthless. In Locke, Strauss found a political philosopher who was deeply religious and believed all men to be equal by nature, but unfortunately one who was also wise enough to know the danger of mixing God with government. 30. Excerpt from Mortimer J. Adler, “On the nature of liberty and license,” Chapter X, The Common Sense of Politics (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), reproduced at . 31. U.S. Declaration of Independence, Philadelphia, Pa., July 4, 1776.

120

Enemies by Design

Locke held that the essence of Christianity could be reduced to the simple acknowledgment that Christ was the Messiah sent to spread the true knowledge of God. All other doctrines were secondary because they could not be proven. Locke did, however, believe that the miracles recorded in the Bible were proof of its Divine origin, and he accepted as given the facticity of events in Genesis—the birth of Adam, the Fall, the Flood—but beyond these articles of faith, human reason was the sole arbiter of what was true and what wasn’t. Moreover, since everyone was endowed with reason, anyone could read Scripture to discover the essentials of the faith, and this creates the basis for tolerant agreement among Christians. Tolerance, natural equality, and respect for civil rights are the essential elements of Locke’s religious and political writings: If a Roman Catholic believe that to be really the body of Christ which another man calls bread, he does no injury thereby to his neighbor. If a Jew do not believe the New Testament to be the Word of God, he does not thereby alter anything in men’s civil rights. If a heathen doubt of both Testaments, he is not therefore to be punished as a pernicious citizen. The power of the magistrate and the estates of the people may be equally secure whether any man believe these things or no. I readily grant that these opinions are false and absurd. But the business of laws is not to provide for the truth of opinions, but for the safety and security of the commonwealth and of every particular man’s goods and person. And so it ought to be. For the truth certainly would do well enough if she were once left to shift for herself. She seldom has received and, I fear, never will receive much assistance from the power of great men, to whom she is but rarely known and more rarely welcome. She is not taught by laws, nor has she any need of force to procure her entrance into the minds of men.32 As the italicized passage shows, Locke scorned beliefs that ran counter to his Protestant Christianity, but he recognized the folly of forcing his views on others. He applied the same reasoning to state-mandated religion: • The state was not competent to adjudicate among competing religious truth claims; • Even if it could make such a decision, the enforcement of one religion over others would not lead to the desired objective of that religion; and • The effects of coercive religious conformity would be far worse than tolerating religious diversity.33 32. John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), reproduced in From Revolution to Reconstruction: A Hypertext on American History from the Colonial Period until Modern Times, University of Groningen, The Netherlands, . (Italics not in original.) 33. “In vain… do princes compel their subjects to come into their Church communion, under pretence of saving their souls. If they believe, they will come of their own accord, if they believe not, their coming will nothing avail them. How great soever, in fine, may be the pretence of good-will and charity, and concern for the salvation of men’s souls, men cannot be

7. Unholy Trinity

121

For Leo Strauss, Locke seemed to be two separate people: on the one hand, a fervent Christian who wrote detailed exegeses of the New Testament and argued for its belief; on the other, a social contract theoretician who abhorred authoritarianism. Strauss resolved this dichotomy by creating a false causality between Locke’s religious and political philosophy. In Natural Right and History, Strauss spends an inordinate amount of time on Locke’s chief religious writings—A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), The First Treatise of Government (1689-90), and The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures (1695, published anonymously)—to make the case that Locke’s political beliefs were derived from the Bible. Strauss focused on statements such as these: The law of nature is a declaration of the will of God. It is “the voice of God” in man. It can therefore be called the “law of God” or “divine law” or even the “eternal law;” it is “the highest law.” It is the law of God not only in fact. It must be known to be the law of God in order to be law. Without such knowledge, man cannot act morally. For “the true ground of morality…can only be the will and law of a God.” The law of nature can be demonstrated because the existence and the attributes of God can be demonstrated. This divine law is promulgated, not only in or by reason, but by revelation as well…. By demonstrating that the New Testament is a document of revelation, one demonstrates that the law promulgated by Jesus is a law in the proper sense of the term. This divine law proves to be in full conformity with reason; it proves to be the absolutely comprehensive and perfect formulation of the law of nature.… A comparison of the New Testament teaching with all other moral teaching shows that the entire law of nature is available in the New Testament, and only in the New Testament. The entire law of nature is available only in the New Testament, and is there available in perfect clarity and plainness.34 Leaving aside the fanciful assertions about the facticity of God’s will and the idea that God’s existence can be demonstrated, this passage openly misrepresents Locke.35 Strauss’s truth claims about the New Testament forced to be saved whether they will or no. And therefore, when all is done, they must be left to their own consciences.” Ibid. 34. Strauss, op. cit., pp. 202-203, 204-205. 35. The demonstrability of God’s existence was refuted in 1787 by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. In his seminal Critique of Pure Reason, he wrote: “It may be allowable to admit the existence of a Being entirely to serve as the cause of all possible effects, simply in order to assist reason in her search for the unity of causes. But to go so far as to say that such a Being exists necessarily, is no longer the modest language of an admissible hypothesis, but the bold assurance of apodictic certainty; for the knowledge of that which is absolutely necessary must itself possess absolute necessity.” Kritik der reinen Vernunft (trans. F. Max Müller, New York: Anchor Books, 1966), pp. 408-409.

122

Enemies by Design

violate Locke’s basic tenets against arbitrariness and religious arrogance. That was the whole point. If Strauss could convince readers that Locke was making a unique claim for the veracity of the New Testament, the propertybased political theory of the Second Treatise could be seen as having divine sanction. In other words, it would allow Strauss to turn Lockean liberalism into Hobbesian liberalism, or a least a watered-down facsimile thereof. Unfortunately for Strauss, Locke had already denied that the Bible could be used to justify authoritarian rule. In fact, his entire First Treatise is a laboriously detailed polemic against Sir Robert Filmer, a royalist political writer who embraced Hobbes’ absolutist ideas on this point. Filmer believed in the natural inequality of man by nature, the natural power of kings, and the right of parents to hold perpetual despotic authority over their children. Although Locke wrote against Filmer, not Hobbes, the First Treatise achieved the same end, and delivered what might be called a pre-emptive refutation of Strauss. In Section 14, Locke gives us the essence of Filmer’s theory of deductive despotism: If God created only Adam, and of a piece of him made the woman, and if by generation from them two, as parts of them all mankind be propagated. If also God gave to Adam not only the dominion over the woman and the children that should issue from them, but also over the whole earth to subdue it, and over all the Creatures on it, so that as long as Adam lived, no man could claim or enjoy anything but by donation, assignation, or permission from him…36 Locke’s main points against this theory are recapitulated in Chapter VI (sections 52-76) of the Second Treatise, but only because they have political significance. In this passage Locke states that a parent’s authority over a child ends when the child reaches the age of reason, but in doing so he is also arguing that free men under a Commonwealth are no longer subordinate to the absolute will of king or God: The law, that was to govern Adam, was the same that was to govern all his posterity, the law of reason. But his offspring having another way of entrance into the world, different from him, by a natural birth, that produced them ignorant and without the use of reason, they were not presently under that law; for no body can be under a law, which is not promulgated to him… and Adam’s children, being not presently as soon as born under this law of reason, were not presently free…but freedom is not, as we are told, a liberty for every man to do what he lists: (For who could be free, when every other man’s humour might domineer over him?) but a liberty to dispose, and order as he lists, his person, actions, possessions, and his whole property, within the allowance of those laws 36. John Locke, The First Treatise of Government, Section 14, cited in John Locke—Two Treatises of Government, intro. by Peter Laslett (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1963), p. 185. He is recapitulating the beginning of Filmer’s Observations Concerning the Original of Government upon Mr. Hobbes Leviathan (1652).

7. Unholy Trinity

123

under which he is; and therein not to be subject to the arbitrary will of another, but freely follow his own.37 Beyond its applications to political society, the First Treatise is utterly irrelevant to the Second. This fact posed a critical problem for Strauss, because he desperately needed a religious crutch to prop up his doctrines of economic selfishness and neo-paternalism.

Property and impropriety To show that selfishness was God’s will, and that any interference with absolute acquisitiveness was immoral, Strauss spliced together the two important themes from Locke’s writing—strong defense of the New Testament (First Treatise) and a theory of property that extolled individualism and exploitation of nature (Chapter V, Second Treatise): Locke’s followers in later generations… took for granted what Locke did not take for granted: Locke still thought that he had to prove that the unlimited acquisition of wealth is not unjust or morally wrong. It was indeed easy for Locke to see a problem where later men saw only an occasion for applauding progress or themselves, since in his age most people still adhered to the older view according to which the unlimited acquisition of wealth is unjust or morally wrong.38 Locke does indeed extol private property, the accumulation of wealth, and the exploitation of nature.39 Moreover, he predicates his social contract on the need to regulate and preserve private property,40 which is explicitly identified as the fruits of one’s labors.41 But Locke does not make the arguments that Strauss attributes to him. He makes the opposite argument! On the subject of acquisitiveness, he wrote: He that gathered a hundred bushels of acorns or apples, had thereby a property in them; they were his goods as soon as gathered. He was only 37. John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, sections 52-76, esp. section 57 (citation), in Ibid., pp. 347-348. (In all citations of Locke, the italics are retained but the capitalization of common nouns is removed.) 38. Strauss, p. 246. 39. “‘Tis labor then which puts the greatest part of value upon land, without which it would scarcely be worth any thing: ‘tis to that we owe the greatest part of all its useful products; for all that the straw, bran, bread, of that acre of wheat, is more worth than the product of an acre of as good land, which lies waste, is all the effect of labor.” Second Treatise, Section 43. 40. Ibid., Sections 3. See also Section 94, where Locke declares that the failure of government to protect property signifies the end of civil society. 41. “It is evident, that though the things of nature are given in common, yet man (by being master of himself, and proprietor of his own person, and the actions or labor of it) had still in himself the great foundation of property; and that which made up the great part of what he applied to the support or comfort of his being, when invention and arts had improved the conveniencies of life, was perfectly his own, and did not belong in common to others. Thus labor, in the beginning, gave a right of property, wherever any one was pleased to employ it upon what was common…” Ibid., sections 44-45.

124

Enemies by Design

to look that he used them before they spoiled, else he took more than his share, and robb’d others. And indeed it was a foolish thing, as well as dishonest, to hoard up more than he could make use of.42 This last sentence alone utterly refutes Strauss’s allegation that Locke endorsed unlimited accumulation of wealth, or that such accumulation was moral. In fact, Locke repeatedly stated that such greed was a cause of disputes, which his theory of property was designed to preclude. Amazingly, Strauss acknowledges this point, and even cites the relevant passages, including Locke’s chapter-ending Section 51 where he makes his case most emphatically.43 Nevertheless, Strauss dismissed Locke’s arguments so that he could invent the idea that criticism of selfishness was merely a tactic for pandering to mass sensibilities, and that Locke didn’t really mean what he said: In stating his doctrine of property, Locke “so involved his sense, this it is not easy to understand him” or went as much as possible “with the herd.” While therefore concealing the revolutionary character of his doctrine of property from the mass of his readers, he yet indicated it clearly enough. He did this by occasionally mentioning and apparently approving the older view.44 The point of this chicanery becomes clear later on in the paragraph: By building civil society on “the low but solid ground” of selfishness or of certain “private vices,” one will achieve much greater “public benefits” than by futilely appealing to virtue, which is by nature “unendowed.” One must take one’s bearings not by how men should live but by how they do live. Locke almost quotes the words of the apostle, “God who giveth us richly all things to enjoy.”… He says that God is ‘sole lord and proprietor of the whole world,” that men are God’s property, and that man’s propriety in the creatures is nothing but that liberty to use them which God has permitted.45 Strauss asserts that Locke embraced selfishness, and then juxtaposes this assertion with non-sequitur citations to show that all property, including man, is God’s property. This union of selfishness and divine bequest is what he needs to justify his case that post-war America needs a Hobbesian government—“that mortal god to which we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and defense.” As we saw above (First Treatise, Section 14), Locke expressly denied that man was subject to the arbitrary will of king or God. 42. Ibid., Section 46.

43. “It is very easy to conceive, without any difficulty, how labor could at first begin a title of property in the common things of nature, and how the spending it upon our uses bounded it. So that there could then be no reason of quarrelling about title, nor any doubt about the largeness of possession it gave… what portion a man carved to himself, was easily seen; and it was useless, as well as dishonest, to carve himself too much, or take more than he needed. Ibid., Section 51. 44. Strauss, p. 246. 45. Ibid., p. 247.

7. Unholy Trinity

125

Second, Strauss actually refutes himself. When he said: “One must take one’s bearings not by how men should live but by how they do live,” he took the words right out of Machiavelli’s mouth. We have come full-circle— Strauss sought to build a new authoritarianism on the bones of Machiavelli, ends up being the greatest exponent of the very amoral pragmatism he professed to abhor. By rights, Strauss should have been written off as a paranoid philosophaster, but instead his ideas gave rise to a school of thought. The popularity of Straussianism is not hard to understand. His econotheology dovetailed nicely with laissez-faire capitalism and intolerant, authoritarian Zionist and evangelical movements. The man most responsible for this merger, which turned Straussianism into “neo-conservatism,” was Irving Kristol.

KRISTOL CLARITY In 1965, as the executive vice-president of Basic Books, Irving Kristol founded and co-edited The Public Interest, the first organ of Straussian economic thought. For his efforts at evangelizing and expanding the Gospel according to Leo, Kristol became known as the “godfather of neoconservatism.” The Public Interest came out during the height of the Civil Rights Movement and the “The Great Society” programs of the Johnson administration. From 1964 to 1965 Johnson signed into law the “War on Poverty” and Medicare; provided aid to education and the arts; and established the Department of Housing and Urban Development. According to the predominantly liberal political ethos of the day, positive federal action to redress inequality and prejudice would bring about a better quality of life for all Americans. During this time of civil rights and anti-war activism, neo-con thinking was considered outré, so The Public Interest featured academic essays, mostly on economics. Later Kristol would add essays attacking social ills like pornography, homosexuality, drug use and crime. These articles gradually earned a following in the burgeoning evangelical Christian movement. In 1995, to mark the 30th anniversary of The Public Interest, Kristol described how the neo-cons and evangelicals found their common ground: Active religion-based conservatism did not become a political force in the United States because of either religion or conservatism. Its activism was provoked by militant liberalism and the militant secularism associated with it. This liberalism and this secularism, in the postwar years, came to dominate the Democratic Party, the educational establishment, the media, the law schools, the judiciary, the major schools of divinity, the bishops of the Catholic Church, and the bureaucracies of the “mainline” Protestant denominations. One day, so to speak, millions of American Christians—most of them, as it happens, registered Democrats—came to the realization that they

126

Enemies by Design

were institutionally isolated and impotent. They quite naturally wanted their children to be raised as well-behaved Christians but discovered that their authority over their own children had been subverted and usurped by an aggressive, secular liberalism that now dominated our public education system and our popular culture. They looked at our high schools and saw that gay and lesbian organizations were free to distribute their literature to the students but that religious organizations were not. They saw condoms being distributed to adolescent teenagers while the Supreme Court forbade the posting of the Ten Commandments on the classroom wall. And so they rebelled and did the only thing left for them to do–they began to organize politically. In so doing they may very well have initiated a sea change in American politics and American life. Inevitably, the conservative Christians began to seek links with traditional conservatives, since they shared common enemies—liberal government, a left-liberal educational establishment, a judiciary besotted with liberal dogmas.46 As neo-cons firmed up this support base, Kristol said the journal also found favor among the Democratic Jewish elite, who broke from the civil rights movement after government policy began to emphasize economic equality and not just political equality: Soon, The Public Interest no longer stood alone. Commentary, which had for some years flirted with the left, veered sharply in a neo-conservative direction. Even more important was the arrival of Robert Bartley as editor of the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal [in 1972]. He quickly melded the familiar anti-statist views of the Journal with the neoconservative critique of contemporary liberalism. This trio of publications suddenly became something like a national force, and politicians and editorial writers began to pay attention.47 Kristol, like Strauss, fervently believed that reinvigoration of American democracy could not exist without the political use of Christianity. Kristol titled his 1978 collection of essays Two Cheers for Capitalism (not three) because he said capitalism promoted the very sort of individualism that undermined traditional institutions, like the nuclear family and faith in God. Kristol and other Jewish apologists for the Christian right maintained that whatever the Framers intended, they did not intend to divest politics of a religious sense, for they said it was the state’s duty to ensure that morality was upheld. Before we get to that, we need to understand what the Framers said regarding religion, the state and freedom.

46. Irving Kristol, “American Conservatism, 1945-1995,” Public Interest, No. 121, Fall 1995, Part IV. 47. Ibid., Part III. Kristol was managing editor of Commentary from 1947 to 1952.

7. Unholy Trinity

127

Morality and the state The man most closely associated with the separation of church and state is Thomas Jefferson, the U.S. third president, and emulator of John Locke. In a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut in 1802, Jefferson gave the most succinct definition of this division: Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.48 This letter reiterates the First Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1791—“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”—and this in turn reiterates the principles in Article VI, Paragraph 3 of the Constitution itself: The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States. Unlike theists, who believe in the revealed truth of the Bible, Jefferson was a deist; that is, he believed God set the universe in motion and left it to unfold without further interference. He considered Christianity to be a perverse superstition, and held the Bible in such contempt that he wrote his own version, The Jefferson Bible, to distill Jesus’ sayings from the embellishments of his biographers. As Jefferson wrote to former president John Adams: The whole history of these books is so defective and doubtful, that it seems vain to attempt minute inquiry into it; and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right from that cause to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine: In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.49 48. Thomas Jefferson, Letter to the Danbury Baptists, Jan. 1, 1802, . 49. Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, Jan. 24, 1814, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol. XIV, pp. 71-72, reproduced at .

128

Enemies by Design

Jefferson was not alone in his distaste for Christianity: Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Paine, to name a few, disparaged it unreservedly. Even George Washington recognized the danger of a state religion and declared that the U.S. was not a Christian country per se: As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen [Muslims]—and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.50 So far as the Framers were concerned, religion was purely personal and none of the state’s business. Freedom of religion and freedom from religion were both respected. For the state to take a position in favor of Christianity would have been tantamount to discriminating against non-Christians, thus making the concepts of personal liberty and religious freedom mutually contradictory. Therefore, Jefferson denied any political role for the clergy: “The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and ingrafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man.”51 Jefferson’s definitive separation of church and state became accepted as the standard of the American republic, and it is still the standard of its constitutional law. One would have to conclude that any act to violate this separation would be unconstitutional. This brings us back to Kristol, and his essay “American Conservatism, 1945-1995:” There has been the emergence, over the past decades, of religion-based, morally concerned, political conservatism. In the long run, this may be the most important of all. Though the media persist in portraying the religious conservatives as aggressive fanatics, in fact their motivation has been primarily defensive–a reaction against the popular counterculture, against the doctrinaire secularism of the Supreme Court, and against a government that taxes them heavily while removing all traces of morality and religion from public education, for example, even as it subsidizes all sorts of activities and programs that are outrages against traditional morality. The religious faith behind this reaction has 50. The Barbary Treaties: Treaty of Peace and Friendship, Article 11, Nov. 4, 1796, . Washington’s support for this position may be inferred from the treaty’s passage during his presidency. Further support comes again from Jefferson: “Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law,” Letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814, reproduced at From Revolution to Reconstruction, op. cit., and at The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. XIV, p. 91. 51. Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Jeremiah Moor, Aug. 14, 1800, reproduced in Thomas Jefferson – Political Writings, eds. Joyce Appelby and Terrence Ball (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 172.

7. Unholy Trinity

129

been steadily gaining in both intensity and popularity, especially among Protestant evangelicals, and may well now have a dynamism of its own. It is not at all unimaginable that the United States is headed for a bitter and sustained Kulturkampf that could overwhelm conventional notions of what is and what is not political.52 When Jefferson wrote about the danger of letting the clergy meddle in politics, it was this kind of religious arrogance and Christian conceit he had in mind.53 Kristol condemned the government for committing “outrages” against traditional morality, yet Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin and Paine went out of their way to separate law, morality and Christian tradition. “Doctrinaire secularism” is similarly bogus. As we saw above, Kristol condemned the Supreme Court for refusing to allow the Ten Commandments to be posted in classrooms, but the Court did nothing less than what the Constitution required. According to the Elementary School Act of 1817: “No religious reading, instruction or exercise, shall be prescribed or practiced inconsistent with the tenets of any religious sect or denomination.”54 Kristol’s condemnation of the government for removing “all traces of morality and religion from public education” must be recognized as a deliberate assault on the Constitution. The sedition is confirmed in the second part of the excerpt where Kristol proudly proclaims the intensity and popularity of the rising evangelical movement, as if to endorse the overthrow of the Supreme Court and the government. Clearly, “neo-conservative” does not accurately describe Strauss, Kristol or the Jewish elites. They are not “neo,” because their belief structure is an eccentric pastiche of pre-existing ideas, principally from Hobbes, Filmer and pseudo-Locke. They are not “conservative” in the traditional American sense, because they embrace foreign intervention, free trade and elephantine defense budgets. Traditional conservatives are isolationist and fiscally prudent. Similarly, “democratic” seems inappropriate. Strauss and Kristol both professed to be acting in the best interests of the U.S. at the same time they were eviscerating the nation’s ethos. If you add up the sum of their beliefs— hyper-nationalism, demagoguery, religious chauvinism, heroic leadership, economic and moral elitism, and militaristic foreign policy—you end up with something familiar and frightening. In these 1932 excerpts from Benito Mussolini extolling fascism, we hear the unmistakable voice of Leo Strauss:

52. Kristol, “American Conservatism, 1945-1995,” Public Interest, No. 121, Fall 1995, Part I. 53. “I am for freedom of religion, & against all manoeuvres to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another,” Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Elbridge Gerry, Jan. 26, 1799, in From Revolution to Reconstruction, op. cit, . 54. Thomas Jefferson, Plan for Elementary Schools, Sept. 9, 1817, in Bergh, Vol. XVII p. 425, t .

130

Enemies by Design

Fascism denies that the majority, by the simple fact that it is a majority, can direct human society; it denies that numbers alone can govern by means of a periodical consultation, and it affirms the immutable, beneficial, and fruitful inequality of mankind, which can never be permanently leveled through the mere operation of a mechanical process such as universal suffrage... Fascism denies, in democracy, the absurd conventional untruth of political equality dressed out in the garb of collective irresponsibility, and the myth of ‘happiness’ and indefinite progress. The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone... In the doctrine of Fascism, Empire is not only a territorial, military or mercantile expression, but spiritual or moral… For Fascism, the growth of Empire, that is to say, to the expansion of the nation, is a manifestation of vitality, and its opposite, staying at home, is a sign of decadence: peoples who rise or re-rise are imperialist, people who die are renunciatory.55

American fascism “Fascism” has become such a meaningless epithet of contempt that a person cannot discuss the subject rationally, lest he be scurrilously accused of condoning the Third Reich’s atrocities. Nevertheless, fascism is a recognized system of social organization. Its application varies according to a state’s culture, development and history, but Professor Lawrence W. Britt has identified 14 general characteristics of fascist or proto-fascist governments. Based upon analyses of seven regimes—Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Papadopoulos’ Greece, Pinochet’s Chile, and Suharto’s Indonesia—he found the following common traits:

1. Powerful and continuing nationalism Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

2. Disdain for the recognition of human rights Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of “need.” The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc. 55. Benito Mussolini with Giovanni Gentile, What is Fascism?” , as well as at Enciclopedia Italiana (1932), .

7. Unholy Trinity

131

3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities, liberals, communists, socialists, terrorists, etc.

4. Supremacy of the military Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

5. Rampant sexism The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively maledominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and antigay legislation and national policy.

6. Controlled mass media Sometimes the media are directly controlled by the government, while in other cases, they are indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in wartime, is very common.

7. Obsession with national security

Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

8. Religion and government are intertwined Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is used frequently by government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government’s policies or actions.

9. Corporate power is protected The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often put the government leaders into power, creating a symbiotic businessgovernment relationship and power elite.

10. Suppressed Labor Power Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.

11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts.

132

Enemies by Design

12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

14. Fraudulent Elections Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.”58 Fascism’s 14 traits stare out from the mirror of George W. Bush’s “Amerika.” We have already seen how cronyism and corporate-government collusion drove U.S. policy in Afghanistan. Fanaticism against birth control and abortions together with fanaticism for executions are typical features of the religious right. In addition, Bush’s fetish for upper-income tax cuts and his assault on regulatory legislation epitomize the dominance of Straussian economic selfishness. Points 1, 2, 3, 6, 8, 11 and 14—especially number three—are of particular importance for understanding how the Zionist contagion took root.

58. Lawrence W. Britt, “Fascism Anyone?” Free Inquiry, Vol. 23, No. 2, .

S E E M S A B S U R D to think that a tiny rogue state like Israel should be able to browbeat and humiliate history’s greatest superpower. Every president since 1967 has told Israel to stop settlement construction in the Occupied Territories, and every Israeli government has responded with open contempt and disregard. Israel even interferes in U.S. affairs with other states, as we saw with the arms sales to Saudi Arabia. T

One would think that Israel were the superpower and the U.S. a sycophantic vassal state. This suggestion, facetious though it may be, is not far from the truth. On Oct. 20, 1990, syndicated columnist Patrick Buchanan made the point succinctly in a now famous declaration: “Capitol Hill is an Israeli occupied territory.” The remark was pithy, but no revelation. The occupation had been going on for decades, and is the reason why the U.S. has become an anti-Arab terrorist state serving Israeli expansionism. One could pick a number of events from which to date the Zionization of the U.S., but the most common is the creation of the “State of Israel” on May 15, 1948. Contrary to popular belief, this creation was illegal, immoral and did not have the sanction of the United Nations. The Partition Plan that would have carved up Palestine into Jewish and Arab regions only received approval from the UN General Assembly, which is why it is called UNGA Res. 181. The Security Council never ratified it, which means that Arab compliance was not compulsory. In fact, the neighbouring Arab states had every right, even a duty, to reject it because the UN has no power to take land from one party and give it to another. The plan would have awarded 56 percent of Palestine to one-third of the population, the 650,000 Jews, who were mostly recent settlers at that, leaving only 44 percent to the 1.3 million indigenous Muslim and Christian Arabs. According to the UN’s own Constitution, UNGA Res. 181 was ultra vires, which also explains why it was never enacted.

134

Enemies by Design

F R O M T R U M A N T O C A RT E R For its part, the U.S. had been preparing to withdraw support for UNGA Res. 181 because of continued Zionist violence against the Palestinian Arabs. In mid-March 1948, UN ambassador Warren Austin observed that it could not be enacted peacefully, and on orders from President Harry Truman recommended that it be suspended for two months pending a meeting of the General Assembly. Truman advocated a temporary UN trusteeship to prevent further bloodshed.1 However, domestic electoral considerations would soon dominate Truman’s thinking. As Gore Vidal writes in his preface to the late Rabbi Israel Shahak’s Jewish History, Jewish Religion: Sometime in the late 1950s, that world-class gossip and occasional historian, John F. Kennedy, told me how, in 1948, Harry S. Truman had been pretty much abandoned by everyone when he came to run for president. Then an American Zionist brought him two million dollars in cash, in a suitcase, aboard his whistle-stop campaign train. ‘That’s why our recognition of Israel was rushed through so fast.’… I shall not rehearse the wars and alarms of that unhappy region. But I will say that the hasty invention of Israel has poisoned the political and intellectual life of the U.S.A., Israel’s unlikely patron.2 Although critics may be tempted to dismiss Vidal’s story as hearsay, there is strong evidence that electoral, not legal or moral, concerns pushed the U.S. to recognize Israel: Partition was adopted only after ruthless arm-twisting by the US government and by 26 pro-Zionist U.S. senators who, in telegrams to a number of UN member states, warned that U.S. goodwill in rebuilding their World War II-devastated economies might depend on a favorable vote for partition. In a Nov. 10, 1945, meeting with American diplomats brought in from their posts in the Middle East to urge Truman not to heed Zionist urgings, Truman had bluntly explained his motivation: “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism: I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”3 Within the Truman White House, a virtual war erupted between 67-yearold Secretary of State George C. Marshall and Clark Clifford, a 41-year-old neophyte political advisor who held the minority view that Truman had to

1. Warren Austin, United States Position on the Palestine Problem, March 19, 1948; President Harry S. Truman, United States Proposal for Temporary United Nations Trusteeship for Palestine, March 25, 1948. 2. Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion (London: Pluto Press, 1994), pp. vii-viii. 3. Richard H. Curtiss, “Truman Adviser Recalls May 14, 1948, U.S. Decision to Recognize Israel,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 1991.

8. Housebreaking the U.S.

135

recognize Israel if he expected to capture the Jewish vote.4 Loy Henderson, Truman’s Director of Near Eastern and African Affairs, described the importance of courting the Jewish vote during the 1948 election campaign: Many of the leaders of the Republican Party, including [New York governor Thomas] Dewey... were almost constantly criticizing Truman for failure to give full support to the Zionists. If Truman had taken positions that would have resulted in a failure to establish the Jewish State, he would almost certainly have been defeated in the November elections, since the Zionists had almost the full support of the Congress, the United States media and most of the American people. The new Republican Administration would then have gone along with the Zionists. From the point of view of the Americans, and world opinion, the creation of Israel was a more or less conscious and willful act that was meant to compensate for the Holocaust.5 A more candid view is that Truman was mainly interested in re-election, so he allowed himself to be bought off. Zionist intimidation and corruption even extended to smearing members of the administration like Henderson, who opposed recognition of a Jewish “national homeland.” Edwin Wright, Middle East specialist for Near East-South Asian-African Affairs, recounted the Lobby’s disreputable tactics: “The Zionists went to various people like Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell and said, “Smear this fellow. Destroy his character and get him out of Government.”… The result was Mr. Henderson became the target of Zionist attacks. All kinds of false stories were told about him in these columns by Walter Winchell and others. I was at that time Mr. Henderson’s assistant and I answered many of the letters, because he didn’t have time to do it himself. I was his sort of alter ego in handling much of this correspondence, and I saw the kind of letters that he got. They were vituperative. Walter Winchell accused him of crucifying the Jews the way that the Jews had been crucified earlier, and so forth, and so on… When the election was coming up in 1946 in New York, [a] group of New York Jews called upon Mr. Truman. Emmanuel Cellar was the 4. “Marshall firmly opposed American recognition of the new Jewish state; I did not. Marshall’s opposition was shared by almost every member of the brilliant and now legendary group of presidential advisers, later referred to as the Wise Men, who were then in the process of creating a post-war foreign policy that would endure for more than 40 years. The opposition included the respected Under Secretary of State Robert Lovett; his predecessor, Dean Acheson; the No. 3 man in the State Department, Charles Bohlen; the brilliant chief of the Policy Planning Staff George Kennan; [Navy Secretary James V.] Forrestal; and... Dean Rusk, then the director of the Office of United Nations Affairs... Officials in the State Department had done everything in their power to prevent, thwart, or delay the President’s Palestine policy in 1947 and 1948, while I had fought for assistance to the Jewish Agency.” Clifford, cited in Ibid. 5. Cited in President Harry S. Truman and U.S. Support for Israeli Statehood, .

136

Enemies by Design

head of this committee. Rabbi Steven Wise and several others were in it. They called upon Mr. Truman and said, “We have just been talking with Mr. Thomas Dewey. He is willing to come out and declare for a Jewish state, and we are going to turn our money and urge the Jews to vote for him unless you beat him to it.” Then Emmanuel Cellar pounded upon Mr. Truman’s desk and said, “And if you don’t come out for a Jewish state we’ll run you out of town.”6

Exploiting Jewish suffering — “solving the Arab problem” The great propaganda device the Zionists exploited was the Nazi holocaust. Even though it had no relevance to “Israel,”the tactic was highly effective. “Generally speaking, the Zionists succeeded in persuading large segments of world public opinion to link the Zionist cause with the Holocaust,” wrote Professor Ilan Pappé of Haifa University. “Against such a claim, even able Palestinian diplomats—and there were not many in those days—hardly could win the diplomatic game.”7 Of course, the Holocaust shoe was on the other foot. Evidence from Zionist sources on the systematic depopulation of Arab Palestine is enormous. Some of the most damning come from Joseph Weitz, a Jewish Pole who was responsible for Israel’s “transfer” program: “[We] must direct our war towards the removal of as many Arabs as possible from the boundaries of our state. The guarding of their property after their removal is a secondary question… I made a summary of a list of the Arab villages which in my opinion must be cleared out in order to complete Jewish regions. I also made a summary of the places that have land disputes and must be settled by military means….” On June 5 [1948] Weitz met with [David] ben Gurion, now prime minister, in Tel Aviv and gave to him the Transfer Committee’s Scheme for the Solution of the Arab problem in the State of Israel, contained in a three-page memorandum…[It] called for preventing Arabs from returning to their homes; destroying Arab villages during military operations; preventing cultivation and harvesting of Arab lands; settling Jews in Arab towns and villages; instituting legislation barring the return of the refugees; launching a propaganda campaign designed to discourage the return of refugees; and campaigning for the resettlement of the refugees in other places.8 6. Richard D. McKinzie, “Oral History Interview with Edwin M. Wright,” Wooster, Ohio, July 26, 1974, Truman Presidential Museum and Library, . 7. Ilan Pappé, “Post-Zionist Critique on Israel and the Palestinians, Part I: The Academic Debate,” The Journal of Palestine Studies (Winter, 1997), pp. 33–34. 8. Joseph Weitz, My Diary and letters to the Children (1965), as cited in Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians (Institute for Palestine Studies: Washington, D.C., 1992), p. 186.

8. Housebreaking the U.S.

137

For the foreseeable future, the world would be expected to succumb to obligatory guilt over the Nazi holocaust, yet deliberately ignore the ongoing Zionist holocaust continually being committed in Palestine. From Nov. 29, 1947, when UN Res. 181 was passed, until Israel was proclaimed on May 15, 1948, Zionist forces had dispossessed more than 300,000 Palestinians. By the end of the year, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine registered 726,000 refugees. Walter Eytan, then-Director General of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, referred to the UNRWA’s figure as “meticulous” and believed that the real number was closer to 800,000.9 In their zeal to destroy Palestinian society, Zionists committed unspeakable atrocities. On April 9, 1948, Menachem Begin led the systematic murder of more than 250 men, women and children in the village of Deir Yassin, which was outside the area that would have been set aside for Jews. Dov Joseph, a later Minister of Justice of Israel, called the Deir Yassin massacre a “deliberate and unprovoked attack,” while the noted British historian, Professor Arnold Toynbee described it as “comparable to crimes committed against the Jews by the Nazis.”10 On July 13, 1948, Israeli troops forced the entire populations of the towns of Lydda and Ramleh—up to 80,000 people—to leave their homes so that newly arrived European Jews could take them. The incident is known as the Lydda Death March. According to Israeli historian Benny Morris: All the Israelis who witnessed the events agreed that the exodus, under a hot July sun, was an extended episode of suffering for the refugees, especially from Lydda. Some were stripped by soldiers of their valuables as they left town or at checkpoints along the way.... One Israeli soldier ... recorded vivid impressions of the thirst and hunger of the refugees on the roads, and of how “children got lost” and of how a child fell into a well and drowned, ignored, as his fellow refugees fought each other to draw water. Another soldier described the spoon left by the slowshuffling columns, “to begin with [jettisoning] utensils and furniture and in the end, bodies of men, women and children, scattered along the way!” Quite a few refugees died—from exhaustion, dehydration and disease— along the roads eastwards, from Lydda and Ramleh, before reaching temporary rest near at Ramallah. Nimr Khatib put the death toll among the Lydda refugees during the trek eastward at 335; Arab Legion commander John Glubb Pasha more carefully wrote that “nobody will ever know how many children died.”… [The London Economist reported:] “The Arab refugees were systematically stripped of all their belongings before they were sent on 9. Dr. Norman Finkelstein, “Debate on the 1948 Exodus,” Journal of Palestine Studies (Autumn 1991), note 4, p. 86. 10. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Vol. VIII, p.290, in Deir Yassin Remembered, April 9, 2003, .

138

Enemies by Design

their trek to the frontier. Household belongings, stores, clothing, all had to be left behind. One youthful Palestinian survivor recalled: “Two of my friends were killed in cold blood. One was carrying a box presumed to have money and the other a pillow, which was believed to contain valuables. A friend of mine resisted and was killed in front of me. He had 400 Palestinian pounds in his pocket.”11 The following candid remark from David ben-Gurion to Nahum Goldmann, future president of the World Jewish Congress, shows that the Zionists knew that they were committing an atrocity: If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?12 By betraying the Arabs for the Jewish vote, the U.S. became midwife to a war crime. Almost from the outset, the UN Charter became a scofflaw, and international bias against the Palestinians became institutionalized.

The 1967 War A full account of U.S. political relations with Israel and the frequent use of its veto in the service of Israel is beyond the scope of this section, which is concerned with how Jewish and Christian Zionists were able to usurp U.S. Middle East policy. The key event in this regard is the 1967 War. According to the received wisdom, the war began when Israel launched a pre-emptive strike against Egypt because President Gamel Abdel Nasser had closed the Red Sea port of Eilat and was preparing to attack across the Sinai. This is false. Israel precipitated the conflict by staging border aggressions against Syria and seizing Syrian land in the demilitarized zone between the two countries. From 1948 to 1967 the Syrians reported more than 1,000 armed clashes. In a candid 1976 interview, Moshe Dayan admitted that Israel provoked 80 percent of border skirmishes with Syria and erred in occupying the Golan Heights after the war: We would send a tractor to plow some area… and we knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn’t shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance further, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that’s how it was…. I made a mistake in allowing the 11. Cited in Donald Neff “Expulsion of the Palestinians—Lydda and Ramleh in 1948,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July/August 1994, page 72. 12. Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Hirsh Goldberg, The Jewish Paradox (Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), p. 121.

8. Housebreaking the U.S.

139

conquest of the Golan Heights. As defense minister I should have stopped it because the Syrians were not threatening us at the time.13 In the period leading up to the war, Egypt did move two divisions into the Sinai and it did close Eilat, but the port city was of marginal economic value. Nevertheless, Israel used the closing of Eilat as an excuse to attack Egypt and seize the Sinai, which was the objective. Those involved in the attack dismiss as ludicrous the idea that Israel acted out of self-defense. For example, on Aug. 21, 1982, Israel’s Prime Minister Menachem Begin told the New York Times: “The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves: we decided to attack him.” This statement is supported by the fact that Nasser had already sent his best troops to fight in the Yemeni civil war. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol also denied that Nasser had any offensive intent. On Oct. 18, 1967, he told the Israel newspaper Yediot Ahronot: “The Egyptian layout in the Sinai and the general military build up there testified to a military defensive Egyptian set-up, south to Israel.” Israel’s capture of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem from the Palestinians, and the Golan Heights from Syria caused an existential crisis. Because Israel attacked first, it was the aggressor, and such an image ran counter to the popular image of Israel as a defensive, peace-loving Western democracy. The acquisition of territory by war is inadmissible under international law, and UN Security Council Resolution 242 compelled Israel to return all lands occupied in the conflict.14 Unfortunately for the Palestinians and Syrians, the U.S. government has vetoed more than 35 Security Council resolutions to force Israel to comply with UNSC Res. 242. Since the Occupied Territories were never meant to be part of Israel under UNGA Res. 181, the U.S. refusal to press Israel to return them makes no sense unless as a function of domestic politics. President Lyndon Johnson, like Truman before him, was unpopular. He needed to shore up support for the Vietnam war, and according to presidential speechwriter Grace Halsell, that meant courting the Zionists: In 1967, President Johnson felt he needed all the support he could get to “win” in Vietnam. Many American Jews were liberals outspokenly 13. Stephen S. Rosenfeld, “Israel and Syria: Correcting the Record,” Washington Post, Dec. 24, 1999. Before he died in 1981, Dayan embargoed the interview. His daughter, Knesset member Yael Dayan, released it on April 27, 1997. It provoked no surprise in Israel. 14. United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, Nov. 22, 1967, UNSC Res. 242 was passed unanimously 15–0. Zionists argue that the absence of the word “all” before “occupied territories” gives Israel the right to some of this land, but this is a lie. Great Britain’s UN ambassador Hugh Foot, the resolution’s drafter, has affirmed its comprehensive intent. (Paul Foot (son of Lord Hugh), “Still waiting for No 242,” Guardian, Nov. 13, 2002. The Zionist interpretation would make the resolution self-contradictory and a contempt of the UN Charter.

