Provocations as Pretexts for Imperial War: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11
Global Research, August 19, 2014
Url of this article:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/provocations-as-pretexts-for-imperial-war-from-pearl-harbor-to-9-11/9063
http://www.globalresearch.ca/provocations-as-pretexts-for-imperial-war-from-pearl-harbor-to-9-11/9063
Article first published by GR in August 2008
Wars
in an imperialist democracy cannot simply be dictated by executive
fiat, they require the consent of highly motivated masses who will make
the human and material sacrifices. Imperialist leaders have to create a
visible and highly charged emotional sense of injustice and
righteousness to secure national cohesion and overcome the natural
opposition to early death, destruction and disruption of civilian life
and to the brutal regimentation that goes with submission to absolutist
rule by the military.
The
need to invent a cause is especially the case with imperialist
countries because their national territory is not under threat. There is
no visible occupation army oppressing the mass of the people in their
everyday life. The enemy does not disrupt everyday normal life as
forced conscription would and does. Under normal peaceful time, who
would be willing to sacrifice their constitutional rights and their
participation in civil society to subject themselves to martial rule
that precludes the exercise of all their civil freedoms?
The
task of imperial rulers is to fabricate a world in which the enemy to
be attacked (an emerging imperial power like Japan) is portrayed as an
invader or an aggressor in the case of revolutionary movements (Korean
and Indo-Chinese communists) engaged in a civil war against an imperial
client ruler or a terrorist conspiracy linked to an anti-imperialist,
anti-colonial Islamic movements and secular states.
Imperialist-democracies in the past did not need to consult or secure
mass support for their expansionist wars; they relied on volunteer
armies, mercenaries and colonial subjects led and directed by colonial
officers. Only with the confluence of imperialism, electoral politics
and total war did the need arise to secure not only consent, but also
enthusiasm, to facilitate mass recruitment and obligatory conscription.
Since
all US imperial wars are fought overseas far from any immediate
threats, attacks or invasions – -US imperial rulers have the special
task of making the causus bellicus immediate, dramatic and
self-righteously defensive.
To
this end US Presidents have created circumstances, fabricated incidents
and acted in complicity with their enemies, to incite the bellicose
temperament of the masses in favor of war.
The
pretext for wars are acts of provocation which set in motion a series
of counter-moves by the enemy, which are then used to justify an
imperial mass military mobilization leading to and legitimizing war.
State
provocations require uniform mass media complicity in the lead-up to
open warfare: Namely the portrayal of the imperial country as a victim
of its own over-trusting innocence and good intentions. All four major
US imperial wars over the past 67 years resorted to a provocation, a
pretext, and systematic, high intensity mass media propaganda to
mobilize the masses for war. An army of academics, journalists, mass
media pundits and experts soften up the public in preparation for war
through demonological writing and commentary: Each and every aspect of
the forthcoming military target is described as totally evil hence
totalitarian – in which even the most benign policy is linked to demonic
ends of the regime.
Since the enemy
to be lacks any saving graces and worst, since the totalitarian state
controls everything and everybody, no process of internal reform or
change is possible. Hence the defeat of total evil can only take place
through total war. The targeted state and people must be destroyed in
order to be redeemed. In a word, the imperial democracy must regiment
and convert itself into a military juggernaut based on mass complicity
with imperial war crimes. The war against totalitarianism becomes the
vehicle for total state control for an imperial war.In the case of the US-Japanese war, the US-Korean war, the US-Indochinese war and the post-September 11 war against an independent secular nationalist regime (Iraq) and the Islamic Afghan republic, the Executive branch (with the uniform support of the mass media and congress) provoked a hostile response from its target and fabricated a pretext as a basis for mass mobilization for prolonged and bloody wars.
US-Japan War: Provocation and Pretext for War
President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt set high standards for provoking and creating
a pretext for undermining majoritarian anti-war sentiment, unifying and
mobilizing the country for war. Robert Stinnett, in his brilliantly
documented study, Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor,
demonstrates that Roosevelt provoked the war with Japan by deliberately
following an eight-step program of harassment and embargo against Japan
developed by Lt. Commander Arthur H. McCollum, head of the Far East desk
of the Office of Naval Intelligence. He provides systematic
documentation of US cables tracking the Japanese fleet to Pearl Harbor,
clearly demonstrating that FDR knew in advance of the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor following the Japanese fleet virtually every step of the
way. Even more damaging, Stinnett reveals that Admiral H.E. Kimmel, in
charge of the defense of Pearl Harbor, was systematically excluded from
receiving critical intelligence reports on the approaching movements of
the Japanese fleet, thus preventing the defense of the US base.