140

Enemies by Design

opposed to the war there. Johnson was told if he gave all-out support to Israel… influential Jewish Americans would stop opposing his Vietnam policies. In a memo to the president, [speechwriter Ben] Wattenberg, whose parents had moved to the U. S. from Palestine and who was known as a strong supporter of the Jewish state, said flatly that if the president came out with strong support for Israel, he would win American Jewish support for the war in Vietnam. Many American Jewish leaders are “doves” on Vietnam, Wattenberg wrote, but ‘hawks’ on a war with Arab states.15 So keen was Johnson to curry favor with Jewish elites that he covered up an unprovoked Israeli attack on a U.S. warship. On June 8, 1967, the intelligence-gathering vessel USS Liberty was stationed off the Gaza Strip when it came under Israeli attack. For 75 minutes its crew withstood torpedoes, rockets and 30mm gunfire, even at life rafts. Thirty-four men died and 171 were wounded. According to the “official” version, Israel mistook the Liberty for an out-of-service Egyptian horse-carrier El Quseir, which was in a war zone and did not display a flag. In fact, the Liberty was in international waters, and flew a new American flag. As Adm. Moorer told the Houston Chronicle, a few weeks before his death in February 2004, “The Liberty was conspicuously different from any vessel in the Egyptian navy. It was the most sophisticated intelligence ship in the world in 1967. With its massive radio antennae, including a large satellite dish, it looked like a large lobster and was one of the most easily identifiable ships afloat.”16 “While there can be no moral justification for the White House cover-up orders to the Navy after the assault on the Liberty,” wrote Halsell, “from hindsight, Johnson’s political motivation is obvious. It was the same motivation that led him subsequently to listen to the Jewish friends and advisers who urged him not to put any pressure on the Israelis to relinquish territories they had seized in the Six-Day War.”17 15. Grace Halsell “How LBJ’s Vietnam War Paralyzed His Mideast Policymakers,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June 1993, Page 20. 16. Ibid., and Jim Ennes and Joe Meadows, The USS Liberty Memorial, May 1, 2001, . This site also contains the following statement from the late Adm. Moorer: “I am confident that Israel knew the Liberty could intercept radio messages from all parties and potential parties to the ongoing war, then in its fourth day, and that Israel was preparing to seize the Golan Heights from Syria despite President Johnson’s known opposition to such a move. I think they realized that if we learned in advance of their plan, there would be a tremendous amount of negotiating between Tel Aviv and Washington. And I believe Moshe Dayan concluded that he could prevent Washington from becoming aware of what Israel was up to by destroying the primary source of acquiring that information, the USS Liberty.” 17. Ibid., Halsell. See also Charles D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1988), p. 203. In an October 2003 affidavit, the former captain of the USS Liberty admitted that Johnson ordered the attack be covered up. According to the Associated Press: “[Capt.] Ward Boston said Johnson and McNamara told those heading the navy’s inquiry to ‘conclude that the attack was a case of ‘mistaken identity’ despite

8. Housebreaking the U.S.

141

In fact, the members of Johnson’s inner circle were mostly Jewish and pro-Israel, so it was impossible for him to have a non-Zionist point of view: Walt Rostow at the White House, brother Eugene Rostow at the State Department, UN ambassador Arthur Goldberg, Associate Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, Democratic Party fundraiser Abraham Feinberg, White House counsels Leo White and Jake Jacobsen, White House writers Richard Goodwin and Ben Wattenberg, domestic affairs aide Larry Levinson, and John P. Roche, Johnson’s intellectual-in-residence.18 Adding to Israel’s attractiveness was its potential to be a strategic asset in the Cold War against Soviet-backed Arab states. For U.S. Jewry and the government, Israel had finally joined the Soviet Union as a centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy.

C A RT E R O P E N S T H E D O O R The Vietnam War effectively destroyed Washington’s political establishment,which officially died on Aug. 8, 1974, when President Richard Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment for his role in the Watergate Hotel break-in and cover-up. The subsequent two-year caretaker presidency of Gerald Ford was merely the last gasp of a moribund political culture. Georgia governor Jimmy Carter’s victory over Gerald Ford was the third major event leading to the Israeli takeover of U.S. Middle East policy. Republicans had never owed anything to the Zionist cause, since most Jews were liberal and voted overwhelmingly Democratic. Thus Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon were able to stand up to the Lobby without ill effect. On Oct. 30, 1956, the day after Israel, France and Great Britain invaded Egypt to capture the Suez Canal, Eisenhower forced Israel to withdraw by threatening to suspend aid. Nixon was avowedly anti-Israel, and as recently released tapes from 1972 show, Rev. Billy Graham and he held disparaging views about Jews, especially about their influence within the media: G R A H A M : This stranglehold has got to be broken or the country’s going down the drain. N I X O N : You believe that? G R A H A M : Yes, sir. N I X O N : Oh, boy, so do I. I can’t ever say that, but I believe it. G R A H A M : No, but if you get elected a second time, then we might be able to do something.19

overwhelming evidence to the contrary.’” The report said Boston came forth after years of silence to counter the book The Liberty Incident, which depicted the attack as unintentional. See “Lyndon Johnson ordered cover-up: Former navy lawyer,” Toronto Star, Oct. 22, 2003. 18. Ibid., Halsell. 19. James Warren, “Nixon, Graham anti-Semitism on tape,” Chicago Tribune, March 1, 2002.

142

Enemies by Design

8. Housebreaking the U.S.

143

Even when Nixon agreed to aid Israel after it suffered defeats in the early stages of the 1973 War, he did so belatedly and only because the Soviet Union was giving military aid to the Arab states.20 Zionist optimism over Carter’s victory, however, quickly turned to disappointment when he proved that he would not be an apologist for Tel Aviv. He wanted a comprehensive end to the Arab-Israeli violence, and came into office prepared with a two-state proposal. On March 16, 1977, at a town hall meeting in Clinton, Mass., he made this point explicit. After uttering the standard line about the need for Arab states to recognize Israel’s right to exist, he said: “There has to be a homeland provided for the Palestinian refugees, who have suffered for many, many years.”21 Middle East historian Alfred M. Lilienthal described the fallout: In and out of Congress, Zionists were up in arms at the mere mention of a Palestinian homeland. The Israeli lobby opened its lines to the White House. [National Security Advisor Zbigniew] Brzezinski was alerted, and told a press briefing at the UN prior to the President’s speech on human rights the next day, that the President had used the word ‘homeland’ generically, and had intended no change in U.S. policy.22 Carter tried to backpedal, saying that any state would have to be affiliated with Jordan, but nothing short of total repudiation of a Palestinian state would satisfy the Lobby. Throughout his presidency, Carter labored under the delusion that his job was to work for peace in the Middle East. Whenever the government did something that upset the Lobby, such as criticizing settlement construction in the West Bank, speaking about involving the Palestinians in peace negotiations, or selling military aircraft to Saudi Arabia—Carter and his cabinet came under withering attack: telegrams to the White House, telephone calls to congressmen, and op-ed pieces in the New York Times and other pro-Zionist newspapers. Always, there was the overt or covert slur of “anti-Semitism” to intimidate members of Congress and the administration. In Israel, meanwhile, Menachem Begin, the terrorist who led the Deir Yassin massacre, led the Likud (Union) Party to its first victory on May 17, 1977. Likud is an amalgam of the most extreme elements of Jewish “dispossessionalism:” hawkish military leaders, smaller Orthodox religious parties, and “settler” groups—principally Jewish Slavs from Russia, Ukraine and Poland. In contrast to the Labor Party, which had ruled Israel from the outset, Likud aggressively advocates the aggressive colonization of Palestinian land. The first “settlement” was established in 1968, and three years later the 20. See Chapter 2 and note 9. 21. Cited in Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection II—What Price Peace? (New Jersey: North American Inc, 1982), p. 681. 22. Ibid.

144

Enemies by Design

extremist settler organization Gush Emunim (Block of the Faithful), grew out of the Kiryat Arba settlement near Hebron. It remains one of the most strident voices of the Israeli right wing.23 Two months after the election, Begin arrived in the U.S. for a state visit with all the arrogance and swagger of a disgruntled king come to browbeat a miscreant noble. Begin openly repudiated the U.S. stand on settlements, and openly lied about the application of UNSC Res. 242. The master had come to set the record straight about Israel and Israel’s God-given right to claim any land it wants, and the U.S. took its punishment. Nothing symbolizes U.S. subservience better than this exclamation from Begin’s Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan: “I know you Americans think you’re going to force us out of the West Bank, but we’re here and you’re in Washington. What will you do if we maintain settlements? Squawk? What will you do if we keep the army there? Send troops?”24 By early 1979, the Lobby abandoned Carter and gambled on Republican California governor Ronald Reagan. He won the 1980 election in a landslide, and by the time he took office the following January, all the elements for the Lobby’s eventual usurpation of U.S. Middle East policy were in place: the rise of evangelicals to political prominence; the alliance of pro-Israeli Christians and Jews; the alliance of pro-Israeli Christians with Straussians; and the election of Israel’s first Likud government.

1 9 7 3 — P R O PA G A N D A A N D P O C K E T B O O K S A case could be made that the Straussian road to conquest began with the high-water mark of liberalism—the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade decision. The 7:2 ruling on Jan. 22, 1973 made abortion legal on demand and was hailed as a great victory for women and individual rights. Christian groups (evangelical and otherwise) condemned it as an affront to God, the sanctity of life and “traditional American values.” From the mid-1970s onward, overturning Roe vs. Wade became the cornerstone of a political and moral crusade. Evangelical and charismatic movements became the fastestgrowing sects of North American Christianity, while mainstream Protestant and Catholic denominations began to shrink. 23. Likud’s victory, though, did not represent all of Israel. Many Jews objected to the settlements in the belief that a smaller Israel at peace with its neighbours was preferable to a “Greater Israel” in a state of permanent war. One such protest was a 1977 open letter to Begin signed by 348 Army reserve officers and soldiers. “Real security can be achieved only in peace,” they wrote. “The real strength of the Israel army grows out of the citizenry-soldiers’ identification with state policy.” Begin denounced the signatories as traitors but their protest drew 40,000 supporters, and the next year, the “Peace Now” movement was founded. The occupation is the single greatest issue dividing Israel today. A poll published in the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv on June 1, 2003 reported that 62 percent of Israelis are fed up with the violence and want to end the occupation. 24. Cited in Paul Findley, Deliberate Deceptions—Facing the Facts About the U.S.-Israeli Relationship (New York: Lawrence Hill, 1993), p. 235.

8. Housebreaking the U.S.

145

Arguably, the most important of these evangelicals was former Senate aide Paul Weyrich. In the same year that Roe vs. Wade was decided, he created the Heritage Foundation, the first “think-tank” specifically designed to propagate a militant Christian-Straussian political order. The foundation’s influence on the White House would redefine U.S. politics and be a main engine of the American fascist revolution, but Weyrich did not accomplish this feat by himself. That revolution owes its success to three philanthropists who became politically active in this seminal year.25

Joseph Coors The Heritage Foundation began with a $250,000 grant from Colorado brewing tycoon Joseph Coors in late 1972. On the occasion of Coors’s death at age 85 on March 16, 2003, Heritage president Edwin J. Feulner eulogized the power and influence of his late patron: “Without Joe Coors, The Heritage Foundation wouldn’t exist—and the conservative movement it nurtures would be immeasurably poorer. Thanks in large part to Joe, though, we can look back on a record of accomplishment that stretches back three decades.”26 Coors not only helped bankroll the revolution, he also epitomized the Straussian marriage of elitist statecraft and religion. He was a notoriously exploitative employer who held deeply prejudiced views of women, homosexuals and minorities, and vigorously opposed any act of government that offended his biblical concept of morality, or impeded his ability to milk the last cent of profit from his business. He also opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, supported the John Birch Society, and gave money to the Nicaraguan Contras.

Richard Mellon Scaife Joe Coors may have been the financial founder of the Heritage Institute, but Richard Scaife was the real banking power behind it. In 1973, he donated $900,000 to Weyrich’s enterprise, more than three times what Coors gave. Scaife came by his money through his mother Sarah Mellon Scaife, daughter of Judge Thomas Mellon, creator of the vast Mellon oil industry and banking empire. Upon her death in 1965, Richard Scaife inherited $200 million. Also in 1973, he became chairman of the Sarah Mellon Scaife foundation and began to direct its money to right-wing institutions and ideas. Scaife also controls the philosophically similar Carthage and Allegheny foundations. He was an integral fixture during the Reagan years, but unlike Coors who became deeply involved with policy, Scaife was content to foster the proliferation of “think tanks” that spread anti-statist economic theory. He did, 25. Background material for the following section comes from Media Transparency and People for the American Way , unless otherwise noted. 26. Edwin J. Feulner, Heritage Foundation President Mourns Death of Joseph Coors, Heritage Foundation, March 16, 2003, .

146

Enemies by Design

though, sit on the U.S. Advisory Commission for Public Diplomacy, which oversees the U.S. Information Agency. Again, it is Feulner who testifies to Scaife’s influence. In November 1994, he told a group of supporters after the Republican sweep of the House of Representatives: The victories we’re celebrating today didn’t begin last Tuesday. They started more than 20 years ago when Dick Scaife had the vision to see the need for a conservative intellectual movement in America. These organizations built the intellectual case that was necessary before political leaders like Newt Gingrich could translate their ideas into practical political alternatives.27

R. Randolph Richardson Little is known about Randolph Richardson, save that his family’s Smith Richardson Foundation started backing the new Straussian economic movement when he became its president in 1973. Early beneficiaries included “supply-side” economics authors Jude Wanniski and George Gilder. The foundation began in 1935 under father H. Smith Richardson, himself the son of Lunsford Richardson, the inventor of Vicks VapoRub. The fortune generated by that single product was enough to establish a philanthropic foundation dedicated to his principles of hard work, industry and enterprise. The foundation’s philosophy, as described on its website (www.srf.org), could have been lifted out of John Locke’s Second Treatise: It was characteristic of [H. Smith Richardson] to capitalize the words “Opportunity” and “Right:” these were key words in his personal creed. He believed that “Opportunity” was something to be pursued with the utmost diligence and seized with zeal. His belief in a personal bill of rights was equally strong: a person rightfully owned what his industry brought him, and the free enterprise system permitted the maximum scope for industry. It was these qualities which enabled him to transform his father’s small mortar-and-pestle drug manufacturing business into an industrial concern of international stature.

O N WA R D C H R I S T I A N S O L D I E R S The next year, Coors and Weyrich formed the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, which in 1977 was renamed the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation. According to its website, www.freecongress.org: Free Congress Foundation is politically conservative, but it is more than that: it is also culturally conservative. Most think tanks talk about tax rates or the environment or welfare policy and occasionally we do also. But our main focus is on the Culture War. Will America return to the 27. Karen Rothmyer, “The Man Behind The Mask,” Salon.com, April 7, 1998.

8. Housebreaking the U.S.

147

culture that made it great, our traditional, Judeo-Christian, Western culture? Or will we continue the long slide into the cultural and moral decay of political correctness? If we do, America, once the greatest nation on earth, will become no less than a third-world country. Here again we find the quintessential Straussian “econo-theology,” the unity of unenlightened self-interest and biblical chauvinism. Out of this comes a hatred for all things Islamic, and since Sept. 11, 2001, Free Congress has pumped out dozens of articles and monographs with this bias. The authors of these tracts are Weyrich and adjunct fellow Robert Spencer, a 20-year writer and researcher on Islam and director of “Jihad Watch,” which draws attention to jihad theology and ideology, whatever that means. Spencer affects the demeanor of the scholar who approaches his subject dispassionately. He claims not to draw his own conclusions, but selectively cites the words of radical Muslims and traditional Islamic sources to show that Islam is inherently a violent religion. Such a disingenuous feint should fool nobody; no group is immune to smearing by such caricature. As we saw in Part I, Islamic culture was historically known for its tolerance and sophistication, and jihad is not offensive, but a defensive response to invasion. These facts appear alien to Spencer, who spends much of his time cherry-picking offensive passages from the Quran. Significantly, Spencer does not cite Jewish or Christian militants or passages from the Hebrew or Christian bibles to illustrate the bloody and irrational origins of the West’s glorious Judeo-Christian tradition. Leaving aside the fact that no holy book can be read literally, or directly applied to the real world, Spencer’s scholarship lacks objectivity. He makes wild allegations founded on nothing but hysterical emotion: Many Muslim controversialists and their allies charge Christians with distorting the idea of jihad in order to give Islam a bad name...Left unanswered by this sort of analysis, however, is the question of how these dishonest Christians were able to convince so many Muslims of the accuracy of their distortions. For it is clear that today and throughout Islamic history, millions of Muslims have considered jihad to be a war to establish the supremacy of Islam. Many have believed, and believe today, that they are commanded to fight this war by Allah himself...28 First, “Allah” is merely the Arabic word for God—the same God of the Hebrew and Christian bibles. The word for God in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, is “Alah” or “Alaha” (cognate with Hebrew “Elohim”), so for a Christian to insinuate that Allah is opposed to God is an unforgivable howler. Second, nowhere does Spencer acknowledge that the Afghan jihad, the Somali jihad or Osama bin Laden’s invocation to rid the Middle East of U.S. forces were all the result of foreign invasion. Also, absent is any mention of the role Israel and Saudi Arabia played in repressing the Muslim world. Thus, 28. Robert Spencer, Jihad in Context, excerpted at .

148

Enemies by Design

Spencer’s attempted dismissal of his critics fails, as does the description of Free Congress as a “research and education foundation.” Weyrich also established National Empowerment Television (NET TV), Free Congress’ own satellite network channel, now called America’s Voice. From this bully pulpit, it rallies grassroots evangelicals across the U.S. to lobby the government, and propagates the views of the National Rifle Association, Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, and the Eagle Forum, which opposes women’s equality. In 1979, Weyrich and executive director Robert Billings prevailed upon Jerry Falwell to head a new group called the “The Moral Majority,” which was instrumental in marshalling the Christian Zionist vote for the Republicans. This led Falwell to boast: “Ronald Reagan would not have been president unless Bible-believing Christians in 1979 and 1980 by the millions said, ‘We’ve had enough,’ and threw Jimmy Carter out and put Ronald Reagan in, to put it bluntly.”29 The theocratization of the White House became firmly entrenched in 1981 with the founding of the deceptively innocuous Council on National Policy. Comprised of more than 500 evangelical, Pentecostal, charismatic, Catholic and Mormon Christians, the council plans political strategy for the religious right and has an international scope. Its members are televangelists, legislators, former military or high-ranking government officers, presidents of “think tanks,” and industry leaders in brewing, lumber, oil, mining, commodities, real estate, the media (radio, television and print) and education.30 Some past and present members are: Holland and Jeffrey Coors, Jerry Falwell, Lt.-Col. Oliver North (who lied to Congress regarding the 1980s Iran-Contra arms-for hostages scandal), Pat Robertson (Christian Broadcast Network), Attorney General John Ashcroft, Rich DeVos (Owner of the NBA Orlando Magics), Alan Gottlieb (Chairman, Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms), Congressman Jack Kemp, Richard Scaife, John Sununu (Reagan’s Chief of Staff), Richard Viguerie (Chairman, American Target Advertising), Paul Weyrich and Don Wildmon (American Family Association). This shadowy college of conspirators embodies Strauss’s élitist governing model. The CNP imbues selfishness with divine sanction, treats regulatory and civil rights legislation as virtual sins against God, and actively conspires against the Constitution. Furthermore, few people know the CNP exists, which reminds us of Strauss’s eccentric argument that philosophers, like Socrates, should work their magic out of public view. 29. “Controversial Falwell statements cut by SBC agency radio show,” Biblical Recorder, July 28, 2000. 30. Marc J. Ambinder, “Vast, right-wing cabal?” ABC News, May 2, 2002; the independent Christian research and apologetics ministry Seekgod has compiled an extensive biographical list of all CNP members, .

8. Housebreaking the U.S.

149

THE HEADLESS HORSEMAN Common to Zionists and Straussians is a Manichean mentality that reduces the world to moral archetypes of good and evil: evangelicalism vs. liberal Christianity; Zionism vs. liberal Judaism; and “neo-con” economics vs. “paleo-con” economics. All this evangelical-zionist-neocon troika needed to take control of government was a horseman to ride it into office. A retired actor, Ronald Reagan began his race for the presidency armed with a strong moral sense—and little else. His election platform consisted of the platitudes: “family, work, neighborhood, peace, and freedom.” He had no firm ideological beliefs and at best had a superficial understanding of domestic and foreign policy. Even Reagan’s chief advisors—Edwin Meese III, Michael Deaver, Lyn Nofziger, Caspar Weinberger and William Clark (“The California Crowd”)—came to Washington with virtually no background or interest in world affairs, wrote arms control expert Strobe Talbot in his 1984 book Deadly Gambits: [Reagan] displayed little knowledge or even curiosity about the interactions of states and forces in the world arena. Even more disturbing, he seemed remarkably blasé about U.S. foreign policy. It was as though long-term strategy was something other people were paid to worry about. Kissinger found that, when he advised Reagan [from time to time] on what the government ought to be doing, the goals it should set and the methods it should apply, Reagan seemed to tune out. The best way to get Reagan’s attention was to suggest to him what he personally should say publicly about a foreign problem or policy. Then the President would sit up, and his eyes would come back into focus. What he cared about was speeches. He knew that his smooth delivery and easy-going, winning manner were huge assets. He would work at fine-tuning a speech with an enthusiasm that he rarely devoted to other duties. It was this aspect of Reagan’s approach to the presidency that led him to see the announcement of the proposal as an end in itself. If the speech worked as a speech, then the policy must be a good one. If the speech came off, the policy could be sustained.31 In all, 11 members of Reagan’s transition team came from Heritage, and the foundation’s pre-election document Mandate for Leadership became Reagan’s playscript for the presidency. It would be more accurate to call Reagan “Heritage’s man in Washington” rather than a representative of the American people, as this remembrance by Feulner demonstrates: It was Joe Coors’ belief in conservative principles such as limited government and economic freedom that led him, starting in the 1960s, to support a citizen politician from California named Ronald Reagan. 31. Strobe Talbott, Deadly Gambits (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), pp. 75-76. There is a consistent pattern in U.S. history of power brokers selecting weak Presidents.

150

Enemies by Design

Throughout the 1970s, Reagan often visited Joe’s home, usually winding up in the Coors kitchen. When Reagan was elected our 40th president, Joe became a member of his Kitchen Cabinet, offering staffing and policy suggestions, especially on national defense. His most important contribution was in the area of strategic missile defense. Like Reagan, Joe Coors had long known nuclear physicist Edward Teller, who stressed the vulnerability of the United States to nuclear attack. Coors agreed strongly that America had to have a defense against Soviet missiles. When Reagan entered the White House, Joe gladly joined a small group assembled by Teller that called itself High Frontier. I am proud to say that Heritage underwrote High Frontier’s first study calling for the development of a multi-satellite global ballistic missile-defense system.33

Economic fantasyland In economic matters, Reagan also followed the script he was given. One of his first acts was to make good on a pledge to cut taxes. Under the “KempRoth tax cut,” as it was known, the bottom tax rate fell from 14 to 10 percent and the top rate from 70 to 50 percent. This tax cut was the first step in a thoroughly Straussian economic strategy called “supply-side” economics. According to this theory, based on the ideas of California economist Arthur Laffer and conservative writer George Gilder, cutting taxes was the way to stimulate the economy, which was just coming out of a recession. According to this theory, businesses would reinvest their huge tax savings in production, technology and jobs, and this in turn would generate more income and help reduce the deficit. This theory of economic rejuvenation is also known as “trickle-down” because the benefit accruing to the economic elite at the top of the income pyramid is expected to trickle down to those at the bottom. One does not need a PhD in economics to recognize that “supply-side economics,” “trickle-down economics” or “Reaganomics,” as it was variously known, was unsound. There was no incentive or obligation to compel the wealthy to reinvest their tax cut, nor could there be, as that would run counter to the supply-siders’ Hobbesian, anti-statist mentality. Reagan’s economic script was initially written for Jack Kemp, the congressional standard bearer for supply-side economics, but he was a long shot to win the 1980 Republican nomination. In view of Reagan’s popularity, Kemp made a deal not to oppose Reagan if he would give supply-siders the lead in making policy. David Stockman, Reagan’s first budget director and a devout supplysider, thought Reagan was a preposterous choice to lead the Republicans, but he suppressed his misgivings. Stockman’s 1986 book The Triumph of Politics— 33. Edwin J. Feulner, “Coors R.I.P.” National Review online, March 18, 2003.

8. Housebreaking the U.S.

151

Why the Reagan Revolution Failed is largely his mea culpa for bringing about the economic disaster: I knew we were on the precipice of triple-digit deficits, a national debt in the trillions, and destructive and profound dislocations throughout the entire warp and woof of the American economy. By then, all the major errors that would eventually shatter the nation’s fiscal stability were apparent…but I kept quiet and tried to work inside. It proved to be of no avail. After November 1981, the administration locked the door on its own disastrous fiscal policy and threw away the key. The President would not let go of his tax cut. [Defense Secretary] Cap Weinberger hung on for dear life to the $1.46 trillion defense budget. Jim Baker carried a bazooka, firing first and asking questions later of anyone who mentioned the words ‘social security.’ [Mike] Deaver, [Ed] Meese and the others ceaselessly endeavored to keep all the bad news out of the Oval Office and off the tube. The nation’s fiscal imbalance was never addressed or corrected; it just festered and grew. By 1982, I knew the Reagan Revolution was impossible—it was a metaphor with no anchor in political and economic reality.34 Nowhere did the imbecility of “trickle-down” economics assert itself more fully than in Reagan’s bizarre promise to increase defense spending and balance the budget in three years without making serious social spending cuts to offset the tax cuts. For good reason, then-presidential rival George Bush Sr. called it “voodoo economics.” When Reagan came to office, the federal debt stood at $909 billion; by the time he left, it had nearly tripled to $2,601 billion. From 1981 to 1986, the Reagan administration slashed taxes by more than $750 billion, but all that did was make the rich much richer, the poor much poorer and the nation far more deeply indebted. The following 1985 account by Richard Stubbing, deputy chief of the Office of Management and Budget’s National Security division (1974-81) shows how elitism and militarism (Straussianism) supplanted responsible government: Excluding inflation, the 1985 defense budget approved by Congress is 51 percent higher than five years ago, reflecting a remarkable $330 billion in cumulative real growth since 1980. During the same period federal support for domestic programs, excluding interest payments and entitlement programs (retirement, health care, unemployment), declined by over 30 percent. … Following the election in November 1980, former Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird offered the following advice to the incoming Reagan team: ‘The worst thing that could happen is for the nation to go on a defense spending binge that will create economic 34. David Stockman, The Triumph of Politics—Why the Reagan Revolution Failed (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), pp. 13, 49.

152

Enemies by Design

havoc at home and confusion abroad, and that cannot be dealt with wisely by the Pentagon.” The Reagan Administration chose not to heed Laird’s warning.35 Table I: Defense Spending and Federal Debt, 1980–89, (US $billion, FY1998) Year

President

Defense Spending

Percent increase

Federal Debt

Percent increase

1980

Carter

$134.0

--

$909

--

1981

Carter

$157.5

17.5

$995

9.4

1982

Reagan

$186.3

18.3

$1,137

14.4

1983

Reagan

$209.9

12.7

$1,371

20.6

1984

Reagan

$227.4

8.3

$1,565

14.1

1985

Reagan

$252.7

11.1

$1,818

16.8

1986

Reagan

$273.4

8.2

$2,121

16.0

1987

Reagan

$282.0

3.1

$2,346

10.7

1988

Reagan

$290.4

3.0

$2,601

10.9

1989

Reagan

$295.3

1.7

$2,868

10.3

Source: U.S. Office of Management and Budget, Historical Tables: Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 1998 U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, pp. 303, 102.

Of course, Laird was not the first person to warn that out-of-control defense spending causes economic dislocation and international unease. President Dwight D. Eisenhower did so most famously in his 1961 Farewell Address. Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations…. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced 35. Richard Stubbing, “The Defense Program: Buildup or Binge?” Foreign Affairs, Spring 1985, p. 848.

8. Housebreaking the U.S.

153

power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.36 In the end, “Reaganomics” undermined and distorted the U.S. economy: • A rapid defense buildup and tight monetary policy combined to drive up the U.S. dollar by 50 percent in the early 1980s, thus creating a high demand for imports and undermining domestic industries. • Despite the 1981 tax cut, the national personal savings rate fell from nine percent in 1981 to five percent in 1987, and the growing budget deficit ate up more of the U.S. savings pool. • From 1981 to 1987, real government spending on goods and services rose by 26 percent, despite an economic plan that called for less spending.37 Thus, we see what Stockman meant when he said Reagan’s economic policy was “a metaphor with no anchor in political and economic reality.” This aphorism could also stand as testament to the utter failure of Strauss’s economic elitism, which was the essence of “Reaganomics.”

Foreign Policy— Begin shows Reagan who’s boss For all of his charisma and moral rectitude, Reagan would quickly find that he was little more than a bystander in foreign policy, even where U.S. law was concerned. In June 1981, Israel used U.S. F-16’s to bomb Iraq’s uncompleted Osirik nuclear reactor. This act of aggression clearly violated the U.S.-Israel arms procurement agreement, which stipulated that weapons may only be used for defensive purposes. Alexander Haig, Reagan’s Secretary of State, swept the matter under the rug. For his part, Reagan sent a letter to Begin to protest the bombing. In response, Begin threw the Nazi holocaust at Reagan: A million and half children were poisoned by the Ziklon [sic] gas during the Holocaust. Now Israel’s children were about to be poisoned by radioactivity. For two years we have lived in the shadow of the danger awaiting Israel from nuclear reactor in Iraq. This would have been a new Holocaust. It was prevented by the heroism of our pilots to whom we owe so much.38

36. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Military–Industrial Complex Speech, November 1960, . 37. Michael Mandel, “Lessons of the Reagan Years,” Business Week, Aug. 19, 1996. 38. Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall–Israel and the Arab World Since 1948 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), p. 387.

154

Enemies by Design

To compound the insult, the first person Begin called after the bombing was Jerry Falwell to ask him to “explain to the Christian public the reasons for the bombing.”39 Three months afterwards, Begin visited Reagan, who never once brought up the question of illegal Jewish “settlements,” or the difference between offensive and defensive weapons. Instead, the two leaders signed an agreement proclaiming U.S. “strategic co-operation” with Israel, although “Israeli co-optation of the U.S.” would be more accurate. During the Reagan era, annual economic aid to Israel rose to $1.2 billion, and military aid rose to $1.8 billion. As part of the agreement, Israel would have access to the most sophisticated U.S. technology and intelligence gathering systems, including techniques to defeat U.S. weapons and reconnaissance systems. As Alfred Lilienthal pointedly commented: “Henceforth, Israel was not to be the 51st state, as critics had complained, but the first state of the Union.”40 Israel’s abuse of U.S. technology was a key factor in the Osirik bombing. In early 1981, Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, wondered how Israel managed to target the Iraq’s reactor with such accuracy, and proceeded to make inquiries about Israel’s requisitioning of U.S. satellite photographs. According to mutual agreement, satellite data was to be shared only for defensive purposes so that Israel could highlight “potential direct threats.” “When I asked what materials had been drawn under that process for the last six months, I found not only a lot of information on Baghdad had been drawn, but also on other countries substantially removed from Israel… Pakistan, Libya,” said Inman. “And I made the decision as the deputy director of central intelligence, the acting director, to limit the process, to say that in the future they could draw material within 250 miles of the border, but beyond that, they would have to ask.”41 Inman goes on to say that then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon was so furious he came to the U.S. to protest to Reagan’s Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, but neither Weinberger nor CIA Director William Casey would cave in. Moreover, Inman enjoyed considerable bipartisan respect.42 39. That same year, Falwell become the first non-Jew to receive the Jabotinsky Award for Zionist Excellence. Two years earlier, Begin gave Falwell a Learjet. Donald Wagner, “Bible and Sword: U.S. Christian Zionists discover Israel,” Daily Star (Lebanon), Oct, 9, 2003. 40. Lilienthal, op. cit., p. 732. 41. Excerpts from transcript of televised news conference by Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, Jan. 18, 1994, cited in “Safire Media Attacks Began When Inman Blocked Israeli Access to U.S. Satellite Intelligence,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Feb./March 1994, p. 29. 42. Adm. Inman won easy Senate confirmation for his nomination, and became the first naval intelligence specialist ever to become a four-star admiral. Oklahoma Democratic Senator David Boren said of him: “It was principally Admiral Inman who first showed that the congressional oversight process could work.” Cited in Biography of Bobby Ray Inman, White House documents, Dec. 16, 1993, .

8. Housebreaking the U.S.

155

Of all the Middle East issues that bothered Reagan, Israel’s June 6, 1982, invasion of Lebanon was the most painful. Begin claimed that the invasion was meant to stop Palestinian attacks from southern Lebanon, but Israel quickly betrayed its true purpose when it laid siege to Beirut to push the PLO out of Lebanon. On June 14, Israel began a punishing two-month bombardment of Beirut’s civilian neighborhoods. More than 4,000 people were killed and untold numbers injured and buried alive under rubble. In one 14-hour assault, 180,000 shells were fired, and American-made bombers flew 200 sorties. For Reagan, the pictures of babies with burnt-off limbs, children dying of starvation and thirst, and weeping mothers was too much.43 He threatened to review U.S.-Israel relations because of the carpet-bombing of Beirut, but Begin again hid behind the Nazi holocaust to put Reagan in his place. Now may I tell you, dear Mr. President, how I feel these days when I turn to the creator of my soul in deep gratitude. I feel as a Prime Minister empowered to instruct a valiant army facing Berlin where amongst innocent civilians, Hitler and his henchmen hide in a bunker deep beneath the surface. My generation, dear Ron, swore on the altar of God that whoever proclaims his intent to destroy the Jewish state or the Jewish people, or both, seals his fate, so that which happened once on instruction from Berlin—with or without inverted commas—will never happen again.44 On Sept. 1, 1982, Reagan delivered a nationwide address in which he defined U.S. policy for Palestinian-Israeli peace. It was a moderate speech, replete with the requisite paeans to Israel and its history, but its significance lies in Reagan’s compassion for the suffering of the Palestinians. The following two paragraphs contain the key points: First, as outlined in the Camp David accords, there must be a period of time during which the Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza will have full autonomy over their own affairs. Due consideration must be given to the principle of self-government by the inhabitants of the territories and to the legitimate security concerns of the parties 43. “Horror for Lebanon,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Aug. 23, 1982, p. 2. “Today in Beirut, Arab children have their legs and arms amputated by candlelight in the basements of hospitals destroyed by bombs, without anesthetics, without sterilization. It is eleven days since proud veteran Israeli troops cut the electricity and water, and food and fuel supplies. We’re in August, a hot August. Rats already outnumber children in the city of Beirut, upon which the best pilots in the world, the aviators of the Israeli Air Force, are exercising their marvelous capacity for precision. From their planes they watch how the buildings of Beirut crumble. People in Beirut also observe those who leap from their windows, choosing a different death from those who were caught in buildings that were reduced to dust….In the second month of the war more children were killed in Beirut than during 30 years of terrorism in Israel.” Jacobo Timmerman, The Longest War—Israel in Lebanon (New York: Vintage, 1982), p. 162. Begin deliriously confuses Beirut with Berlin. 44. Shlaim, op. cit., pp. 404-405.

156

Enemies by Design

involved. The purpose of the five-year period of transition, which would begin after free elections for a self-governing Palestinian authority, is to prove to the Palestinians that they can run their own affairs and that such Palestinian autonomy poses no threat to Israel’s security. The United States will not support the use of any additional land for the purpose of settlements during the transitional period. Indeed, the immediate adoption of a settlement freeze by Israel, more than any other action, could create the confidence needed for wider participation in these talks. Further settlement activity is in no way necessary for the security of Israel and only diminishes the confidence of the Arabs that a final outcome can be freely and fairly negotiated.45 Within four days of the speech, Israel announced the allocation of $18.5 million to build the first three of 10 new “settlements.” Approval was given on the same day that Begin wrote a letter of protest to Reagan for his comments about Palestinian statehood. On Nov. 3, five more settlements were approved. Harsh condemnation led to Israel announcing 15 more settlements. The World Zionist Organization even called for 1.4 million Jews to be living in the West Bank by 2010.46 Even though the Lobby bullied previous administrations, its pressure had been external—from Jewish groups, senators, congressmen and the media. As Rabbi Alexander Schindler, the leader of Jewish political lobbying, said in April 1978: “The strength of Israel depends on the strength of the American Jewish community and its unity in support of Israel.”47 With Reagan in the White House, the Lobby was given the keys to government. Although Reagan did not appoint any Jews to his cabinet, many Zionists, including Israeli citizens, received key appointments to advisory and sub-cabinet policymaking positions. Thus, it came to pass that Ronald Reagan, the movie actor-turnedpolitical actor, was cast in a reality movie written, directed and produced by the Heritage Foundation and supply-side economic mystics. The Reagan Revolution, as this production came to be called, was a critical and financial failure, but it became a cult hit among Americans eager to imbibe simplistic slogans and jingoistic patter. Moreover, the backers of The Reagan Revolution were prepared to do anything to ensure an indefinite run. As a result of these machinations, Zionist influence on government proliferated, and the U.S. began to resemble an Israeli satrapy.

45. President Ronald Reagan, Address to the Nation on United States Policy for Peace in the Middle East, Sept. 1, 1982, . 46. “West Bank: Settlements Galore,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Nov. 15, 1982, p. 3. 47. Cited in Lilienthal op. cit., p. 709.

8. Housebreaking the U.S.

157

BURNING BUSH After the Berlin Wall fell on Nov. 9, 1989, the geopolitical social order changed radically: the Cold War was over, the Soviet Union disappeared, and the U.S. found itself without a clear external enemy. This was the world Reagan’s Vice-President and successor George Bush Sr. inherited. Bush was a reluctant Reaganaut. He was neither senile nor passively dependent on advisors. Thanks to his elite connections, Bush had spent much of his life in politics, including posts as UN ambassador and director of the CIA under Nixon. On foreign policy, Bush was an internationalist and pragmatist, and in the Middle East, he favored regional stability over Israel’s selfaggrandizement. Using the pretext of rolling back Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and protecting Saudi Arabia from an attack, he put together an international armed coalition to protect the U.S. Persian Gulf oil supply. Bush’s limited aims put him at odds with the radical Pentagon Zionists, whom he derisively called “the crazies.” The crazies wanted to use the Gulf War to oust Saddam Hussein, but then-Gen. Colin Powell (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) and field commander Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf opposed the idea on legal, political and military grounds. The United States had a UN mandate only to liberate Kuwait, not to topple Hussein—which would have torn apart the coalition. Regional allies like Turkey and Saudi Arabia feared that taking out Hussein would fragment Iraq into warring ethnic and religious factions. In one scenario, the Kurds in the north could spread rebellion to Turkey’s own Kurdish population, and Iraq’s majority Shi’ites could find themselves under Iranian influence. To his credit, Bush stared down the crazies, but he would not enjoy his victory for long. In 1991, Bush tried to breathe new life into Carter’s idea of a comprehensive Middle East peace. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev co-sponsored an Oct. 30–31 ministerial conference in Madrid to devise an end to the first Palestinian Intifada or uprising (literally, “shaking off”). A letter of invitation went out to the governments of Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan (including Palestine), the European Community, and the Gulf Cooperation Council (observer). At the time, the U.S. had still not recognized the PLO. Former terrorist and assassin Yitzhak Shamir, the Likud Prime Minister at the time, refused to participate. To compel his participation, Bush threatened to withhold $10 billion in loan guarantees. The threat worked, but the Lobby was furious, to say nothing of Shamir. The cause of their anger is obvious in these excerpts from Bush’s address. Our objective must be clear and straightforward. It is not simply to end the state of war in the Middle East and replace it with a state of nonbelligerency. This is not enough; this would not last. Rather, we seek

158

Enemies by Design

peace, real peace. And by real peace I mean treaties. Security. Diplomatic relations. Economic relations. Trade. Investment. Cultural exchange. Even tourism. What we seek is a Middle East where vast resources are no longer devoted to armaments. A Middle East where young people no longer have to dedicate and, all too often, give their lives to combat. A Middle East no longer victimized by fear and terror. A Middle East where normal men and women lead normal lives…. What we envision is a process of direct negotiations proceeding along two tracks, one between Israel and the Arab states; the other between Israel and the Palestinians. Negotiations are to be conducted on the basis of UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338…. Real peace—lasting peace—must be based upon security for all states and peoples, including Israel. For too long the Israeli people have lived in fear, surrounded by an unaccepting Arab world. Now is the ideal moment for the Arab world to demonstrate that attitudes have changed, that the Arab world is willing to live in peace with Israel and make allowances for Israel’s reasonable security needs. We know that peace must also be based on fairness. In the absence of fairness, there will be no legitimacy - no stability. This applies above all to the Palestinian people, many of whom have known turmoil and frustration above all else. Israel now has an opportunity to demonstrate that it is willing to enter into a new relationship with its Palestinian neighbors; one predicated upon mutual respect and cooperation.48 The very act of showing compassion for Palestinians and arguing for stability in the Middle East was logical and rational, but it posed a direct threat to the crazies and the colonialist ambitions of Israel’s ruling Likud party. Since 1968, Labor and Likud governments alike have supported progressive Jewish colonization in the Occupied Territories. On paper at least, Labor governments have been willing to trade land for peace, because they recognize that the occupation is the greatest threat to Israel’s security. On this point, the party has the backing of the vast majority of Israelis, who are tired of the violence. On the ground, Labor merely pursues expansionist results with greater discretion than Likud. Likud governments derive much of their electoral support from thuggish “settler” groups, who overtly terrorize and provoke Palestinians. As such, Likud does not want a political solution to the violence, because such a solution would compromise their power base and their messianic “Nile to Euphrates” expansionism. In short, Labor governments pay lip service to international law and profess to want a political solution, albeit one grossly unfair to the Palestinians. Likud governments care nothing for international law or 48. President George Bush, Madrid Conference Opening Speeches, Oct. 30-31, 1991, .

8. Housebreaking the U.S.

159

morality. They are deliberately provocative and bent on conducting a Nazistyle Lebensraum conquest and dispossession. In spirit if nothing else, Bush supported the Labor position, and for this reason he had to go. On Feb. 26, 1992, a domestic pressure group of crazies calling itself the “The Committee on U.S. Interests in the Middle East” took out a full-page ad in the New York Times to excoriate Bush for “pressuring” Israel to enter into negotiations based on “land for peace.” The attack was gratuitous, since Bush had peremptorily capitulated to Israel, as shown by the letters of assurance Secretary of State James Baker III sent to the two major parties. To the Palestinians he wrote: “‘The U.S. will accept any outcome agreed by the parties,’’ ignoring the fact that UNSC Res. 242 compels Israel to leave the Occupied Territories unconditionally, and renders the basis of any other agreement null and void. To the Israelis, Baker wrote: “Israel holds its own interpretation of Security Council Resolution 242 alongside other interpretations.”49 Nevertheless, the ad signaled the impending end of Bush’s presidency and the Lobby’s intention to return to the Democrats. In a 2002 article Should Israel Retaliate? Avi Davis, a Likudnik writer for the Freeman Center for Strategic Studies, typified the Israel Lobby’s anger with Bush. Ostensibly a discussion of whether Israel would again agree not to retaliate against attack as it did during the Gulf War, the piece was a character assassination of the Bush administration and a swipe at the Labor Party: • The last Bush administration was the most unfriendly to Israel since the country’s founding. • James Baker famously admonished the Israelis: call us when you are serious about peace, and repeated the identification of settlements as the major obstacle to achieving it. He turned US-Israeli relations into a bitter slogging match between lobbyists. • The first Bush Administration, flush with confidence in its new diplomatic muscle, railroaded an unwilling Shamir into a peace conference in Madrid. The conference… succeeded in revealing the depth of hatred for Israel (and, if we are to be truthful, for the U.S. itself) in the Arab world. • The United States has no better military, political or ideological ally in the Middle East [than Israel]. • [The U.S.] might finally acknowledge that the future of the Middle East lies in a quarantine of the region by a quadrilateral military alliance, linking those democratic countries such as Turkey, India, Israel and the United States, who feel most threatened by the export of militant Islam.50 49. Elaine C. Hagopian, “The Pope’s emphasis on Palestinian rights,” Boston Globe, May 16, 2001, p. 15. 50. Avi Davis, Should Israel Retaliate? Freeman Center for Strategic Studies, November 2002, .

160

Enemies by Design

With the last point we see the beginnings of the latest shift in Zionist strategy. Just as Israel and the Lobby pushed the “special relationship” as the foundation of U.S.-Israeli relations under Reagan, it now needed to adapt to a post-Cold War vacuum marked by the lack of an arch-enemy for the U.S. The new role for Israel would be as bulwark against the bogeyman of “Islamic fundamentalism.” It was an easy sell. By this time, the chief opposition to repressive regimes in the Arab world had taken Islamist forms, and Israel-firsters in the media, academia and Middle East “think tanks” were propagating the dogma of a global threat from Muslims who gratuitously hated Western freedoms, values and prosperity.

E A L P O W E R D O E S N O T L I E with the White House or Congress; it lies with the people and pressure groups that tell the president and Congress what to do. Lobbyists, academics and “think tanks” constitute the real governing class, as in the example of the Heritage Foundation’s dominance over Ronald Reagan.

Over the past half-century, especially the last 25 years, Christian and Jewish Zionists used this extra-governmental structure to become, in essence, the real government. The shadowy cabal at the Council on National Policy epitomizes Leo Strauss’s elite economic governing class imposing a moral order on society. Some of these “think tanks,” though, operate in plain sight. They carry deceptively neutral names and operate as tax-deductible educational foundations, but they are in fact part of an intricate network that fosters Straussian econotheology, Christian-Jewish Zionism, and hatred of Muslims.

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE— PROFILE OF A STRAUSSIAN/ZIONIST FRONT In its promotional blurb, the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research claims to be one of America’s largest and most respected “think tanks:” [The AEI] is dedicated to preserving and strengthening the foundations of freedom—limited government, private enterprise, vital cultural and political institutions, and a strong foreign policy and national defense— through scholarly research, open debate, and publications…. AEI publications are distributed widely to government officials and legislators, business executives, journalists, and academics; its conferences, seminars, and lectures are regularly covered by national television.

162

Enemies by Design

The institute’s 50 resident scholars and fellows include some of America’s foremost economists, legal scholars, political scientists, and foreign policy experts. The resident faculty is augmented by a network of more than one hundred adjunct scholars at universities and policy institutes throughout the United States and abroad. AEI scholars testify frequently before congressional committees, provide expert consultation to all branches of government, and are cited and reprinted in the national media more often than those of any other think tank. 1 Although the preceding is factually accurate, the implied connotation of public research in the national interest is not. The moniker “think tank” conveys the comforting illusion of intellectually honest advice and analysis. In plain language, the AEI is a propaganda mill with an inordinate ability to influence government. The institute began in 1943 in Washington D.C. when Lewis Brown, head of the Denver construction giant Johns-Manville, established it to oppose President Roosevelt’s New Deal policies. The AEI was little more than an eccentric mouthpiece for big business until former White House publicist William Baroody Jr. became president in 1977. It was he who turned the AEI into a well-funded, broad-based institute that could appeal to mainstream conservatives. According to Deborah Toler, a policy analyst at the Washington-based Institute for Public Accuracy: Baroody started AEI’s massive publicity campaigns, which included press releases about its seminars, forums and policy proposals, sending opinion pieces to newspapers and distributing free radio commentaries to broadcast stations. While the publicity campaign helped improve AEI’s image with the media, Baroody’s hiring of former Ford administration officials after the Republicans’ 1976 electoral defeat was also instrumental…. Baroody’s strategy was extremely successful, turning AEI into a $9 million, 154person Republican government-in-waiting. AEI employees who eventually became high-level Reagan officials included James C. Miller, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Murray Weidenbaum and Antonin Scalia.2 With the advent of the Straussian brand of American fascism under Reagan, however, the AEI found itself increasingly outfunded and outmaneuvered by the likes of Paul Weyrich’s Heritage Foundation. AEI Chairman William C. Butcher, chief executive officer of Chase Manhattan Bank, decided to jump aboard the bandwagon, and so in December 1986 he replaced Baroody with Christopher DeMuth, a former publicist in Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget. Since then, the institute has subsumed its former conservative economic and political ideology under a Straussian militancy. 1. See the institute’s website, www.aei.org. 2. Deborah Toler, “‘The Right’s ‘Race Desk’—American Enterprise Institute finds profit in prejudice,” Extra! March/April 1999, .

9. Invasion of the Policy Snatchers

163

Michael Ledeen— warmonger extraordinaire One of the clearest exponents of the symbiosis between Zionism and government policy is Michael Ledeen, who holds the institute’s ironically named Freedom Chair. Ledeen advocates nothing less than the de facto U.S.Israeli conquest of the Middle East, and writes with such venom and ignorance that he might as well be writing Likud policy papers, as in the following excerpt from the National Review, reprinted at AEI: Unable or unwilling to recognize that it is impossible to bring about a serious peace between Israel and the Palestinians unless Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia support it (and the current leaders of those countries will never support it, which is why they are the targets of the war against terrorism), the Bush administration, egged on by the Saudis, the Egyptians, and the Europeans, is desperately looking for a magic formula. They have bought into the big lie that we can’t wage war against the terror states until there is peace between Israel and the Palestinians. They have it backwards. If we destroy the terror masters in Baghdad, Damascus, Tehran, and Riyadh, we might have a chance of brokering a durable peace. Without that, it’s hopeless. The terror now afflicting Israel is not a purely Palestinian operation. Iran, Iraq, and Syria are all deeply involved, and Saudi Arabia foots many of the bills. Therefore there can be no “peace” until and unless we win the war... first. So let’s get on with the war. Faster, please.3 Just four months earlier on Feb. 19, 2003, Sharon said virtually the same thing to a group of visiting U.S. Congressmen: “[Iran, Libya and Syria] are irresponsible states, which must be disarmed of weapons of mass destruction, and a successful American move in Iraq as a model will make that easier to achieve.” After meeting with Israeli officials, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton reported that the U.S. would certainly attack Iraq, and that it would then be necessary to deal with threats from Syria, Iran and North Korea,4 even though such a widening of the conflict ran counter to the primary U.S. interest in promoting stability in the oil-rich region. Bolton is one of George W. Bush’s most zealous ideologues, and the leading proponent of confrontation with states that oppose Israel. He is also known to be argumentative and dogmatically opposed to international treaties, because he believes they impede the U.S. military will. He “successfully” sabotaged a 2001 biological weapons conference because it would have involved inspection of U.S. facilities, and earned exemptions for Americans before the International Criminal Court. Bolton rails against 3. Michael Ledeen, “What Is George Tenet Doing Anyway?” National Review onlne, June 3, 2002. 4. Aluf Benn, “Sharon says U.S. should also disarm Iran, Libya and Syria,” Ha’aretz, Feb. 20, 2003.

164

Enemies by Design

“rogue states” at the same time he pushes rogue U.S. conduct upon the world in defiance of international agreements. Before he joined the administration, Bolton served as the vice president of the AEI.5

Syria Ledeen’s castigation of Syria as one of the “terror masters” cannot be taken at face value, since it’s not based on any defensible argument, and conspicuously omits evidence of Israeli manipulation. Three days before the U.S. formally “ended” its war against Iraq on May 1, 2003, Israel’s U.S. ambassador Daniel Ayalon said the defeat of Saddam Hussein “helped create great opportunities for Israel,” but more had to be done. It was now time to apply economic and psychological pressure to isolate and overthrow regimes in Syria and Iran.6 Suddenly, Syria became a major U.S. focus, even though Bush did not include it in his infamous “axis of evil” speech. The new political and economic offensive would be driven by the same rumors and fabrications that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq—“weapons of mass destruction.” “Significant equipment, assets and perhaps even expertise was transferred, the first signs of which appeared in August or September 2002,” a Bush administration official told The Telegraph in early April 2003. “It is quite possible that Iraqi nuclear scientists went to Syria and that Saddam’s regime may retain part of its army there.”7 In that same news story, Sharon declared that Israel “was certain” Iraq had recently moved chemical or biological weapons into Syria. Further down, though, we read a week-old comment in which Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said the U.S. didn’t know if Hussein had exported weapons to Syria. Israel took command of the Syrian campaign on Oct. 5, 2003, when it bombed the Ein Saheb camp 22 kilometres northwest of Damascus, ostensibly in reprisal for a Haifa restaurant bombing. Israel claimed Islamic Jihad used the camp to train terrorists; in fact, the camp had never belonged to Islamic Jihad but to the Damascus-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command, and even then it had been abandoned. Abu Emad El-Refaei, an Islamic Jihad spokesman in Beirut, told al-Jazeera that all the group’s military bases were inside the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The only casualty of the bombing was an injured civilian guard.8

5. Barbara Slavin and Bill Nichols Bolton, “A ‘guided missile’” USA Today, Dec 1, 2003. 6. Jonathan Wright, Israeli Ambassador to US Calls for ‘Regime Change’ in Iran, Syria, April 28, 2003, . 7. Toby Harnden, “Syria now top U.S. target for ‘regime change,’” The Telegraph, April 8, 2003. 8. “Israel Bombs Alleged Terror Base in Syria; U.N. to Meet on Israeli Strike in Syria,” Associated Press, Oct. 5, 2003.

9. Invasion of the Policy Snatchers

165

To keep up the propaganda barrage, Israel’s UN ambassador Dan Gillerman that same day called Israel’s attack a “measured defensive response” that did not violate international law. This was a blatant lie because Article 51 of the UN Charter, which Gillerman cited, does not condone pre-emptive attacks, and Articles 33 to 38 rule out unilateral aggression. Moreover, the target in question was not a threat.9 Gillerman also justified the attack by claiming that Syria provided “safe harbour, training facilities, funding, logistical support” to terrorist groups; this happens to be the same justification Nixon gave for the secret bombing of Cambodia. That bombardment, which began on Feb. 22, 1969, ultimately led to the Watergate break-in and cover-up that brought down Nixon’s presidency. It also led to the 1973 War Powers Act by which Congress banned bombing of Cambodia and compelled the president to consult Congress before committing troops. If the U.S. Congress recognized that the bombing of Cambodia was illegal, it should do the same in the case of Syria. Nevertheless, on Nov. 11, the Senate passed the punitive H.R. 1828, The Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act, which reads in part: “A bill to halt Syrian support for terrorism, end its occupation of Lebanon, stop its development of weapons of mass destruction, cease its illegal importation of Iraqi oil and illegal shipments of weapons and other military items to Iraq, and by so doing hold Syria accountable for the serious international security problems it has caused in the Middle East.”10 The Act also bans exports of dual-use technology, allows the U.S. to freeze Syria’s assets in the United States, and restricts overflight rights for Syrian aircraft inside U.S. airspace. The vote passed by 89 votes to four with seven Senators not voting. Sen. Robert Byrd (D-West Virginia) told Agence France Presse he feared the bill could be used to manufacture a pretext for military intervention: The bill speaks of “hostile actions” by Syria against US-led forces in Iraq. I have not seen any evidence that would lead me to believe that it is the government of Syria that is responsible for the attacks against our troops in Iraq. Such insinuations can only build the case for military action against Syria, which, unfortunately, is a very real possibility because of the dangerous doctrine of pre-emption created by the Bush administration.11 9. Fionnuala Sweeney, Brent Sadler and Rula Amin, Syria asks UN to condemn Israel, CNN.com, Oct. 5, 2003. 10. H.R. 1828 (as amended), U.S. Senate Roll Call Votes 108th Congress–1st Session, Nov. 11, 2003, . 11. “Sen Byrd: U.S. Syria bill could lead to an invasion,” Agence France Press, Nov. 12, 2003, .

166

Enemies by Design

Meanwhile, a U.S. team investigating multiple reports of banned weapons or weapons-related substances moving from Iraq into Syria, Iran and Jordan had turned up nothing. National Security advisor Condoleezza Rice conceded this point three days after the Syria Accountability Act was passed: “I’ve seen reports, as everyone has. We don’t have any evidence at this point that that’s what happened.”12 The U.S. case against Syria is worse than threadbare, but it serves Israel’s interests by putting Syrian President Bashar Assad in an untenable position, especially because of the Israeli attack. If he stands up to the U.S.-Israeli aggression, he invites the destruction of his country; if he does nothing, he risks undermining his own legitimacy. None of this reasoning appears anywhere in Ledeen’s alleged analysis.

Iran Two days after Ayalon spoke of the need to apply political and economic pressure on Syria and Iran, Ledeen also wrote about the need to use political and economic pressure to topple these regimes: “The Syrians and the Iranians are going to fight now in Iraq. They are not going to send their armies against us, but rather a swarm of terrorists, from Hezballah to Islamic Jihad, Hamas, al-Qaida, Ansar al-Islam, and the rest of the jihad mafia.” The irresponsible hyperbole in this passage demonstrates that neither Ledeen nor the AEI is familiar with responsible scholarship on the Middle East. As was the case with Syria and Iraq, the political and economic pressure on Iran would be applied through intimidation and coercion over “weapons of mass destruction.” The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna monitors compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and would be the body to determine if Iran, a signatory, were producing such weapons in violation of the treaty. Nevertheless, the United States had already prejudged the matter. On June 11, Rumsfeld declared: “The intelligence community in the United States and around the world currently assess that Iran does not have nuclear weapons. The assessment is that they do have a very active program and are likely to have nuclear weapons in a relatively short period of time.”13 Why the U.S. should want to pick a fight with Iran at this time seems strange, given that its forces are bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq.

12. “U.S. Has No Evidence Iraq Hid Banned Arms in Syria,” Reuters, Nov. 14, 2003, . 13. Richard Bernstein, “Rumsfeld Says Iran Is Developing Nuclear Arms Under Guise of Civilian Program,” New York Times, June 12, 2003.

9. Invasion of the Policy Snatchers

167

Since Rumsfeld’s statement came about six weeks after the end of offensive operations in Iraq, one could argue that the U.S. felt it would soon extricate itself and be in a position to face Iran. This view, though, doesn’t account for the subsequent inconsistencies in U.S. rhetoric toward Iran or the realignment of its overseas military forces. A better interpretation of this belligerency comes from a piece Ledeen wrote for the Wall Street Journal the same day Rumsfeld spoke: Iran’s support of the hard-core Palestinian terrorists, from Hamas to Islamic Jihad, is one of the major obstacles to any hopes for a viable peace settlement. Iraq’s support of terrorism was miniscule compared to Iran’s activities. If we are serious about winning the war against the terror masters, the Tehran regime must fall.14 Since Hamas and Islamic Jihad target Israel, not the U.S., Ledeen’s use of “we” must be read as Israeli agitprop. Like all the crazies, many of whom are spawned and reared at the AEI, Ledeen treats U.S. interests, resources, prestige and lives as commodities to be expended in the service of Greater Israel. According to the standard Zionist argument, Iran is developing an offensive nuclear capability, presumably to use against Israel. On Sept. 17, Ledeen wrote a scaremongering piece for the National Review built entirely out of conjecture and innuendo. It concluded: “If Iran turns up with the bomb, that would add urgency to our ongoing war against the terror masters in Tehran. Let’s hope we have time to do that before they use the thing.”15 Yet the U.S., which bristles with nuclear weapons, has a lot more to do with promoting anxiety in the region than does Iran. Erich Marquardt, Middle East analyst for the Power and Interest News Report, argues persuasively that the U.S. is provoking Tehran into building a nuclear arsenal: After establishing military bases in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Bush administration had engineered the successful projection of U.S. power and influence into Central Asia that could then be used to achieve U.S. interests in the region. This sudden change of the geopolitical map on both Iran’s western and eastern borders has led to the conclusion in Tehran that it must make itself militarily powerful in order to continue to secure its interests and, most importantly, its territorial and governmental integrity. This explains why in recent days Iran has continued to focus attention on its Shahab-3 missile, which was fully and successfully tested on July 15, 2000. According to the Federation of American Scientists, these missiles have the ability to strike targets within a 1,350 to 1,500 kilo– meter range, putting them well within striking capability of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, and also within striking distance of Israel.16 14. Michael Ledeen, “The Tehran Regime Must Fall,” Wall Street Journal, June 11, 2003. 15. Michael Ledeen “The Ayatollahs’ Bomb,” National Review Online, Sept. 17, 2003. 16. Erich Marquardt, “Iran’s Race for Nuclear Weapons,” The Power and Interest News Report, Sept. 29, 2003.

168

Enemies by Design

The U.S. is pressing the international community to act as soon as possible, said Marquardt, because when Iran’s main reactor at Bushehr is loaded with nuclear fuel sometime this year, any attempt to destroy it from the air would risk nuclear fallout. Strong parallels between the AEI and the government are visible in the near identical comments of Ledeen and the Bush administration concerning the need for non-military pressure to change the Iranian regime, specifically regarding a popular uprising. On June 6, Powell told CBS: “What we have to do is keep showing to the Iranian people that there is a better world out there waiting for you, and you can become a more responsible member of the international community if you stop supporting terrorist activity and if you stop trying to develop weapons of mass destruction.”17 A month later in the National Review, Ledeen urged the U.S. to stoke antigovernment rebellion in Iran: I have long argued that the United States could provide the decisive support that would guarantee success of the democratic revolution. All Iranians, from the top ayatollahs to the student organizers, believe that America is capable of guaranteeing the outcome of the conflict, and they are all trying to decipher the American strategy. Whenever President Bush speaks warmly of the demonstrators, they are enormously encouraged; whenever some other official--typically from the State Department--speaks words subject to many interpretations (or, worse still, proclaims the current regime “a democracy,” as Deputy Secretary of State [Richard] Armitage did in February), it sends a chill through the hearts of the freedom fighters…. The doom of the mullahs will not come from the barrel of a gun. It will come from millions of Iranians in the public spaces of the major cities, demanding an end to their misery. So what are we waiting for?18 Ledeen and the other crazies caught a break last year when Iran admitted that it had not been totally forthcoming about making nuclear safety reports to the IAEA. In June, Iran’s nuclear energy chief Gholamreza Aghazadeh said that in 1991 the government failed to report the purchase of a small amount of uranium hexofluoride (UF6), which is used for uranium enrichment. In fact, Iran had failed to meet its obligations under the IAEA’s Safeguards Agreement for 18 years concerning:

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is not a one-way street; non-nuclear powers agree to refrain from developing nuclear weapons in exchange for an undertaking by the nuclear signatories not to threaten them. Israel has broken both sides of the agreement. 17. Iran Admits Importing Uranium, Associated Press, June 9, 2003, . 18. Michael Ledeen “The Future of Iran,” National Review Online, July 9, 2003.

9. Invasion of the Policy Snatchers

169

• reporting of nuclear material and its processing and use; • declaring the facilities where such material was being processed and stored; • enriching uranium and separating plutonium in said undeclared facilities, in the absence of IAEA safeguards; • continuing a pattern of concealment that led to breaches of safeguard obligations; and • supplying contradictory information to the Director-General of the IAEA.19 Serious though these failures were, though, they did not constitute formal violations of the Non-Proliferation Treaty; therefore, Iran’s conduct did not have to be referred to the UN Security Council for action. At its Sept. 12 meeting, the IAEA Board of Governors gave Iran until Oct. 31 to submit documents to prove that its nuclear program was for peaceful civilian purposes. It also asked Iran to sign an additional protocol permitting snap IAEA inspections of nuclear sites—Arak, 240 kilometres southwest of Tehran, and Nantaz, 250 miles to the south. The IAEA was particularly concerned about the Nantaz site, because it contains a higher percentage of enriched uranium than is considered necessary for a civilian power program. Iran’s Foreign Minister Kamal Karrazi attributed the higher percentage to contamination of imported components.20 To induce Iran to meet the Oct. 31, 2003, deadline and sign the additional protocol, the U.K., France and Germany offered renewed trade negotiations and access to nuclear technology. In the end, Iran met the deadline and 10 days later signed the protocol. Iran agreed to suspend all enrichment and reprocessing activities, especially at Nantaz; production of feed material for enrichment; and the importation of enrichment-related items.21 Hassan Rowhani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, subsequently asserted that Iran would determine how long this voluntary fuelrestraint measure would last, given that it plans to generate 6,000 megawatts of electricity within 20 years: “Our decision to suspend uranium enrichment is voluntary and temporary. Uranium enrichment is Iran’s natural right, and [Iran] will reserve for itself this right. … There has been and there will be no question of a permanent suspension or halt at all.”22

19. Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in the Islamic Republic of Iran, IAEA, Nov. 26, 2003, . 20. Iran minister denies nuke program, CNN.com, Aug, 28, 2003. 21. Iran to sign Additional Protocol and Suspend Uranium Enrichment and Reprocessing (Press Release 2003/13), IAEA, Nov. 10, 2003, . 22. Erich Marquardt, “Tehran Outmaneuvers Washington for Now,”PINR, Dec. 4, 2003.

170

Enemies by Design

In its final report of Nov. 26, which had been leaked five days earlier, ElBaradei condemned Iran’s prior transgressions, praised its new openness, and found no evidence of a weapons program. On the other hand, he was not prepared to accept that Iran’s nuclear energy was meant entirely for peaceful purposes until further research was done. El-Baradei’s report infuriated the U.S., especially Bolton, who wanted him to include explicit “trigger mechanisms” to send problems of compliance to the Security Council. The U.S. also attacked El-Baradei for not declaring Iran guilty of pursuing nuclear weapons and violating the NPT. The disrespectful conduct towards El-Baradei by U.S. envoy to the IAEA Kenneth Brill was appalling.23 El-Baradei defended the IAEA against Brill’s accusations by saying simply: “We reflect facts, as radar does, without partiality.” That, for the U.S., was the problem. In the fallout from this contrived dust-up, Iran clearly emerged the victor. As the Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov told CNN on Nov. 18: “I see no grounds for imposing sanctions against Iran. On the contrary, if it carries out its obligations to the IAEA, the world community, on the basis of international agreements, is obliged to assist Iran in developing its nuclear program for peaceful aims.”24 The U.S. had no support among the other nations on the IAEA board and its disparagement of El-Baradei and the IAEA report exposed the shallowness of its case and alienated key nations, especially Russia. The reasons for picking this fight are no real mystery. U.S. harassment of Iran at the IAEA is part of a co-ordinated Israeli campaign to destroy Iran’s nuclear industry.25 Meir Dagan, director of Israel’s spy agency Mossad, has called Iran an “existential threat” to Israel, thus showing that the question of peaceful or military intent is irrelevant. The real threat is that Iran will break Israel’s nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. Consequently, Israel is prepared to launch an Osirik-style pre-emptive attack if international coercion does not shut down Iran’s nuclear program, and the U.S. is more than willing to use any excuse to trigger a crisis, even though no evidence of nuclear weapons exists.26 Nowhere in its analysis does the AEI offer any useful research about the views of Iran or Syria, much less take up the subject of U.S.-Israeli collusion. One would think that an institute conducting public policy research would provide as complete a picture of a subject as possible, but as stated above, such bodies serve private agendas, not the public interest. 23. “U.S. Sparks UN Nuclear Flap,” Associated Press, Nov. 21, 2003, . 24. Marquardt, Dec. 4, 2003, op. cit. 25. Nicole Gaouette, “Israel: Iran is now danger No. 1,” Christian Science Monitor, Nov. 28, 2003. 26. “Tests Show No Nuke Activity at Iran Site,” Associated Press, Sept. 28, 2004.

9. Invasion of the Policy Snatchers

171

AEI’s main financiers According to its 2002 annual report, the AEI raised $23,567,256 for fiscal year 2001 from individuals (35 percent), foundations (34 percent), corporations (24 percent), and conferences, sales and other sources (7 percent). However, we’re not given specifics about these donors. All the public sees is: “The institute is an independent, nonprofit organization supported primarily by grants and contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals.” Generally speaking, the AEI benefits from the same largesse as Heritage does, but two major donors deserve special mention.27

The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation The Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, gives generously to numerous cultural, educational, economic and political causes, but especially to institutes and individuals that advocate a return to absolute laissez-faire capitalism, and by extension oppose business regulation, welfare reform and social spending.28 It also staunchly supports increased defense spending. (The Bradleys gave their name to the U.S. Army’s Bradley fighting vehicle.) In 1985, the Allen-Bradley Company, a major manufacturer of electronic and radio components, was sold to supergiant defense contractor Rockwell International for $1.65 billion. Assets of the Allen-Bradley foundation jumped from $14 million to $290 million and it was renamed “The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation,” in honor of the brothers who founded Allen-Bradley in 1903. Bradley president Michael Joyce was the main architect of the skein of foundations, institutes and activist organizations that became a self-sustaining propaganda industry. After the Democrats reclaimed the White House in 1992, influential Republican government officials found safe havens in these institutes where millions of dollars’ worth of foundation grant money allowed them to influence government policy. With Joyce as its president, the Bradley foundation emerged as the strongest Straussian foundation in the country.

John M. Olin Foundation The John M. Olin Foundation is a byproduct of the New York-based Olin chemical and munitions fortune. In 2002, the foundation doled out $17,062,603, down from $20,905,961 the year before. Many of the beneficiaries are the same ones that benefit from the Bradley Foundation. 27. Background data for these foundations come from Media Transparency (mediatransparency.org.), People for the American Way (pfaw.org), and individual annual reports, unless otherwise noted. 28. Last year, Bradley Foundation assets fell to $500 million, from a high of $715 million in 2000, due to a declining stock market. (Alan J Borsuk, “Funding’s new heavy-hitter,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel online, Feb. 9, 2003.)

172

Enemies by Design

Joyce serves as an example of the cross-pollination among these groups. In 1979, at the behest of Irving Kristol and William Simon, he left as president of the Allen-Bradley foundation to run the Olin Foundation. In 1985, Joyce returned to Bradley until his retirement in 2001. Olin funding also shows a connection to Strauss’s economic élitism. For example, as Toler points out, after DeMuth took over, the AEI created a “race desk,” consisting of Judge Robert H. Bork (John M. Olin Scholar in Legal Studies), Dinesh D’Souza (a John M. Olin Research Fellow), and Charles Murray, a Bradley Fellow, who wrote the contentious book The Bell Curve, in which he equated intelligence with race. Murray received a $100,000 annual grant from the Bradley Foundation, but his views were so objectionable that in 1990 he was obliged to leave his position at the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. Joyce, who oversees Bradley donations to Manhattan, continued Murray’s $100,000 stipend when he moved to the AEI.29 Also typical of the specious “scholarship” the AEI churns out is Bork’s essay Civil Liberties after 9/11—a polemic against civil libertarians and critics of the Bush administration, as well as an apologia for racial profiling and the PATRIOT Act’s Orwellian surveillance, search and seizure provisions.30 As an Olin chair in Legal Studies, Bork has received nearly $163,000 annually since 1984. For his part, Kristol received more than $380,000 between 1992 and 1994 as an Olin fellow. The following table shows how well funded the Straussian-Zionist propaganda industry is. In addition to the AEI, Heritage and Free Congress, the table includes: • Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies—Founded in the early 1980s, the society is a network of radical libertarian law students, alumni and attorneys that denies the government or the judiciary any role in attenuating a citizen’s or business’s self-interest. Society members believe that any attempt to regulate industry or civil rights is proof of “an activist liberal bias” that aims to create a uniform society. Current Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is a founding member. • Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace—Founded in 1919 by future president Herbert Hoover, the institution is an exponent of radical laissez-faire economics. It promotes “ideas defining a free society,” in which government activity in education, industry or the environment is seen as a threat to freedom. • Hudson Institute—Founded in 1961, the institute advocates the abolition of federally funded Social Security and corporate income taxes. Its 29. “Buying a Movement—The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation,” . 30. Robert H. Bork, “Civil Liberties after 9/11,” Commentary (Vol. 116, No. 1, July-August 2003), pp. 29-35.

173

9. Invasion of the Policy Snatchers

center on Middle East Studies is led by well-known Zionist Meyrav Wurmser, former executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). • Manhattan Institute for Policy Research—Founded in 1978, the institute advocates privatization of public maintenance services and public education, and cuts to social welfare programs. Table II: Sample of financial support for Straussian/Zionist organizations (US$000, FY2002) RECIPIENT ORGANIZATION

FOUNDATION Bradley

Olin

Sarah Scaife

AEI

750

661

25

Federalist Society

100

602

Heritage

200

Free Congress

Carthage

Scaife Fam.*

Smith R’son†

Castle Rock

100

84

625

245

300

100

--

--

135

400

1,375

15

100

--

1,949

200

--

900

250

--

--

1,050

Hoover Institution

375

445

600

--

--

265

25

Hudson Institute

510

280

200

85

32

200

55

Manhattan Institute

200

443

150

30

4

231

70

*Annual average (1985-2001). †FY2001 Sources: annual reports, MediaTransparency.org, disinfopedia.org.

In addition to the AEI, an understanding of the following three Zionist fronts is integral to understanding how the U.S. began to lose control of its foreign policy in the Reagan-Bush years. In what follows, two items are of particular note. The first is the conspicuous recurrence of key names. Although these groups are nominally different, overlapping memberships demonstrate that they drink from each other’s bathwater. The second point is the connection between these groups and the Reagan administration, which made the infiltration of government possible.

J E W I S H I N S T I T U T E F O R N AT I O N A L S E C U R I T Y A F FA I R S ( J I N S A ) The Nixon Administration’s less-than-zealous support for Israel during the 1973 war led to the creation of the first overtly pro-Israel lobby group. According to Herbert Fierst, a founding member of JINSA and a leading Washington attorney, “During the 1973 war, a number of us began meeting with Pentagon officials to discuss getting supplies to Israel. We did it as

174

Enemies by Design

individuals, not members of a particular group. At that time, JINSA only existed as an idea, not as a functioning effort.”31 Other founders were former Reagan-era arms negotiator Max M. Kampelman, State Department Assistant Secretary for Human Rights Richard Schifter, Washington-area businessman Saul Stem, and former member of the White House science board Dr. Lawrence Goldmuntz. JINSA’s primary mission, as stated on its website, is two-fold: • To educate the American public about the importance of an effective U.S. defense capability so that our vital interests as Americans can be safeguarded; and • To inform the American defense and foreign affairs community about the important role Israel can and does play in bolstering democratic interests in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. JINSA’s main activity is the General and Flag Officer’s Program. In collaboration with the Pentagon and the U.S. Department of State, JINSA officials bring retired senior military officers on information visits to Israel and Jordan, and set up meetings with political and military leaders of both countries. JINSA has also recently begun to coordinate the sharing of counter-terrorism experience and tactics between U.S. law enforcement agencies and the Israeli national police. JINSA also acts as a liaison between the U.S. military, concerned citizens and Congress. It facilitates visits to military bases, holds symposia, and produces papers that highlight trends, and areas of concern regarding U.S. national security.

Serving two masters The interrelation between the “JINSANs” and the government has deep roots. In 1977, the founders chose as their executive director Michael Ledeen, who at the time was a visiting professor of history at the University of Rome. Although he is still a board member, Ledeen’s JINSA affiliations do not appear in any of his official biographies. After serving as executive director, Ledeen entered government on the coattails of Reagan’s presidential victory. From 1982 to 1986 he served as consultant to the White House, Pentagon, State Department, and the Italian military intelligence service. Ledeen is most infamously remembered as the central figure in the “armsfor-hostages” scandal (Irangate), which exposed the Reagan administration’s involvement in illegal arm sales to Iran via Israel. In 1984, Ledeen served as go-between for Oliver North and Israeli spy David Kimche to gain the release of U.S. hostages in Beirut through Iranian arms dealer and Mossad agent Manucher Ghorbanifar. In congressional testimony, National Security 31. Mark H. Milstein “Strategic Ties or Tentacles? Institute for National Security Affairs,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October 1991, p. 27.

9. Invasion of the Policy Snatchers

175

advisor Robert McFarlane stated that Ledeen violated procedure by bypassing the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv to deal directly with Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres.32 Ledeen’s successor at JINSA was Stephen Bryen, who epitomizes the ease with which pro-Israeli Jews infiltrate the government. In 1978, a North Dakota businessman, Michael Saba, was in a Washington hotel coffee shop ordering breakfast when he overheard Bryen offer a top-secret document on Saudi air bases to a group of visiting officials from the Israel Ministry of Defense. At the time, Bryen was on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Saba was struck by the inclusive “we” tone of the conversation with these agents of a foreign government and began taking notes. According to his account, the conversation concerned strategies Israel could use to reverse the steep decline in administration and congressional support for Israel caused by Menachem Begin’s religious justifications for holding on to the West Bank: “We must re-establish credibility,” Bryen told the group in English. “The West Bank can be gained on security grounds. To get [Senator Henry] Jackson and the others back we must push the security issue.” …. An Israeli asked Bryen if certain military information were available. “I have the Pentagon document on the bases, which you are welcome to see,” [said Bryen.]33 Saba, who is also former executive director of the National Association of Arab Americans (NAAA), took his concerns to the Justice Department. Subsequently, department and FBI investigators turned up sufficient evidence to consider a charge of espionage. In his book They Dare to Speak Out, former Congressman Paul Findley summarizes the case: After nine months the investigating attorneys recommended that a grand jury be empanelled to consider the evidence against Bryen. According to the Justice Department, other witnesses testified to Bryen’s Israeli contacts. Indeed, a Justice Department memorandum dated January 26, 1979, discussed “unresolved questions thus far, which suggest that Bryen is (a) gathering classified information for the Israelis, (b) acting as their unregistered agent and (c) lying about it….” The Justice Department studied the complaint for two years. Although it found that Bryen had an “unusually close relationship with Israel,” it made no charges and in late 1979 closed the file.34 During the investigation, Bryen was suspended from the committee but was later reinstated. Despite a series of successful NAAA appeals, Bryen was never indicted. As Saba wrote, Deputy U.S. Attorney General Philip 32. Ibid. Ledeen affirms that his meetings had been approved. 33. Richard H. Curtiss, “Book Review: Michael P. Saba, The Armageddon Network” (Brattleboro, VT: Amana Books, 1984), WRMEA, Nov. 26, 1984, p.10. 34. Paul Findley, They Dare to Speak Out, (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1989), Ch. 5.

176

Enemies by Design

Heymann was a long-time professional associate and close friend of Bryen’s lawyer. Saba’s book The Armageddon Network is a history of the Bryen investigation, his current activities, and the Justice Department’s role. He raises the possibility that the department might have covered up Israeli espionage.35 After his reinstatement, Bryen left the committee to succeed Ledeen at JINSA, where he could work for Israel under the pretext of promoting the “strategic relationship.” He remained as executive director until he resigned in early 1981 in favor of his wife Shoshona. Bryen still kept his membership on the JINSA board of directors when he subsequently took up his new post as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, responsible for regulating military technology transfers to foreign countries. Thus, at the very onset of the Zionist-dominated Reagan presidency, this member of JINSA and suspected Israeli spy was placed in the highly sensitive position of helping decide which weapons Israel could buy with its annual allotment of military aid, and also which technology Israel could use in its own arms industry. Israel’s abuse of U.S. satellite intelligence to bomb Iraq’s Osirik nuclear reactor also occurred at this time. The man responsible for Bryen’s appointment was under Assistant Secretary-designate Richard Perle, the most powerful Israeli agent in the government. Perle also had a history in politics as a staff member for hawkish pro-Israel Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. He also had more than casual contact with Israeli officials. In 1970, an FBI wiretap summary recorded Perle discussing classified information with the Israeli embassy, and in 1983, while in the government, he received payments to represent the interests of an Israeli weapons company.36 Perle was the mentor of Wolfowitz, architect of the Gulf War while George W. Bush’s Assistant Secretary of Defense, a research fellow at the AEI, former member of the Defense Policy Board, and current member of the JINSA advisory board. Other key board members past and present include: Dick Cheney, Douglas Feith (the third-highest executive at the Pentagon), Jeane Kirkpatrick (Reagan’s UN ambassador), John Bolton, Sen. Connie Mack, Congressmen Jack Kemp and Stephen Solarz, Lt.-Gen. Jay Garner (George W. Bush’s first viceroy in post-invasion Iraq), and Ahmad Chalabi (head of the Iraqi National Congress).

CENTER FOR SECURITY POLICY (CSP) Formed in 1988, the Center for Security Policy was nominally different from JINSA, but it might as well be considered JINSA’s defense and foreign policy arm, since its leadership features many of the same people—Perle, Ledeen, Kirkpatrick, etc. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. Perle said the fees were for work done before he entered government.

9. Invasion of the Policy Snatchers

177

The center is run by Frank Gaffney, and these highlights from his CSP bio show how fast the Zionists spread throughout the Reagan administration. • late 1970s—with Perle on the staff of Sen. Jackson, specializing in defense and foreign policy. • February 1981 to August 1983— staff member on the Senate Armed Services Committee. • August 1983 until November 1987—Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy under Perle. • April to November 1987—Succeeded Perle as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, and chaired the prestigious High Level Group, NATO’s senior politico-military committee. Whereas JINSA declares its Israeli bias up front, the CSP hides behind an innocuous, generic name. The center is little more than a reflection of Gaffney’s own simplistic, militant prejudices, and as such cannot seriously be considered a research institution. If there’s an anti-Arab, anti-UN, pro-Israeli, pro-military or obsequiously pro-George W. Bush position, the CSP will adopt it. The CSP is less of an independent organization than it is a recycler of writings from other Zionist sources like The National Review, American Spectator, Fox News, New York Post, frontpagemagazine.com and townhall.com. To give an example of the incestuous nature of the Zionist fronts, frontpagemagazine.com managing editor Jamie Glazov offered up a fawning interview with Ledeen in which he affected Ledeen’s “terrorist” vocabulary and asked him leading questions to elicit the proper anti-Arab responses. At no time did Glazov identify Ledeen as a member of JINSA, yet the interview was dutifully reposted on the CSP website as if it were from an outside source. In all, the CSP supplied 22 members to the incoming Bush administration, including Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith and Secretary of the Air Force James Roche. Of late, though, the CSP may have become a victim of its own venom. As Jason Vest wrote in The Nation: “Gaffney has worn out his welcome by being an overbearing gadfly rather than a serious contributor to policy,” says a senior Pentagon political official. Since earlier this year, White House political adviser Karl Rove has been casting about for someone to start a new, more mainstream defense group that would counter the influence of CSP…. “A lot of us have taken [Gaffney] at face value over the years,” one influential conservative says. “Yet we now know he’s pushed for some of the most flawed missile defense and conventional systems…And since 9/11, he’s been less concerned with the threat to America than to Israel.”37 37. Jason Vest, “The Men From JINSA and CSP,” The Nation, Sept. 2, 2002.

178

Enemies by Design

WASHINGTON INSTITUTE FOR NEAR EAST POLICY (WINEP) Of all these Zionist fronts, the respectable-sounding Washington Institute for Near East Policy most clearly epitomizes the surreptitious hijacking of U.S. policy. WINEP began as an offshoot of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most influential Israeli lobby group in Washington D.C. In February 1985, Martin Indyk, a three-year employee of AIPAC, cofounded WINEP with Barbi Weinstein, former president of the Jewish Federation in Los Angeles and wife of AIPAC chairman emeritus Lawrence Weinberg. Indyk sought to model WINEP after the Brookings Institution, and promote it as a “balanced and realistic” voice on the Middle East, but WINEP’s transparent pro-Israel bias and links to AIPAC say otherwise. Of the more than 100 members on the institute’s board of trustees, 14 also sat on AIPAC’s board. In turn, six members of WINEP’s 11 executive committee members served on AIPAC’s executive committee or national council, including Weinberg and two of WINEP’s three vice-presidents. AIPAC also provided office space and services to WINEP during its first year.38

“Building for Peace” In 1988, WINEP became to President Bush what the Heritage Foundation was to Reagan in 1980—it set the agenda and sent its people into government. Just before the November 1998 election, WINEP issued the 113page report Building for Peace: An American Strategy for the Middle East, a howto-manual to stall Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations to the point where Israel would not have to give up anything. One such tactical recommendation was to follow Israel’s lead in refusing to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization, even though the PLO recognized Israel that same month at a session of the Palestine National Council. Building for Peace recommended essentially four basic principles it said the Bush government had to achieve before diplomacy could work: 1. The legitimate rights of the Palestinians should be secured through direct negotiations. 2. The principal participants in the negotiations must be Israel, Palestinian representatives and Jordan. 3. Any Palestinian participant must accept UN Resolutions 242 and 338, renounce terror and recognize Israel’s right to exist.

38. Mark H. Milstein, “Washington Institute for Near East Policy: An AIPAC ‘Image Problem,’” WRMEA, July 1991, p 30; Grace Halsell, “Clinton‘s Indyk Appointment One of Many from Pro-Israel Think Tank,” WRMEA, March 1993, p. 30.