The
sneak attack by the Japanese, which caused the death over three
thousand American service men and the destruction of scores of ships and
planes, successfully provoked the war FDR had wanted. In the run-up to
the Japanese attack, President Roosevelt ordered the implementation of
Naval Intelligences October 1940 memorandum, authored by McCollum, for
eight specific measures, which amounted to acts of war including an
economic embargo of Japan, the shipment of arms to Japans adversaries,
the prevention of Tokyo from securing strategic raw materials essential
for its economy and the denial of port access, thus provoking a military
confrontation.
To
overcome massive US opposition to war, Roosevelt needed a dramatic,
destructive immoral act committed by Japan against a clearly defensive
US base to turn the pacifist US public into a cohesive, outraged,
righteous war machine. Hence the Presidential decision to undermine the
defense of Pearl Harbor by denying the Navy Commander in charge of its
defense, Admiral Kimmel, essential intelligence about anticipated
December 7, 1941 attack. The United States paid the price with 2,923
Americans killed and 879 wounded, Admiral Kimmel was blamed and stood
trial for dereliction of duty, but FDR got his war. The successful
outcome of FDRs strategy led to a half-century of US imperial supremacy
in the Asia-Pacific region. An unanticipated outcome, however, was the
US and Japanese imperial defeats on the Chinese mainland and in North
Korea by the victorious communist armies of national liberation.
Provocation and Pretext for the US War Against Korea
The incomplete conquest of Asia following the US defeat of Japanese imperialism, particularly the revolutionary upheavals in China , Korea and Indochina , posed a strategic challenge to US empire builders. Their massive financial and military aid to their Chinese clients failed to stem the victory of the anti-imperialist Red Armies. President Truman faced a profound dilemma how to consolidate US imperial supremacy in the Pacific at a time of growing nationalist and communist upheavals when the vast majority of the war wearied soldiers and civilians were demanding demobilization and a return to civilian life and economy. Like Roosevelt in 1941, Truman needed to provoke a confrontation, one that could be dramatized as an offensive attack on the US (and its allies) and could serve as a pretext to overcome widespread opposition to another imperial war.
The incomplete conquest of Asia following the US defeat of Japanese imperialism, particularly the revolutionary upheavals in China , Korea and Indochina , posed a strategic challenge to US empire builders. Their massive financial and military aid to their Chinese clients failed to stem the victory of the anti-imperialist Red Armies. President Truman faced a profound dilemma how to consolidate US imperial supremacy in the Pacific at a time of growing nationalist and communist upheavals when the vast majority of the war wearied soldiers and civilians were demanding demobilization and a return to civilian life and economy. Like Roosevelt in 1941, Truman needed to provoke a confrontation, one that could be dramatized as an offensive attack on the US (and its allies) and could serve as a pretext to overcome widespread opposition to another imperial war.
Truman
and the Pacific military command led by General Douglas Mac Arthur
chose the Korean peninsula as the site for detonating the war.
Throughout the Japanese-Korean war, the Red guerrilla forces led the
national liberation struggle against the Japanese Army and its Korean
collaborators. Subsequent to the defeat of Japan , the national revolt
developed into a social revolutionary struggle against Korean elite
collaborators with the Japanese occupiers. As Bruce Cumings documents in
his classic study, The Origins of the Korean War , the internal civil
war preceded and defined the conflict prior to and after the US
occupation and division of Korea into a North and South. The political
advance of the mass national movement led by the anti-imperialist
communists and the discredit of the US-backed Korean collaborators
undermined Trumans efforts to arbitrarily divide the country
geographically. In the midst of this class-based civil war, Truman and
Mac Arthur created a provocation: They intervened, establishing a US
occupation army and military bases and arming the counter-revolutionary
former Japanese collaborators. The US hostile presence in a sea of
anti-imperialist armies and civilian social movements inevitably led to
the escalation of social conflict, in which the US-backed Korean clients
were losing.
As
the Red Armies rapidly advanced from their strongholds in the north and
joined with the mass revolutionary social movements in the South they
encountered fierce repression and massacres of anti-imperialist
civilians, workers and peasants, by the US armed collaborators. Facing
defeat Truman declared that the civil war was really an invasion by
(north) Koreans against (south) Korea . Truman, like Roosevelt, was
willing to sacrifice the US troops by putting them in the direct fire of
the revolutionary armies in order to militarize and mobilize the US
public in defense of imperial outposts in the southern Korean peninsula.