9. Invasion of the Policy Snatchers

179

4. There should be a prolonged transitional period in which the intentions of the Palestinians to live in peace with Israel and Jordan could be tested.39 Of course, this is exactly the tack Bush adopted at the 1991 Madrid conference, as shown by James Baker’s differing letters to Arafat and Shamir. Note particularly how the authors of Building for Peace stipulate that only the Palestinians must renounce terror, accept UN resolutions 242 and 338, and recognize Israel’s right to exist. Israel, the great violator of these resolutions, is absolved of any responsibility as implied in Point 1 above. Jordan has no useful role to play in this affair, but the Israelis want it included because it is utterly dependent on U.S. aid. The second reason is that the Israelis did not recognize the Palestinians’ right to exist, and so it needed to speak over their heads. A Jordanian state with a subject Palestinian population would be easier for Israel to intimidate and control. The report claims that both sides have an obligation to renounce violence, but this attempt at evenhandedness cannot be taken seriously, especially considering its one-sided recommendations for regional security: “Any Palestinian entity which emerges from such a negotiation would have to have its authority heavily qualified by the security requirements of Israel and Jordan….[and that] preserving Israel’s military superiority is the only way to ensure Israel’s security and discredit the Arab war option.” In Part V of Building for Peace, “Implementing U.S. Policy: Appointing a Special Emissary,” the actual biases of WINEP are formally laid out: • Express to the new Israeli government the president’s desire to work in close consultation on the peace process and his unshakeable commitment to Israel’s security. [emphasis added] • Begin the sensitive process of discussing with the region’s leaders the need to control the arms race. • Emphasize the new administration’s commitment to a process designed to reshape the political environment rather than seek a procedural breakthrough to negotiations. • Express to friendly Arab leaders the president’s concern for their interests. The emissary will need to avoid creating inappropriate expectations in the region or generating plans for grand solutions once he returns. Given the need to maintain Israel’s military superiority, including its nuclear monopoly, the second point must be read as an attempt to prevent other states from developing even a civilian nuclear industry. The third point means that Israel and the U.S. want to stall for time until compliant regimes are in place, especially in Iraq, Syria, and Iran. 39. Building for Peace: An American Strategy for the Middle East— Executive Summary, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, April 1993. All citations come from this source, .

180

Enemies by Design

The final sentence essentially confirms this policy, in which the emissary is prohibited from doing anything constructive to bring about a peaceful settlement. In all, six WINEPers joined the Bush government: Lawrence S. Eagleburger, Dennis Ross, Richard Haass, Francis Fukuyama, Aaron David Miller and Harvey Sicherman. Building for Peace would become the blueprint for the Clinton administration. Of course, there are other Zionist fronts masquerading as objective public policy centers—the Hudson Institute, Middle East Media Research Institute and Middle East Forum to name but three—but the four mentioned above are for the moment sufficient to show that the Zionist usurpation of U.S. policy rose in tandem with the ascent of Straussian economic elitism. From the theory and development of American fascism we now turn to its applications in Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq from 1991 onward. From these three simultaneous threads comes the Clinton-Bush “war on terrorism” and the politically instrumental demonization of Muslims.

Part III Afghanistan Palestine Iraq

T A L I B A N O R I G I N A T E D in August 1994 in the small town of Sanghisar just north of Qandahar. Unlike the mujahedin, which are led by Tajiks and Uzbeks, the Taliban are drawn from the majority Pashtun ethnic group. They follow the conservative Deobandi school, which adheres to a strict interpretation of the Sharia and some traditions of Pashtunwali, the tribal code of the Pashtuns. Deobandis have close ties to the Wahhabi. H E

According to one version, the movement began when Mawlawi Muhammad Omar and 11 of his taliban (students) from the madrassas [religious schools] chased down a mujahid who had assaulted three women in Qandahar. According to another, the idea for the movement came to Omar in a dream. He envisaged a pure Islamic state, and so he gathered his closest allies and attacked a mujahedin checkpoint. Whatever the cause, Omar’s Islamist morality militia was greeted warmly. After 15 years of civil war, Afghans desired peace and order, as did the Iranians, Saudis and Pakistanis, so the Taliban were seen as a vast improvement over the corrupt, power-hungry warlords of the Peshawar Seven. Under the terms of an April 1992 United Nations-brokered peace plan, these victorious mujahedin were supposed to form a broad-based coalition government of reconciliation with Najibullah’s communists. The fact that the UN thought this scheme had any chance of success underscores the facile thinking that drives the Western understanding of the Islamic world. There was no conceivable scenario under which the mujahedin would form a meaningful collaboration with communists. Moreover, the UN scheme failed to account for the collapse of the Soviet Union four months earlier. With former enemies (the U.S. and Russia) now tentative allies, neither of them had any use for the mujahedin, or any interest in the long-term success of an Islamic Afghanistan.

10. The Taliban and “petropolitics”

183

Peter Tomsen, veteran State Department official and special envoy to Afghanistan, was one of a few critical voices insisting that the U.S. help rebuild Afghanistan, both to prevent extremists from coming to power and to preserve the 10-year U.S. investment: “The U.S. mistake was to ignore Afghanistan,” he said. “We walked away.”1

Third Afghan war On March 7, 1993, after more than eight months of starvation, economic blockades, and anarchic violence, Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd sponsored the Islamabad Accord to reconcile the warring factions. Under the agreement, Rabbani was made president for a term of 18 months and Hekmatyar was made prime minister. This appointment did not sit well with defense minister Ahmad Shah Masoud, and fighting between the two erupted two days later. On June 16, Hekmatyar was sworn in as prime minister, and Masoud resigned. Hekmatyar resigned a week later to launch an assault on Kabul. On Jan. 1, 1994, Uzbek warlord Gen. Abdurrashid Dostum joined Hekmatyar’s attack, and by the end of the year, the capital was reduced to rubble. The death toll in the city would reach 50,000, mostly civilians.2 The Islamabad Accord was put together by outsiders to serve their interests, not those of Afghanistan. The Saudi government wanted to keep political Islam from spilling over into other areas, and Pakistan and Iran wanted a quick end to the fighting so that they could take advantage of a new trade route to the newly independent Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union. Pakistan wanted peace, but on its own terms. It suspected Rabbani’s government of being too friendly with India, and was looking with apprehension at Afghanistan’s improved relations with Iran and Russia. In short, Pakistan foresaw an imminent loss of regional influence. It wanted its own man in Kabul. That man was supposed to be Hekmatyar, who was trained and nurtured in Pakistan-run training camps (with U.S. and Saudi backing), and who was integral to Pakistan’s guerrilla activity in Kashmir. Pakistan expected Hekmatyar and his Hizb-i-Islami to take power once the jihad was over, but Rabbani’s elevation to leader thwarted Pakistan’s grand design. With Hekmatyar a lost cause, Pakistan searched for a new surrogate, and found the ideal candidate in Omar and his taliban. As the magazine Nida’ul Islam (Call of Islam) reported:

1. Cited in Mary Pat Flaherty, David B. Ottaway and James V. Grimaldi, “How Afghanistan Went Unlisted as Terrorist Sponsor,” Washington Post, Nov. 5, 2001. 2. On Nov. 11, 1994, the United Nations appealed for $106.4 million to meet the humanitarian requirements of Afghanistan for the next twelve months. Fighting during the year killed 7,000, injured around 100,000 and made more than half a million people homeless, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

184

Enemies by Design

Pakistan found in the movement the object of pursuit in that it preserves its interests represented by the route of trade with the nearby Islamic Republics. Accordingly, the Pakistani army supported the movement by providing fuel and food, and by facilitating the movement of students from Pakistan.3 A comprehensive history of the Taliban and their defeat of the mujahedin is beyond the scope of this book, but a few events are worth highlighting to give a sense of its popularity and rapid rise from obscurity. In October 1994, the Taliban took over Qandahar, and Omar called for 4,000 volunteers from Pakistan. By February 1995, the Taliban had captured half of the southern provinces without meeting any resistance, and forced Hekmatyar to lift the siege of Kabul. On Sept. 5, 1995, the major western town of Herat fell, forcing warlord Ismail Khan to flee to Iran with 8,000 supporters. Capturing Kabul proved to be more difficult, as Rabbani’s forces put up fierce resistance. Rabbani continued to denounce Pakistan for meddling in Afghan politics and supporting the Taliban, but Pakistan consistently denied the charges. Nevertheless, rioting Afghans set fire to the Pakistani Embassy on Sept. 6. In October, the Taliban laid siege to the city and pounded it with rocket fire. On June 26, 1996, the Rabbani government formed a desperate alliance with Hekmatyar, who resumed his post as prime minister, but the Taliban were already in command of most of the country. On Sept. 5, a year to the day after Herat fell, the Taliban launched an offensive in Eastern Afghanistan, capturing Jalalabad. Three weeks later, Rabbani and Masoud abandoned Kabul and headed north. On Sept. 27, the Taliban took Kabul, hanged Najibullah, and declared Afghanistan to be “completely Islamic.” The victory wasn’t complete, though: three of Afghanistan’s 30 provinces remained under mujahedin control, thus ensuring that hostilities and the suffering of the hapless civilian population would continue.

BIN LADEN AND THE TALIBAN After he arrived from Sudan in the spring of 1996, bin Laden set up his headquarters in Nangarhar province, just across the Khyber Pass from Pakistan. The area and its capital, Jalalabad, were under the control of minor Pashtun warlord Yunis Khalis, who split from Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i Islami to form his own group of the same name. Bin Laden was on good terms with all factions and could count on universal protection despite the chaos. With the coming of Taliban rule, bin Laden’s position strengthened. He and Omar were both Islamists, and each needed the other. Bin Laden needed refuge, and the Taliban needed cash.

3. Abu Abdul Aziz Al-Afghani, “The Islamic Taliban Movement And The Dangers of Regional Assimilation,” Nida’ul Islam, April–May 1997, .

10. The Taliban and “petropolitics”

185

Bin Laden gave Omar $3 million, and with that money the Taliban took Jalalabad on Sept. 5, 1996. When the Taliban entered the city, they paid their deepest respects to bin Laden: O Sheikh! Our lands are not the lands of the Afghans, but it is the lands of Allah; and our jihad was not the jihad of the Afghan, but it is the jihad of the Muslims. Your martyrs that are in every region of Afghanistan, their graves testify to that. You are between [among] your families and kinsmen, and we bless the soil that you walk upon.4 However, even in Afghanistan bin Laden had to stay on guard. A failed Saudi kidnapping attempt in early 1997 pushed him into the Taliban stronghold of Qandahar. The Saudis had arranged with Pakistan’s ISI to bring mercenaries to the Afghan border, but bin Laden got wind of the plan from sympathetic sources in Pakistan’s military. When the Saudis paid an official visit to recognize the government, the Taliban representative refused to discuss turning over bin Laden. Later that same year, the Americans planned a major commando-style kidnapping in which special forces would attack bin Laden’s new Qandahar residence. The plan was tested in the Pakistani desert but proved to be too dangerous. While the Americans were re-evaluating the project, news leaked to bin Laden from the same source, and he made the plan public in the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper. The Americans had no choice but to cancel. Though they acknowledged the plan, they did not acknowledge that there was a leak.5 Bin Laden further entrenched himself with the Taliban by marrying his eldest daughter to Omar. As Omar’s father-in-law, bin Laden became a member of the Pashtun tribe, thus ensuring that the family would never give up one of their own, especially to a non-Muslim power. Of bin Laden’s activities since the 1996 Khobar bombing, we know next to nothing, which is not surprising given his inaccessibility. Yet the myth of bin Laden as the demiurge of Islamist terrorism gets a boost during this period, due largely to the Zionist author Yossef Bodansky. As we saw in Chapter V, readers of his book Bin Laden: The Man who Declared War on America have no way to check the veracity of his assertions. However, one passage stands out as glaringly absurd. In October 1996, when bin Laden is supposed to be in Qandahar, Bodansky has him returning from a terrorism summit in Khartoum—a meeting that is not previously mentioned, or cited in the book’s index. Bodansky then has bin Laden, among other things, returning home via Tehran where he is supposed to have stopped for consultations with highranking terrorists like Abu Nidal: “Bin Laden’s visit to Tehran was significant

4. Ibid. 5. “Hunting Bin Laden,” Sept. 13, 2001, op. cit.

186

Enemies by Design

in the planning of the new wave of Islamist international terrorism that the ISI would support and benefit from.”6 Bodansky goes on to say that bin Laden is a high official in Hezballah; made frequent visits to Tehran; and acted as political go-between for Islamabad and Tehran. Shooting down these assertions is child’s play. First, a Wahhabi would not be caught dead negotiating with Shi’ites. On this score, bin Laden and the Taliban are of one mind. Only moderate Sunnis like Hasan al-Turabi of Sudan could manage to establish a co-operative working relationship with Shi’ites. Second, we have no independent evidence that bin Laden even left Afghanistan. Third, Bodansky’s claim that the ISI would benefit from such terrorism is asserted without evidence or logical foundation. Why should the ISI care what bin Laden did, save as it affected Afghanistan and the region? Given that Islamabad has a vested interest in promoting stability for the sake of economic gain, it is hard to understand why it would advocate terrorist activity. Without access to Bodansky’s sources, this whole episode must be rejected as an attempt to exaggerate bin Laden’s importance in the Islamist movement and to give plausibility to the existence of “al-Qaida” with bin Laden at or near the top, as well as targeting Iran and Sudan as alleged “terror masters.” Ironically, the one thing about bin Laden that can be said with certainty is that he and the U.S. had the same objective—supporting the Taliban because they promised to impose order.

“ T H E U N O C A L S TAT E S O F A M E R I C A ” Soon after Kabul fell to the Taliban on Sept. 27, 1996, U.S. congressmen, State Department officials and representatives from Unocal (Union Oil Company of California) rushed to embrace the new government. Enthusiasm was so high that a precipitous offer of official recognition from the State Department had to be hastily repudiated, because Rabbani’s government was still recognized as the legitimate authority. Only Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates recognized the new Taliban regime.7 As we now know, the Taliban were arguably the world’s most repressive and regressive anti-Western regime of their day. Some of the misanthropic absurdities of life under Taliban rule included: • Banning women from the workplace, even hospitals, as well as all schools and university. 6. Yossef Bodansky, Bin Laden: The Man who Declared War on America (New York: Forum, 1999), pp. 196-197. 7. On May 25, 1997, Pakistan became the first state to offer diplomatic recognition.

10. The Taliban and “petropolitics”

187

• Requiring women to wear a head-to-toe garment (burqa), and prohibiting them from going out in public unless accompanied by a husband or male blood relative. • Subjecting homes and apartments to arbitrary searches by the religious police, who confiscated western cultural materials (books, magazines, videos, records, CDs), and alcohol. • Forcing men to wear their hair short, grow full beards and attend mosque five times a day. • Permitting radios only for listening to the official Taliban Radio Sharia (“religious law”). Televisions were confiscated. • Roving militias and religious police who executed a “street level” form of punishment that included whippings and public beatings. A married couple riding on the same bicycle on the way to the market was beaten for being physically too close in public.8 Despite these abominations, the Clinton administration actively pursued good relations with the Taliban from 1995 to 1997. In a speech at a November 1996 closed-door session of the UN, Asst. Secretary of State for South Asia Robin Raphael articulated the official, tolerant U.S. attitude: The Taliban control more than two-thirds of the country, they are Afghan; they are indigenous; they have demonstrated staying power. The real source of their success has been the willingness of many Afghans, particularly Pashtuns, to tacitly trade unending fighting and chaos for a measure of peace and security, even with severe social restrictions. It is not in the interests of Afghanistan or any of us here that the Taliban be isolated.9 Contrary to Raphael, the interests of Afghanistan played no role in the U.S. decision to support the Taliban. So long as the U.S. got its pipeline, the Taliban could abuse their people as much as they wanted, because they could count on the U.S. to shield them from international criticism and scrutiny. An American diplomat said as much to veteran Pakistani reporter Ahmed Rashid: “The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be ARAMCO, pipelines, an emir, no parliament, and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that.”10 On Dec. 12, 1996, The New York Times gave the following account of the rosy U.S. scenario: From early on, American diplomats in Islamabad had made regular visits to Qandahar to see Taliban leaders. In briefings for reporters, the 8. “Taliban Abuses Ignored for Oil, Money, Drug War,” American Atheists, July 19, 1998, . 9. Peter Symonds, “The Taliban, the US and the Resources of Central Asia,” World Socialist Website, Oct. 24, 2001, . 10. Cited in “Unocal & Afghanistan,” Oil and Gas International, Oct. 29, 2001, .

188

Enemies by Design

diplomats cited what they saw as positive aspects of the Taliban, which they listed as a capacity to end the war in Afghanistan and its promises to put an end to the use of Afghanistan as a base for narcotics trafficking and international terrorism.11 A bonus for the U.S. was the Taliban’s fanatical hatred of Iran, which was not only an enemy of the U.S. but also a rival transit country for the Turkmenistan gas pipeline. Congress granted the CIA a budget of $20 million to fund covert operations to destabilize Iran, which has alleged, over repeated U.S. denials, that the Taliban were one of the recipients of this money.12 It was impossible to tell where Unocal’s interests stopped and those of the U.S. government began. The government lobbied Pakistan to support the Unocal-led Central Asia Gas (CentGas) bid, and Unocal lobbied the government to recognize the Taliban. It even enlisted the services of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former special U.S. ambassador John J. Maresca, who would become Unocal’s vice-president of international relations.

Like Burma, like Afghanistan Unocal’s disregard for Taliban repression has precedents in its operations in other countries, many of which have repressive regimes. However, a successful lawsuit by villagers in the Tenasserim region at the southeast tip of Burma’s panhandle might embolden Afghan claimants to seek redress for human rights abuses committed because of Unocal’s support for the Taliban’s atrocities. The Burmese are suing Unocal in California court for violating that state’s constitution and unfair business practice law. The issue is the Yadana Project—a joint venture among Unocal, the Burmese military government and France’s Total-Elfina. The suit charges that Unocal knowingly supported the Burmese army’s use of torture, beatings and forced labor during the building of a 4o-mile $1.2 billion natural gas pipeline from the Yadana gas field under the Andaman Sea to Thailand. On Aug. 21, 2000, Federal District Court Judge Ronald S. W. Lew dismissed the plaintiffs’ case, citing the failure to prove that Unocal specifically sought to employ forced or slave labor. Nevertheless, he did rule that the case could proceed under California State law, and what he said about Unocal was damning. He found that Unocal, the largest investor in the country, not only knew of, and benefited from, these abuses but financially aided the ruling junta, since renamed the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC). Lew also accepted evidence that the plaintiffs, as well as thousands of other villagers, were forced to serve as porters for military battalions 11. “Workers Freed, U.N. Resumes Afghan Aid,” New York Times, Dec. 12, 1996. 12. Symonds, op. cit.

10. The Taliban and “petropolitics”

189

specifically created to protect the pipeline. On Aug. 30, 2001, California Superior Court Judge Victoria Chaney ruled that the plaintiffs would have their day in court, although Unocal eventually won the case.13

Pipeline politics The Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan gas pipeline had been the Clinton administration’s prime foreign policy objective in the region since the spring of 1995. Turkmenistan, the former Soviet republic on the eastern edge of the Caspian Sea, has proven natural gas reserves of 101 trillion cubic feet (Tcf), of which 2 Bcf (billion cubic feet) would be expected to flow per day. The largest natural gas fields are in the Amu-Darya basin, with half of the country’s gas reserves located in the giant Daulatabad-Donmez field. In addition to Amu-Darya, Turkmenistan has large reserves in the Murgab basin, particularly the giant Yashlar deposit, which contains an estimated 27 Tcf. It also has proven oil reserves of 546 million barrels and estimated 1.7 billion barrels in areas under the Caspian Sea. Maresca estimated the natural gas reserves of the entire Caspian basin at more than 236 Tcf and oil reserves at more than 60 billion barrels, though some estimates place it as high as 200 BB. In 1995, the region produced 870,000 barrels of oil per day, but by 2010, he said that figure could jump five times to about 4.5 million barrels, or five percent of total world production. Unocal wanted to head up a consortium to develop the Turkmenistan gas fields, but was already part of a consortium put together by the Argentinean company Bridas. Bridas had relations with Turkmenistan dating to 1991, during which time it focused mainly on developing the Yashlar field and the Keimir oil and gas field in the southwest. In 1994, it entered into negotiations with the Turkmen and Pakistani governments to build a gas pipeline from Yashlar where Bridas had a 75 percent stake. The Turkmen oil and gas ministry hired Bridas to draw up a feasibility study, and in early 1995 hired it to represent them in negotiations with the Pakistani government of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.14 Bridas had an exclusive arrangement with the Turkmen government, but in March 1995 Unocal approached President Saparmurat Niyazov with the idea of building a 48-inch diameter pipeline from the Daulatabad gas fields, 13. “Burmese Workers Suing Unocal in Los Angeles Will Have Their Day in Court,” International Labor Rights Fund, Aug. 30, 2001, . On Jan. 23, 2004 Judge Chaney ruled that Unocal, as the parent company, was not liable for the rape, murder, torture and forced labor that occurred during construction of Yadana pipeline. She said Unocal’s subsidiary, Burma’s SPDC, had the financial resources to be accountable under California law. However, she also said the villagers, whose testimony she said was honest and well-documented concerning Unocal’s knowledge of these atrocities, could proceed if their attorneys could prove liability by other means. Daniel J. Hughes “Unocal Off the Hook?” inthesetimes.com, Feb. 17, 2004. 14. Symonds, op. cit.

190

Enemies by Design

also in the southeast, to the central Pakistani town of Multan 1,424 kilometres (890 miles) away. A 640-kilometer (400-mile) extension to India would also be considered. Daulatabad has estimated reserves of 25 Tcf of gas. The cost of the project was estimated at $1.9 billion for the segment to Pakistan and an additional $600 million for the extension. The Daulatabad field had been delivering natural gas north via Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Russia to markets in the Caspian and Black Sea areas since 1983. However, because of Moscow’s demand for high transportation fees, the Turkmen government found that tapping other fields was uneconomical. In contrast, a southern pipeline route through Afghanistan would be cheaper and bring Turkmenistan’s oil and gas closer to world markets. Niyazov also liked Unocal’s proposal because it came with the promise of more U.S. investment. Closer ties to the U.S. in turn would give Turkmenistan more independence from its more powerful neighbors Iran and Russia. Thus, Niyazov signed a memorandum of understanding with Unocal and Pakistan to form a consortium to build the pipeline. (Although Bhutto remained loyal to Bridas, Pakistan’s official policy was to go with whichever bidder got out of the starting gate first.) In December 1995, Niyazov showed his exclusive support for Unocal when he arbitrarily and without warning banned Bridas’ oil exports from the Keimiri field and shut down its other operations. In February 1996, Bridas, which thought it had an exclusive pipeline agreement, launched a $15 million lawsuit against its former partner Unocal for interfering in its deal with the Turkmen government to develop the Yashlar Field.15 Bridas lost, but succeeded in having the International Chamber of Commerce pass a binding ruling against the Turkmen government for freezing its assets and stopping its gas and oil exploration and extraction work. Niyazov ignored it.16 After being squeezed out of Turkmenistan, Bridas struck a deal with the Taliban, who needed money. On May 4, 1996, the two parties announced that an agreement-in-principle to build the pipeline would be signed by the end of the month. By the time the dust settled in the spring of 1996, Unocal had Turkmenistan and Bridas had Afghanistan, but given Niyazov’s betrayal of Bridas, Unocal clearly had the advantage. All it had to do was convince the Taliban to support the bid, and convince the U.S. and the international 15. According to Unocal’s 1997 Annual Report: “Bridas seeks actual damages as well as punitive damages, plus interest. Bridas’ expert witnesses have stated in pre-trial discovery that Bridas’ total actual damages for loss of future profits are approximately $1.7 billion. In the alternative, Bridas is expected to seek an award of approximately $430 million with respect to its total expenditures in Turkmenistan. The company believes the assertions made by Bridas are without merit and is vigorously defending the lawsuit.” . 16. Ishtiaq Ahmad, “U.S.-Taliban relations: Friend turns fiend as pipeline politics fail,” Oct. 3, 2001, .

10. The Taliban and “petropolitics”

191

community to recognize the Taliban as the official government so that Afghanistan could secure financing from agencies like the World Bank.

Different priorities Despite their seeming unanimity of purpose, Unocal was in a more dependent position than the U.S. government. The pipeline depended on the recognition of the Taliban regime, while for the Clinton administration, recognition was contingent upon proof that the Taliban could end the civil war, but that looked less and less likely. On May 13, 1997, Rabbani became the head of a new government in the northern town of Mazar-i-Sharif, the only major town that didn’t fall to the Taliban. (Eight months earlier, Rabbani, Dostum and Karim Khalili, leader of Hizb-i-Wahdat (Unity Party), had formed the anti-Taliban Council for the Defense of Afghanistan.)

192

Enemies by Design

The Taliban responded by trying again to take the city, aided this time by Dostum’s second-in-command. As Human Rights Watch reported: “Gen. Malik Pahlawan… apparently believed he had struck a deal to share power with the Taliban and ousted Dostum in a coup. When the Taliban reneged on the agreement and began disarming local forces, resistance broke out first in Hazara neighborhoods, and the Taliban found themselves trapped in a city that had turned murderous on them. Hundreds of Taliban were attacked in the streets and killed, and at least 2,000 taken prisoner, only to be summarily executed and their bodies dumped in wells or taken to remote desert sites and left lying in the open. Most analysts appear to agree that General Malik was responsible for many of the summary executions of the Taliban prisoners. However, a large number of Taliban forces were reportedly gunned down in the streets by the Hazara Hizb-i Wahdat. Malik fled to Iran, and Dostum returned. Driven back after a subsequent attack on Mazar in September 1997, retreating Taliban troops who may have included Balkh Pashtuns massacred Hazara civilians in Qizalabad, south of the city on the road to Herat.17 The May 1997 uprising convinced Clinton that he should also support geopolitically safer Caspian Sea pipeline routes to hedge his bets. One route, to be built by the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), would run west from the Northern Caspian to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossijsk. From there, oil would be transported by tanker through the Bosphorus to the Mediterranean and the world markets. Another pipeline would run westward from the oil-rich Azerbaijani port capital of Baku through Georgia to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan.18 Even though Unocal is part of the $8 billion, 11-member Azerbaijan International Operating Company (AIOC) consortium, it doesn’t believe that these two routes would have enough capacity. During U.S. Congressional testimony, Maresca said that a direct route south through Afghanistan, despite the political difficulties, would be easier and cheaper to build, and provide access to higher-value markets than the

17. “Background,” Afghanistan: The Massacre in Mazar-i-Sharif, Human Rights Watch, November 1998, Vol. 10, No. 7 (C), . 18. In August 1996, President Bill Clinton became personally involved with Amoco (American Oil Company) and other U.S. oil companies in this project. (See Dan Morgan and David B. Ottaway, “Azerbaijan’s Riches Alter the Chessboard” (first of three articles), Washington Post Oct. 4, 1998, Page A1. However, for Clinton to make this gesture, Section 907 of the 1992 Freedom Support Act had to be repealed. Government-to-government dealings with Azerbaijan had been banned because of its blockade of its internal Armenian enclave Nagorno-Karabakh. Because of intense lobbying by past and present politicians on behalf of Azerbaijan, the section was repealed. See Christopher Hitchens, “Greasing the Wheels,” salon.com, Sept. 29, 1997, .

10. The Taliban and “petropolitics”

193

other routes could.19 Because it represented a higher economic advantage to Unocal, the project was effectively in commercial competition with other pipeline routes. Also, the only other route, through Iran, was prohibited. Therefore, on July 23, 1997, despite the civil unrest, officials from Turkmenistan, Pakistan, Unocal and Delta Oil (a Saudi company) signed an agreement to build the pipeline and form a consortium by October.20 CentGas (The Central Asia Gas Consortium) was formed at a signing ceremony in the Turkmen capital of Ashgabat on Oct. 27, 1997.21 Construction was planned to begin by December 1998 and be completed by 2001. Unocal also proposed building a 1,000-mile, $2.5 billion oil pipeline with a capacity of 1 million barrels per day. Eight days after the ceremony, the head of Bridas’ Afghan operations Sebastian Otero Asp announced that an agreement with the Taliban to build a pipeline was close, civil unrest notwithstanding. Soon afterwards, Unocal Vice-President Martin Miller waxed pessimistic: “It’s uncertain when this project will start. It depends on peace in Afghanistan and a government we can work with. That may be the end of this year, next year or three years from now, or this may be a dry hole if the fighting continues.”22 In December 1997, Unocal lobbyist Sen. Hank Brown glad-handed with Taliban ministers and invited three of them for several days of industrygovernment talks in Washington D.C., and at the company’s headquarters in Sugarland, southwest of Houston. Although the British press covered the event—The Daily Telegraph and the BBC—a search of the New York Times and Washington Post on-line archives turned up no mention of it. In this excerpt from the Telegraph, the convivial relationship between Unocal and the regime is unmistakable: The Taliban ministers and their advisers stayed in a five-star hotel and were chauffeured in a company minibus. Their only requests were to visit Houston’s zoo, the NASA space center and Omaha’s Super Target discount store to buy stockings, toothpaste, combs and soap. The 19. John J. Maresca speaking before the Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific of the Committee on International Relations House of Representatives on U.S. interests in the Central Asian Republics 105th Congress, Second Session, Washington D.C., Feb. 12, 1998, . 20. International Energy Annual, 1997, . 21. Unocal’s share of CentGas was 46.5 percent; Delta Oil of Saudi Arabia had 15 percent; Government of Turkmenistan, 7 percent; Indonesia Petroleum, Ltd. (INPEX, Japan), 6.5 percent; ITOCHU Oil Exploration Co., Ltd. (CIECO) (Japan), 6.5 percent; Hyundai Engineering & Construction Co., Ltd. (Korea), 5 percent; and The Crescent Group (Pakistan), 3.5 percent. RAO Gazprom (Russia) indicated an interest in a 10 percent share. Unocal would later merge with Phillips 66 of Tulsa, Okla., which would announce a merger with Conoco on Nov. 19, 2001. The new entity, ConocoPhillips, would become the third-largest integrated U.S. energy company based on market capitalization and oil and gas reserves and production; the sixth-largest energy company based on hydrocarbon reserves; and the fifth-largest global refiner. 22. Cited in Symonds, op. cit.

194

Enemies by Design

Taliban, who control two-thirds of Afghanistan and are still fighting for the last third, were also given an insight into how the other half lives. The men, who are accustomed to life without heating, electricity or running water, were amazed by the luxurious homes of Texan oil barons. Invited to dinner at the palatial home of Martin Miller… they marvelled at his swimming pool, views of the golf course and six bathrooms. After a meal of specially prepared halal meat, rice and Coca-Cola, the hard-line fundamentalists—who have banned women from working and girls from going to school—asked Mr. Miller about his Christmas tree. ‘They were interested to know what it was for and what the star was,’ said Mr. Miller, who hopes that Unocal has clinched the deal. ‘The first day, they were stiff and cautious. But before long they were totally relaxed and happy,’ he said… But it was the homely touches that swayed the Taliban. When the delegation left Texas, one of their entourage stayed behind. Mullah Mohammad Ghaus, the former foreign minister and a leading member of the Taliban ruling council, remained in Texas for medical treatment. Years on the front line damaged his eyesight. Unocal bought him a battery-powered magnifying glass and are paying for him to go to an optician.23 A different account of the Sugarland meeting comes from Dev George, managing editor of Oil and Gas International. In the editorial, “Unocal & Afghanistan,” he credits the agreement to political lobbying: “They were offered US$0.15 per 1,000 cubic feet of gas that passed through Afghanistan, and they agreed after U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Robin Raphael lobbied them for the Unocal pipeline.”24 Differences notwithstanding, there can be no doubt that Unocal actively pursued the Taliban and was eager to do business with them, despite the Taliban’s brutality and taxation of the opium trade. As the CentGas development manager, Unocal even tried to use Delta Oil representatives to influence the Taliban, because Saudi Arabia was one of only three countries that recognized the regime. Unocal also donated $900,000 to the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Omaha, Nebraska. However, this act of apparent magnanimity came under criticism as a front to funnel aid to the Taliban. The Center set up a training and humanitarian aid program for Afghans—including disaster relief aid after the earthquakes—and opened a school in Qandahar, which began to train 400 Afghan teachers, electricians, carpenters and pipe-fitters to help Unocal lay the pipeline. Unocal aid was over and above the millions of dollars of official U.S. assistance to the Taliban that was labeled “humanitarian assistance.”

23. Caroline Lees, “Oil barons court Taliban in Texas,” The Telegraph, Dec. 14, 1997. 24. “Unocal & Afghanistan,” editorial, Oil and Gas International, Oct. 29, 2001.

10. The Taliban and “petropolitics”

195

Finally, it’s worth noting Pakistan’s participation in the consortium because it was both a founding patron of the Taliban and a supporter of Bridas. One month before Bridas signed its deal with the Taliban, the U.S. was pushing Pakistan to switch sides. “We have an American company which is interested in building a pipeline from Turkmenistan through to Pakistan,” said Raphael at an April 21, 1996, press conference in Islamabad. “This pipeline project will be very good for Turkmenistan, for Pakistan and for Afghanistan.”25 She forgot to include the United States. Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto resisted relentless U.S. pressure to support CentGas, but in November 1996 her government was dismissed on charges of corruption. The new government of Nawaz Sharif joined the CentGas consortium, thus abrogating its exclusive support for Bridas, and for the first time putting the country at odds with the Taliban.

Unocal bails out On Aug. 21, 1998, the day after Clinton visited biblical vengeance upon Afghanistan, Unocal issued a release that began: As a result of sharply deteriorating political conditions in the region, Unocal, which serves as the development manager for the Central Asia Gas (CentGas) pipeline consortium, has suspended all activities involving the proposed pipeline project in Afghanistan. We are discussing this suspension with the other members of the consortium. This decision to suspend activities is consistent with Unocal’s long-held position concerning its involvement in the project. For the past several months, Unocal has been reviewing this project with CentGas participants. We have consistently informed the other participants that unless and until the United Nations and the United States government recognize a legitimate government in Afghanistan, Unocal would not invest capital in the project. Contrary to some published reports, Unocal has not–and will not—become a party to a commercial agreement with any individual Afghanistan faction.26 Given the Sugarland episode, this last statement is at best contentious and at worst fallacious. Also, Clinton’s attack was not the decisive factor Unocal made it out to be. According to an editorial in Oil and Gas International, Unocal found the Taliban’s price to be too steep: When the Taliban demanded more than the $100 million a year in rent for the pipeline route in the form of the construction of roads, water supplies, telephone lines, and electricity power lines, as well as a tap in

25. Cited in “Pipeline Dreams: One of the factors which led to throwing Ms Benazir Bhutto out of Power,” The Herald (Pakistan), June 1997. 26. “Unocal Statement: Suspension of activities related to proposed natural gas pipeline across Afghanistan,” Aug. 21, 1998, .

196

Enemies by Design

the pipeline to provide oil and gas for Afghanistan, Unocal balked, and finally dropped its plans after the East Africa embassy bombings.27 In contrast to this “closed pipeline,” Bridas proposed an open line to allow the Taliban to draw gas for local needs. This is why the Taliban signed with Bridas instead of CentGas. On Dec. 4, 1998, Unocal officially withdrew from the consortium, and has steadfastly denied reports that it plans to return. However, Unocal Pakistan Ltd.’s president and general manager Richard Keller was quoted as telling Reuters: “We are hopeful that this is a temporary situation.”28 Other members of the consortium hadn’t given up. On April 29, 1999, Pakistan’s Petroleum Minister Nisar Ali Khan, Turkmenistan’s Deputy Prime Minister Batyr Sardjaev, and Afghanistan’s Minister of Energy and Mines Maulvi Ahmedjan met in Islamabad to revive the project. The meeting came just two days after an exchange of international visits between Russia and Pakistan that signaled a warming of relations despite Pakistan’s opposition to Russia’s support for India, and Russia’s opposition to Pakistan’s support of Islamists. In place of Unocal, Delta Oil was reported to be taking over as lead partner, but the plan went nowhere. According to India’s Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses: The pipeline from Afghanistan may remain a non-starter even in the longer term, for the simple reason that there exists a strong contradiction between the oil pipeline and drug-trafficking in the region of the Golden Crescent. According to Western estimates, the region generates revenue worth $45 billion (some give the figure of $90 billion) from drug-related activities. There are so many stakes involved in the region, which actually become the cause for perpetuating conflict in Afghanistan. In such a situation, it would be highly difficult for anyone to replace drugs with oil, especially when Afghanistan being only a transit state would receive not more $100 million per year in transit fees (i.e., no more than one-fifth of one percent of the drug revenue).29

OSTRACIZING THE TALIBAN—BIN LADEN In mid-to-late September 1997, the Taliban charged Iran with conducting more than 170 airdrops of arms and ammunition to anti-government forces in the Northern towns of Mazar-i-Sharif, Bamiyan, and Shebarghan, the region dominated by the Rabbani-led government and the Hezb-i-Wahdat (Unity Party) militia, which Iran supported. 27. Oil and Gas International, Oct. 29, 2001, op. cit. 28. Cited in “U.S. seeks Pakistan’s oil nod,” pakwatan.com, Jan. 26, 2002, . 29. P. Stobdan, “The Afghan Conflict and Regional Security,” IDSA (August 1999), pp.719747.

10. The Taliban and “petropolitics”

197

The Taliban warned Iran to cease all recruiting, training, monetary and military assistance to the alliance, or it would reciprocate by arming and promoting local resistance groups inside Iran. Iran had never admitted aiding anti-Taliban forces—just like Pakistan never admitted to aiding and promoting the Taliban—but it couldn’t give in to threats without loss of face. Iran therefore hoped that Rabbani’s forces would be in a position to launch a quick and effective pre-winter offensive to reclaim most of the country. On Aug. 8, 1998, the Taliban launched another attack on Mazar-i-Sharif. It not only succeeded in taking the town, but exacted a horrible vengeance on the Hazara, a Farsi-speaking Shi’ite minority who fiercely opposed Taliban rule. The Taliban went on a rampage of rape and mass murder that would be familiar to survivors of the 1982 Israeli/Phalangist massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. According to the report from Human Rights Watch: A woman who lived in Kamaz camp, where persons who had fled Kabul and other cities were living, stated that a large number of Taliban came searching for men at the camp the first day. Most of the men were beaten and then taken away, but some were shot on the spot. From one tent they took six boys. They were all 17, 18, or 20 years old. They just shot them dead in front of the tent. The bodies lay there for four days until the women could finally bury them. A medical student testified that the Taliban also searched the hospital looking for Hazaras. I saw two Hazara boys, one about thirteen years old and one about twenty. One had a broken arm. The Taliban wanted to take them away, but the director intervened. But they came back the next day and took them. One witness stated that he saw bodies that had been left in the city’s cemeteries. We passed by the cemetery at Dasht-i-Shour. The cemetery is along the main road. There are also shops along the road. These shops were built with the dirt taken in the same area. So there are many holes left along the road. All these holes were filled with bodies.30 On the second day of the takeover, the new Taliban governor of the province Mullah Manon Niazi declared open season on Hazaras for their opposition to the Taliban: Hazaras are not Muslim, they are shi’a. They are kofr [infidels]. The Hazaras killed our force here, and now we have to kill Hazaras. If you do not show your loyalty, we will burn your houses, and we will kill you. You either accept to be Muslims or leave Afghanistan.31 In a UN report, all killings were described as “systematic, planned, and very well organized.” Approximately 3,000 Hazara were murdered in their 30. “The First Day of the Takeover,” Afghanistan: The Massacre in Mazar-i-Sharif, Human Rights Watch, November 1998, Vol. 10, No. 7 (C), . 31. “Incitement to Violence against Hazaras by Governor Niazi,” in Ibid.

198

Enemies by Design

homes, or indiscriminately shot in the street during the first six days of the Taliban takeover. The total estimated number of dead ranges from 5,000 to 8,000; 10,000 to 12,000 fled Mazar-i-Sharif on the first day. Later that month, bin Laden was suspected of being behind the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The civil war showed no signs of ending, which meant time was up for the Taliban. Clinton had thought that the Taliban would improve their humanitarian record and ease up on the repression of women in expectations of receiving a $100 million annual rent from CentGas. Given the austere religious orientation of the Taliban, and the U.S./Unocal hands-off attitude toward domestic repression, this notion was pure delusion. In late 1997, the U.S. began throwing its support behind the Northern Alliance, which was led by warlords Rabbani, Masoud and Dostum—the same warriors who slaughtered 50,000 people in Kabul during the 1992–1996 civil war, and committed the May 1977 massacre of Taliban fighters at Mazar-i-Sharif. These were also the same warriors the U.S. wanted the Taliban to destroy in the name of Unocal and national stability. To add to the absurdity of this scenario, the alliance was backed by Iran, Russia and Uzbekistan. After getting involved in Afghanistan to fight Russia because of the fall of the shah, the U.S. was now supporting Russian and Iranian surrogates. If support for the Taliban was cynical and unethical, it was at least understandable in the context of traditional U.S. petropolitics. The decision to ostracize and punish the Taliban when he did made no sense, since Clinton could have acted against bin Laden at any time from 1996 onward. An editorial in Afghanistan’s Omaid Weekly made the point most poignantly: Is Osama bin Laden all that matters to the U.S. when it comes to Afghanistan? Are the cries of millions of Afghanistan’s orphans, widows and beggars drowned out by the voice of an outcast Saudi hermit? Or is it that Clinton cannot bear to face up to what his administration has helped to create—the near annihilation of Afghanistan at the hands of a barbaric horde mothered by the CIAtrained ISI, fathered by the U.S.-backed Saudis and cheered by Uncle Sam—so he seeks to focus on Osama, a scapegoat of Washington’s own creation?32 On Feb. 3, 1999, Assistant Secretary of State Karl E. Inderfurth and State Department counter-terrorism chief Michael Sheehan met the Taliban’s deputy foreign minister Abdul Jalil in Islamabad, and warned that the U.S. would hold the Taliban responsible for any further terrorist acts by bin Laden. On July 10, 1999, Clinton followed up with unilateral trade sanctions against Afghanistan for its refusal to hand over bin Laden. This made no sense,

32. “Clinton Draws a Blank on Afghanistan,” editorial, Omaid Weekly, March 27, 2000.

10. The Taliban and “petropolitics”

199

especially since Afghanistan had not appeared on any U.S. State Department list of terrorism-supporting countries. Afghanistan is desperately poor, and depends on international food relief agencies to fend off starvation. What’s worse, two massive earthquakes struck northern Afghanistan in 1998 (Feb. 4 and May 30). The first quake measured 6.1 on the Richter scale, killed 4,200 people, and destroyed 30 villages; the second, in a more remote region, measured 6.9 and killed 150.33 The $24 million-worth of exports at stake, mostly gems and carpets, was insignificant to the U.S., but important to Afghanistan. Bullying them would only make them more defensive and dependent on bin Laden’s largesse. Second, the U.S. Congress had acknowledged that unilateral sanctions have little or no effect. In fact, the House was preparing to deal with 23 pieces of legislation designed to stop precisely this kind of one-sided economic warfare.34 Third, Afghanistan is a sovereign nation, and according to Article 2 of the United Nations Charter is guaranteed the same rights of equality and independence as any other state. Punishing the Taliban for something bin Laden might have done only served to fuel bin Laden’s image as a champion of oppressed Muslims. In his Declaration of War, Bin Laden made much of the West’s mistreatment of Muslims and the international community’s moral double standard. On Oct. 15, 1999, Clinton took his crusade against bin Laden and the Taliban to the United Nations. The Security Council unanimously passed U.S.-sponsored Resolution 1267, which compelled the Taliban to surrender bin Laden by Nov. 14. Failure to comply would lead to an international flight ban on any aircraft owned, leased or operated by or on behalf of the Taliban, as well as a freeze on all Taliban-related funds and investment in Afghanistan. The resolution’s specious moral and legal legitimacy can be seen in the seventh clause to the preamble: “Noting the indictment of Usama bin Laden and his associates by the United States of America for, inter alia, the 7 August 1998 bombings of the United States embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and for conspiring to kill American nationals outside the United States, and noting also the request of the United States of America to the Taliban to surrender them for trial.” The indictment, as we saw earlier, was invalid on its face and built on speculation and imputed guilt. Resolution 1267 received unanimous support from other council members like Russia and China, both of which have Muslim minorities and therefore a vested interest in suppressing Islamist activism. As expected, the Afghan regime refused to comply with this edict. Four days before the 33. “Afghanistan quake survivors face new peril,”, Feb. 10, 1998, and “Earthquake hits northern Afghanistan,”, May 31, 1998, Seattle Times. 34. “Clinton bucks the trend with Taliban sanctions,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 10, 1999.

200

Enemies by Design

deadline, foreign minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil stated that the U.S. was going to impose sanctions anyway, so talking was a waste of time.35 It might appear that by taking his case to the Security Council Clinton showed respect for international law, but that is not the case. Clinton appealed to the world body only after an attempt to assassinate bin Laden failed. As he admitted in September 2001 at a New York news conference: “I authorized the arrest, and, if necessary, the killing of Osama Bin Laden, and we actually made contact with a group in Afghanistan to do it—and they were unsuccessful.”36 The U.S. and Pakistan agreed on a joint covert operation to assassinate bin Laden in 1999: the U.S. supplied satellite intelligence, air support and financing; Pakistan supplied the Pashtu-speaking assassins. The attack was aborted on Oct. 12 when Pakistan’s president Nawaz Sharif was overthrown in a military coup by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who halted the operation.37 Twenty-five years earlier, President Gerald Ford outlawed political assassinations. Clinton had just confessed to attempted murder and violating U.S. law.

OSTRACIZING THE TALIBAN—DRUGS Just as the Reagan administration followed a covert pro-drug policy in Afghanistan to fund the mujahedin, the Clinton administration sacrificed the “war on drugs” to aid Unocal’s pipeline bid. Officially, the U.S. wanted the Taliban to tear up the poppy fields and have farmers grow substitute crops, like wheat and onions. Officially, the Taliban agreed. Within a month of taking power, Mullah Mohammad Omar told the United Nations International Drug Control Program (UNDCP) office in Islamabad that he wanted international aid for crop substitution programs. Such talk pleased anti-drug and human rights activists, especially in the U.S. State Department, but the project was utterly infeasible. Profit from the opium trade was the primary source of income for the Taliban. In 2001, the total production value of Afghanistan’s opium crop was put at $100 billion, of which the Taliban derived a modest annual tax of $10-75 million during the 1990s.38 Without international recognition and the foreign investment that comes with it, the Taliban had no means to offset the loss in revenue. Similarly, poppy-growing was the only viable cash crop for Afghanistan’s impoverished 35. Cited in Ajith Abeysinghe, “US intrigues and the imposition of United Nations sanctions on Afghanistan,” World Socialist Website, Nov. 23, 1999, . 36. “Clinton ordered bin Laden killing,” BBC, Sept. 23, 2001. 37. Patrick Martin, “U.S. planned War In Afghanistan,” rense.com, Nov. 20, 2001, . 38. James Ridgeway, “Bush’s Opium Bender,” Village Voice, June 20-26, 2001.

201

10. The Taliban and “petropolitics”

farmers. A farmer could earn US$8,600 per hectare of opium compared to just $49 per acre for wheat.39 Moreover, opium dealers pay poppy farmers up front, whereas wheat farmers have to wait until their crop is sold to receive payment. To make matters worse, three years of drought had destroyed Afghanistan’s wheat harvests, so planting more wheat would have been fruitless. Table III: Opium production under Taliban rule Year

Opium produced (tonnes)

Cultivation (hectares)

World output

1999

6,000

91,000

75%

1998

3,750

64,000

60%

1996 2,200–2,300 55,000–58,000 Source: “Taliban and Drugs,” Hazara.net, April 7, 2002.

N/A

The Taliban were caught in an impossible situation. The price for destroying the poppy fields was the financial ruin of the country, the impoverishment of farmers, and greater reliance on Pakistan, so consequently the ban was not strictly enforced. According to the drug control program’s Annual Opium Survey, production and plantings increased markedly in Taliban-controlled areas. Until 2000, 95 percent of Afghanistan’s opium was grown in the southern and eastern Taliban-held provinces of Helmand, Uruzgan, Qandahar and Nangarhar. On July 28, 2000, three weeks after Clinton renewed the unilateral U.S. sanctions, Mullah Muhammad Omar decreed a complete ban on poppy growing, and declared it to be contrary to Islam. Few in the State Department took the decree seriously, but within two months, Afghanistan’s opium production was nearly wiped out. From a high of 3,667 tonnes (70 percent of world production), it fell to 74.0 tonnes.40 The fall in production shifted demand, especially to the Golden Triangle along the Burma-Thailand border and to the Northern Alliance-held territory of Afghanistan. In the northern provinces of Badakhshan and Takhar, opium plantings grew unchecked over 2,485 and 500 hectares respectively, mostly for the Central Asian market. (Badakhshan was run by troops loyal to Rabbani, the officially recognized head of state.) The arrival of opium traders from the Mashriqi district of Nangarhar led to a rise in plantings to 6,342 hectares, and also turned Badakhshan into a major conduit for southern 39. Paul Harris, “Victorious warlords set to open the opium floodgates,” Sunday Observer, Nov. 25, 2001. The Observer figures give £6,000 per hectare and £34 per hectare respectively. There is of course a large body of research indicating that the drug trade exists to provide covert funding for intelligence agencies, originally the UK’s, now chiefly the USA’s. 40. Tim Golden “Afghan Ban On Growing of Opium Is Unraveling,” The New York Times, Oct. 22, 2001; Anthony Davis “Afghan drug output wanes – but only under Taliban,” Jane’s Intelligence Review, October, 2001. Davis estimates the 2000 crop at 3,300 tonnes.

202

Enemies by Design

opium and heroin. Alliance fields accounted for 83 percent of total Afghan production of 185 tonnes of opium during the ban.41 However, as far as the U.S. State Department was concerned, the Taliban’s opium ban and the Northern Alliance’s drug trafficking didn’t exist. In The Taliban and the Afghan Drug Trade, a Dec. 20, 2000, fact sheet released by the Bureau of South Asian Affairs, the Taliban are mentioned 26 times, the Northern Alliance, not once. The information in the fact sheet is at such variance with published accounts of the Taliban’s opium ban and the UNDCP’s detailed data, that it must be considered disinformation designed to demonize the Taliban while masking the unethical conduct of the new U.S. “allies.” For example, in the section “The Explosion of Poppy Cultivation under the Taliban” we read: “Poppy cultivation overall for Afghanistan has climbed from 41,720 hectares in 1998 to 64,510 hectares in 2000, mainly as a result of increases in Helmand. Taliban-controlled Helmand province alone now accounts for 39 percent of the world’s illicit opium.”42 According to UNDCP data, 64,510 hectares would represent a decrease of more than 26,000 acres. Although Helmand at the time was a Taliban-held province, by the time the fact sheet came out it was no longer a major source of opium. The claim that Helmand accounted for 39 percent of world output is outlandish. The U.S. “war on drugs” is more a political weapon of convenience than a declaration of principle. So long as the CentGas pipeline bid looked viable, the U.S. ignored rocketing opium production on Taliban-held territory and shielded the Taliban from international human rights criticism. After the embassy bombings and the collapse of the CentGas bid, the Taliban role in the opium trade suddenly became a major political issue. Now, the pipeline was on hold and bin Laden became the new obsession. To coerce the Taliban into surrendering him, the U.S. imposed unilateral economic sanctions and sponsored a UN resolution to isolate and punish the Taliban. However, in July 2000 the Taliban destroyed more than 90 percent of its poppy fields, as the U.S. and UNDCP demanded. The anti-bin Laden sanctions made it impossible for the Taliban to earn international recognition, attract investment, or make up for lost revenue. Meanwhile, the Northern Alliance openly produced opium to which the U.S. was conveniently blind. As Frederick Starr, chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said: “It is legal under U.S.-led UN sanctions to send

41. Ibid., Jane’s; Sunday Observer, op. cit. 42. Fact Sheet—The Taliban And The Afghan Drug Trade, Bureau of South Asian Affairs, U.S. Department of State, Dec. 9, 2000, .

10. The Taliban and “petropolitics”

203

arms to the Northern Alliance, which is actively exporting drugs, but illegal to send arms to the Taliban, which has stopped drug production.”43 When you add up the tens of thousands of Afghan dead and wounded, the millions who wer made refugees, the destruction of Afghanistan’s infrastructure. the corrupt U.S. drug policy, and support for the repressive Taliban in the name of Unocal’s self-interest, U.S. policy in Afghanistan since 1979 has been one of abject failure and ruthless disregard for human life—a heinous legacy.

43. Ridgeway, op. cit.

D I S C U S S I N G the Bush government’s relations with the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and the “war on terrorism,” it’s important to appreciate the degree to which petropoliticians controlled U.S. policy during this period.

E F O R E

O I L I N T H E FA M I LY President George W. Bush In 1978, Bush started his own oil company, Arbusto (“bush” in Spanish), with money from his father’s friends and associates. Bush consistently lost money, and three times had to call on his investors to bail him out (earning his firm the trade nickname of “Are-Bust-Owe”). He was finally saved in 1986 when he merged Arbusto with Harken Energy of Houston, Texas. Bush’s political connections and ability to raise investment funds were what Harken needed. Two years later, Bush’s connections helped Harken attract Saudi investment and win its first international contract—oil drilling in Bahrain.1 1. Damien Cave, The United States of Oil, salon.com, Nov. 19, 2001. Bush received 212,000 shares of Harken stock in 1986, and sold it on June 20, 1990, for $848,000. Harken suffered a serious setback when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, leading to suspicions that George W. Bush illegally used inside information for personal gain. See Rick Wiles “Bush’s Former Oil Company Linked to bin Laden Family,” American Freedom News, Oct. 3, 2001, ; and George W. Bush Jr.—The Dark Side .

11. Oil for one, and one for oil

205

Vice-President Dick Cheney Cheney was George Bush Sr.’s Defense Secretary from 1988-1992, whence he became chairman and chief executive officer of Dallas-based Halliburton Corporation, the world’s largest pipeline services company, with interests throughout the Caspian region. One of Halliburton’s largest clients is Chevron (Standard Oil of California), the major shareholder in the Caspian Pipeline Consortium. Chevron owns a 55 percent share with Kazakhstan in the joint company Tengizchevroil. Halliburton also did contract work for Unocal’s pipeline in Burma, which was being built in co-operation with the Burmese military.

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice Condoleezza Rice was a director of Chevron from 1991 until January 15, 2001, when she entered Bush’s government. Nevertheless, her name still floated around the company, causing the government some embarrassment. Before she left, Chevron did her the honor of naming a 136,000-ton tanker after her. At an April 2001 press briefing, a reporter asked assistant press secretary Scott McLellan about Bush’s attitude on the Condoleezza Rice: “Given that Chevron has been accused of human rights abuses with the Nigerian Mobile Police against civilians in Nigeria, I’m wondering whether the president thinks it’s wise to have this close a relationship with Chevron.” McLellan said, in effect, that the issue had been resolved and Chevron spokesman Fred Gorell told the San Francisco Chronicle that the ship would not be renamed: “If you remember, Carla Hills was on our board, and went off the board to take a role in the administration, and we did not rename the tanker.” In May, the Condoleezza Rice was quietly renamed Altair Voyager. When asked if the White House asked for the name change, Gorell declined comment.2

Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans and Secretary of Energy Stanley Abraham Both men worked for Tom Brown, a Denver-based energy company engaged in exploration, development, acquisition, production and marketing of natural gas and crude oil mostly in the Rocky Mountains, Texas and Alberta. Among other notables, Robert Oakley (Ambassador to Pakistan), Richard Armitage (Deputy Secretary of State), Donald Rice (former RAND corporation CEO and Secretary of the Air Force under George Bush Sr.), and Charles Larson (Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Command) all went to work for Unocal as consultants or directors. Oakley played an important role helping the CIA funnel aid to the mujahedin during the 1980s. 2. “Condi Rice Renamed,” Multinational Monitor, June 2001, .

206

Enemies by Design

Former Unocal consultant Zalmay Khalilzad, now U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, will be discussed below in a separate section.

Big Oil Because of the oil and gas industry’s overrepresentation in senior political offices, and its role in shaping foreign policy, it should be treated as a collective “petropolitician” in its own right. Overall, the oil and gas industry spent $33.9 million in the 2000 presidential election, of which $26.6 million (78 percent) went to the Republicans.3 Of the top 20 contributors, all save one favored Bush. Table IV: Top five oil contributors to Bush Corporation

Contribution

% to Republicans

Enron Corp.

$2,374,298

72

Exxon Mobil Corp.

$1,375,250

89

El Paso Corp.

$1,114,995

83

Chevron Corp.

$1,084,077

72

Koch Industries

$1,062,956

90

Halliburton was 17th, contributing $420,688, (98 percent Republican). Regarding the final presidential candidates, the oil and gas industry collectively gave Bush $1,914,706; Gore, $138,514. For its part, Unocal, through its subsidiary Pure Resources of Midland, Texas, contributed $125,000 in “soft money” to the Republican National Committee. 4 The example of Texas-based Enron epitomizes the dominance of oil interests in the Bush administration. In early 2001, Enron was among a group of multinationals—Amoco, Chevron, Mobil, Unocal, British Petroleum and others—spending billions to tap Caspian Sea oilfields. Cheney and James Baker III were two major government figures who negotiated deals on their behalf. Among Enron’s ventures was a February 1999 feasibility study of a $2.5 billion gas pipeline project from Turkmenistan. The signing of a joint venture agreement among Turkmenistan, Bechtel Corp. and General Electric Capital Services supplanted in importance the CentGas project, which was in limbo after Unocal’s withdrawal. 3. Unless otherwise noted, all campaign statistics come from www.opensecrets.org, the website for The Washington, DC-based Center for Responsive Politics. 4. “Soft money” refers to campaign contributions not regulated by federal election laws, and which are meant to support political parties at the state and local levels rather than specific candidates. Such projects would include voter registration, get-out-the-vote drives, bumper stickers, and generic TV ads that support party platforms. However, soft money is applied much more widely to pay for office overhead, computer equipment, and other non-candidate expenses that free up “hard money” contributions that do support candidates. Thus, this widespread abuse of “soft money” contributions indirectly benefits candidates, creating a gaping loophole in the law.

11. Oil for one, and one for oil

207

Enron’s former Chief Executive Officer Kenneth Lay is a close friend of the Bush family. He was the biggest contributor to Bush’s campaign, and Enron officials met no fewer than six times with Cheney while he was conducting an energy task force to determine long-term U.S. National Energy Policy. Since April 2001, Rep. Henry Waxman, (D-CA) Minority Leader of the House Committee on Government Reform, has been asking Cheney to give details of these six meetings, but Cheney, through his lawyer David Addington, has refused to identify who met with the task force or who served on the task force staff. Addington has also refused to produce documents connected with its meetings with outside groups.5 The General Accounting Office has been rebuffed on this and other requests and is taking legal action against the White House to obtain documents. According to Waxman, the final report of the National Energy Policy Development Group, which came out on May 17, 2001, contained at least 17 recommendations that benefited Enron. One of these was for U.S. government support for natural gas development in India that directly aided Enron’s controversial and troubled Dabhol power plant. “It appears that [this decision] was absent from the final draft that the State Department circulated during the interagency review process for the energy ban,” wrote Waxman. “Instead, the provision appears to have been added to the plan during the period in which the White House directly controlled the drafting.”6 The Dabhol project began in the early years of the Clinton administration. On June 20, 1992, Enron and the government of the Indian state of Maharashtra signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding to build a power plant at Dabhol, 115 miles north of Bombay. The resultant Dabhol Power Company (DPC), became a joint venture among Enron (65 percent ownership), General Electric and Bechtel. In February 1993, a formal agreement was signed to produce 2,450 megawatts at an approximate cost of $3 billion, but two months later the World Bank rejected Enron’s loan application because the plant would produce too much power at too high a cost and therefore was not considered economically sound. Nevertheless, intense lobbying on Enron’s behalf by the government and by Clinton himself led the Indian government to issue provisional clearance in November 1993. The following year, the Washington based Export-Import Bank approved a $302 million loan, and after two years construction began.

5. The Bush White House’s Refusal to Cooperate with a Congressional Investigation of the Energy Task Force—Chronology, House Committee on Government Reform, Minority Office, U.S. Congress. At the time of writing, Cheney still has not complied. . 6. Letter, Rep. Henry Waxman to Vice-President Dick Cheney, Jan. 25, 2002, .

208

Enemies by Design

The project faltered on May 29, 2001, when the Indian government got into a dispute with Enron over pricing, and stopped buying energy, which was four times more expensive than that of domestic producers. To plead Enron’s case, Cheney approached government officials and Opposition Congress Party president Sonia Gandhi during a June 2001 visit by India’s national security adviser Brajesh Mishra. According to the New York Daily News, Cheney tried to help Enron collect on a $64 million debt. The White House defended Cheney’s actions, saying public funds were at risk in the Dabhol project, so the investment had to be protected. The public exposure was due to the involvement of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a federal taxpayer-based agency that provides financial and political risk insurance to projects like Dabhol.7 Since there was no logical reason for the government to risk public money on a project that was shown to be unsound, the real explanation is petropolitics. Enron, though, wasn’t the only energy company influencing policy. Of the top 25 energy corporations that contributed to the Republican Party before the election, 18 sent executives or representatives to meet with Cheney or members of the task force and its staff. For example, on May 3, 2001, two electrical utilities lobbyists—former Montana Governor and now Republican party chairman Marc Racicot and former party chairman Haley Barbour— attended a White House task force meeting with Cheney. As Time reported, the connection between Republican campaign contributions and favorable energy policy was inescapable: Two weeks later, Cheney’s report gave the lobbyists much of what they wanted, including a re-evaluation of a costly clean-air rule, called the new-source review, which requires new pollution controls when power plants are expanded. While he was lobbying for these energy interests, Barbour was also raising at least $250,000 for a May 21 GOP gala honoring President Bush. The group of utilities Barbour was representing, led by Southern Co., gave $150,000 to the event. The night before the gala, Cheney held a glitzy reception at the vicepresidential mansion for hundreds of the fete’s sponsors and longtime party donors. Another company that had an entrée to the Cheney task force was Peabody Energy, a coal behemoth whose holding company and top

7. At its height, Enron was the seventh largest corporation in the U.S. (16th largest in the world), and worth $70 billion. On Dec. 31, 2001, it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Enron executives were forced to admit that they inflated profits by $600 million and hid $1 billion worth of debt in thousands of offshore partnerships. When news of the hidden debt first aired in October 2001, Enron’s share value and credit rating plummeted, leaving the company unable to raise money to stay afloat. The collapse of Enron is the greatest failure of a private company in history. The full extent of the Bush administration’s role in the collapse and the Dabhol fiasco is not yet known. For a summary of major events and confidential e-mails related to the Enron collapse and the government’s involvement, see “Chronology of Administration Dealings With Enron’s Dabhol Power Plant in India,” Washington Post, Jan. 22, 2002.

209

11. Oil for one, and one for oil

officer have given nearly $200,000 to the president and his party since Bush took office, including $25,000 for the May gala.8 The full scope of the government’s support for energy companies is codified in H.R. 4, the National Energy Security Act, introduced by Sen. Frank Murkowski (R-AK) on Feb. 26, 2001. The energy interests’ returns on investment in exchange for their political contributions are as follows:9 Table V: Big Oil’s political investment Industry

Contributions, 2000 election cycle, in $ millions

Total industry benefits in NESA, in $ millions

Return on Investment

Coal

$3,8

$5,844

153,800 %

Oil & gas

$33,3

$21,980

66,000 %

Electric

$18,6

$5,862

31,500 %

Nuclear

$13,8

$2,666

19,300 %

TOTALS

$69,5

$36,352

52,300 %

P U B L I C A N D P R I VAT E A F G H A N I S TA N P O L I C I E S Until the Sept. 11 attack, the political pecking order on Afghanistan was still 1) Oil, 2) drugs, 3) bin Laden. At any given time 2 and 3 were interchanged or sacrificed for the sake of 1, but so far as the public was concerned, 1 had nothing to do with it. The idea that the U.S. could have commercial dealings with the Taliban at the same time the UN and U.S. were subjecting them to sanctions could not be admitted. Whereas Clinton was content to let the pipeline deal lie dormant while he went after the Taliban, Bush tried to do both. In public, the U.S. isolated the Taliban, but used the suffering of the Afghan people to play up the image of the U.S. as a caring, generous state. Take, for example, Secretary of State Colin Powell’s May 17, 2001, press conference, in which he announced $43 million in new humanitarian assistance for “the people of Afghanistan.” The aid consisted of 65,000 tons of wheat, $5 million in complementary food commodities, and $10 million in

8. Michael Weisskopf and Adam Zagorin, “Getting the Ear of Dick Cheney,” Time, Feb. 03, 2002. 9. Hitting the Jackpot: How the House Energy Bill (H.R. 4) Rewards Millions in Contributions with Billions in Returns. Paper prepared for Rep. Henry A. Waxman, Minority Staff Special Investigations Division Committee on Government Reform U.S. House of Representatives, Aug. 1, 2001, p.2. The figures for industry sector contributions are approximately 10 percent higher than those given by opensecrets.org.

210

Enemies by Design

other livelihood and food security programs (read: “crop substitution”). After delineating the aid, Powell proceeded to praise U.S. generosity: Even before this latest commitment, the United States was by far the largest provider of humanitarian assistance for Afghans. Last year, we provided about $114 million in aid. With this new package, our humanitarian assistance to date this year will reach $124 million. This includes over 200,000 tons of wheat. We will continue to look for ways to provide more assistance for Afghans, including those farmers who have felt the impact of the ban on poppy cultivation, a decision by the Taliban that we welcome.10 Given that the opium industry is worth in excess of $100 billion annually, $10 million to promote crop substitution was conspicuously inadequate, which raises suspicion about the true nature of the aid. Was it “humanitarian aid” as Powell said, or support for the Taliban disguised as humanitarian aid? As columnist Robert Scheer wrote in the Los Angeles Times: The opium ban will not last unless the U.S. is willing to pour far larger amounts of money into underwriting the Afghan economy. As the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Steven Casteel admitted, ‘The bad side of the ban is that it’s bringing their country—or certain regions of their country—to economic ruin.’ Nor did he hold out much hope for Afghan farmers growing other crops such as wheat, which require a vast infrastructure to supply water and fertilizer that no longer exists in that devastated country.11 An example of the self-defeating nature of U.S. policy is what happened to Jamroz, a farmer in the Black Mountains of Eastern Afghanistan, after he switched to wheat and onions in the wake of Mullah Mohammed Omar’s political and religious injunctions against growing poppies. All Jamroz had to show for his obedience was poverty. The worst drought in decades destroyed his wheat crop, and he saw none of the promised international aid meant to compensate him for the loss of poppy-growing income.12 So long as the U.S. and UN subjected the Taliban to economic sanctions and refused to recognize their government, Afghanistan had no hope of attracting investment to diversify its economy and reduce dependency on the opium trade. Moreover, so long as the opium ban was in place, rival producers like Pakistan and Burma threatened to capture Afghanistan’s share of the drug market. The Taliban faced a no-win scenario—grow poppies and suffer isolation and punishment, or grow wheat and starve on U.S. handouts. 10. Colin L. Powell, Humanitarian Assistance to Afghans, U.S. State Department, Washington, D.C. May 17, 2001. 11. Robert Scheer, “Bush’s Faustian Deal With the Taliban,” Los Angeles Times, May 22, 2001. 12. Jim Teeple, Taliban Wipes out Afghanistan’s Opium Production, Institute for Afghan Studies, April 8, 2001, .

11. Oil for one, and one for oil

211

Frederick Starr, chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins University, stated that without Western, U.S., and UN leadership, Afghanistan would remain dependent on the world’s demand for its opium.13 However, the concept of leadership presupposed an attitude that didn’t exist. For example, Powell saw no contradiction between upholding sanctions and aiding the Afghan people: We provide our aid to the people of Afghanistan [through international agencies of the United Nations and non-governmental organizations], not to Afghanistan’s warring factions. Our aid bypasses the Taliban, who have done little to alleviate the suffering of the Afghan people, and indeed have done much to exacerbate it. We hope the Taliban will act on a number of fundamental issues that separate us: their support for terrorism; their violation of internationally recognized human rights standards, especially their treatment of women and girls; and their refusal to resolve Afghanistan’s civil war through a negotiated settlement. UN sanctions against the Taliban are smart sanctions and do not hurt the Afghan people, nor do these sanctions affect the flow of humanitarian assistance for Afghans.14 At first glance, Powell’s statement seems absurd, since there is ample empirical evidence to prove that sanctions do hurt the Afghan people. But this passage must also be read in a deeper, more cynical, way. Of the “fundamental issues” to be resolved, the first two—support for terrorism and violations of human rights—can be dismissed as disingenuous, because the U.S. only began to care about them after the pipeline bid failed. The third point, “[refusing] to resolve Afghanistan’s civil war through a negotiated settlement,” is the key.

“Carpet of Gold” Even though the CentGas bid collapsed, the U.S. need for a southern pipeline to carry Central Asian oil and gas remained as acute as ever. Existing routes in the area ran north through Russia, and Bush wanted to establish a U.S.-controlled supply of Caspian Central Asian oil to offset dependency on the Persian Gulf. Thus, Bush privately continued to treat the Taliban as a “force for stability” in expectations that the regime could be convinced or forced to support the U.S. In Ben Laden: la vérité intérdite, Brisard and Dasquié describe an intense six-month campaign to compel the Taliban to accept the U.S. pipeline: Several meetings took place this year, under the arbitration of Francesc Vendrell, personal representative of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, to discuss the situation in Afghanistan. Representatives of the U.S. government and Russia, and the six countries that border with 13. Cited in James Ridgeway, “Bush’s Opium Bender,” Village Voice, June 20-26, 2001. 14. Ibid., Powell.

212

Enemies by Design

Afghanistan were present at these meetings. Sometimes, representatives of the Taliban also sat around the table.15 The authors trace negotiations with the Taliban to February 2001, almost immediately after Bush took office. In March, the Taliban enlisted the public relations services of Laila Helms, the part-Afghan niece of Richard Helms, former CIA director and former U.S. ambassador to Tehran. For five days in March she arranged meetings in Washington D.C. between Mullah Omar’s advisor Sayed Rahmatullah Hashimi, the directorate of Central Intelligence at the CIA and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department. As proof of Bush’s single-minded focus on oil, the meetings took place after the Taliban appalled the world by blowing up the ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan. By July, the failure to reach an agreement led the U.S. to change tactics. Bush let Vedrell take the lead in the negotiations and appointed Thomas Simons, a former ambassador to Pakistan, to represent the U.S. at an informal four-day “six plus two” meeting in Berlin. (“Six plus two” refers to Afghanistan’s six neighbors—China, Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan—plus the U.S. and Russia.) The U.S. ceded control of the negotiations to the UN because it had taken the decision to oust the Taliban. It did, however, leave one last ultimatum: form a coalition government of national unity with the Northern Alliance, or else. As Niaz A. Naik, Pakistan’s former Foreign Secretary said in an interview on French television: “Simons said: ‘either the Taliban behave as they ought to, or Pakistan convinces them to do so, or we will use another option.’ The words Simons used were ‘a military operation.’”16 Similarly, Brisard said U.S. representatives told the Taliban: “Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.”17 The last direct contact with the Taliban occurred on Aug. 2, 2001, when the State Department’s director of Asian affairs Christina Rocca met the Taliban ambassador in Islamabad. Rocca had previously served in the CIA where she oversaw contacts with the mujahedin and delivery of Stinger missiles. Just over two months after this meeting, the U.S. delivered its carpet of bombs. “If the Taliban had accepted [the] coalition, they would have immediately received international economic aid, and the pipelines from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan would have come,” said Naik.18 15. Cited in Julio Godoy, “US policy on Taliban influenced by oil—authors,” Asia Times, Nov. 20, 2001. 16. Cited in Ibid. See also Jonathan Steele et al. “Threat of US strikes passed to Taliban weeks before N.Y. attack, Guardian, Sept. 22, 2001. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid.

11. Oil for one, and one for oil

213

Z A L M AY K H A L I L Z A D — B U S H ’ S T H E O R I S T On May 23, less than a week after Powell made his humanitarian aid speech, and one day before the Republicans lost their majority in the Senate, Zalmay Khalilzad was appointed to the National Security Council as a special assistant to the president and senior director for Gulf, Southwest Asia and Other Regional Issues. Bush’s “Afghan policy” would ultimately be his brain child. Khalilzad, an ethnic Pashtun, was born in Mazar-i-Sharif in 1951. His family belonged to the old ruling elite of Afghanistan, and his father was an aide to King Zahir Shah. The family moved to Kabul, where Khalilzad attended English-language schools. Khalilzad spent one year of his highschool education as an exchange student in the U.S., and later received an undergraduate degree from the American University in Beirut. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1979. In 1984, Khalilzad became an American citizen and joined the State Department on a one-year fellowship. His background and language skills earned him a permanent position on the State Department’s Policy Planning Council during the Reagan era, thus beginning a career-long connection to Republican governments: • 2000-2001, Head of the Bush-Cheney Transition team for the Department of Defense and advisor to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. • 1993–1999, Director of the Strategy, Doctrine and Force Structure program for the hawkish RAND Corporation’s Project Air Force, and founder of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. • 1991–1992, Assistant Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning, senior political scientist at RAND, and associate professor at the University of California at San Diego in 1989 and 1991. • 1985–1989, Special Advisor during the Reagan/Bush presidencies to the Under Secretary of State for Policy working on policy issues on the Iran-Iraq War and the Soviet War in Afghanistan. Khalilzad was also assistant professor of Political Science at Columbia University from 1979 to 1989.

214

Enemies by Design

11. Oil for one, and one for oil

215

Though this résumé in the official White House announcement is impressive and doubtless recommends Khalilzad to his position, it is conspicuously incomplete. Lacking from this or other mainstream media reports at the time—New York Times, New York Post, Washington Post— was any mention of Khalilzad’s work on behalf of Unocal. In the mid-1990s, while writing books and articles on defense and political issues for RAND, Khalilzad worked for the Boston-based Cambridge Energy Research Associates, which was contracted to conduct pipeline risk analyses for Unocal. In Oct. 7, 1996, in an opinion piece for the Washington Post, Khalilzad argued that the U.S. abandonment of Afghanistan following the Soviet defeat was a mistake, and that it was now time for “re-engagement.” He recommended three steps: 1) Encourage the Taliban to end the civil war by negotiating a national government with Dostum’s forces in the North and other major groups; 2) offer the Taliban recognition and humanitarian assistance, and promote international economic reconstruction; and 3) encourage “regional friends” Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to work for the same objectives. “We should use as a positive incentive the benefits that will accrue to Afghanistan from the construction of oil and gas pipelines across its territory,” he wrote. “These projects will only go forward if Afghanistan has a single authoritative government.” That government would be friendly because the Taliban does not practice “the anti-U.S.” style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran.19 It cannot be coincidence that ending the civil war and obtaining international recognition were Unocal’s two prerequisites for building the pipeline. Without them, it could not secure financing. Also, advocating the involvement of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan was tantamount to advocating the interests of CentGas. The piece was a de facto Unocal policy paper, but the author was identified only as a RAND analyst and a federal government official. Khalilzad was also identified as a RAND analyst when he was one of the American officials who schmoozed Taliban delegates during their visit to Unocal’s Sugarland headquarters in December 1997. Over dinner at a reception, he even got into a deep philosophical debate with the Taliban minister of culture and information Amir Khan Muttaqi over the regime’s treatment of women.20 Khalilzad’s pro-Taliban views changed after Clinton attacked Afghanistan in August 1998, which was also when Unocal suspended its participation in CentGas. Now, the Taliban were seen as an obstacle to 19. Zalmay Khalilzad, “Afghanistan: Time To Reengage,” Washington Post, Oct. 7, 1996. 20. Joe Stephens and David B. Ottaway, “Consultant’s Policy Influence Goes Back to the Reagan Era,” Washington Post, Nov. 23, 2001.

216

Enemies by Design

peace. Khalilzad’s most influential work on this theme was a 2000 essay cowritten with RAND colleague Daniel Byman entitled, Afghanistan: The Consolidation of a Rogue State. In it, the authors recommended that the U.S. take the following six steps to stabilize Afghanistan: (1) Aid the Pashtun opposition to create a political stalemate, thus preventing the Taliban from consolidating power. 2) Oppose the Taliban ideology by aiding moderate Islamic voices. 3) Press Pakistan to withdraw support for the Taliban. 4) Give humanitarian aid to the victims of the Taliban. 5) Aid moderate Afghan political forces and foster a movement that could act as an accountable government. 6) Elevate the importance of Afghanistan at home, including appointment of a high-level envoy for Afghanistan to coordinate overall U.S. policy.21 These six steps would form the essence of Bush’s Afghanistan policy.

Scholastic propaganda “Afghanistan: The Consolidation of a Rogue State” is not a straightforward analysis piece. It is largely a political tract designed to denigrate the Clinton administration and obscure U.S. support for the Taliban. A few statements are worth examining: “The Clinton administration has ignored the challenge of the Taliban. Some administration officials tacitly favored the group when it emerged between 1994 and 1995, underestimating the threat it posed to regional stability and to U.S. interests.” (p. 66). Khalilzad fails to mention that he was one of these officials, and that favoring the Taliban was not just a minority view—it was government policy. As for U.S. support of a regime inimical to regional stability and even its own national interest, such conduct is standard operating procedure when the regime in question possess a raw material the U.S. needs. The same could be said of U.S. policy towards Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Latin America, ad nauseam. “The many states that meddle in Afghanistan complicate any peace settlement and will lead to continued war and instability… Any lasting solution to the Afghan conflict requires working with the Pashtun population; too close a relationship with the Northern Alliance will hinder rather than help this objective.” (pp. 69, 74.) Pakistan comes in for particularly harsh criticism for arming the Taliban in 1994, and then using them to fight a proxy war with Iran. However, in saying this, Khalilzad repudiated his own 1996 Washington Post article in 21. Zalmay Khalilzad and Daniel Byman, “Afghanistan: The Consolidation of a Rogue State,” The Washington Quarterly (Winter 2000), pp. 65–78.

11. Oil for one, and one for oil

217

which he argued for Pakistani re-engagement. Khalilzad’s and Byman’s statement about the dangerous effects of meddling most directly points to the U.S. itself, and to a lesser degree Saudi Arabia. Embracing the Pashtun would likely alienate minority groups, representing more meddling. this measure is supposed to remedy. Khalilzad’s recommendation comes down to a roadmap for overthrowing the Taliban. Since May 2000, the CIA’s Special Activities Division had been inserting specialized case officers from the agency’s Near East Division into Afghanistan. These officers speak local languages and have previous covert relationships with the Northern Alliance. Prior to 2000, the division was called the Military Support Program, and units of the program had been involved in Afghanistan and making contacts with opposition forces since 1997.22 “The importance of Afghanistan may grow in the coming years, as Central Asia’s oil and gas reserves, which are estimated to rival those of the North Sea, begin to play a major role in the world energy market. Afghanistan could prove a valuable corridor for this energy as well as for access to markets in Central Asia. In addition, Afghanistan can serve as a trade link between Central and South Asia…So far, the United States has taken few steps to secure its interests in Afghanistan and the region. Most U.S. efforts are confined to ad hoc measures to appease domestic critics concerned with terrorism or the treatment of women.” (pp. 70–71) The conditional tense in this passage is disingenuous. Khalilzad knows full well that Afghanistan’s importance has grown, that Central Asian oil is playing a major role, and that Afghanistan is a valuable corridor. The intent here is to disguise U.S. foreknowledge of these matters. “Afghanistan is ruled by a rogue regime, the Taliban. The outrages that draw headlines in the West stem from its misrule and will continue as long as the movement dominates Afghanistan… Afghanistan is a haven for some of the world’s most lethal anti-U.S. terrorists and their supporters. [Osama] Bin Laden is only the most famous of a large and skilled network of radicals based in Afghanistan.” (pp. 65, 69) In this passage we have the essence of Bush’s “war on terrorism,” which he articulated at a joint session of Congress on Sept. 20, 2001. What makes this passage significant is the equation of Afghanistan, specifically the Taliban, with terrorist activity. Since 1996, there have been only seven names on the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorism-supporting countries: Cuba, Libya, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Sudan and Syria. The exclusion of Afghanistan leads to one of two conclusions: 1) Afghanistan didn’t support terrorism, or 2), Afghanistan did, but could not be on the list because of petropolitics. 22. Bob Woodward, “Secret CIA Units Playing a Central Combat Role,” Washington Post, Nov. 18, 2001, p. A1.

218

Enemies by Design

Given the Taliban’s protection of bin Laden and his supporters, option 1 is not possible. Option 2 is the only answer, and this fact shows Khalilzad’s and Byman’s condemnation of the Taliban to be hypocritical.

WHO CARES ABOUT OSAMA? In fact, hypocritical is the best word to describe the general U.S. approach to terrorism. Nobody knew that better than FBI Deputy Director John O’Neill. He headed the investigations into the bombings at the World Trade Center (1993), Khobar (1996), the U.S. embassies (1998), and the USS Cole (2000). In Ben Laden – la vérité intérdite, O’Neill told Brisard and Dasquié that U.S. oil companies and the Saudi Arabian government repeatedly frustrated his efforts to bring bin Laden to justice. O’Neill said that all the information needed to dismantle bin Laden’s organization was in Saudi Arabia, but the government didn’t want to upset the Saudi monarchy. In the case of the 1996 Khobar blast, the Saudis interrogated, tried and executed the suspects without allowing the FBI to speak with them. Similarly, the U.S. State Department obstructed O’Neill’s attempts to prove that bin Laden was behind the USS Cole explosion. He told Brisard that he had clear evidence of bin Laden’s guilt, but Barbara Bodine, U.S. ambassador to Yemen, refused to allow O’Neill and his team to enter the country. In August 2001, O’Neill resigned in frustration and took up a job as head of security in the World Trade Center. He died in the Sept. 11th attack. In a CNN interview with Paula Zahn about Brisard’s and Dasquié’s claims of Bush administration obstruction, former chief UN weapons inspector Richard Butler confirmed the necessity of a trans-Afghanistan pipeline. These are allegations. They’re worth airing and talking about, because of their gravity. We don’t know if they are correct. But I believe they should be investigated, because Central Asian oil, as we were discussing yesterday, is potentially so important. And all prior attempts to have a pipeline had to be done through Russia. It had to be negotiated with Russia. Now, if there is to be a pipeline through Afghanistan, obviating the need to deal with Russia, it would also cost less than half of what a pipeline through Russia would cost. So financially and politically, there’s a big prize to be had. A pipeline through Afghanistan down to the Pakistan coast would bring out that Central Asian oil easier and more cheaply.23

23. Interview with Richard Butler, “Explosive New Book Published in France Alleges that U.S. Was in Negotiations to Do a Deal with Taliban,” American Morning With Paula Zahn, CNN, Jan. 8, 2002.

11. Oil for one, and one for oil

219

Catching bin Laden was not the priority it was made it out to be. A search of the New York Times database shows the following results for “bin Laden” from 1996 to 2000: 1996, 11; 1997, 5; 1998, 211; 1999, 162; and 2000, 170. Even after the high of 211 in the year the embassies were attacked, one would expect to find more, not fewer, hits in succeeding years. Moreover, there is little evidence to suggest that the U.S. actively tried to compel the Taliban to turn him over, even after Russian President Vladimir Putin openly warned the Clinton administration that bin Laden posed a danger: “Washington’s reaction at the time really amazed me. They shrugged their shoulders and said matter-of-factly: ‘We can’t do anything because the Taliban does not want to turn him over.’”24 Before Sept. 11, Bush’s attitude about bin Laden differed little from Clinton’s. From Jan. 1 to Sept. 10, 2001, the number of hits in the New York Times database totaled 187—fewer than one per day. Over that same period, “Taliban” registered 205 hits. This apparent lack of urgency about bin Laden is consistent with the exigencies of pro-Taliban petropolitics and obstruction of O’Neill’s investigations. Here, too, Bush follows the advice of Khalilzad and Byman: The question of bin Laden illustrates the limits of U.S. policy. Clearly, bin Laden is a dangerous terrorist who must be captured and prosecuted. Yet the U.S. focus on him, rather than on the trend he represents, is misguided. Bin Laden is a wealthy, capable, and dedicated foe, but hardly an evil genius or charismatic leader who single-handedly is waging war against the United States. If he dies, the war will continue. As one Taliban officer noted, “What will the Americans do even if they find bin Laden? There are hundreds of bin Ladens just up the road.” Indeed, the U.S. focus on bin Laden has enabled him to increase his recruitment and fund-raising from abroad… To stop bin Laden’s network, Washington must gain the support of the governments that host it. (pp. 71-72) The importance of this passage cannot be exaggerated. It represents not only a sober refutation of Clinton’s obsession with bin Laden and the “war on terrorism,” but it’s also the most rational assessment of the threat bin Laden posed to the U.S. The strength of this passage comes from its candid tone and different focus. Unlike the previous excerpts, this one is concerned with U.S. policy towards bin Laden, not the Taliban. Significantly, this passage also contains the essay’s only citation, thus enhancing the authors’ rational appreciation of the low importance of bin Laden within the context of petropolitical self-interest. (The assessment remained accurate, if one subscribes to the dissenting view that bin Laden had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.)