In
the run-up to the US invasion of Korea , Truman, the US Congress and
the mass media engaged in a massive propaganda campaign and purge of
peace and anti-militarist organizations throughout US civil society.
Tens of thousands of individuals lost their jobs, hundreds were jailed
and hundreds of thousands were blacklisted. Trade unions and civic
organizations were taken over by pro-war, pro-empire collaborators.
Propaganda and purges facilitated the propagation of the danger of a new
world war, in which democracy was threatened by expanding Communist
totalitarianism. In reality, democracy was eroded to prepare for an
imperial war to prop up a client regime and secure a military beachhead
on the Asian continent.
The
US invasion of Korea to prop up its tyrannical client was presented as a
response to North Korea invading South Korea and threatening our
soldiers defending democracy. The heavy losses incurred by retreating US
troops belied the claim of President Truman that the imperial war was
merely a police action. By the end of the first year of the imperial
war, public opinion turned against the war. Truman was seen as a
deceptive warmonger. In 1952, the electorate elected Dwight Eisenhower
on his promise to end the war. An armistice was agreed to in 1953.
Trumans use of military provocation to detonate a conflict with the
advancing Korean revolutionary armies and then using the pretext of US
forces in danger to launch a war did not succeed in securing a complete
victory: The war ended in a divided Korean nation. Truman left office
disgraced and derided, and the US public turned anti-war for another
decade.
The US Indochinese War: Johnsons Tonkin Pretext
The
US invasion and war against Vietnam was a prolonged process, beginning
in 1954 and continuing to the final defeat in 1975. From 1954 to 1960
the US sent military combat advisers to train the army of the corrupt,
unpopular and failed collaborator regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem.
With the election of President Kennedy, Washington escalated the number
of military advisers, commandos (so called Green Berets) and the use of
death squads (Plan Phoenix). Despite the intensification of the US
involvement and its extensive role in directing military operations,
Washington s surrogate South Vietnam Army (ARNV) was losing the war to
the South Vietnamese National Liberation Army (Viet Cong) and the South
Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF), which clearly had the
support of the overwhelming majority of the Vietnamese people.
Following
the assassination of President Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson took over the
Presidency and faced the imminent collapse of the US puppet regime and
the defeat of its surrogate Vietnamese Army.
The
US had two strategic objectives in launching the Vietnam Was: The first
involved establishing a ring of client regimes and military bases from
Korea, Japan, Philippines, Taiwan, Indochina, Pakistan, Northern Burma
(via the KMT opium lords and Shan secessionists) and Tibet to encircle
China, engage in cross border commando attacks by surrogate military
forces and block Chinas access to its natural markets. The second
strategic objective in the US invasion and occupation of Vietnam was
part of its general program to destroy powerful national liberation and
anti-imperialists movements in Southeast Asia, particularly in Indochina
, Indonesia , the Philippines . The purpose was to consolidate client
regimes, which would provide military bases, de-nationalize and
privatize their raw materials sectors and provide political and military
support to US empire building. The conquest of Indochina was an
essential part of US empire-building in Asia . Washington calculated
that by defeating the strongest Southeast Asian anti-imperialist
movement and country, neighboring countries (especially Laos and
Cambodia ) would fall easily.
Washington faced
multiple problems. In the first place, given the collapse of the
surrogate South Vietnam regime and army, Washington would need to
massively escalate its military presence, in effect substituting its
ground forces for the failed puppet forces and extend and intensify its
bombing throughout North Vietnam , Cambodia and Laos . In a word convert
a limited covert war into a massive publicly declared war.The second problem was the reticence of significant sectors of the US public, especially college students (and their middle and working class parents) facing conscription, who opposed the war. The scale and scope of military commitment envisioned as necessary to win the imperial war required a pretext, a justification.
The pretext had to be such as to present the US invading armies as responding to a sneak attack by an aggressor country ( North Vietnam ). President Johnson, the Secretary of Defense, the US Naval and Air Force Command, the National Security Agency, acted in concert. What was referred to as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident involved a fabricated account of a pair of attacks, on August 2 and 4, 1964 off the coast of North Vietnam by naval forces of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam against two US destroyers the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy. Using, as a pretext, the fabricated account of the attacks, the US Congress almost unanimously passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on August 7, 1964, which granted President Johnson full power to expand the invasion and occupation of Vietnam up to and beyond 500,000 US ground troops by 1966. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorized President Johnson to conduct military operations throughout Southeast Asia without a declaration of war and gave him the freedom to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of freedom.