24. Cited in Jonathan Steele, et al., “Threat of US strikes passed to Taliban weeks before NY attack,” The Guardian, Sept. 22, 2001.

220

Enemies by Design

WERE BIN LADEN AND HIS FOLLOWERS R E A L LY T H E TA R G E T ? The conspicuous benefits that accrued to the Bush White House as a result of the Sept. 11 attack, as well as the administration’s incoherent statements about its ability to capture bin Laden, shows that the bombing of Afghanistan had little to do with bin Laden and his Islamist followers. On Oct. 25, 2001, Rumsfeld exposed the inconsistency between the Bush administration’s apparent objective (capturing or killing bin Laden) and its actual objective (destroying the Taliban) during an interview with the editorial board of USA Today: Rumsfeld has tried to lower expectations for the military campaign by comparing it to the Cold War, which lasted a half-century. In a 50minute interview, Rumsfeld cautioned repeatedly that it would be ‘very difficult’ to capture or kill bin Laden: “It’s a big world. There are lots of countries. He’s got a lot of money, he’s got a lot of people who support him, and I just don’t know whether we’ll be successful. Clearly, it would be highly desirable to find him.” Even if bin Laden were killed, his terrorist network would carry on, Rumsfeld said. “If he were gone tomorrow, the same problem would exist.”25

Setting up the Taliban The USA Today interview is particularly noteworthy because Rumsfeld’s equation of the “war on terrorism” with the Cold War contradicts Pentagon statements that public support for the “war on terrorism” “stems not from Cold War geopolitics but from attacks on U.S. soil.” In one case, the “war on terrorism” is a long, deliberate campaign; in the other, it’s an emotional response to a specific act. The incoherence of these two positions at least shows that bin Laden was not the all-consuming target he was made out to be. Rumsfeld’s early pessimism about the ability to capture bin Laden was validated on April 17, 2002, when the U.S. government accepted an intelligence report stating that bin Laden had left his Tora Bora cave complex during the first 10 days of December.27 In fact, Bush’s own statements indicate that the Afghan government, not bin Laden, was his major target. In his Sept. 20 speech, Bush delivered the following ultimatum to the Taliban: Deliver to United States authorities all the leaders of al-Qaida who hide in your land. (Applause.) Release all foreign nationals, including American citizens, you have unjustly imprisoned. Protect foreign journalists, diplomats and aid workers in your country. Close 25. Jonathan Weisman and Andrea Stone, “Rumsfeld: Bin Laden may get away; ‘It’s a big world,’ he says, but predicts the Taliban regime will be toppled,” USA Today, Oct 25, 2001. 27. Barton Gellman and Thomas E. Ricks, “U.S. concludes bin Laden survived Tora Bora fight,” Washington Post, April 17, 2002.

11. Oil for one, and one for oil

221

immediately and permanently every terrorist training camp in Afghanistan, and hand over every terrorist, and every person in their support structure, to appropriate authorities. (Applause.) Give the United States full access to terrorist training camps, so we can make sure they are no longer operating. These demands are not open to negotiation or discussion. (Applause.) The Taliban must act, and act immediately. They will hand over the terrorists, or they will share in their fate. The impression here is that by giving the Taliban a chance to avoid military reprisals, the U.S. was being fair-minded, but this impression is fraudulent. First, the Taliban were under no obligation to comply with Bush’s diktat because Article 2 of the Charter of the United Nations recognizes the sovereign equality of all member states. In other words, the U.S. has no right to compel obedience from any nation. Second, Article 51 recognizes the supremacy of the Security Council to resolve disputes, so by threatening to take the law into its own hands, the U.S. under Bush was violating Afghanistan’s sovereignty and declaring to the world that it was a rogue state. Third, Bush failed to mention that he had already authorized an extra $1 billion for CIA covert operations, and told the agency to do “whatever necessary” to assassinate bin Laden. This contract on bin Laden’s life was put out despite President Gerald Ford’s explicit 1976 ban on political assassinations. Rumsfeld even acknowledged the ban’s authority: “There is no question but that that ban does have effect. It restricts certain things that government can and cannot do.”28 Fourth, according to some press accounts, Mullah Muhammad Omar was prepared to hand over bin Laden, even to a third country, if the U.S. provided proof of his guilt. This offer, if true, showed that Omar was at least willing to abide by Security Council Resolutions 1267 and 1333, but Bush’s uncompromising tone showed that he cared less about obtaining bin Laden than destroying the Taliban. The same is true of Rumsfeld’s comments. In the USA Today interview, he said the U.S. likely would not capture bin Laden, but was certain the Taliban would be toppled: "Yes, I think there will be a post-Taliban Afghanistan. That is easier than finding a single person.” Even after making allowances for vengefulness, Bush’s ultimatum to the Taliban was so arrogant, punitive and humiliating that compliance was precluded. Bush had already decided that the Taliban should be destroyed, but the illusion of fair-mindedness was necessary to delude the American public, and the world at large, into believing that the coming U.S.-led onslaught was morally justified.

28. Ibid., News Briefing, Sept. 18, 2001.

222

Enemies by Design

SACRED VIOLENCE In his Sept. 20, 2001, address George W. Bush declared: “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaida, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated. (Applause.)” This was not the language of reasoned statecraft. It was the sort of immature posturing one expects of a gang leader looking to pick a fight. It didn’t matter that Afghanistan had nothing to do with the attacks, or that the vast majority of the alleged hijackers were Saudi Arabian nationals living in the United States. Afghanistan would receive America’s wrath. Bombing one of the world’s poorest countries was irrational. It would be the first act in an open-ended crusade against U.S. enemies, who were to henceforth to be known as “terrorists.” On the same day Bush spoke, the Pentagon christened the crusade “Infinite Justice.” The overt chauvinism of the name and the invocation of a crusade caused the administration severe embarrassment. The names were hastily changed with the excuse and apology that they were unintentionally offensive to Muslims, but these offenses were not gaffes; they accurately reflected the government’s anti-Muslim bigotry. At a press conference two days thereafter, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer backed away from “crusade,” but only for political and diplomatic reasons: Q U E S T I O N : The President used the word crusade last Sunday, which has caused some consternation in a lot of Muslim countries. Can you explain his usage of that word, given the connotation to Muslims? A R I F L E I S C H E R : I think what the President was saying was—had no intended consequences for anybody, Muslim or otherwise, other than to say that this is a broad cause that he is calling on America and the nations around the world to join. That was the point— purpose of what he said. Q U E S T I O N : Does he regret having used that word, Ari, and will he not use it again in the context of talking about this effort? F L E I S C H E R : I think to the degree that that word has any connotations that would upset any of our partners, or anybody else in the world, the President would regret if anything like that was conveyed. But the purpose of his conveying it is in the traditional English sense of the word. It’s a broad cause.29 Five days after it was created, Operation “Infinite Justice” was smugly renamed Operation “Enduring Freedom,” a change that made little sense. If the White House were genuinely concerned about Muslim sensitivities it should not have taken five days to rename the operation. As Fleischer’s comments showed, politics, not concern for Muslims, was what mattered. 29. Ari Fleischer, Press Briefing, White House Documents, Sept 18, 2001.

11. Oil for one, and one for oil

223

“Infinite” literally described the Bush cabal’s warmongering zeal. Toward the end of September, Rumsfeld submitted to Bush two proposals for openended war in the Middle East and Central Asia drawn up by Wolfowitz.30 The attacks on the World Trade Center gave the crazies the impetus they needed to launch unfettered war against “terrorist states,” of which Afghanistan would be only the first. From here, the U.S. would go after Iraq, Iran, Syria and southern Lebanon. “Justice” captured the essence of the vigilante-style retribution to be visited upon Afghanistan for the Taliban’s harboring of bin Laden. In short, “Enduring Freedom” was a ludicrous and cruel euphemism that pretended Afghanistan was being bombed for its own good.

U.S.—WAR CRIMINAL Professor Marc W. Herold of the University of New Hampshire’s Whittemore School of Business & Economics compiled an exhaustive daily account of the civilian cost of this imposed “enduring freedom” entitled A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States’ Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan: A Comprehensive Accounting. His research is based on analyses of data collected from more than two-dozen sources—news agencies, major newspapers and first-hand reports. These sources include The Frontier Post [Pakistan], BBC News, Pakistan Observer, Times of India, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Agence France-Presse, The Independent [UK], The Hindustan Times, The Times of London, The Singapore News and Al Jazeera [Qatar]. Herold concluded that from Oct. 7 to Dec. 6, 2001, at least 3,767 Afghani civilians were killed—an average of 62 per day: What causes the documented high level of civilian casualties? The explanation is the apparent willingness of U.S. military strategists to fire missiles into and drop bombs upon, heavily populated areas of Afghanistan. A legacy of the ten years of civil war during the ’80s is that many military garrisons and facilities are located in urban areas where the Soviet-backed government had placed them since they could be better protected there from attacks by the rural mujahedin… A heavy bombing onslaught must necessarily result in substantial numbers of civilian casualties simply by virtue of proximity to “military targets,” a reality exacerbated by the admitted occasional poor targeting, human error, equipment malfunction, and the irresponsible use of out-dated Soviet maps. But, the critical element remains the very low value put upon Afghan civilian lives by U.S. military planners and the political

30. Ed Vulliamy, “Hawks and doves fight for control of campaign,” The Observer, Sept. 30, 2001.

224

Enemies by Design

elite, as clearly revealed by U.S. willingness to bomb heavily populated regions.31 The U.S. also played a major role in one of the worst massacres of the campaign—the bombing of the Qala-i-Janghi fortress near Mazar-i-Sharif (again), where as many as 400 Taliban being held prisoner staged a revolt. According to The Independent: The Northern Alliance—on the advice of the U.S. Special Forces and the SAS—poured oil into the basement of the building and set fire to it, forcing those remaining prisoners holed up in the lower parts of the fort to move upstairs. The Northern Alliance troops then drove a huge Russian-made tank through the gates of the fortress, crushing the corpses of Pakistani and Arab fighters lying in the courtyard. The tank fired off four rounds aimed at the small building where the remaining Taliban fighters were holding out. The distance was no more than 20 metres, and the building was reduced to rubble in seconds…. If the accounts of the Northern Alliance soldiers are to be believed, 400 defeated men managed to force the United States into taking part in the massacre of prisoners of war.32 An Associated Press photographer who wandered into the area saw the dead bodies of 50 prisoners, whose hands had been tied behind their backs with black scarves. Alliance soldiers were busy removing the scarves with knives and scissors. The BBC reported that alliance troops continued to shoot at corpses in case any Taliban were still alive.33 Officially, the Pentagon has tried to discredit any report that reflects badly on the U.S. After the morning of Nov. 13, this task was made easier when a U.S. missile destroyed Al-Jazeera’s Kabul office and damaged the offices of the Associated Press and the BBC. When asked if he thought al-Jazeera was deliberately targeted, managing director Mohammed Jassim al-Ali said: “They know where we are located and they know what [equipment] we have in our office, and we also did not get any warning.”34

31. Professor Mark Herold, A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States’ Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan: A Comprehensive Accounting [revised], March 2002, . 32. Justin Huggler, “The Castle of Death,” The Independent, Nov. 20, 2001. 33. Jerry White, “After US massacre of Taliban POWs: the stench of death and more media lies,” World Socialist Website, Nov. 29, 2001. 34. Adnan Malik, “Arab satellite channel’s Kabul office destroyed by missile,” The Independent, Nov. 13, 2001.

225

11. Oil for one, and one for oil Table VI: Marc Herold’s analysis of the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan Date of bombing

Taliban version

Pentagon/State Dept. version

Herold’s assessment

Oct. 11

Bombed Karam village, 200 killed.

Hit military base on hillside. While possible civilians killed, Taliban claims are predictably exaggerated

Two jets bomb the mountain village of Karam comprised of 60 mud houses, during dinner after evening prayer time, killing 100-160 in Karam alone.

Oct. 21

Bombed Herat hospital, killing 100+ civilians.

Pentagon admits missing military barracks, but says hospital is "considerable distance" from where bomb landed and bomb blast unlikely to cause civilian deaths.

F-18 dropped a 1,000 lb. cluster bomb on a 200-bed military hospital and mosque, missing the target by 5001000 metres.

Oct. 31

Red Crescent clinic in Qandahar hit, killing 11.

A military target was hit and a Red Crescent hospital was in vicinity - 100s of meters away and was undamaged.

In a pre-dawn raid, F-18 drops a 2,000 lb. JDAM bomb on the clinic, killing 15-25. A photo shows the clinic reduced to a mangled mess of iron and concrete

‘WAR ON TERRORISM’S’ DIVIDENDS Electoral amnesia Bush came to power in a virtual coup d’état; that is, his victory reflected the will of vested interests, not the democratic will of the American electorate. Although vested interests always influence elections, Bush’s “election” was unique. On election night in November 2000, a scandal over voting irregularities in a handful of southeast Florida counties held up that state’s vote certification. Since neither Bush nor Vice-President Al Gore emerged as a clear favorite in the lackluster campaign, each needed Florida’s 25 electoral college votes to win the presidency. Much of the scandal concerned imperfect or mistaken punches in badly designed “butterfly ballots” that led to tens of thousands of votes being disqualified. In fact, independent candidate Patrick Buchanan acknowledged that most of the 3,000 votes he received, six times more than in any other state, were meant for Gore.

226

Enemies by Design

The Bush and Gore camps fell into a bitter existential ballot war that lasted for weeks. Was a vote defined by a clean punch on the ballot, or by the clear intent of the voter? In the contentious counties, numerous ballots were imperfectly punched, leaving the punched-part of the ballot, the chad, hanging or merely dimpled. Technically the votes didn’t count, and so were rejected, but the Gore camp argued that these “undervotes” should have counted because the will of the voter could be accurately discerned. In a final petition to the Florida State Supreme Court, the Gore camp was granted a full hand-recount in the disputed counties. Oddly, neither the Florida Supreme Court nor Gore demanded a recount of the overvotes, votes made when a voter punched more than one choice for president. If a voter mistakenly voted for Buchanan, and then punched the chad next to Gore and also wrote in Gore’s name, that would be considered legal under Florida law. However, the question was rendered moot when the conservative, Republican-dominated Federal Supreme Court quashed the recount order on Dec. 9, 2000. That decision, not the will of the American public, handed Florida’s 25 electoral college votes to Bush, making him the country’s 43rd president. By the time the counting was stopped, the final tally for Florida was: Bush 2,912,790; Gore 2,912,253—a difference of 537 votes, or 9/1,000ths of one percent. To settle the question of legitimacy, a consortium of eight major newsgathering organizations—including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and CNN—conducted a post mortem of the Florida recount. After spending almost $1 million examining 175,010 uncounted ballots, the consortium rendered its verdict on Nov. 12, 2001. It determined that Bush would have won a limited state-wide recount of undervotes by 243, but in a statewide recount of all ballots, including approximately 113,820 rejected overvotes, Gore would have eked out a slim victory by 60 to 171 votes, depending on the counting standards of the particular consortium member. In fact, Newsweek obtained hastily scribbled faxed notes from recount presiding judge Terry Lewis suggesting that overvotes would have been counted. In a Dec. 9, 2000, note to Judge W. Wayne Woodard, chairman of the Charlotte County Canvassing Board, Lewis wrote: “Judge, if you would, segregate ‘overvotes’ as you describe and indicate in your final report how many where you determined the clear intent of the voter.”35 On balance, the evidence showed that Gore was the true winner in Florida and that the Supreme Court helped Bush steal the presidency, yet the Times and virtually every major news organization ran with a “Bush wins” version of the recount, under the false presumption that overvotes would have been excluded. The Times front page declared: “Study of Disputed Florida

35. Cited in Michael Isikoff, “The Final Word?” Newsweek, Nov. 19, 2001.

11. Oil for one, and one for oil

227

Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote.” The Post, though, was more equivocal: In all likelihood, George W. Bush still would have won Florida and the presidency last year if either of two limited recounts—one requested by Al Gore, the other ordered by the Florida Supreme Court—had been completed…. But if Gore had found a way to trigger a statewide recount of all disputed ballots, or if the courts had required it, the result likely would have been different.36 Even less did the corporate media raise the issue of 90,000 mostly black voters who were wrongly denied the right to vote by Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris, while she was also serving as Republican campaign chairman under Florida governor Jeb Bush. It seems illogical for the U.S. media to spin their coverage to favor Bush, but with the country still seething from the World Trade Center attacks, and actively engaged in the “war against terrorism,” the question of Bush’s legitimacy had become a non-issue, if not an unpatriotic one. In the USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll: • 91 percent approved of Bush’s handling of events after the attack; • 92 percent supported retaliatory military action; • 86 percent approved of Bush’s handling of the presidency, compared to 51 percent between Sept. 7 and Sept. 10 ; • 73 percent agreed that the U.S. was at war; • 49 percent blamed airport security for the attacks. Nine percent blamed the Bush administration.37 Typical of the new jingoism was the government’s disparagement of Democratic Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. In an early April 2002 radio interview in Berkeley, Calif., McKinney charged Bush forces with denying the American public a free and fair election in 2000, and becoming “an administration of questionable legitimacy [that had] been given unprecedented power.” In response, Bush spokesman Scott McLellan said: ‘The American people know the facts, and they dismiss such ludicrous, baseless views,” he said. “The fact that she questions the president’s legitimacy shows a partisan mindset beyond all reason.”38

36. Dan Keating and Dan Balz, “Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush, But Study Finds Gore Might Have Won Statewide Tally of All Uncounted Ballots,” Washington Post, Nov. 12, 2001. The disenfranchisement of alleged “felons” by the Republican machine in Florida was reported in the book Black Box Voting, and by journalist Greg Palast. 37. “USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll results,” USA Today, Sept. 16, 2001. 38. Cited in Juliet Eilperin, “Democrat Implies Sept. 11 Administration Plot,” Washington Post, April 12, 2002.

228

Enemies by Design

Absolute power For the first nine months of 2001, Bush tried to put the Florida controversy behind him, but could not shake the taint of illegitimacy or charges that he was intellectually unqualified. On May 24, he was dealt a seemingly crippling blow when 67-year-old Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords broke from the Republican Party to sit as an independent. Jeffords refused to support the 2002 budget or Bush’s conservative educational reforms. Bush planned to create a voucher system to allow parents to transfer their children out of failing public schools into “faith-based” schools, but Jeffords pointed out this did not amount to new funding as promised.39 Jeffords’ defection shifted the balance of power in the Senate to the Democrats and cast doubt on Bush’s ability to impose his legislative agenda on the nation. Instead of a 50-50 split in which Vice-President Cheney held the deciding vote, the balance was now 50 Democrats, 49 Republicans and one independent. After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush was able to don the mantle of “war president” and co-opt the nation. Everyone was now united in the “war against terrorism,” as he said in his Sept. 20, 2001, speech: I thank the Congress for its leadership at such an important time. All of America was touched on the evening of the tragedy to see Republicans and Democrats joined together on the steps of this Capitol, singing "God Bless America." And you did more than sing; you acted, by delivering $40 billion to rebuild our communities and meet the needs of our military. Speaker Hastert, Minority Leader Gephardt, Majority Leader Daschle and Senator Lott, I thank you for your friendship, for your leadership and for your service to our country.40 Two days later, Bush asked Congress to strip the export of U.S. military assistance and weapons exports of all moral and political restrictions. Countries that had been denied military aid because of human rights abuses, sponsorship of terrorism, possession of nuclear and offensive-weapons programs, or lack of a commitment to democracy, were now eligible if they joined in the “war on terrorism.” Also on Sept. 22, Bush lifted all military and economic restrictions on India, and permitted Pakistan to make commercial military purchases from U.S. companies. The new proposal would also allow the president to lift restrictions on U.S. military cooperation with other countries that had been imposed by Congress based on human rights concerns.41 39. “Jeffords bolts GOP; Democrats poised to take over,” Inside Politics, CNN, May 24, 2001. 40. President George W. Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, White House documents, Sept. 20, 2001. 41. Karen de Young, “Bush Seeks Power to Lift Arms Curbs,” Washington Post, Sept. 24, 2001.

11. Oil for one, and one for oil

229

The first Democratic criticism of Bush’s handling of the “war on terrorism” dates to comments made by Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee Sen. Joseph Biden during an Oct. 22, 2001, conversation with the Council on Foreign Relations: How much longer does the bombing continue? Because we're going to pay every single hour, every single day it continues, we're going to pay an escalating price in the Muslim world. We're going to pay an escalating price in the region. And that in fact is going to make the aftermath of our ‘victory’ more difficult to reconstruct the region… I hope to God it ends sooner than later, because every moment it goes on, it makes the aftermath problem more severe…. I know of no clear path that suggests how they [the government] secure the notion that there is no possibility of Pakistan degenerating into chaos, and us dealing with a problem there. The ultimate answer would be, if that were the case, we would find ourselves with a whole hell of a lot more forces in that region than we have now, which would be a very bad idea.42 The White House had no comment on Biden’s criticism, but Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert called Biden's legitimate skepticism about the bombing “completely irresponsible.” “The American people want us to bring these terrorists to justice. They do not want comments that may bring comfort to our enemies.”43 Four days after Biden made his comments, Bush cemented his cooptation of Congress when he signed into law the Orwellian sounding USA PATRIOT Act, which was presaged in his speech: Tonight I announce the creation of a Cabinet-level position reporting directly to me—the Office of Homeland Security. [Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge]… will lead, oversee and coordinate a comprehensive national strategy to safeguard our country against terrorism, and respond to any attacks that may come. These measures are essential. But the only way to defeat terrorism as a threat to our way of life is to stop it, eliminate it, and destroy it where it grows.” (Applause) “Office of Homeland Security” is only two synonyms away from “Committee of State Security,” the English for KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti). The odious comparison is deserved, although “Homeland Security” also reminds one of the Nazi motto of “Fatherland.” For example, Sec. 213 of the Act gives the police arbitrary powers to search a person’s property and ask permission later, thus violating the fundamental protection afforded by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which reads: 42. “A Conversation with Joseph R. Biden,” Council on Foreign Relations, Oct. 22, 2001. 43. Cited in Seymour M. Hersh, “Watching The Warheads— The risks to Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal,” The New Yorker FACT, Nov. 5, 2001. Further proof of the irrationality of the attack on Afghanistan was this comment to Hersh by a former State Department official: “What worries me is if, a month from now, bin Laden gets on al-Jazeera and thumbs his nose at us. It’d be a huge loss of prestige for the United States.”

230

Enemies by Design

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. Sec. 412 permits, among other things, the arbitrary detention without charge of any non-citizen whom the Attorney General suspects might be a terrorist. In a pointed letter dated Nov. 9, 2001, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy demanded that Attorney General John Ashcroft answer questions relating to this and other aspects of the Act: Since we provided you with new statutory authorities in the USA Patriot Act, I have felt a growing concern that the trust and cooperation Congress provided is proving to be a one-way street. You have declined several requests to appear before the Committee to answer questions and have not responded to requests to provide information on such basic points as the number of people—according to some Department of Justice reports, more than a thousand—currently detained without trial and without specific criminal charges under your authority. Today I also learned through the press of another troubling development: Your unilateral executive decision to authorize interception of privileged attorney-client communications between detained persons and their lawyers. As I noted to you this morning, after having worked closely with the Department to equip Federal and State law enforcement to combat terrorism and after having received no request from you for statutory authorization to take this controversial step, and with no warning that you were contemplating such a step, I am deeply troubled at what appears to be an executive effort to exercise new powers without judicial scrutiny or statutory authorization.44 Bush’s Brave New Legislation had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden, but by propagating the notion that he and his followers represented a pervasive threat, Bush effectively short-circuited his critics. In his speech, he said without a trace of irony: “I ask you to uphold the values of America, and remember why so many have come here. We are in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them…(Applause.)” Their principles include the arbitrary arrest and detention of hundreds of Americans, and the establishment of military tribunals. Bush established the tribunals on Nov. 13, the same day that the Justice Department ordered the nation-wide detention of 5,000 men aged 18-33, mainly from Middle Eastern countries, who entered the country legally on tourist, student or business visas since Jan. 1, 2000.45 44. Letter from Sen. Patrick Leahy to Attorney General John Ashcroft, Nov. 9, 2001, . 45. Elisabeth Bumiller And David Johnston, “Bush to Subject Terrorism Suspects to Military Trials,” New York Times, Nov. 14, 2001.

11. Oil for one, and one for oil

231

The PATRIOT Act passed in the House of Representatives by 357 votes to 66, before the first draft was even finished. The only dissenting voice in the Senate was Wisconsin Democrat Russell Feingold. “This is one of the ridiculous things they do in Washington,” he told the Washington Post. “They want to intimidate people… A number of my colleagues said they thought I was right on the merits but felt they had to vote for it anyway.”46 In the article, Feingold was condescendingly dismissed as a maverick. Not a single congressman or senator read the Act before voting. By Dec. 5, 2001, almost 1,000 people had been secretly detained. A total of 19 human rights organizations—including the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International USA, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and Reporters Committee For Freedom of the Press—filed a civil action against the Justice Department demanding the disclosure of all documents relating to the proceedings as are guaranteed under the law.47 As the assembled congressmen, senators and assorted dignitaries repeatedly interrupted Bush’s Sept. 20 address with thunderous applause, it was easy to envision Roman senators cheering the demented emperor Caligula as he named his horse to sit among them.

Gas pipeline back on front burner Operation “Infinite Justice / Enduring Freedom” began on Sunday, Oct. 7, 2001. Two days later in Islamabad, U.S. Ambassador Wendy Chamberlain paid a visit to Usman Aminuddin, Pakistan’s petroleum and natural resources minister.48 The conversation centered on topics like current and future development of oil and gas fields, exploitation of Pakistan’s coal deposits (fifth-largest in the world), and investment in onshore and offshore exploration. Aminuddin also briefed Chamberlain on the CentGas pipeline project. The official Pakistani government statement read: "The pipeline opens up new avenues of multi-dimensional regional cooperation, particularly in view of the recent geopolitical developments in the region."49 Chamberlain responded favorably, saying that the U.S. attached great importance to its relations with Pakistan, and that a number of sanctions would be lifted so that Pakistan could revive its economy.

46. Robert E. Pierre, “Wisconsin Senator Emerges as a Maverick,” Washington Post, Oct. 27, 2001. 47. Arthur B. Spitzer et al., Complaint for Injunctive Relief, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Dec. 5, 2001, . 48. Virtually the only newspaper to cover this event was Pakistan’s Frontier Post, “U.S. envoy calls on Petroleum Minister,” Oct. 10, 2001. The meeting got no mention in the New York Times or the Washington Post. 49. “Pipelineistan: The rules of the game,” Alexander’s Gas and Oil Connections, volume 7, issue #4, Feb. 21, 2002.

232

Enemies by Design

Behind the scenes, the U.S. had been quietly laying the groundwork for a pro-pipeline, post-Taliban Afghanistan. From Nov. 27 to Dec. 5, 2001, in Bonn, Germany, the UN was sponsoring talks with four Afghan factions to come up with an interim government. Although Rabbani was still officially recognized as head of state, the U.S. was pushing the candidacy of Hamid Karzai, a 44-year-old English-speaking upper-class Pashtun who, like Khalilzad, had connections to former king Zahir Shah. At the end of the Bonn meetings, the U.S. got its wish, but it was a victory it did not dare celebrate. As a former senior U.S. diplomat still active in Afghan affairs told the Washington Post: American officials are just delighted that Karzai is going to be interim leader, but we can’t say that and Karzai can’t show it much either, because then he would be called an American puppet back home. And being seen as the puppet of any foreign power is political death in Afghanistan.50 Rabbani and other leaders charged that the U.S. imposed Karzai on Afghanistan, and the conduct of the U.S. at the Bonn negotiations supports the charge. Although the UN ran the proceedings, the U.S. did most of the work to broker a political agreement among Afghanistan’s ethnic and political factions. While Afghans ultimately made the decision to select Karzai, Afghan, American and UN officials agree that the United States played a central role in creating the conditions that made Karzai’s selection more likely,” reported the Post. “In particular, they delivered the message to Rabbani, a leader of the Northern Alliance, that he had to step aside, and to Abdul Sattar Sirat, who had been nominated by the group representing the former king to become interim leader, that he did not have the necessary support. With those two competitors gone, Karzai became the consensus candidate.51 Karzai’s affiliation with the U.S. military dates to the mid-’80s, when he served as military liaison between the CIA and the mujahedin during the Afghan jihad. He maintained close relations with CIA Director William Casey and Ronald Reagan’s Vice-President George Bush, another former CIA director. Karzai studied law in Kabul and India, but completed his education in the U.S., thanks to CIA assistance. While in the U.S. Karzai also worked as consultant to Unocal, which at the time was considering the idea of a pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan. In 1994, Karzai aligned himself with U.S. petropolitics and supported the new Taliban regime.

50. Marc Kaufman, “Karzai’s Ties to U.S. are a Mixed Blessing; Pashtun Leader Trades Carefully on U.S. Bond,” Washington Post, Dec. 22, 2001, p. A16. 51. Ibid.

11. Oil for one, and one for oil

233

In 1996, the year Osama bin Laden returned from Sudan, Karzai broke with the Taliban over the inordinate political influence exercised by bin Laden and his “Arab Afghans,” but the Taliban were in a thoroughly dependent position. Whether or not they approved of bin Laden’s activities or the domineering conduct of the “Arab Afghans,” they couldn’t afford to alienate bin Laden because his money was running the government. The following year, Karzai started organizing Pashtun resistance movements in the southern provinces, but since Clinton was still playing footsie with the Taliban at the time, Karzai’s requests for assistance were rejected. Nevertheless, he made contact with Pashtun chiefs and leaders, and started fomenting rebellion, which led to his father’s assassination in 1999.52 After the Sept. 11 attack, the U.S. decided to support Karzai’s insurrection. Karzai wanted to lead a group of men across the border to instigate uprisings in Qandahar, Zabol, Urozgan and Helmand provinces. The plan had the approval of Zahir Shah and the CIA, who also promised arms to rebel Afghans. The infiltration, co-ordinated with Rumsfeld and CIA Director George Tenet, took place on Oct. 8, 2001, 24 hours after the launch of “Infinite Justice / Enduring Freedom.” The close co-operation between Karzai and the Bush administration is significant for a number of reasons. First, and most obviously, it proves that Bush lied when he held out the possibility that the Taliban could avoid military attack, or that bin Laden was the primary target of the offensive. Second, it helps explain Rumsfeld’s contradictory pronouncements about assassinating or capturing bin Laden. The crusade to get bin Laden was a rhetorical feint to obscure the premeditated destruction of the Taliban. As such, when questioned about U.S. objectives, Rumsfeld occasionally lapsed into honesty, and admitted the implausibility of this task. The need to sustain the cover-story led to the sharp reversals of opinion. Third, the decision to go after the Taliban rather than bin Laden, as Clinton had, shows how closely Bush followed Khalilzad’s advice as set out in the Washington Quarterly. On Dec. 31, 2001, Bush followed through on another recommendation: He appointed a high-level envoy for Afghanistan. Khalilzad said such an envoy should have sufficient stature and access to be taken seriously in foreign capitals and by local militias, and be able to shape Afghan policy within U.S. bureaucracies. The man Bush chose was Khalilzad. Significantly, this appointment was not covered in the U.S. press, and the BBC account failed to make any mention of Khalilzad’s work for Unocal.53 52. Wayne Madsen, “Afghanistan, the Taliban and the Bush Oil Team,” Centre for Research on Globalisation, January 2002, ; “Saudi paper profiles new Afghan leader,” al-Watan, Dec. 11, 2001, reprinted and translated by the BBC monitoring service, Dec. 15, 2001. 53. Khalilzad and Byman, p. 77; Mike Fox, “Bush appoints Afghan envoy,” BBC, Jan. 1, 2002. On Nov. 24, 2003, Khalilzad was sworn in as ambassador to Afghanistan.

234

Enemies by Design

Thus, after the U.S. deposed the Taliban, Bush engineered the appointment of one Unocal consultant to lead Afghanistan, and appointed another Unocal consultant to be his chief policy advisor in the area.54 During a one-day visit to Islamabad on Feb. 9, 2002, Karzai and Pakistan’s leader Gen. Pervez Musharraf discussed the proposed Central Asian gas pipeline project. They agreed that it was in the interest of both countries.

54. Karzai took up his duties as interim leader, on Dec. 22, 2001. The following June 14, a loya jirga [grand assembly] of representatives of ethnic, regional and religious groups appointed him for an additional 18 months, after which time elections would be held. He was reelected in October 2004, amid accusations of vote fraud and a boycott by other candidates.

N A 1 9 6 2 E P I S O D E of The Twilight Zone, a ventriloquist named Jerry is an emotional wreck because of his wooden dummy “Willy.” Unbeknownst to anyone else, Willy does his own thinking and talking, and Jerry is trying to keep his sanity.

Jerry finally decides to get rid of his malevolent “partner” in favor of a new act with a different dummy, but Willy will not accept defeat. Towards the end of the episode, we find the other dummy destroyed, and Jerry and Willy back on stage. This time, Jerry looks like a wooden dummy and Willy looks human. The ostensible “dummy” is now firmly in control. Did Jerry and Willy exist as separate entities, or did Willy represent a disturbed part of Jerry’s psyche? We can make of it what we want because The Twilight Zone exists in the world of imagination. On the other hand, there is nothing imaginary about the similarity of this episode to the way Zionists dictate U.S. Middle East policy. This chapter covers the eight years of Clinton’s presidency (1992–2000), which can be divided into three overlapping political layers—Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq. We have already seen: • The Riyadh and Dhahran bombings; • Osama bin Laden’s declaration of war on the U.S.; • U.S. attempts to cajole the Taliban into signing a pipeline deal; • The bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; • Clinton’s gratuitous retaliatory bombing of Afghanistan and Sudan; • The beginning of the “war on terrorism;” and • The demonization of Osama bin Laden. These events constitute the Afghanistan thread. Now we examine the Palestinian thread, and the Zionist domination of the White House.

236

Enemies by Design

THE JEWISH PRESIDENCY The 1992 presidential election represented the fifth and highest stage to date of the Zionist campaign to control the U.S. government. The first stage was the buying of the Truman White House (1948), which forced the world to recognize the illegal state of Israel. Next came the Johnson administration (1968), which was pre-occupied with the Vietnam War and re-election, and so turned a blind eye to further illegal seizures of Palestinian land in the Occupied Territories. In the third stage (1976), Carter brought Christian Zionists to political prominence, thus allowing dispensationalist thinking to fill the post-Vietnam political vacuum. The fourth stage (1980) began with the election of Reagan and the rise of American fascism. Even though Zionists strengthened their influence during these periods, few “warm Jews” (Israel-first Jews) were appointed to senior ministerial positions. In other words, Zionists had made their bullets, but lacked a compliant government to fire them. Under Clinton, warm Jews would fill many key federal posts.1 One notable position was that of Special Liaison to the Jewish Community (Jay Footlik). No other group has a special liaison. This high concentration of warm Jews was so conspicuous that the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv ran a 4,000-word article entitled “The Jews Who Run Clinton’s Court”: As far as the Jews are concerned, President Bill Clinton contributed towards a real change in the administration’s outlook, having concluded a series of changes in enhancing Jewish power beginning under President Reagan and his Secretary of State, [George] Shultz. True, Jewish political influence was also evident in America of the previous decades. We have already seen a Jewish Secretary of State, Kissinger, enjoying the confidence of President Richard Nixon, and there were Jewish Cabinet members under Carter. However, they were usually the exceptions testifying to the rule. Especially, pious Jews were hardly ever appointed to participate in political work concerning the Middle East. … All the Clinton Administration officials dealing with Israel… may have different views concerning the desired solution for the Israeli-Arab conflict but they are warm Jews in whatever they do. They sometimes disagree among themselves and they sometimes even disagree with the views of the Israeli governments, first and foremost since they are Americans and their primary loyalty is towards America. But they also firmly believe that the shared interests between the two states are fundamental and permanently enduring. It is because of this deeply held belief that they made a huge contribution to the fact that the Clinton 1. For a list of the 64 Zionist Jews in the administration as of Jan. 4, 1998, see The Jews in Clinton’s Cabinet, .

12. Warm Jews, cold calculations

237

Administration has fully adopted their approach on the issue of relations between the U.S. and Israel. Perhaps because of that belief they claim that they are upset about the Israeli violations of human rights in the Territories, and are even more upset when one or another Israeli minister takes an initiative concerning Iraq which does not accord with the American line. ‘If Israel wants American support for all its interests it also must coordinate its steps with us when this concerns the basic interests of the U.S.,’ one of the senior officials told me this week, following the news of the initiative of ministers Moshe Shachal and Binyamin Ben-Eliezer to add Iraq to the peace process.2 This excerpt contains four observations that deserve special comment. The first concerns the assertion that warm Jews have a “primary loyalty towards America.” One would naturally expect American government officials to be loyal to their own country; anything else is treason. Yet the phrase “primary loyalty” implies that warm Jews have another loyalty to at least one foreign power. This conclusion is validated in the next sentence: “But they also firmly believe that the shared interests between [the U.S. and Israel] are fundamental and permanently enduring.” Thus, warm Jews have divided loyalties, which means they cannot be trusted to act in the best interests of the U.S. The seemingly positive slant given to “primary loyalty” is an attempt to obscure this fact. The second observation concerns the expression “shared interests.” It is meant to convey the impression that the U.S. and Israel share a common value system and have similar objectives in the Middle East, yet there is no evidence to suggest such a commonality of interests, much less a “fundamental and permanently enduring” one. The U.S. is founded on republican principles of popular government. It has a Constitution, Bill of Rights, the rule of law, and common citizenship for its people. Israel has none of these democratic traditions. It is a chauvinistic, colonial state that has no regard for international law. The U.S. could not possibly have a shared interest in the systematic mistreatment of the Palestinian people, but the reporter had to imply that it did so that he could draw the following conclusion: “It is because of this deeply held belief that… the Clinton Administration has fully adopted their approach on the issue of relations between the U.S. and Israel.” The reporter cannot overtly state that Israel and the Lobby run the U.S., so the ventriloquist-dummy relationship must be masked in a faux gentility that supports the appearance of independent American policy. This illusion is borne out by the idle U.S. threat of predicating support for Israel on its respect for basic U.S. interests. If this threat had any meaning, settlement

2. See the reproduction at , translated and annotated by Rabbi Israel Shahak.

238

Enemies by Design

construction would have ceased long ago, and Israel would have been forced to abide by Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention: Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive… The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.3 The third observation concerns the disagreement among warm Jews and how the Labor-Likud alternations in Israel’s government determined U.S. attitudes toward Middle East peace during the Oslo “peace process.” The fourth observation concerns the attempt of two Israeli ministers to add Iraq to the Middle East peace negotiations. The date of this statement is September 1994, when Iraq was already hobbled by sanctions, so this means the plan to crush Iraq had been in the works for more than eight years.

T H E FA R C E O F O S L O A major factor in the Likud defeat was the First Intifada, a spontaneous uprising against Israeli occupation that began in the fall of 1987 in the Gaza Strip. In June 1992, Shamir’s inability to quell the unrest led to a broad rejection of hard-line settlement policy in favor of a Labor government under Yitzhak Rabin, who signaled an apparent willingness to sign a genuine peace treaty. Clinton, like Bush, also seemed to want a peaceful settlement of Israeli–Palestinian violence, so Rabin’s victory was fortuitous. Clinton capitalized quickly. On Sept. 13, 1993, he was front-and-centre when Arafat and Rabin came to the White House to sign the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-government, which signaled the official end of the first Intifada by starting the five-year Oslo “peace process,” after which time Israel would pull its military out of the Occupied Territories and a final status agreement would be signed.4 Arafat’s letter to Rabin four days earlier captured this general mood of optimism: The PLO considers that the signing of the Declaration of Principles constitutes a historic event, inaugurating a new epoch of peaceful coexistence, free from violence and all other acts which endanger peace and stability. Accordingly, the PLO renounces the use of terrorism and other acts of violence and will assume responsibility over all PLO

3. Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, Oct. 21, 1950, . 4. The French newspaper Le Monde provides an excellent summary of the Oslo documentation in its series in English: “Middle-East: The Faultline,” . The term comes from back-channel meetings between Israel and the Palestinians in Oslo that formed the basis of the agreement. The five-year interim period officially began with the signing of the Agreement on the Gaza Strip and the Jericho Area on May 4, 1994, in Cairo.

12. Warm Jews, cold calculations

239

elements and personnel in order to assure their compliance, prevent violations and discipline violators. In view of the promise of a new era and the signing of the Declaration of Principles and based on Palestinian acceptance of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, the PLO affirms that those articles of the Palestinian Covenant which deny Israel’s right to exist, and the provisions of the Covenant which are inconsistent with the commitments of this letter are now inoperative and no longer valid.5 In his return letter, Rabin formally recognized the Palestinian Liberation Organization as the Palestinian people’s representative and Israel’s negotiating partner. Given this long-awaited mutual recognition, it seemed nothing could stop the inexorable move towards a peaceful settlement. Doubtless one reason for Arafat’s optimism was Rabin’s promise to freeze new “settlement” construction and prevent any changes to the status quo in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during the five years of talks. Also, Arafat needed a personal political victory for himself and his organization. During the Gulf War, he was the only Arab leader to side with Saddam Hussein, and this alienated him from the U.S. and other Arab states. The peace negotiations allowed Arafat to present himself and the PLO positively; in fact, Arafat was now hailed as a partner for peace. The heady atmosphere hit its zenith on Oct. 14, 1994, when Arafat, Rabin and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Twelve days later, Rabin and King Hussein of Jordan even signed a formal peace treaty. But after a Jewish zealot assassinated Rabin in central Tel Aviv on Nov. 4, 1995, the optimism all but died. A caretaker government under Peres lasted only six months before it was supplanted by a Likud-Labor unity government led by the overtly provocative Benjamin Netanyahu, who did everything he could to sabotage the agreement. Because of his assassination, Rabin has been virtually canonized as a champion of peace, but such an accolade is undeserved. Rabin only agreed to recognize the PLO because repeated refusals to do so had failed to stop the Intifada. As recently as 1988, Rabin ordered the army to intensify violence and break the limbs of Palestinians.6 Moreover, the fact that Rabin died before the “peace process” was concluded, lends credence to the notion that it might have worked under his leadership. This is also nonsense. As events showed, the Oslo process was little more than a U.S.-Israeli feint to disarm Palestinian militants and coerce Arafat into legitimizing Israel’s theft of Arab land.

5. “Exchange of letters between PLO chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin,” in Ibid. 6. Ha’aretz, Jan. 21, 1988, cited in Issa Nakhleh ed., Encyclopedia of the Palestine Problem, Vol. II (New York: Intercontinental Books, 1991), p. 744.

240

Enemies by Design

In fact, Labor betrayed this fact almost immediately after signing the Declaration of Principles. From 1992 to 1996, the West Bank “settler” population expanded by 39 percent to 145,000; less than one-sixth of that increase was due to births. The government also built a major network of access roads in preparation to annex several large settlement blocs. In East Jerusalem, the Jewish population grew by 800 percent over this period to more than 170,000, and the Rabin/Peres governments authorized completion of 10,000 subsidized housing units begun by Shamir. Also, in violation of international law and Oslo’s principles, Rabin and Peres reaffirmed Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem.7 This kind of treachery is part of Labor’s standard operating procedure. The only real difference between it and Likud is that Labor feigns respect for diplomacy and legal niceties, whereas Likud indulges in overt acts of aggression. For example, over the entire period of the Oslo negotiations during which Labor ruled for all but three years, the number of “settlers” in the Occupied Territories quietly doubled to more than 200,000. Since 1993, Israel has imposed a permanent closure on the Occupied Territories, and there was no reduction in the number of Arab houses demolished under the fraudulent pretext of lacking “permits.” These facts show up the emptiness of Rabin’s promise. Nevertheless, Arafat continued to negotiate and sign interim agreements, thereby giving increasing legitimacy to Israel’s dishonest interpretation of UNSC Res. 242. Moreover, any agreement that he might have signed would have come at the expense of the Palestinians’ right of return and right to compensation for the 1947-48 dispossession. Here, too, Israel had already pledged to honour these commitments (UNGA Res. 194 and 273), but would not discuss them. Arafat had nothing to gain and everything to lose. U.S. acquiescence in Israel’s creeping land grab was made clear when Peres declared in 1996: “We have exhausted our requests. President Clinton has answered all our needs. There has been no American president in history like President Clinton, in his support of Israel and the Jewish people.”8

Blueprint for subversion— “Clean Break” Netanyahu’s victory in May 1996 gave the crazies the opening they needed to mount a power play against their own U.S. government. In July, they presented Netanyahu with Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. The report was prepared by the “Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000” at the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, a right-wing “think tank” with offices in Washington D.C. and Jerusalem. Perle, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, was the group’s leader. Other signatories included James Colbert (JINSA), 7. Joel Beinin, “The Demise of the Oslo Process,” Middle East Report, March 26, 1999. 8. Khaled Al-Maeena, “Is the U.S. Government’s First Obligation to Americans or to Israelis?” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July 1996, p. 17.

12. Warm Jews, cold calculations

241

Douglas Feith (Feith and Zell Associates law firm), Jonathan Torop, (WINEP), David Wurmser (who commissioned the report for IASPS and who is Perle’s colleague at the AEI) and his wife Meyrav Wurmser (Johns Hopkins University, Hudson Institute). Clean Break was an opportunistic end-run around the Clinton administration and a radicalized version of WINEP’s earlier 1998 LaborZionist Building for Peace. “Clean Break” refers to the need for Israel to “break away” from its 70-year tradition of Labor Zionism, which the authors blame for hobbling the economy and cramping its ability to express its national sovereignty: Benjamin Netanyahu’s government comes in with a new set of ideas… It can forge a peace process and strategy based on an entirely new intellectual foundation, one that restores strategic initiative and provides the nation the room to engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism, the starting point of which must be economic reform.9 The authors of Clean Break highlighted four main tactics that Netanyahu could use to subvert the U.S.-brokered peace agreement. They even highlighted “text” passages that Netanyahu could use in speeches.

A New Approach to Peace “Displaying moral ambivalence between the effort to build a Jewish state and the desire to annihilate it by trading ‘land for peace’ will not secure ‘peace now.’ Our claim to the land —to which we have clung for hope for 2000 years—is legitimate and noble. It is not within our own power, no matter how much we concede, to make peace unilaterally. Only the unconditional acceptance by Arabs of our rights, especially in their territorial dimension, ‘peace for peace,’ is a solid basis for the future.” (Text passage) Peace was no longer a matter to be negotiated; it was to be imposed with no regard for the needs of the Palestinians. In language eerily similar to Adolf Hitler’s portrayal of Germany, the authors see Israel as a peace-loving state beset on all sides by foes eager to destroy it, and invoke chauvinistic allusions to a romanticized past (the biblical state of Israel) to justify the theft of land for Lebensraum.

Moving to a Traditional Balance of Power Strategy “Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq—an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right—as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions. Jordan has challenged Syria’s regional ambitions recently by suggesting the restoration of the Hashemites in Iraq. This has triggered a 9. Richard Perle et al., A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, July 1996, . All italics in original.

242

Enemies by Design

Jordanian-Syrian rivalry to which Assad has responded by stepping up efforts to destabilize the Hashemite Kingdom, including using infiltrations. Syria recently signaled that it and Iran might prefer a weak, but barely surviving Saddam, if only to undermine and humiliate Jordan in its efforts to remove Saddam.” “Balance of power” is wholly misleading. Israel wants to redraw the Middle East map to suit its interests, and King Hussein’s reassertion of the Hashemite claim to Iraq is the perfect means. It is important to note that the removal of Saddam Hussein is already being discussed “as an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right.” Although much more will be said about this later, it should be obvious that George W. Bush’s reasons for wanting to remove Hussein had nothing to do with compliance with UN Security Council resolutions or weapons of mass destruction.

Changing the Nature of Relations with the Palestinians “Israel has a chance to forge a new relationship between itself and the Palestinians. First and foremost, Israel’s efforts to secure its streets may require hot pursuit into Palestinian-controlled areas, a justifiable practice with which Americans can sympathize… Israel has no obligations under the Oslo agreements if the PLO does not fulfill its obligations. If the PLO cannot comply with these minimal standards, then it can be neither a hope for the future nor a proper interlocutor for [the] present. To prepare for this, Israel may want to cultivate alternatives to Arafat’s base of power. Jordan has ideas on this.” This section reduces the Oslo agreements to a scofflaw by making compliance a one-way street. If Arafat won’t play along, he will be removed to make way for a compliant Palestinian leader who will do Israel’s bidding. Under this double standard, Zionist “settlers” can terrorize Palestinians at will, but the moment a single Palestinian retaliates, Netanyahu can charge Arafat with non-compliance.

Forging A New U.S.-Israeli Relationship “In recent years, Israel invited active U.S. intervention in Israel’s domestic and foreign policy for two reasons: to overcome domestic opposition to "land for peace" concessions the Israeli public could not digest, and to lure Arabs — through money, forgiveness of past sins, and access to U.S. weapons — to negotiate. This strategy, which required funneling American money to repressive and aggressive regimes, was risky, expensive, and very costly for both the U.S. and Israel, and placed the United States in roles is should neither have nor want.” In this section, the authors ostensibly claim that Israel should have independence to effect economic reforms, but the purpose is to push the U.S. out of the picture so that Israel can wage unfettered terror on Palestinians. That cannot happen so long as the U.S. controls the purse strings and values regional stability over Zionist expansionism.

12. Warm Jews, cold calculations

243

JEBEL ABU GHNEIM/HAR HOMA Israel had been planning for years to build a “settlement” on a densely forested hill overlooking Jerusalem called Jebel Abu Ghneim, but appeals from Palestinian and Israeli landowners, as well as drawn-out court cases, had delayed construction. A quick look at this issue shows how Netanyahu put Clean Break into action. Peres’ Labor government started the project in early 1996, but because of overwhelming international condemnation he stopped construction. Soon after Netanyahu took office and received Clean Break, he announced that construction of Har Homa would resume. On Feb. 26, 1997, the Ministerial Committee on Jerusalem gave approval to build the first 2,465 of a total of 6,500 units and set off an international furor. The UN Security Council debated this issue for two days, leading to a March 7 vote on a European resolution denouncing Israeli settlement practices in Jerusalem, especially Har Homa. The vote was 14–1. The U.S. exercised its veto even though four days earlier Clinton told Arafat he opposed Har Homa. On March 13, the UN General Assembly, with a majority vote of 133, reaffirmed the majority sentiment of the Security Council, but to no avail. Bulldozers moved onto Jebel Abu Ghneim five days later. When the Security Council passed an identical condemnatory resolution nine days later, the U.S. again vetoed it. Throughout this period, Israel used Clean Break-style deceptions to defend Har Homa and assail those who challenged its legality. According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: The Declaration of Principles of September 1993, the Interim Agreement of 1995, and all related documents, contain no commitment to refrain from the construction of settlements, neighborhoods, houses, roads, or any other such building project. Hence, the approval of the Har Homa project and its implementation do not constitute any violation of these agreements.10 In fact, the ministry’s statement flatly contradicted Article I of the Declaration of Principles, which states that the objective of the current negotiations was to lead to a permanent settlement based on UNSC Resolutions 242 and 338. Since all “settlements” are illegal under these resolutions, the Israeli position is fraudulent. On April 25, at Qatar’s request, the UN General Assembly convened a rare special session to discuss Jebel Abu Ghneim/Har Homa. Israel’s chargé d’affaires David Peleg vehemently denounced the UN’s right to have any say in Israeli-Palestinian affairs, and especially condemned the special session: 10. Har Homa, Legal Aspects, Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, March 3, 1997, .

244

Enemies by Design

It is a relic of the Cold War era, and is particularly unsuited and discordant in the context of the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. The dispute between Israel and the Palestinians over the building of a new neighborhood in Jerusalem and any other dispute that may arise between the two sides, cannot be considered, by any stretch of the imagination, a “threat to international peace and security.”11 PLO observer Nasser Kidwa called for the Assembly to impose “collective measures” against Israel, and he defended the Palestinians’ right “to shout and to use their bare hands to confront the Israeli gun and tank.” Peleg declared this statement to be “an incitement to violence” and proof of the PLO’s lack of commitment to curb terrorism, even though Kidwa’s statements are entirely consistent with the Charter of the UN and the right to self-defense against aggression.12 The U.S. refusal to let the Security Council condemn Israel, even though the Clinton administration strongly opposed Har Homa, also shows that Israel and the Lobby were dictating policy. UN Ambassador Bill Richardson’s speech followed a standard propaganda format—quickly concede U.S. disapproval of Israeli aggression, and then explain at length why nothing should be done about it: The achievement of a just, lasting and comprehensive peace in the Middle East requires an honest negotiating process. The parties must take special care to avoid preemptive actions that can be seen to prejudge the outcome of negotiations, while working hard to nurture an atmosphere of trust and confidence that will make productive negotiations possible. The decision on Har Homa/Jebel Abu Ghneim did just the opposite. We regret that it was taken. However, our responsibility as a co-sponsor of the peace process requires us to tell our friends in the United Nations frankly: the Security Council and the General Assembly should not insert themselves into issues that the negotiating partners have decided will be addressed in their permanent status talks.13 Note the mild rebuke (“We regret”), and how quickly Richardson maneuvered the speech into a lecture on non-intervention. He could not oppose Har Homa lest he give offence to the crazies and the Christian Zionists in Congress. Thus, he virtually avoided the subject. Mr. President, the United Nations can and has played an important part in supporting the Middle East peace process. This is the right and proper role for the UN to play…. This resolution would have the 11. Marilyn Henry, “Israel slams UN emergency debate,” Jerusalem Post, April 25. 12. Ibid. 13. UN Ambassador Richardson, Speech on Israeli Settlements, April 25, 1997, .

12. Warm Jews, cold calculations

245

opposite effect of its advertised intent. Threats of economic boycott, condemnation and harsh rhetoric will only serve to erode the vital trust, confidence and quiet diplomatic efforts that are needed if the peace process is to begin moving forward again. In other words, Richardson told the UN it had no obligation other than to stand aside while Israel and the U.S. mugged the Charter and created a fait accompli, more “facts on the ground,” even though Article 34 clearly states that the UN had a right to intervene: “The Security Council may investigate any dispute, or any situation which might lead to international friction or give rise to a dispute, in order to determine whether the continuance of the dispute or situation is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security.” The cruel irony of this debacle is that it was merely a political stunt. According to a poll conducted by the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot, only 38 percent of Israelis wanted it built, and 55 percent wanted to wait for the right time or drop the idea altogether. Netanyahu built Har Homa to placate hardliners in his coalition government who merely wanted it built as a symbol of Jewish control, and to dynamite the peace process.14 Even today, the place is all but deserted. As Ha’aretz reported on June 10, 2002: Construction companies have had little success at marketing their large inventory of unsold apartments in the Har Homa neighborhood, which caused Arafat to suspend talks with Israel in 1996 when its construction began. Similarly, the houses of the new Jewish compound situated in the heart of East Jerusalem’s Ras al-Amud neighborhood remain unoccupied. … One Palestinian journalist said last week that the attitude of the Palestinians toward every house and every kindergarten being built in the settlements was identical to the attitude of Israelis to terrorist attacks carried out in the heart of Israel. Palestinian leaders are certain that the stepped-up Israeli pressure—military raids, destruction, mass arrests, tightening siege, continuation of settlement initiatives and daily toll of victims—will ensure a further spiraling up of the circle of violence.15

Israel’s Christian soldiers While the UN was debating Jebel Abu Ghneim/Har Homa, the Lobby was priming its Zionist forces in the U.S. Congress and Senate. In early March 1997, the White House received 14 letters signed by 140 Senators and Congressmen urging Clinton not to attend a March 15 meeting in Gaza to protest Har Homa. In fact, two main letters—sponsored by Sen. Connie Mack (R-FL) and Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-GA)—were identical, a strong 14. Kurt Holden “Clinton’s Tilt Toward Israel Losing Public Opinion Support,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June/July 1997, pp. 50-54. 15. Danny Rubinstein, “Sticking to the Principles of the Intifada,” Ha’aretz, June 10, 2002.

246

Enemies by Design

indication they were written by the Lobby.16 At length, Clinton sent a representative—U.S. Consul General in Jerusalem Edward Abington—but this was as much as he could do, since Likud was now calling the shots. Evangelical Christians had enjoyed warm relations with Netanyahu dating to his time as Israel’s ambassador to the UN. In one of his first acts after taking power, Netanyahu convened the Israel Christian Advocacy Council to bring 17 Christian Zionist leaders over for a briefing on the Middle East. These leaders—who included Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network, Ralph Reed, then director of the conservative Christian Coalition, Ed McAteer of the Religious Roundtable, and Falwell— returned to the U.S. and proceeded to spread the gospel of Clean Break. Their objective was two-fold—undermine the president’s peace initiative and attack moderate religious groups who support a shared Jerusalem.17 Democrats and Republicans alike fell over themselves to ingratiate themselves with Israel and manufacture legality for Har Homa, especially at the annual policy conference of the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee on April 6-8 in Washington, D.C. Gingrich was the most egregious: “Let me be clear. Har Homa is not, as the media attempt to insist, a settlement. It is a Jewish neighborhood in the city Israel has chosen as her capital.” He went on to accuse the media of spreading false images of Israel and being an unwitting dupe of Arafat’s “information warfare campaign against Israel.”18 Ten days after the end of the conference, 10 of the top U.S. Christian Zionists took out a full-page ad in the New York Times entitled “Christians Call For A United Jerusalem.” Using copious biblical references, the authors repeated the chauvinistic claim that Jerusalem was the political and spiritual capital of the Jews alone and cannot be divided.19 John Hagee, pastor of the Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, and one of the signatories openly equated the settlement of Russian Jews in the West Bank with the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. He looks upon the Clinton administration with the same contempt as John Nelson Darby looked upon the Anglican Church. When asked if he realized that increasing Jewish settlements contradicted U.S. policy, Hagee declared: “I am a Bible scholar and a theologian, and from my perspective the law of God transcends the laws of the United States government and the U.S. State Department.”20 16. Shirl McArthur, “Congress Launches Fawning Frenzy Over Netanyahu’s Har Homa Decision,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June/July 1997, pp. 14–17. McArthur said the only exception to the pro-Likud pressure was a bi-partisan letter from Rep. Nick Rahall (D-WV) calling upon President Clinton “to prevail upon Israel to refrain from undertaking the construction of the Har Homa settlement on Jabal Abu Ghneim until the status of Jerusalem is resolved through negotiations.” The letter received 17 other signatures by the end of April. Ibid. 17. Donald Wagner, “The interregnum: Christian Zionism in the Clinton years,” Daily Star (Lebanon), Oct. 10, 2003. 18. McArthur, op. cit. 19. “Christians Call for a United Jerusalem,” New York Times, April 18, 1997. 20. Ibid., Wagner.

12. Warm Jews, cold calculations

247

The corollary to this religious sedition is the non-existence of the Palestinians as a people. They are seen as enemies of God, as Darby said, and as such God sanctifies whatever is done to them in the name of reclaiming “biblical Israel.” Similarly, any acts of Palestinian resistance are by definition acts of terrorism.

Manufacturing dissent Netanyahu’s government resorted to outright disinformation to stoke anti-Muslim hatred among Christians within the Zionist community. On Oct. 22, 1997, Israel Radio fraudulently claimed that Palestinian Christians faced relentless and brutal persecution from the predominantly Muslim Palestinian Authority. These acts were said to include the destruction of Christian cemeteries, cutting phone lines to monasteries, and breaking into convents. The story was parroted two days later by the Jerusalem Post, and on Dec. 4. Oklahoma Rep. J.C. Watts used it as the basis for an inflammatory op-ed piece, in which he called for a review and possible freeze on $307 million in grants pledged to the Palestinian Authority. He wrote of “abuse suffered by Christians at the hands of Mr. Arafat’s henchmen,” and regurgitated the Netanyahu government’s press release. Christians in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, now account for just 20 percent of the total population and the Christian population of Jerusalem also is steadily declining. The trend is clear: Those Christians living under the Palestinian Authority’s direct control who can afford to leave are doing so. Since the beginning of the Middle East peace process, Christians living under Mr. Arafat’s regime have suffered in a silent state of oppression.”21 Against Watts’s unresearched allegations, the following personal account by Donald Wagner, professor of religion and Middle Eastern studies at North Park University in Chicago and executive director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, describes how this elaborate fraud came about: The campaign grew, thanks in part to publicity generated by the articles of A.M. Rosenthal and William Safire of the New York Times, and pressure exerted on Congress by Michael Horowitz, a pro-Israel lobbyist. Palestinian Christians were quick to denounce the charges. Mayor Hanna Nasser of Bethlehem stated: “Our churches have complete freedom, and I’ve never heard that they’ve been under pressure.” Together with the international evangelical leader “Brother Andrew,” president of the Netherlands based Open Doors, I led a May 1998 investigation of the Israeli charges on behalf of Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding. We interviewed more than 60 Muslim and Christian leaders, people at the grass roots level throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip and officials and leaders from the PA and Israeli 21. J.C. Watts, “Yasser Arafat vs. Christians,” The Washington Times, Dec. 4, 1997.

248

Enemies by Design

government. We found no evidence of PA or Muslim persecution of Palestinian Christians, although there were three isolated cases of Christian-Muslim family disputes over intermarriage. The most telling interview was with Uri Mor, the director of the Department of Christian Communities at the Israeli Ministry of Religious Affairs, which oversees all Christian activities in Israel and the Occupied Territories. Mor said the charges were traceable to David Bar-Ilan, Netanyahu’s chief spokesman, and told our team that Bar-Ilan used shreds of information as his “bread and butter” in the propaganda campaign against the Palestinians. We later interviewed a staff member of the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem, which had previously interviewed Mor and looked into the problem. The consulate had received a report on the persecution of Christian Palestinians as a confidential internal document. Upon investigation, it determined that the basis of the report came from four Palestinians who had been converted to Christianity by a Messianic Jewish evangelist who resided in an Israeli settlement. Two had criminal backgrounds and the others were suspected of collaborating with the Israeli secret services. The PA had imprisoned the converts, based on their criminal activities, not their conversions. Apparently, Bar-Ilan’s office leaked the report to the International Christian Embassy-Jerusalem, which then published the stories and launched a campaign against the PA. After our investigation, Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding issued a statement clarifying the matter and citing “disturbing indications that political motivations were behind the publicity about Christian persecution” in the Holy Land. The Christian Zionist campaign against the PA came to a halt, but undoubtedly the tactic will be pursued again.22 In a broad sense, the title “Enemies by Design” can mean any subversive manufacturing of enmity. Divide and conquer, divide et impera is the motto of the British empire. Fomenting minority secessionist movements breaks up rival empires, as with Chechnya or Lawrence of Arabia. The garrison state of Israel itself was surely invented for an imperial agenda: preventing the rise of a rival world power that would straddle the strategic isthmus of Eurasia and Africa and dominate the world’s fields of oil. Enmity as a tool of psychological warfare is useful for frightening free citizens into accepting oligarchical rule at home, while destabilizing targeted nations, incapacitating them from national development or joining rival alliances. Moreover, the Straussian or “neo-conservative” philosophy requires enemies: as a form of fascism, it glorifies war as “noble” and despises peace as “weak.”

22. Ibid., Wagner.

12. Warm Jews, cold calculations

249

FINAL PUSH The Wye River Memorandum, signed on Oct. 23, 1998, between Arafat and Netanyahu, was supposed to restart “the peace process” and expedite its resolution by May 1999—five years after Rabin and Arafat signed the Cairo Agreement. Officially, it constituted a timetable for Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories, but much of it consisted of forcing Arafat to repress his own people. Sections A1-A3 were: “Outlawing and Combating Terrorist Organizations,” “Prohibiting Illegal Weapons” and “Preventing Incitement.” Of course, there was no mention of any reciprocal Israeli obligations. The memorandum was dead almost as soon as it was signed. In December, Netanyahu reneged on a scheduled Dec. 18 redeployment, and set a series of preposterous conditions for Arafat to meet. Israel was suspending all peace moves until the Palestinians stopped inciting violence against Israelis, handed over 30 Palestinian suspects to Israel, collected illegal weapons held by Palestinians, and ceased threats to declare a state on May 4, when the interim peace accord technically ended. This tactic comes right out of Clean Break, which arrogates to Israel the right to forego its obligations if the Palestinians do not live up to theirs. For this, proof was not necessary; accusation was tantamount to guilt. The real reason for this sabotage was politics—Netanyahu faced a no-confidence vote over the memorandum, and needed to prepare for the upcoming May 1999 elections. In the face of Netanyahu’s obstructionism, Clinton was vapid and craven: “We now have the means to decide practical means to go forward and I think we’re well on our way to doing that. So, I have achieved what I came here to achieve and expect the Secretary of State to be back here in several weeks, and we’ll just keep at it.”23 The dummy knew who was doing the talking.

Camp David— the final indignity On May 17, 1999, Labor returned to power under Ehud Barak. Arafat had acceded to Clinton’s request not to declare a sovereign Palestinian state so that talks could continue. Barak and Arafat signed the Sharm el-Sheikh Memorandum to extend the deadline for an agreement on all permanent status issues by Sept. 13, 2000. The substance of the memorandum, like all those before, is immaterial since the Palestinians and Israelis had always been negotiating at crosspurposes. Moreover, Israel had consistently found excuses to avoid fulfilling its interim treaty commitments: • Scheduled military withdrawals from occupied territory had not taken place;

23. Cited in “Arafat, Netanyahu, Clinton gather to seek Mideast Peace,” CNN.com, Dec. 15, 1998.

250

Enemies by Design

• Indiscriminate killing of Palestinians continued, as did settlement construction and Arab house demolition; • The Occupied Territories remained under tight siege, and • Israeli checkpoints and road destruction cut off Palestinian families from their land so they couldn’t make a living or feed themselves. (The same tactic was used in 1947-48 to draw the map of “Israel.”) Clinton and Barak wanted to coerce Arafat into signing a dishonorable agreement for reasons that had nothing to do with peace. Clinton wanted a treaty to boost his political reputation and avoid alienating the Christian Zionists in Congress, and Barak wanted to legitimize the Zionist dispossession of the Palestinians. Each was interested in only one thing— cajoling and coercing Arafat to end the Palestinian resistance. This was not a peace conference—it was an ambush. Shlomo Ben-Ami, head of Barak’s negotiating team, provides some of the best evidence for U.S.-Israeli collusion and hypocrisy:

Refugees [Clinton] went toward the Palestinians to the very end of the farthest limit of what we could accept. His formulation was that “the two sides recognize the right of the refugees to return to historic Palestine” or “to return to their homeland,” but on the other hand, he made it clear that “there is no specific right of return to Israel.”24 Leaving aside the obvious dishonesty of this passage, note how Clinton is serving Israel: “the farthest limit of what we could accept.” At no time did Clinton show any concern for Arafat’s minimum demands. In any event, the refugee question was not negotiable. The right of return is an individual right, not something that can be bargained away. Wavering on this point is one of Arafat’s greatest blunders.

Israel’s right to exist Morally and conceptually, [Arafat] didn’t recognize Israel’s right to exist. He doesn’t accept the idea of two states for two peoples. He may be able to make some sort of partial, temporary settlement with us— though I have doubts about that, too—but at the deep level, he doesn’t accept us. Neither he nor the Palestinian national movement accept us. The fact that Arafat was prepared to negotiate at all proves the dishonesty of Ben-Ami’s statement. Arafat was prepared to negotiate away the 78 percent of historic Palestine that was seized in 1947-48. In the end, Israel would not even give him that. The real failure of Camp David was Israel’s refusal to recognize Palestine’s right to exist. 24. “Insider Reflects on Failure of 2000 Camp David Summit,” Ha’aretz, Sept. 13, 2001, . All of Ben-Ami’s citations come from this source.

12. Warm Jews, cold calculations

251

Arafat’s obstinacy When all is said and done, Camp David failed because Arafat refused to put forward proposals of his own and didn’t succeed in conveying to us the feeling that at some point his demands would have an end. The idea that Arafat had to put forth a counterproposal is absurd, as is the idea that his demands were endless. Ben-Ami’s statement contains the faulty presumption that Israel had the right to negotiate with land it didn’t rightly own. Arafat did not have to make a counter offer because such an offer would merely have been identical to the very purpose of the negotiations. Arafat and his negotiating team came to Camp David hoping to achieve four objectives: • the right of return or appropriate compensation under the terms of UNGA Resolution 194 • complete Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, under UNSC Resolutions 242 and 338 • evacuation of all Israeli settlements, and • recognition of East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state. All of these are consistent with international law, and represent the stated objectives of the peace negotiations. For his part, Barak came with five obstructions that violated international law and Israel’s own prior agreements: • No withdrawal to pre-1967 borders • No division of Jerusalem • No Palestinian state west of the Jordan River • Most Jewish settlers to remain under Israeli sovereignty, even after a final agreement, and • No acknowledgement of moral or legal responsibility for Palestinian refugees. Arafat had already put forward his proposals, because they were spelled out in the objectives of the negotiations.

Barak’s “generous offer” Palestinians don’t want a solution as much as they want to place Israel in the dock of the accused. They want to denounce our state more than they want their own state. At the deepest level they have a negative ethos. This is why unlike Zionism, they are unable to compromise.... The Big Lie of Camp David was that Barak offered Arafat a final “generous offer” of 95 percent of the West Bank, but Arafat rejected it. No such offer was ever made. The canard of Arab rejection is similar to the one that holds the Arabs responsible for Middle East violence because they did not accept the Partition Plan. In each case the deal offered to the Arabs was insulting.

252

Enemies by Design

Arafat was expected to agree to a total of four disconnected Bantustanlike enclaves in the West Bank and ostensibly all of the Gaza Strip, but Israel would retain total control over all water, roads, air space, borders, security, the Jordan Valley and East Jerusalem. The Palestinian “capital” in East Jerusalem would have been reduced to three villages: Abu Dis, Al-Aisaria and Sauwahra. The West Bank would become a de facto prison camp, with the Israeli army acting as wardens controlling every aspect of daily life. This is not the viable Palestinian state envisioned by the negotiations, yet the “95 percent” myth persists, and is invoked to blame Palestinians for their miserable existence.25

Exploiting violence The “peace process” all but collapsed on Sept. 28 after Likud leader Ariel Sharon with a bodyguard of 1,000 made a deliberately provocative visit to the sacred precincts of al-Aqsa Mosque in Arab East Jerusalem, where he declared it to be Israeli territory in perpetuity. The Israeli police violently repressed demonstrations, killing several Muslims, including Mohammed AlDurah, the boy captured on camera trying to shelter under his father’s arm against a wall. Arafat called the intrusion a dangerous affront to Islam’s holy places. Thus began the Second or Al-Aqsa Intifada. The visit sparked widespread rioting in the Occupied Territories and in the Galilee region, where police clashed with Israeli Arabs staging a sympathy strike. Sharon’s provocation re-ignited violence, as he intended, and this in turn pushed Clinton and Barak to lean on Arafat even harder. On Oct. 7, Barak gave Arafat a 48-hour ultimatum to end the violence, but this was an absurd and impossible demand. Six days earlier, Hamas had called for Arafat’s resignation and for an increase in the resistance. Arafat was fighting a three-front war—against the U.S., Israel and Hamas. On the same day as Barak issued the ultimatum—the first of two—a mob of Hamas militants overran Joseph’s Temple, in the Palestinian city of Nablus. The attack took place just as the Israeli authorities were transferring security to the Palestinians. As the New York Times reported: Firas al-Amleh, the Palestinian police chief in Nablus, said there was little he could do to stop the raging crowd. “We lost 18 martyrs here and 170 people were wounded,” he said of the week of gun battles around the shrine. “There are people here who have lost their brothers. What do you expect?”26 To the UN and Europe, responsibility for the violence was clear. The Security Council passed Resolution 1322, which read in part.

25. For a summary of the Palestinian Negotiating Team’s refutation of U.S.–Israeli claims, see . 26. Joel Greenberg, “Palestinians Destroy Israeli Site that was Scene of Many Clashes,” New York Times, Oct. 8, 2000.

12. Warm Jews, cold calculations

253

1. [The Security Council] deplores the provocation carried out at AlHaram Al-Sharif in Jerusalem on 28 September 2000, and the subsequent violence there and at other Holy Places, as well as in other areas throughout the territories occupied by Israel since 1967, resulting in over 80 Palestinian deaths and many other casualties; 2. Condemns acts of violence, especially the excessive use of force against Palestinians, resulting in injury and loss of human life; 3. Calls upon Israel, the occupying Power, to abide scrupulously by its legal obligations and its responsibilities under the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War of 12 August 1949…27 The next day, 200 Jews from the town of Upper Nablus attacked the Arab town of Nablus. Israel’s Channel 1 called it a “pogrom.”28 Nevertheless, all that mattered to Clinton and the U.S. Congress was that Arafat rejected an offer from Israel, and the violence had again erupted. It didn’t matter that the offer was a travesty, or that Sharon deliberately provoked the violence. Blame was predetermined. On Oct. 13, more than 70 senators signed a letter to Clinton that said: We are deeply concerned at the continuing, coordinated campaign of Palestinian violence. That campaign leads us to believe that Arafat either seeks to use violence as a negotiating tool to extort even further concessions from the government of Israel, or that he in fact intends to end the peace process in its entirety as a prelude to unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood.29 After Sharon came to power in February 2001, the farce of Oslo ended, and Israel had a new excuse to continue the occupation—“everything was Arafat’s fault.” No negotiations would take place until he was replaced as the Palestinian representative. In this manner, Arafat became a necessary enemy for the crazies. The way was now open for a return to Likud heavyhandedness and the thorough colonization of the White House.

‘WE, THE JEWISH PEOPLE, CONTROL AMERICA’ On Oct. 3, 2001, the Israeli radio station Kol Yisrael reported that Sharon reacted testily to complaints from Shimon Peres and other cabinet ministers who said refusal to heed “incessant American requests for a cease-fire with the Palestinians” would endanger Israeli interests and turn the US against Israel.

27. UN Security Council Res. 1322, Oct. 7, 2000. The U.S. abstained. 28. Ibid., “Timeline” in Le Monde—Middle East: The Faultline. 29. “Senators Support Israel,” Reuters, Oct. 13, 2000.

254

Enemies by Design

“Every time we do something you tell me Americans will do this and will do that,” said Sharon. “I want to tell you something very clear. Don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.30 The truth of Sharon’s candid outburst is undeniable because Israel humiliates the U.S. whenever it shows any sign of political independence. Take the example of veteran diplomat Daniel Kurtzer, who was appointed ambassador to Israel soon after PNAC seized power. In early January 2002, Kurtzer reiterated the oft-heard plea for Israel to stop financing “settlers” and put the money toward helping the poor and handicapped. The rebuff he received was so outrageous that the Israeli government had to repudiate it. Zvi Hendel, a leader of Gaza Strip settlers, called Kurtzer “a little Jewboy” who was meddling in Israel’s internal affairs.31 Despite official condemnation of the remark as “anti-Semitic” and Hendel’s subsequent retraction, the insult accurately described the parasite’s contempt for its host. In April, Israel invaded Bethlehem, Nablus and other towns in the West Bank with the standard excuse of stopping suicide attacks. Secretary of State Colin Powell told Israel it had to get out “now,” and Bush spent 20 minutes on the phone with Sharon insisting he pull out immediately. Sharon ignored them.32 Given the history of this exploitative relationship, it was inevitable that U.S. opposition to Israel’s Wall should end in another humiliating retreat. The following brief chronology shows what happens when the U.S. tries to defy its master.

July 25, 2003 Bush welcomed Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas on an official visit to the White House. In his address in the Rose Garden afterwards, Bush uttered the usual boilerplate phrasing that the U.S. opposes settlement construction, insists on an end to Palestinian (but not Israeli) terrorist attacks, and supports an improvement in the lives of the Palestinian people. It was an unremarkable speech, but in response to a reporter’s question about the wall, he said something risky: I think the wall is a problem, and I discussed this with Ariel Sharon. It is very difficult to develop confidence between the Palestinians and Israel with a wall snaking through the West Bank. And I will continue to discuss this issue very clearly with the Prime Minister. As I said in my statement today, he has

30. “Sharon to Peres: ‘Don’t worry about American pressure; we control America,’” IAP news, Oct. 3, 2001 . 31. Uri Dan, “Israeli pol rips U.S. envoy,” New York Post, January 9, 2002. 32. “Israel defies US pressure to withdraw,” BBCNews, April 8, 2002.

12. Warm Jews, cold calculations

255

issued a statement saying he is willing to come and discuss that with us. And I appreciate the willing to discuss it.33

July 29 Throughout the summer, Bush still labored under the delusion that his “road map” could be the key to resolving the Israel-Palestine dispute. Like the Oslo Accords, it was a heavily biased proposal that imposed conditions on the Palestinians, disregarded international law, and did nothing to arrest Israeli expansionism. Bush, though, failed to appreciate that Sharon was not interested in diplomatic duplicity, and cared nothing for U.S. sensitivities. After a White House meeting to “discuss” their differences, Bush and Sharon stated their respective positions at another Rose Garden press conference. Despite Bush’s public opposition to the wall—disingenuously called a fence—Sharon declared: “The security fence will continue to be built, with every effort to minimize the infringement on the daily life of the Palestinian population.”34 After this emasculating rebuke in his own back yard (literally), Bush immediately changed his tune in response to a question: The fence is a sensitive issue, I understand. And the Prime Minister made it very clear to me that it was a sensitive issue. And my promise to him is we’ll continue to discuss and to dialogue how best to make sure that the fence sends the right signal that not only is security important, but the ability for the Palestinians to live a normal life is important as well.35 Note that the wall is no longer “a problem” to be stopped but “a sensitive issue” to be discussed. The idea that Palestinians could lead normal lives behind the wall is idiotic, since whole villages were destroyed, and Palestinians are cut off from farms, homes, schools and workplaces.

Aug. 4 Despite his upbraiding the week before, Bush still wanted to stop the wall. He was considering reducing the $9 billion in loan guarantees to Israel that had been approved by Congress in the spring. The funds were slated for residential and commercial projects, and included $1 billion in military aid. According to U.S. law, no part of a loan guarantee may be used for settlement construction, which is illegal. If it is, that money is deducted from the guarantee. The New York Times reported that many in the government were concerned that the wall might also be illegal, at least the part that extended into Occupied Palestine: 33. Remarks by President Bush and Prime Minister Abbas, White House Documents, July 25, 2003, . 34. President Discusses Middle East Peace with Prime Minister Sharon, White House documents, July 29, 2003, . 35. Ibid.

256

Enemies by Design

An administration official said today that a growing consensus in the administration has led to the conclusion that the loan guarantees must not be used to pay for the barrier or to free other Israeli funds to build it. ‘The feeling is that we do need to do something about the fence,’ said an administration official.36

Aug. 22 Flouting U.S. and Palestinian objections, Israel broke ground deep inside the West Bank to build the latest section of the wall between Occupied East Jerusalem and the Arab village of Abu Dis. Land confiscations had been completed weeks earlier. A seven-kilometer wall between Egypt and the Gaza Strip was also begun.

Sept. 7 Mahmoud Abbas resigned as prime minister, citing Israel’s unwillingness to implement its “road map” commitments, and the U.S. unwillingness to exert any influence on Israel. He also cited a lack of support within the Palestinian Authority.

Sept. 19 Israeli leaders decide to send a high-ranking delegation to Washington to come to a compromise on the segment of the wall near the major settlement of Ariel, even though the U.S. had already objected to extending the wall into Occupied Palestine.

Oct. 24 Bush dropped all objections to the wall and claimed that Israel was justified in building it, even deep into the West Bank. Bush now parroted the official Israeli line of self-defense against Palestinian attacks. For Bush, the resignation of Abbas signaled the end of the “road map,” because he spent considerable political capital cultivating him as a negotiating partner. So long as Abbas was around, the wall threatened to undermine his leadership and had to be opposed. With Abbas gone, the “road map” became irrelevant, and Bush saw no reason to oppose the Lobby, which was mounting an offensive in Washington.37 Bush’s four-month fling with political independence was over.

April 1, 2004 In addition, Bush assured Sharon that Israel would not have to return to the Green Line (1967 border) in any future settlement with the Palestinians. Not only does this assurance violate UNSC Res. 242—which the U.S. supports—but it proves the fraud of the U.S. claim to be an “honest broker.”

36. Steven R. Weisman, “U.S. May Reduce Aid to Get Israel to Halt Barrier,” New York Times, Aug. 5, 2003. 37. Ori Nir, “Bush Drops Opposition to Building of Barrier,” Forward, Oct. 24, 2003.

12. Warm Jews, cold calculations

257

This new assurance appears in a draft letter of guarantees as a quid pro quo for Sharon’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip, even though Israel’s departure is 37 years overdue.38 The letter also includes implied recognition of settlement blocks, a denial of the Palestinian right of return, and a de facto imposition of a border. Throughout all these proceedings, the Palestinians were never consulted.

The ICJ Ruling On July 9, The International Court of Justice in The Hague rendered its advisory opinion on the legality of the Wall. It rejected all of Israel’s arguments about defensive necessity and the nature of the Wall, and specifically condemned Israel for humanitarian and legal violations. Some of the ICJ’s key findings include: • Rejection of Israel’s claim that the ICJ had no jurisdiction to rule on a political matter. (Paras. 36–41) As is clear from its long-standing jurisprudence on this point, the Court considers that the fact that a legal question also has political aspects, “as, in the nature of things, is the case with so many questions which arise in international life, does not suffice to deprive it of its character as a ‘legal question’ and to ‘deprive the Court of a competence expressly conferred on it by its Statute.’” (Para. 41)39 • The Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War does apply to Palestinians under Israeli Occupation, contrary to Israel’s claim. (Paras. 86–101). After the occupation of the West Bank in 1967, the Israeli authorities issued an order No. 3 stating in its Article 35 that: “the Military Court… must apply the provisions of the Geneva Convention dated 12 August 1949 relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War with respect to judicial procedures. In case of conflict between this Order and the said Convention, the Convention shall prevail.” Subsequently, the Israeli authorities have indicated on a number of occasions that in fact they generally apply the humanitarian provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention within the occupied territories. (Para. 93) • The Wall is illegal and amounts to a de facto annexation of Palestinian land (Paras. 115–122) The route chosen for the wall gives expression in loco to the illegal measures taken by Israel with regard to Jerusalem and the settlements, 38. Aluf Benn “Bush to assure PM: Israel won’t have to retreat to Green Line,” Ha’aretz, April 1, 2004. 39. “Advisory Opinion,” Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (International Court of Justice: The Hague, July 9, 2004), . All ICJ citations come from this website.