On August 5, 1964 Lyndon Johnson went on national television and radio announcing the launching of massive waves of retaliatory bombing of North Vietnamese naval facilities (Operation Pierce Arrow). In 2005, official documents released from the Pentagon, the National Security Agency and other government departments have revealed that there was no Vietnamese attack. On the contrary, according to the US Naval Institute, a program of covert CIA attacks against North Vietnam had begun in 1961 and was taken over by the Pentagon in 1964. These maritime attacks on the North Vietnamese coast by ultra-fast Norwegian-made patrol boats (purchased by the US for the South Vietnamese puppet navy and under direct US naval coordination) were an integral part of the operation. Secretary of Defense McNamara admitted to Congress that US ships were involved in attacks on the North Vietnamese coast prior to the so-called Gulf of Tonkin Incident .
So much for Johnsons claim of an unprovoked attack. The key lie, however, was the claim that the USS Maddox retaliated against an attacking Vietnamese patrol boat. The Vietnamese patrol boats, according to NSA accounts released in 2005, were not even in the vicinity of the Maddox they were at least 10,000 yards away and three rounds were first fired at them by the Maddox which then falsely claimed it subsequently suffered some damage from a single 14.5 mm machine gun bullet to its hull. The August 4 Vietnamese attack never happened. Captain John Herrick of the Turner Joy cabled that many reported contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful...No actual visual sightings (of North Vietnamese naval boats) by Maddox.
The
consequences of the fabrication of the Tonkin Gulf incident and
provocation was to justify an escalation of war that killed 4 million
people in Indochina, maimed, displaced and injured millions more, in
addition to killing 58,000 US service men and wounding a half-million
more in this failed effort in military-driven empire-building. Elsewhere
in Asia, the US empire builders consolidated their client collaborative
rule: In Indonesia, which had one of the largest open Communist Party
in the world, a CIA designed military coup, backed by Johnson in 1966
and led by General Suharto, murdered over one million trade unionists,
peasants, progressive intellectuals, school teachers and communists (and
their family members).
What
is striking about the US declaration of war in Vietnam is that the
latter did not respond to the US-directed maritime provocations that
served as a pretext for war. As a result Washington had to fabricate a
Vietnamese response and then use it as the pretext for war.
The
idea of fabricating military threats (the Gulf of Tonkin Incident ) and
then using them as pretext for the US-Vietnam war was repeated in the
case of the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan . In fact Bush
Administration policy makers, who launched the Afghan and Iraq wars,
tried to prevent the publication of a report by the top Navy commander
in which he recounted how the NSA distorted the intelligence reports
regarding the Tonkin incident to serve the Johnson Administrations
ardent desire for a pretext to war.
Provocation and Pretext: 9/11 and the Afghan-Iraq Invasions
In
2001, the vast majority of the US public was concerned over domestic
matters the downturn in the economy, corporate corruption (Enron, World
Com etc..), the bursting of the dot-com bubble and avoiding any new
military confrontation in the Middle East . There was no sense that the
US had any interest in going to war for Israel , nor launching a new war
against Iraq , especially an Iraq , which had been defeated and
humiliated a decade earlier and was subject to brutal economic
sanctions.
The
US oil companies were negotiating new agreements with the Gulf States
and looked forward to, with some hope, a stable, peaceful Middle East,
marred by Israel s savaging the Palestinians and threatening its
adversaries. In the Presidential election of 2000, George W, Bush was
elected despite losing the popular vote in large part because of
electoral chicanery (with the complicity of the Supreme Court) denying
the vote to blacks in Florida. Bushs bellicose rhetoric and emphasis on
national security resonated mainly with his Zionist advisers and the
pro-Israeli lobby otherwise, for the majority of Americans, it fell on
deaf ears.
The
gap between the Middle East War plans of his principle Zionist
appointees in the Pentagon, the Vice Presidents office and the National
Security Council and the general US publics concern with domestic issues
was striking. No amount of Zionist authored position papers, anti-Arab,
anti-Muslim rhetoric and theatrics, emanating from Israel and its US
based spokespeople, were making any significant impact on the US public.
There was widespread disbelief that there was an imminent threat to US
security through a catastrophic terrorist attack which is defined as an
attack using chemical, biological or nuclear weapons of mass
destruction. The US public believed that Israel s Middle East wars and
their unconditional US lobbyists promotion for direct US involvement
were not part of their lives nor in the countrys interest.
The
key challenge for the militarists in the Bush Administration was how to
bring the US public around to support the new Middle East war agenda,
in the absence of any visible, credible and immediate threat from any
sovereign Middle Eastern country.
The
Zionists were well placed in all the key government positions to launch
a worldwide offensive war. They had clear ideas of the countries to
target (Middle East adversaries of Israel ). They had defined the
ideology (the war on terror, preventive defense). They projected a
sequence of wars. They linked their Middle East war strategy to a global
military offensive against all governments, movements and leaders who
opposed US military-driven empire building. What they needed was to
coordinate the elite into actually facilitating a catastrophic terrorist
incident that could trigger the implementation of their publicly stated
and defended new world war.
The key to the
success of the operation was to encourage terrorists and to facilitate
calculated and systematic neglect to deliberately marginalize
intelligence agents and agency reports that identified the terrorists,
their plans and methods. In the subsequent investigatory hearings, it
was necessary to foster the image of neglect, bureaucratic ineptness and
security failures in order to cover up Administration complicity in the
terrorists success. An absolutely essential element in mobilizing
massive and unquestioning support for the launching of a world war of
conquest and destruction centered in Muslim and Arab countries and
people was a catastrophic event that could be linked to the latter.
After
the initial shock of 9/11 and the mass media propaganda blitz
saturating every household, questions began to be raised by critics
about the run-up to the event, especially when reports began to
circulate from domestic and overseas intelligence agencies that US
policy makers were clearly informed of preparations for a terrorist
attack. After many months of sustained public pressure, President Bush
finally named an investigatory commission on 9/11, headed by former
politicians and government officials. Philip Zelikow, an academic and
former government official and prominent advocate of preventative
defense (the offensive war policies promoted by the Zionist militants in
the government) was named executive director to conduct and write the
official 9-11 Commission Report. Zelikow was privy to the need for a
pretext, like 9/11, for launching the permanent global warfare, which he
had advocated. With a prescience, which could only come from an insider
to the fabrication leading to war, he had written: Like Pearl Harbor ,
this event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The
United States (sic) might respond with draconian measures, scaling back
civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of
suspects and use of deadly force (torture), (see Catastrophic Terrorism
Tackling the New Dangers , co-authored by Philip Zelikow and published
by Foreign Affairs in 1998).
Zelikow
directed the commission report, which exonerated the administration of
any knowledge and complicity in 9/11, but convinced few Americans
outside of the mass media and Congress. Polls conducted in the summer of
2003 on the findings of the Commission proceedings and its conclusions
found that a majority of the American public expressed a high level of
distrust and rejection especially among New Yorkers. The general public
suspected Government complicity, especially when it was revealed that
Zelikow conferred with key figures under investigation, Vice President
Cheney and Presidential Guru Karl Rove. In response to skeptical
citizens, Zelikow went on an insane rage, calling the sceptics pathogens
or germs whose infection needed to be contained. With language
reminiscent of a Hitlerian Social Darwinist diatribe, he referred to
criticisms of the Commission cover up as a bacteria (that) can sicken
the larger body (of public opinion). Clearly Zelikows pseudoscientific
rant reflects the fear and loathing he feels for those who implicated
him with a militarist regime, which fabricated a pretext for a
catastrophic war for Zelikows favorite state Israel .
Throughout
the 1990s the US and Israeli military-driven empire building took on an
added virulence: Israel dispossessed Palestinians and extended its
colonial settlements. Bush, Senior invaded Iraq and systematically
destroyed Iraqis military and civil economic infrastructure and fomented
an ethnically cleansed Kurdish client state in the north. Like his
predecessor Ronald Reagan, President George H.W. Bush, Senior backed
anti-communist Islamic irregulars in their conquest of Afghanistan via
their holy wars against a leftist secular nationalist regime.. At the
same time Bush, Senior attempted to balance military empire building
with expanding the US economic empire, by not occupying Iraq and
unsuccessfully trying to restrain Israeli colonial settlements in the
West Bank .