258

Enemies by Design

as deplored by the Security Council. There is also a risk of further alterations to the demographic composition of the Occupied Palestinian Territory resulting from the construction of the wall inasmuch as it is contributing… to the departure of Palestinian populations from certain areas. (Para. 122) • The wall has led to the illegal destruction or requisition of Palestinian property. (Paras. 132–137) The wall, along the route chosen, and its associated regime gravely infringe a number of rights of Palestinians residing in the territory occupied by Israel, and the infringements resulting from that route cannot be justified by military exigencies or by the requirements of national security or public order. The construction of such a wall accordingly constitutes breaches by Israel of various of its obligations under the applicable international humanitarian law and human rights instruments. (Para. 137) Not only did the ICJ denounce the Wall, but in paragraph 160 it instructed the UN to do something about it: The Court is of the view that the United Nations, and especially the General Assembly and the Security Council, should consider what further action is required to bring to an end the illegal situation resulting from the construction of the wall and the associated regime, taking due account of the present Advisory Opinion. Naturally, Israel has refused to recognize the court’s decision, which means the U.S.—and other compromised countries—also refused. Israel is accustomed to being an international pariah; in fact, the isolation feeds the illusion of Israel as a victim, which reinforces the propaganda of bias against Israel, which reinforces the Lobby’s strength. The U.S. is another matter. Because it still nurtures the conceit that it stands for freedom and the rule of law, its endorsement of Israel’s illegality cannot be sustained over the long term without even greater moral, political and economic cost, especially when the weight of evidence and world opinion is so clearly on the side of the Palestinians. Only when the U.S. finds the courage to stand up to them will the war of terrorism end, but for that to happen, the U.S. must be prepared to fight another war of independence.

H E N G E O R G E W . B U S H formally occupied the White House in January 2001, the American republic ceased to exist. The corrupt edifice that arose in its place bore no resemblance to the Enlightenment philosophy of Washington, Jefferson or Locke.

Of course, the republic had been deteriorating rapidly ever since Ronald Reagan’s benighted presidency led the fascist revolution, but now anyone who stood up for traditional, Eisenhower-style Republicanism, defended the rule of law, or put U.S. interests ahead of Israel’s would be purged, intimidated or marginalized. This final stage of the Zionization of America was led by a cabal of familiar crazies and economic imperialists who belonged to a new organization called Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Certain members of this “think tank” would come to fill high government positions under George W. Bush and orchestrate the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, the demonization of Muslims, and the evisceration of the Constitution, civil liberties, environmental laws and any other public goods and services that stood in the way of realizing the dream of unenlightened imperial statecraft. PNAC’s bias is obvious from its address: 1150 17th St. NW, Suite 510, Washington, D.C., 20036. This is the same location as the Weekly Standard, a propaganda organ churned out by Zionist media baron Rupert Murdoch and run by PNAC chairman and co-founder William Kristol, who is every bit as dedicated to warmongering for Israel as was his father Irving. PNACers believe that the U.S. lost its way during Clinton’s presidency, because Israel’s needs and U.S. economic expansionism were not prosecuted with sufficient zeal.

260

Enemies by Design Table VII: Selected signatories to PNAC’s Statement of Principles

PNACer

Reagan era post(s)

George W. Bush era post(s)

Elliot Abrams

Assistant Secretary of State

National security council senior director for democracy, human rights and international operations

Indicted by the Iran-Contra special prosecutor for giving false testimony before Congress Dick Cheney (Founding PNACer)

Six-term congressman from Wyoming

Vice-President

Zalmay Khalilzad

Special State Department advisor on the Iran-Iraq War and the Soviet War in Afghanistan

Head of the Bush-Cheney Transition team for the Department of Defense and advisor to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld

Lewis “Scooter” Libby

State Dept. Policy Planning Staff

Chief of staff to Cheney

Defense Secretary (Bush Sr.)

Director of special projects for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Deputy defense undersecretary for policy (Bush Sr.) Peter W. Rodman

Director of State Dept. Policy Planning Staff

Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs

Deputy Asst. National Security Affairs Special Assistant for National Security Affairs and NSC Counselor (Reagan-Bush) Frank Gaffney

Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy

Founder of the Centre for Security Policy

Norman Podhoretz

Editor, Commentary

Editor-at-large, Commentary

Donald Rumsfeld

General Advisory Committee on Arms Control

Senior fellow Hudson Institute Secretary of Defense

Presidential envoy to Iraq Paul Wolfowitz

Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Ambassador to Indonesia Head of the State Department Policy Planning Staff

Deputy Secretary of Defense Advisor to Cheney

13. Rogue state

261

According to PNAC’s June 3, 1997 Statement of Principles: The history of the 20th century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire. The history of this century should have taught us to embrace the cause of American leadership. Our aim is to remind Americans of these lessons and to draw their consequences for today. Here are four consequences: • we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future; • we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values; • we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad; • we need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles. Such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next.1 The allusion to Reagan is no accident. PNACers longed for their own ventriloquist’s dummy that could project the image of strength without having the actual strength to think for himself. After Reagan, presidents Bush and Clinton were too smart to be stampeded into unilateral militaristic adventurism. Of the 25 people who signed the Statement of Principles, many had come to prominence during the Reagan administration. The media and Labor-Zionist foreign policy establishment of the Clintonera dismissed PNAC’s warmongering fulminations, even after Benjamin Netanyahu led Israel’s hard-line Likud to power in May 1996. To get PNAC’s message out, Kristol issued public propaganda letters against the government. The letter dated Jan. 26, 1998, warning Clinton about the danger posed by Iraq is easily recognizable as the basis of George W. Bush’s justification for invasion: “We are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War…. The policy of ‘containment’ of Saddam Hussein has been steadily eroding over the past several months. As recent events have 1. Statement of Principles (Washington, D.C.: The Project for the New American Century, June 3, 1997), hereinafter cited as PNAC.

262

Enemies by Design

demonstrated, we can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or evades UN inspections. Our ability to ensure that Saddam Hussein is not producing weapons of mass destruction, therefore, has substantially diminished… The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.2 For the true-believing Marxist or fascist, the cause is everything; the end justifies the means. Truth in the abstract does not exist because the cause is Truth. As the disseminator of “Truth,” the propagandist will freely distort, lie, libel, inflame, intimidate, misrepresent and dissemble. A reader can detect propaganda by the conspicuous repetition of slogans and key words, valueladen assertions, and promotion of an enemy. In the letter, we see all three factors: In a mere six paragraphs, “Saddam” or “Saddam Hussein” occurs nine times and “weapons of mass destruction” four times; Hussein’s “possession” of WMDs is constantly imputed without evidence; and the danger of doing nothing is equated with weakness. The following sentence encompasses all three elements: It hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course, the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard. Note particularly the passing mention of defending Israel and oil supplies. This, not WMDs, is the real objective of the letter. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to claim the assault on Iraq came solely at PNAC’s instigation. An undeclared war to destroy Iraq had been in effect since the invasion of Kuwait.3 A cease-fire was declared on Feb. 28, 1991, and Iraq’s army withdrew to its position status quo ante. With hostilities ended and the sovereignty of Kuwait re-established, the pretext for economic sanctions had vanished, yet they were not removed. They remained in place for 12 years, keeping Iraq weak until it was invaded for the second time.

2. Letter to President Clinton, PNAC, Jan. 26, 1998. Signatories included Elliot Abrams John Bolton, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. 3. Security Council resolutions, 1990 .

13. Rogue state

263

After the war, UNSC Res. 687 (April 3, 1991) institutionalized a sanctions regime, which was illegal when compared to the terms of Res. 660. Iraq was banned from buying commodities other than medical and food supplies or for “essential civilian needs.” The Security Council would review the terms of the sanctions every 60 days and decide to reduce or lift them according to Iraq’s compliance with all past council resolutions. Furthermore, the resolution forced Iraq to adhere to a stringent, internationally supervised disarmament schedule. Under Section C (paragraphs 7 to 14), Iraq had to eliminate all WMDs, ballistic missiles with a range greater than 150 kilometres, related items and production facilities, and agree not to resume their acquisition or production. In addition, Iraq had to agree to accept a UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) that would implement non-nuclear provisions of the resolution and assist the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in nuclear inspections.4 Because compliance with all Security Council resolutions was the condition for the lifting of sanctions, economic and military punishments were linked, and so UNSCOM became the billy club by which the U.S. kept Iraq in a perpetually beggared state. If WMDs could not be found, it could always be argued that the Hussein government was not co-operating or that the weapons were “hidden somewhere,” thus ensuring the continuation of the economic sanctions.

Weapons of mass disinformation The U.S. had known for at least 10 years that Saddam Hussein had no credible chemical, biological or nuclear weapons capability, yet the Bush administration went to preposterous lengths to bludgeon the world into believing he did. The best way to demonstrate this point is to let Hussein’s accusers speak for themselves. Saddam Hussein’s offensive military capability, his capacity to threaten his neighbors, has been virtually eliminated. This is a very significant development. Israel, I think, from a military standpoint is more secure today than she’s been at any time in the recent past because of the elimination of Iraq’s offensive military threat. A very significant development.5 (Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, April 29, 1991) [Saddam Hussein] has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq, and these are policies 4.Security Council resolutions, 1991 . United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), . 5. Dick Cheney, The Gulf War: A First Assessment, Soref Symposium, Washington Institute for Middle East Policy, April 29, 1991, .

264

Enemies by Design

that we are going to keep in place, but we are always willing to review them to make sure that they are being carried out in a way that does not affect the Iraqi people but does affect the Iraqi regime’s ambitions and the ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction…6 (Secretary of State Colin Powell, Feb. 24, 2001) Even though we have no doubt in our mind that the Iraqi regime is pursuing programs to develop weapons of mass destruction—chemical, biological and nuclear—I think the best intelligence estimates suggest that they have not been terribly successful. There’s no question that they have some stockpiles of some of these sorts of weapons still under their control, but they have not been able to break out, they have not been able to come out with the capacity to deliver these kinds of systems or to actually have these kinds of systems that is much beyond where they were 10 years ago.7 (Powell, Senate testimony, May 15, 2001) The 10-year span between Cheney’s statement and Powell’s two statements proves beyond doubt that during the 1990s the U.S. did not believe that Hussein had a WMD capability. Nevertheless, within a year of Powell’s last statement, the U.S. would abandon logic and reasoned analysis for demagoguery, hatemongering and fraud: Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional ambitions will lead him into future confrontations with his neighbors —confrontations that will involve both the weapons he has today, and the ones he will continue to develop with his oil wealth.8 (Vice-President Cheney, Aug. 26, 2002) We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more. Given Saddam Hussein's history of aggression, given what we know of his grandiose plans, given what we know of his terrorist associations, and given his determination to exact revenge on those who oppose him, should we take the risk that he will not someday use these weapons at a time and a place and in a manner of his choosing, at a time when the world is in a much weaker position to respond? The United States will not and cannot run that risk for the American people. Leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or

6. Colin Powell, Press Remarks with Foreign Minister of Egypt Amre Moussa, U.S. Department of State, Feb. 24, 2001. 7. Colin Powell, Testimony to the Foreign Operations, Export Financing and Related Programs Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, May 15, 2001 (excerpts), . 8. Dick Cheney, Address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars 103rd National Convention, White House documents, Aug. 26, 2002.

13. Rogue state

265

years is not an option, not in a post-September 11th world.9 (Powell, Feb. 5, 2003) The issue of weapons of mass destruction, once the subject of skepticism, was now implicitly assumed, even though no new information had come forth to confirm their existence. This bizarre flip-flop convinced few world leaders, as shown by this comment from Russian President Vladimir Putin less than two months after Cheney’s diatribe: Russia does not have in its possession any trustworthy data that supports the existence of nuclear weapons or any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and we have not received any such information from our partners as yet. This fact has also been supported by the information sent by the CIA to the U.S. Congress.10 Clearly, the Bush administration was now deliberately lying to manufacture public and international support for an invasion of Iraq. Wolfowitz virtually admitted as much in a May 9, 2003, Vanity Fair interview: “For reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason…”11 After he reigned as the chief U.S. arms hunter on Jan 23, 2004, David Kay upheld the original skeptical point of view: “I don’t think they existed. What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the [1991] Gulf War and I don’t think there was a large-scale production program in the ’90s.”12

C A L C U L AT E D G E N O C I D E In 1996, the UN began to allow Iraq to sell limited amounts of oil for food, but the effort was wholly inadequate to forestall this man-made humanitarian catastrophe. In 1998, Denis Halliday, head of the UN’s humanitarian relief efforts and overseer of the oil-for-food program in Baghdad, resigned in disgust:

9. Remarks by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell To The United Nations Security Council, U.S. State Department, Feb. 7, 2003. 10. Cited in Michael White “Putin demands proof over Iraqi weapons” Guardian, Oct. 12, 2002. 11. Critics of the Iraq invasion trumpeted this statement as proof that the WMD rationale was a fraud, but defenders of the war claimed Wolfowitz had been misquoted, and that newspapers like Britain’s The Independent distorted his meaning. (See David Usborne, “WMD Just a Convenient Excuse for War, Admits Wolfowitz,” May, 30, 2003.) However, the U.S. knew full well that Iraq had no WMDs. The Independent headline accurately reflected the dishonesty of the Bush administration’s rush to war. 12. Cited in Tabassum Zakaria, “Ex-Arms Hunter Says Iraq Had No Banned Stockpiles,” Reuters, Jan. 24, 2004.

266

Enemies by Design

To understand the gravity of the situation in Iraq, one must understand the damage inflicted by the 1991 Gulf War. The allied forces destroyed sewerage systems, water purification plants, electrical grids, hospitals, schools, grain silos—in short, the entire civilian infrastructure. The consequences for Iraq have been disastrous. Raw sewage flows in the streets, contaminating the water, causing an upsurge in diarrhea, typhoid and cholera is the result. Electric power runs at less than 40 percent of pre-1990 levels. A major health problem is the sharp increase in cancers, leukemia and birth defects. This is most likely due to the use of depleted uranium weapons by allied forces during the Gulf War. Sanctions have wreaked havoc on the economy. To survive, families are forced to sell their belongings and to resort to begging and crime. School drop-out rates and childhood illiteracy have soared. Archeological sites, many of them bombed in the Gulf War, have been looted and their treasures sold overseas. We are destroying an entire society. It is as simple and as terrifying as that…. It may sound too dramatic to call this systematic destruction genocide. But what better word is there? The UN Security Council knows full well the dimensions of the tragedy unfolding in Iraq—even if the American people do not.13 The sanctions were felt much more acutely in the strategically sensitive south-central region than in the Kurdish north. For all categories in southcentral, infant mortality under age 5 almost doubled in every category between 1990 and 1998. According to UNICEF, if the substantial reduction in under-five mortality of the 1980s had continued, there would have been half a million fewer deaths overall during 1991 to 1998.14 Thus, Halliday’s use of “genocide” is not an exaggeration; it fits the definition in Article 6 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court: For the purpose of this Statute, ‘genocide’ means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.15

13. Dennis Halliday, “End the catastrophe of sanctions against Iraq,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Feb. 12, 1999; “The Catastrophe of Sanctions Against Iraq,” Seattle Times, Feb. 19, 1999. 14. Under-5 mortality (UNICEF, July 23, 1999 . 15. Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court .

267

13. Rogue state Table VIII: Child mortality per 1,000 live births Years

Newborn

Infant

Child

Newborn

South-Central Iraq

Infant

Child

Northern Iraq

1980

33.2

57.2

18.5

44.6

93.6

37

1985

29.9

45.1

8.1

35.8

71.6

26.2

1990

26.2

46.8

13.2

42.5

72.4

21.1

1991

59.1

98.7

19.2

48.4

103.1

27.9

1992

59.5

99.2

18.8

39.5

68

21.2

1993

63.4

101.3

20.3

31.7

52.5

16.1

1994

67.2

102.8

21.3

36.7

58.6

15.9

1995

66.9

105

26.5

47.3

66.1

15.4

1996

69.2

112.3

28.3

33.2

52

19.6

1997

63.1

108.3

26.5

35.2

51.5

11.1

1998

67.6

113

33.3

41.7

52.2

7.9

Avg. 1980–90

29.8

49.7

13.3

41.0

79.2

28.1

Avg. 1996–98

66.6

111.2

29.4

36.7

51.9

12.9

% Change 124% 124% 121% -10% -34% -54% Source: Mohamed M. Ali, John Blacker and Gareth Jones, Annual mortality rates and excess deaths of children under five in Iraq, 1991-98, April 2003 at

On May 12, 1996, in a now infamous exchange on 60 Minutes, Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright conceded that the U.S. was willfully and knowingly killing Iraqi children: I N T E R V I E W E R L E S L I E S T A H L : We have heard that a half million children have died... I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And—and you know, is the price worth it ? M A D E L E I N E A L B R I G H T : I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it. S T A H L V O I C E - O V E R : Worth it because she believes the sanctions are working. A L B R I G H T : He has in fact come cleaner on some of these weapons programs than we thought before and has recognized Kuwait which was one of the very important reasons this war was started. It is a moral question, but the moral question here is a large one. Don’t we owe to the American people and to the American military and to the other countries of this region that this man not be a threat. S T A H L : Even with the starvation?

268

Enemies by Design

A L B R I G H T : It is hard for me to say this but I am a humane person, but I think my main responsibility is to make sure that United States forces don’t have to go and refight the Gulf War.16 This exchange produced three important facts: First, Albright did not dispute the number of deaths or the fact of starvation; second, the lives of Iraqi civilians did not figure in the larger moral picture of the U.S.; and three, Albright immediately shifted the focus from the U.S.-created catastrophe to Saddam Hussein. Even though the U.S.-led sanctions regime directly created and perpetuated this catastrophe, Hussein had to be made responsible for it— and finally even for 9/11. “It’s Saddam’s fault” would become the catch-all U.S. mantra to justify the beggaring of Iraqi civilians and the subsequent invasion. In reflecting upon the UN Resolutions behind this man-made humanitarian catastrophe, UNSC Res. 662 (Aug. 9, 1990) is also worth noting. Substitute “Israel” for “Iraq,” “Palestine” for “Kuwait,” and “5 June 1967” for “1 August 1990” and you have the essence of Israel’s occupation of Palestine: Recalling its resolutions 660 (1990) of 2 August 1990 and 661 (1990) 6 August 1990; Gravely alarmed by the declaration by Iraq of a ‘comprehensive and eternal merger’ with Kuwait; Demanding, once again, that Iraq withdraw immediately and unconditionally all its forces to the positions in which they were located on 1 August 1990; Determined to bring the occupation of Kuwait by Iraq to an end and to restore the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of Kuwait; Determined also to restore the authority of the legitimate Government of Kuwait; 1. Decides that annexation of Kuwait by Iraq under any form and whatever pretext has no legal validity, and is considered null and void; 2. Calls upon all States, international organizations and specialized agencies not to recognize that annexation, and to refrain from any action or dealing that might be interpreted as an indirect recognition of the annexation; 3. Further demands that Iraq rescind its actions purporting to annex Kuwait; 4. Decides to keep this item on its agenda and to continue its efforts to put an early end to the occupation.17 16. See excerpts at . 17. Security Council resolutions 1990, op. cit. This result supports the prevalent belief in the Arab world that the UN is the handmaiden of Western imperialism, since Kuwait is after all an integral part of Iraq that was carved off by the British Empire to secure its oil.

13. Rogue state

269

Nevertheless, the UN has not imposed sanctions against Israel or threatened it with military reprisals for continuing to flout international law; in fact, the UN has done nothing but issue a blizzard of paper protests. When Osama bin Laden charges the U.S. and the UN with a moral double standard and disregard for the welfare of Muslims, this is what is meant.

Illegal containment When the subject of WMDs comes up, invariably so does Halabja, the Kurdish city 260 kilometres northeast of Baghdad. On March 16, 1988, an aerial chemical weapons attack killed 5,000 and left 7,000 injured or with long-term illnesses. Hussein was blamed, and Halabja became a symbol of Iraqi inhumanity toward its Kurdish minority, even though Hussein likely had nothing to do with it. Stephen C. Pelletière, the CIA’s senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war has evidence to suggest that the gas that killed the Kurds came from Iran. He said the Kurds died, not deliberately, but as the result of a chemical-weapons battle around Halabja. According to a tightly controlled United States Defense Intelligence Agency classified report, Pelletière said each side used gas, but the bodies of the Kurds showed that they had been killed by a blood agent, a cyanide-based gas, which Iran had used. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas, were not known to have possessed blood agents at the time.18 Nevertheless, on April 5, 1991, the Security Council passed Res. 688 that, among other things, demanded that Iraq end its repression of the Kurds, and allow international humanitarian aid organizations into the north. The resolution also requested that the Secretary-General use all available resources and agencies to pursue humanitarian efforts.19 Two weeks later, the U.S., U.K. and France used Res. 688 as a pretext for setting up a “no-fly zone” for Iraq aircraft north of the 36th parallel, ostensibly to create a “safe haven” for the Kurds. In August 1992, these countries set up a southern no-fly zone south of the 32nd parallel to “protect” Iraq’s Shi’ites. The U.S. extended this zone up to the 33rd parallel in September 1996.20 In total, the two NFZs covered about two thirds of Iraq. The NFZs were illegal, since nothing in this or any Security Council or UN resolution authorized them. Furthermore, their stated humanitarian objectives didn’t stand up to observational scrutiny. For example, in the south, the NFZ did not stop artillery bombardments, draining and poisoning of marshes, mass arrests and large-scale burning of houses. 18. Stephen C. Pelletière, “A War Crime or an Act of War?” New York Times, Jan. 31, 2003. 19. Security Council Resolutions, 1991, op. cit. 20. France withdrew from the northern NFZ in December 1996 and from the southern NFZ December 1998. The northern no-fly zone was first established to protect coalition aircraft during airdrops of aid to Kurdish refugees on the Turkish border, and then to protect coalition ground troops advancing into northern Iraq as part of Operation “Provide Comfort.”

270

Enemies by Design

In fact, the U.S. State Department acknowledged that Hussein’s repression of his opponents had increased since the zone was established.21 One reason was that the latitudinal boundaries of the NFZs did not encompass all Kurdish or Shi’ite areas, so it’s impossible to see how they could have accomplished their mission, or have been an improvement over satellite and human intelligence. Without question, the NFZs were tied into the phantom hunt for WMDs and designed to hobble Iraq’s economy and military. From 1991 to 1998, the U.S. and U.K. patrolled the NFZs almost daily and bombed Iraq only when they encountered anti-aircraft fire, surface-to-air missiles or acquisition by radar—all of which Iraq had a right to do in the name of national self-defense. Bombings during this period were limited to the sources of national resistance, but in 1998 Clinton authorized “more expansive rules of engagement,” which turned the no-fly zones, illegal as they already were, into a covert air war. Pilots were now no longer limited to firing at Iraqi planes or ground installations; they could now target other parts of the broader air-defense network.22 From December 1998 to June 2000, the Royal Air Force dropped 78 tonnes of bombs, compared with 2.5 tonnes between April 1991 and December 1998. The average monthly tonnage dropped on NFZs rose from 0.025 to five tonnes.23 As the bombings increased so did civilian casualties. In 1999, the results of the most destructive aerial raids were: • About 20 killed in Basra region (South)—Jan. 25 • Oil exports cut after attack damages pipeline in Mosul (North)—Feb. 28 • 12 killed when planes hit residential area (North)—May 13 • 14 civilians killed (South)—July 18 • Eight killed and 26 injured (North)—July 28.24 So much for the humanitarian justification.

21. For an excellent history and analysis of the NFZs, see Teisha Leigh, The No-Fly Zones Over Iraq: A Review, CAABU Briefings, No. 68, 2001, at The Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding . 22. Paul Richter, “Clinton OKs More Aggressive Response to Iraqi Attacks,” Los Angeles Times, Jan 27, 1999. 23. Sarah Graham-Brown, No-Fly Zones: Rhetoric And Real Intentions, MERIP (Middle East Research and Information Project), Press Information Note 49, Feb. 20, 2001, . 24. No-fly zones: The legal position, BBC, Feb. 19 2001, news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1175950.stm.

13. Rogue state

271

The UNSCOM scam Clinton’s increased bombardment in December 1998 was a direct consequence of the UN weapons inspectors’ decision to leave Iraq. The Australian head of the UNSCOM inspection team Richard Butler declared that Iraq was not co-operating, but this charge does not accord with the views of chief U.S. weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who said the U.S. was trying to provoke a confrontation to justify withdrawal so that an attack could take place. He recalls a meeting on either Feb. 28 or March 1, 1998, with U.S. Ambassador Bill Richardson and Butler at the UN, when Butler told him to provoke a confrontation with Iraq so that the U.S. could start bombing before March 15, the start of a Muslim holy season. After arriving in Baghdad on March 10, Ritter said the inspection teams were barred from searching the Ministry of Defense, but at length the Iraqis allowed them in. Their acquiescence, said Ritter, forced Albright to cancel plans to explain to the French why the U.S. was planning to take military action.25 In December 1998, Australian weapons inspector Roger Hill successfully manufactured a provocation when the Iraqis initially refused entry into one of Saddam Hussein’s presidential palaces. As Ritter told an audience in Vancouver, Canada, on Oct. 4, 2002, the inspection team asked an Iraqi in the palace if this constituted a formal refusal, and was told “yes,” but then he changed his mind and allowed the team access. The team took the first refusal as the excuse it needed to leave in advance of the long-planned air attack. In a speech to the British parliament, Ritter formally debunked the case for war: As of December 1998, the weapons inspectors had destroyed the factories that could be used to produce chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. They are gone. We backed it up with monitoring and the most stringent controls in history to ensure that Iraq wasn't reconstituting that ability. We could not account for everything. But we do know that the factory where, for example, they made liquid bulk anthrax ceased production. We blew it up in 1996. Liquid bulk anthrax cannot survive for more than three years even under ideal storage conditions. So even if Iraq did hide some from us it is no longer viable. As of December 1998 we came close to zero level in terms of Iraq's ability to produce or maintain weapons of mass destruction. Biological and chemical weapons must be produced in industrial facilities possessing the highest level of technology. Iraq would have had to procure much of this from abroad to reconstitute facilities.… Even if

25. Edith M. Lederer, “Former UN Inspector Accuses U.S.,” Newsday, July 19, 2001; Ronni Berke, “Ex-U.N. inspector in Iraq: U.S. set up air raids,” CNN.com, July 19, 2001.

272

Enemies by Design

they got it and attempted to reconstitute a biological, chemical or nuclear factory, it is detectable.26 Despite overwhelming evidence that Iraq posed no danger, the U.S. and U.K. would escalate their undeclared war. In April 2002, the RAF dropped 0.3 tonnes of bombs on the no-fly zones; in September the tonnage increased 180 times to more than 54 tonnes. In December, British government officials admitted that the patrols in the south were designed to weaken Iraq's air defense systems and had nothing to do with defending the marsh Arabs and Shi’ites.27 The softening up of Iraq for the invasion was in its final stages.

IMPERIAL MANIFESTO In September 2000, PNAC came out with Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century. It is to the U.S. what Clean Break was to Israel; in fact, many of the same people were involved in both documents. Only from this common perspective can the seventh and final stage of the Zionist conquest of America be understood. Rebuilding America’s Defenses, though written near the end of the Clinton administration, became the policy bible for George W. Bush. It is a politicotheocratic manifesto calculated to reduce the U.S. to a servant of Big Oil and Zionism. (Even though Israel is only mentioned once in passing, its agenda is well represented.) It’s unclear if PNAC would have come to such prominence if Vice-President Al Gore had won the 2000 election, but with George W. Bush in the White House, PNACers had a ventriloquist’s dummy that exceeded Reagan’s capacity for gormless leadership. As the rest of this chapter will show, Bush’s bombing of Afghanistan, invasion of Iraq, and assault on the Constitution—all in the name of fighting the “war on terrorism”—can be traced to PNAC and its need for an external Arab enemy.

Rationalizing militarism Rebuilding America’s Defenses is an unselfconsciously patronizing apologia for U.S. world domination. Its underlying conceit of “what’s good for the U.S. is good for the world” is summed up in these two passages from the Introduction: Today, the United States has an unprecedented strategic opportunity. It faces no immediate great-power challenge; it is blessed with wealthy, powerful and democratic allies in every part of the world; it is in the midst of the longest economic expansion in its history; and its political and economic principles are almost universally embraced. At no time in 26. Scott Ritter, “The time to stop the war on Iraq is now,” Speech to the British Houses of Parliament, July 2002, . 27. Richard Norton-Taylor, “Britain and US step up bombing in Iraq,” Guardian, Dec. 4, 2002.

13. Rogue state

273

history has the international security order been as conducive to American interests and ideals. Yet unless the United States maintains sufficient military strength, this opportunity will be lost…. Years of cuts in defense spending have eroded the American military’s combat readiness, and put in jeopardy the Pentagon’s plans for maintaining military superiority in the years ahead. Increasingly, the U.S. military has found itself undermanned, inadequately equipped and trained, straining to handle contingency operations, and ill-prepared to adapt itself to the revolution in military affairs. Without a wellconceived defense policy and an appropriate increase in defense spending, the United States has been letting its ability to take full advantage of the remarkable strategic opportunity at hand slip away.28 One needn’t be a specialist in military history to recognize that the rosy scenario in the first part is irreconcilable with the paranoid insecurity in the second. If the world almost universally embraces U.S. political and economic principles, what could this “strategic opportunity” be? To mask the true intent of the report, the authors concoct an elaborate illusion of U.S. military weakness that must be reversed. Since today’s peace is the unique product of American preeminence, a failure to preserve that preeminence allows others an opportunity to shape the world in ways antithetical to American interests and principles. The price of American preeminence is that, just as it was actively obtained, it must be actively maintained.29 Furthermore, PNAC—like JINSA, WINEP, AEI, CSP and other “think tanks”—has deep ties to the U.S. and Israel military establishments, and as such needs an external enemy to justify bloated defense budgets. In short, PNACers needed to re-orient U.S. military doctrine toward overt, unilateral aggression in a world that at least paid lip service to the idea of collective security. Rebuilding America’s Defenses articulates this strategy by disguising aggression and wasteful military spending as necessary defensive reforms. The following passage is key to understanding the mentality of PNAC: In broad terms, we saw the project as building upon the defense strategy outlined by the Cheney Defense Department in the waning days of the Bush Administration. The Defense Policy Guidance (DPG) drafted in the early months of 1992 provided a blueprint for maintaining U.S. preeminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests. Leaked before it 28. Donald Kagan, Gary Schmitt, Thomas Donnelly et al., Rebuilding America’s Defenses— Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century (Washington, D.C.: PNAC, September 2000), pp. iv; i-ii. Even though the first of these citations comes after the second in the report, there is no change in meaning or context. All pages refer to the print document, not the PDF version on PNAC’s website. 29. Ibid., p. 73.

274

Enemies by Design

had been formally approved, the document was criticized as an effort by “cold warriors” to keep defense spending high and cuts in forces small despite the collapse of the Soviet Union; not surprisingly, it was subsequently buried by the new administration. Although the experience of the past eight years has modified our understanding of particular military requirements for carrying out such a strategy, the basic tenets of the DPG, in our judgment, remain sound. And what Secretary Cheney said at the time in response to the DPG’s critics remains true today: “We can either sustain the [armed] forces we require and remain in a position to help shape things for the better, or we can throw that advantage away. [But] that would only hasten the day when we face greater threats, at higher costs and further risk to American lives.”30 Because the period between Cheney’s statement and the publication of Rebuilding America’s Defenses overlaps the rosy scenario period, the call for a renewed militarism must have an objective other than maintaining the peace. We get a sense of that mission from statements in the report concerning the role of U.S. allies: The presence of American forces in critical regions around the world is the visible expression of extent of America’s status as a superpower and as the guarantor of liberty, peace and stability. Our role in shaping the peacetime security environment is an essential one, not to be renounced without great cost: it will be difficult, if not impossible, to sustain the role of global guarantor without a substantial overseas presence. Our allies, for whom regional problems are vital security interests, will come to doubt our willingness to defend their interests if U.S. forces withdraw into a Fortress America. Equally important, our worldwide web of alliances provides the most effective and efficient means for exercising American global leadership; the benefits far outweigh the burdens.31 This noblesse oblige underscores the primacy of U.S. interests; any defense of allied interests is merely a means to this end. The authors assert the need for a substantial overseas presence in “critical regions” based upon the presumption of threats to itself and its allies. On the other hand, they state that an alliance network provides “the most effective and efficient” means of projecting U.S. power. One could make the case that the U.S. should abandon a substantial overseas presence in favor of greater reliance on allies, but the image of Fortress America is evoked to pre-empt any such consideration and to remind allies of who’s in control. In fact, “preeminence” or “preeminent” with respect to U.S. power occurs 51 times in 76 pages of text. “Pax Americana” or “American Peace” occurs 17 times. Such conspicuous repetition of pat phrases indicates that Rebuilding America’s Defenses is propaganda, not analysis. 30. Ibid.,. p. ii. For a detailed treatment of the DPG, see Chapter 14. 31. Ibid., p. 14.

13. Rogue state

275

Plan of attack In the report, the authors describe four core military missions of a reformed military: • defending the American homeland; • fighting and winning multiple simultaneous major theatre wars; • performing “constabulary” duties to shape the security environment in critical regions; and • reorganizing U.S. forces to exploit the “revolution in military affairs.” To achieve these goals, the U.S. must: • Maintain nuclear strategic superiority; • Increase active-duty personnel from 1.4 million to 1.6 million; • Reposition permanently-based U.S. forces to southeast Europe, the Persian Gulf and Southeast Asia, and redeploy the Navy in East Asia; • Modernize our fighter aircraft, submarine and surface fleets; • Develop and deploy global missile defenses to defend the American homeland and American allies, and to provide a secure basis for U.S. power projection around the world; • Control the new “international commons” of space and “cyberspace,” and pave the way for the creation of a new military service, “U.S. space forces,” with the mission of space control; • Exploit the “revolution in military affairs” to ensure the long-term superiority of U.S. conventional forces; and • Increase defense spending gradually to a minimum level of 3.5 to 3.8 percent of gross domestic product, adding $15 billion to $20 billion to total defense spending annually.32 Even if the case for military reform were sound, the recommendations in Rebuilding America’s Defenses go far beyond any reasonable definition of what should be sufficient to maintain U.S. superiority. The strategic opportunity the authors mention, therefore, is not one of preserving U.S. influence but of expanding it to prevent any other countries, even allies, from challenging U.S. dominance. Rebuilding America’s Defenses, therefore, is a manifesto for the unbridled use of U.S. military power to coerce the world into serving U.S. and Israeli interests. The following table shows the magnitude of the planned military build-up in proportion to Clinton-era defense spending (1993-2000), which coincided with the high-water mark of U.S. hegemony. By the end of Clinton’s term, total national defense spending amounted to $330 billion; if Bush’s projected increases through 2007 hold true, that figure will rise by 29.16 percent in 2007, especially in procurement and new weapons programs.

32. Ibid., pp. iv-v, 23.

276

Enemies by Design Table IX: National Defense Budget Authority Trends by Appropriations Title, FY1993–2007 (US $billion FY2003)

Department

Avg. 1993– 2000

Est’d. 2001– 2004

Est’d. 2005– 2007

Real Growth 1985– 1990

Real Growth 1990– 1998

Real Growth 1998– 2003

Military Personnel

91.0

91.0

103.1

0%

-31%

11%

Operation and Maintenance

112.9

135.9

140.2

-4%

-9%

36%

Procurement

52.0

67.2

83.5

-29%

-52%

42%

RDT&E*

40.7

50.6

55.9

-2%

-14%

34%

Military Construction

6.2

5.6

9.7

-23%

-8%

-20%

Family Housing

4.2

4.1

4.7

-7%

3%

2%

Other

3.9

2.4

1.9

NA

NA

NA

Subtotal, Dept. of Defense

310.8

356.7

399.0

-13%

-27%

29%

Dept. of Energy Defenserelated

13.5

16.1

15.7

13%

0%

23%

Other Defenserelated

1.3

1.7

1.6

4%

37%

49%

Total, National Defense

325.6

374.5

416.3

-12%

-26%

28%

* Research, Development, Testing and Evaluation Source: Stephen Daggett, Amy Belasco, Defense Budget for FY2003: Data Summary, Table 6 (Congressional Research Service: Washington D.C.: March 29, 2002), pp. 16-17.

Such aggressive militarism calls into question the underlying presumption of the report: “The American peace has proven itself peaceful, stable and durable. It has, over the past decade, provided the geopolitical framework for widespread economic growth and the spread of American principles of liberty and democracy.”33 Clearly, the American peace is neither stable nor durable, and for Iraqis, Palestinians, Afghanis and many other nationalities it has been anything but peaceful. “American principles of liberty and democracy” is Orwellian double-talk for subservience to U.S. economic interests, because as we saw earlier the U.S. does not want genuine democracy in countries that have valuable raw materials. This asymmetry is characteristic of mercantilist economic practice, 33. Ibid., p. 1

13. Rogue state

277

in which a central power exploits the resources of other, usually poorer, countries to feed the domestic economic machine. To this end, the authors demand permanent U.S. military control of the Persian Gulf under the guise of ensuring “regional security”: The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.34 This seemingly even-tempered recommendation masks profound frustration with Clinton’s policy. Because the sanctions and no-fly zones destroyed Iraq’s economy and military capabilities, they also destroyed the sense of urgency that PNAC needed to justify a full-scale assault. For obvious reasons the authors could not say this, so they did the next best thing—they damned the Clinton administration with faint praise. Now, the no-fly zones were only “an essential element” in U.S. strategy and force posture.35 This diminution of importance amounts to covert preparedness for unilateral military action as presaged in PNAC’s Jan. 26, 1998, open letter to Clinton. As we saw above, PNACers fumed about the failure of Clinton’s “containment” policy, and declared that Saddam Hussein had to be deposed at any cost. The letter concluded: We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf. In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council.36 Contrary to the letter-writers’ assertion, Clinton’s containment policy did not fail—it worked too well. From this perspective, we can now appreciate the apparent non sequitur between the boast of U.S. hegemony and the lament of U.S. military unpreparedness. The boast was not an endorsement of the status quo, but a warning that the status quo did not serve the interests of Israel. PNAC needed an excuse for an enormous military buildup to do Israel’s dirty work and expand U.S. hegemony. It selected the same excuse Clinton used to justify the no-fly zones—weapons of mass destruction.

34. Ibid., p. 14. 35. Ibid., p. 23. 36. Letter to President Clinton, PNAC, Jan. 26, 1998, .

Part IV One Nation under PNAC

E ’ V E S E E N H O W the Cheney White House hid behind the Sept. 11 attack and the rhetoric of the “war on terrorism” to wreak a terrible vengeance on Afghanistan for the Taliban’s refusal to be intimidated. According to a popular theory, controlling energy supplies from the Persian Gulf was the primary motive for Bush’s invasion of Iraq. At first glance the case seems persuasive:

• Iraq possesses the world’s second largest reserves of accessible oil, and indirect U.S. control would lessen dependence on Saudi Arabia, which is becoming a political liability. • Using the military to secure long-term access to Persian Gulf oil is a stated objective of PNAC, both in the letter to Clinton and in Rebuilding America’s Defenses; • Bush and Cheney are both products of the oil industry. • Like Taliban leader Mullah Omar, Saddam Hussein was a tyrant who was treated as an ally while he served U.S. purposes, but then became an enemy of convenience over access to energy; • The U.S. exploited the UN to give moral sanction to the invasion of Iraq, as it did with Afghanistan; and • Both attacks were justified in the name of the “war on terrorism.” Nevertheless, these similarities only go so far. As oil analyst Anthony Sampson wrote in the Observer: The fact that President George Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney have both been enriched by oil companies raises suspicions about their motives for war, even though oil companies have had little influence on US policy-making. Most big American companies, including oil companies, do not see a war as good for business, as falling share prices indicate, while the obvious beneficiaries of war are arms companies.

280

Enemies by Design

Western oil companies have differing attitudes. The French want to maintain their special relationship with Iraq, while seeking links with Iraqi opposition leaders who may form a post-war government.1 Sampson goes on to note that an added disincentive for British and European oil companies to wage war was the threat of another Suez Crisis. After Britain, France and Israel invaded Egypt in 1956, British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell became targets of nationalist anger, and were pushed out by U.S. firms. Second, if the U.S. were really interested in maintaining a secure oil supply, it would not have used trumped up charges against Saddam Hussein to impose crippling sanctions and no-fly zones. Hussein may have been a tyrant, but the U.S. has a long history of supporting and working with repressive rulers—the Shah, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, Suharto—all of whom were no less brutal than Hussein. In fact, the U.S. enjoyed good relations with him during the 1980s, even though it knew Hussein was using U.S.supplied chemical weapons almost daily.2 On Nov. 26, 1983, President Reagan issued National Security Decision Directive 114, in which he spelled out the primacy of oil in the declared neutral U.S. stance in the Iran-Iraq war: In our consultations [with key allies] we should assign the highest priority to access arrangements which would facilitate the rapid deployment of those forces necessary to defend the critical oil facilities and transshipment points against air or sapper attacks. … Because of the real and psychological impact of a curtailment in the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf on the international economic system, we must assure our readiness to deal promptly with actions aimed at disrupting that traffic.3 To underscore U.S. support for Iraq, on Dec. 20, 1983, Reagan sent Rumsfeld as a special envoy to assure Hussein of U.S. support and to promise assistance to build a pipeline to Aqaba, Jordan.4 Neither Reagan nor Rumsfeld brought up the subject of Hussein’s use of chemical weapons. In the following table, we can see how U.S. policy under Clinton did not show a paranoid fear of losing control of Persian Gulf oil. In Table X, the drop from 514,000 bbl/d in 1990 to zero in 1991 coincides with the start of the sanctions program. The resumption of imports from zero to 1,000 bbl/d in 1996 reflects the beginning of the “oil for food program,” which was virtually useless in allowing Iraq to export sufficient 1. Anthony Sampson, “Oilmen don’t want another Suez,” Observer, Dec. 22, 2002. 2. Declassified State Department information memorandum, Nov. 1, 1983, at . 3. President Ronald Reagan, National Security Decision Directive 114, Nov. 26, 1983, at National Security Archives, . 4. Robert Scheer, “U.S. to Hussein: WMD A–OK,” The Nation, Dec. 30, 2003.

281

14. Imperial designs—Part I

quantities of oil to help either the Iraqi people or rebuild the economy. By 1998, U.S. import levels returned to pre-sanction levels and more than doubled the following year. Table X: U.S. annual average crude oil imports from Iraq (1,000 barrels per day) Year

1980

1981

1982

1983

1984

1985

1986

1987

U.S. Imports

28