With
the rise of Clinton , all restraints on military-driven empire building
were thrown over: Clinton provoked a major Balkan war, viciously
bombing and dismembering Yugoslavia , periodically bombing Iraq and
extending and expanding US military bases in the Gulf States . He bombed
the largest pharmaceutical factory in Sudan , invaded Somalia and
intensified a criminal economic boycott of Iraq leading to the death of
an estimated 500,000 children. Within the Clinton regime, several
liberal pro-Israel Zionists joined the military-driven empire builders
in the key policy making positions. Israeli military expansion and
repression reached new heights as US-financed colonial Jewish settlers
and heavily armed Israeli military forces slaughtered unarmed
Palestinian teenagers protesting the Israeli presence in the Occupied
Territories during the First Intifada. In other words, Washington
extended its military penetration and occupation deeper into Arab
countries and societies, discrediting and weakening the hold of its
client puppet regimes over their people.
The
US ended military support for the armed Islamic anti-communists in
Afghanistan once they had served US policy goals by destroying the
Soviet backed secular regime (slaughtering thousands of school teachers
in the process). As a consequence of US-financing, there was a vast,
loose network of well-trained Islamic fighters available for combat
against other target regimes. Many were flown by the Clinton regime into
Bosnia where Islamic fighters fought a surrogate separatist war against
the secular and socialist central government of Yugoslavia . Others
were funded to destabilize Iran and Iraq . They were seen in Washington
as shock troops for future US military conquests. Nevertheless Clinton s
imperial coalition of Israeli colonialists, armed Islamic mercenary
fighters, Kurdish and Chechen separatists broke up as Washington and
Israel advanced toward war and conquest of Arab and Muslim states and
the US spread its military presence in Saudi Arabia , Kuwait and the
Gulf States .
Military-driven
empire building against existing nation-states was not an easy sell to
the US public or to the market-driven empire builders of Western Europe
and Japan and the newly emerging market-driven empire builders of China
and Russia . Washington needed to create conditions for a major
provocation, which would overcome or weaken the resistance and
opposition of rival economic empire builders. More particularly,
Washington needed a catastrophic event to turn around domestic public
opinion, which had opposed the first Gulf War and subsequently supported
the rapid withdrawal of US troops from Iraq in 1990.
The
events, which took place on September 11, 2001, served the purpose of
American and Israeli military-driven empire builders. The destruction of
the World Trade Center buildings and the deaths of nearly 3,000
civilians, served as a pretext for a series of colonial wars, colonial
occupations, and global terrorist activities, and secured the unanimous
support of the US Congress and triggered an intense global mass media
propaganda campaign for war.
The Politics of Military Provocations
Ten
years of starving 23 million Iraqi Arabs under the Clinton regimes
economic boycott, interspersed with intense bombing was a major
provocation to Arab communities and citizens around the world.
Supporting Israel s systematic dispossession of Palestinians from their
lands, interspersed with encroachment on the Islamic holy sites in
Jerusalem was a major provocation, which detonated scores of suicide
bomb attacks in retaliation. The construction and operation of US
military bases in Saudi Arabia , home of the Islamic holy city of Mecca ,
was a provocation to millions of believers and practicing Muslims. The
US and Israeli attack and occupation of southern Lebanon and the killing
of 17,000 Lebanese and Palestinians were a provocation to Arabs.
Ruled
by pusillanimous Arab regimes, servile to US interests, impotent to
respond toward Israeli brutality against Palestinians, Arabs and devout
Muslim citizens were constantly pushed by the Bush and especially
Clinton regime to respond to their continued provocations. Against the
vast disproportion in fire-power between the advanced weaponry of the US
and Israeli occupation forces (the Apache helicopter gun ships, the
5,000 pound bombs, the killer drones, the armored carriers, the cluster
bombs, Napalm and missiles) the secular Arab and Islamic resistance had
only light weaponry consisting of automatic rifles, rocket propelled
grenades, short-range and inaccurate Katusha missiles and machine guns.
The only weapon they possessed in abundance to retaliate was the
suicidal human bombs.
Up
to 9/11, US imperial wars against Arab and Islamic populations were
carried out in the targeted and occupied lands where the great mass of
Arab people lived, worked and enjoyed shared lives. In other words, all
(and for Israel most) of the destructive effects of their wars (the
killings, home and neighborhood destruction and kinship losses) were
products of US and Israeli offensive wars, seemingly immune to
retaliatory action on their own territory.
September
11, 2001 was the first successful large-scale Arab-Islamic offensive
attack on US territory in this prolonged, one-sided war. The precise
timing of 9/11 coincides with the highly visible takeover of US Middle
East war policy by extremist Zionists in the top positions of the
Pentagon, the White House and National Security Council and their
dominance of Congressional Middle East policies. Arab and Islamic
anti-imperialists were convinced that military-driven empire builders
were readying for a frontal assault on all the remaining centers of
opposition to Zionism in the Middle East, i.e. Iraq , Iran , Syria ,
Southern Lebanon, the West Bank, Gaza , as well as in Afghanistan in
South Asia and Sudan and Somalia in North-East Africa .
This
offensive war scenario had been already spelled out by the American
Zionist policy elite headed by Richard Pearl for the Israeli Institute
for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies in a policy document,
entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. This was
prepared in 1996 for far-right Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu
prior to his taking office.
On
September 28, 2000, despite the warnings of many observers, the
infamous author of the massacre of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon ,
General Ariel Sharon profaned the Al Aqsa Mosque with his huge military
entourage a deliberate religious provocation that guaranteed Sharon s
election as Prime Minister from the far right Likud Party. This led to
the Second Intifada and the savage response of the Israelis. Washington s
total support of Sharon merely reinforced the worldwide belief among
Arabs that the Zionist Solution of massive ethnic purges was on
Washington s agenda.
The
pivotal group linking US military-driven empire builders with their
counterparts in Israel was the major influential Zionist public policy
group promoting what they dubbed the Project for a New American Century
(PNAC). In 1998 they set out a detailed military-driven road map to US
world domination (the so-called Project for a New American Century),
which just happened to focus on the Middle East and just happened to
coincide exactly with Tel Avivs vision of a US-Israel dominated Middle
East. In 2000 the PNAC Zionist ideologues published a strategy paper
Rebuilding Americas Defenses, which laid down the exact guidelines which
incoming Zionist policy makers in the top spheres of the Pentagon and
White House would follow. PNAC directives included establishing forward
military bases in the Middle East, increasing military spending from 3%
to 4% of GNP, a military attack to overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and
military confrontation with Iran using the pretext of the threats of
weapons of mass destruction.
The PNAC agenda
could not advance without a catastrophic Pearl Harbor type of event, as
US military-driven empire builders, Israelis and US Zionist policy
makers recognized early on. The deliberate refusal by the White House
and its subordinate 16 intelligence agencies and the Justice Department
to follow up precise reports of terrorist entry, training, financing and
action plans was a case of deliberate negligence: The purpose was to
allow the attack to take place and then to immediately launch the
biggest wave of military invasions and state terrorist activities since
the end of the Indochina War.
Israel
, which had identified and kept close surveillance of the terrorists,
insured that the action would proceed without any interruption. During
the 9/11 attacks, its agents even had the presumption to video and
photograph the exploding towers, while dancing in wild celebration,
anticipating Washingtons move toward Israels militarist Middle East
strategy.
Military-Driven Empire Building : The Zionist Connection
Militaristic
empire building preceded the rise to power of the Zionist Power
Configuration (ZPC) in the George W. Bush Administration. The pursuit of
it after 9/11 was a joint effort between the ZPC and long-standing US
militarists, like Rumsfeld and Cheney. The provocations against Arabs
and Muslims leading up to the attacks were induced by both the US and
Israel . The current implementation of the militarist strategy toward
Iran is another joint effort of Zionist and US militarists.
What
the Zionists did provide, which the US militarists lacked, was an
organized mass-based lobby with financing, propagandists and political
backing for the war. The principle government ideologues, media experts,
spokespeople, academics, speechwriters and advisers for the war were
largely drawn from the ranks of US Zionism. The most prejudicial aspects
of the Zionist role was in the implementation of war policy, namely the
systematic destruction and dismantling of the Iraqi state. Zionist
policymakers promoted the US military occupation and supported a massive
US military build-up in the region for sequential wars against Iran ,
Syria and other adversaries of Israeli expansion.
In pursuit of
military driven empire building in accord with Israels own version, the
Zionist militarists in the US government exceeded their pre-9/11
expectations, raising military spending from 3% of GNP in 2000 to 6%
in2008, growing at a rate of 13% per year during their ascendancy from
2001-2008. As a result they raised the US budget deficit to over $10
trillion dollars by 2010, double the 1997 deficit, and driving the US
economy and its economic empire toward bankruptcy.
The
Zionist American policy makers were blind to the dire economic
consequences for US overseas economic interests because their main
strategic consideration was whether US policy enhanced Israel s military
dominance in the Middle East . The cost (in blood and treasure) of
using the US to militarily destroy Israel s adversaries was of no
concern.
To
pursue the Zionist-US military-driven imperial project of a New Order
in the Middle East, Washington needed to mobilize the entire population
for a series of sequential wars against the anti-imperialist,
anti-Israeli countries of the Middle East and beyond. To target the
multitude of Israeli adversaries, American Zionists invented the notion
of a Global War on Terrorism. The existing climate of national and
international opinion was decidedly hostile to the idea of fighting
sequential wars, let alone blindly following zealous Zionist extremists.
Sacrificing American lives for Israeli power and the Zionist fantasy of
a US-Israeli Co-Prosperity Sphere dominating the Middle East could not
win public backing in the US, let alone in the rest of the world.
Top
policymakers, especially the Zionist elite, nurtured the notion of a
fabricated pretext an event which would shock the US public and
Congress into a fearful, irrational and bellicose mood, willing to
sacrifice lives and democratic freedoms. To rally the US public behind a
military-driven imperial project of invasion and occupation in the
Middle East required another Pearl Harbor .
The Terror Bombing: White House and Zionist Complicity
Every
level of the US government was aware that Arab extremists were planning
a spectacular armed attack in the United States. The FBI and the CIA
had their names and addresses; the Presidents National Security Adviser
Condoleeza Rice publicly admitted that the Executive branch knew that a
terrorist hijacking would occur...only they had expected, she claimed, a
traditional hijacking and not the use of airliners as missiles. The
Attorney General John Ashcroft was acutely aware and refused to fly on
commercial airliners. Scores of Israeli spies were living blocks away
from some of the hijackers in Florida , informing headquarters on their
movements. Overseas intelligence agencies, notably in Germany , Russia ,
Israel and Egypt claimed to have provided information to their US
counterparts on the terrorist plot. The Presidents office, the CIA, the
Defense Intelligence Agency and the FBI allowed the attackers to prepare
their plans, secure funding, proceed to the airports, board the planes
and carry out their attacks...all carrying US visas (mostly issued in
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia once a prominent site for processing Arabs to
fight in Afghanistan) and with pilots who were US-trained. As soon as
the terrorists took control of the flights, the Air Force was notified
of the hijacking but top leaders inexplicably delayed moves to intercept
the planes allowing the attackers to reach their objectives...the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The
military-driven empire builders and their Zionist allies immediately
seized the pretext of a single military retaliatory attack by non-state
terrorists to launch a worldwide military offensive against a laundry
list of sovereign nations. Within 24 hours, ultra-Zionist Senator Joseph
Lieberman, in a prepared speech, called for the US to attack Iran ,
Iraq and Syria without any proof that any of these nations, all full
members of the United Nations, were behind the hijackings. President
Bush declared a Global War on Terror (GWOT) and launched the invasion of
Afghanistan and approved a program of extraterritorial, extrajudicial
assassinations, kidnappings and torture throughout the world. Clearly
the Administration put into operation a war strategy, publicly advocated
and prepared by Zionist ideologues long before 9/11. The President
secured nearly unanimous support from Congress for the first Patriot
Act, suspending fundamental democratic freedoms at home. He demanded
that US client-states and allies implement their own versions of
authoritarian anti-terrorist laws to persecute, prosecute and jail any
and all opponents of US and Israeli empire building in the Middle East
and elsewhere. In other words, September 11, 2001 became the pretext for
a virulent and sustained effort to create a new world order centered on
a US military-driven empire and a Middle East built around Israeli
supremacy.
Provocations and Pretexts: the Israeli-US War Against Iran
The
long, unending, costly and losing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
undermined international and national support for the Zionist-promoted
New American Century project. US militarists and their advisers and
ideologues needed to create a new pretext for the US plans to subdue the
Middle East and especially to attack Iran . They turned their
propaganda campaign on Iran s legal non-military nuclear energy program
and fabricated evidence of Iran s direct military involvement in
supporting the Iraqi resistance to US occupation. Without proof they
claimed Iran had supplied the weapons, which bombed the American Green
Zone in Baghdad. The Israeli lobby argued that Iranian training and
weapons had been instrumental in defeating the American-backed Iraqi
mercenaries in the major southern city of Basra. Top Zionists in the
Treasury Department have organized a worldwide economic boycott against
Iran . Israel has secured the support of top Democrat and Republican
Congressional leaders for a military attack on Iran . But is Iran s
existence a sufficient pretext or will a catastrophic incident be
necessary?
Conclusion: Provocations and Imperial Wars:
Behind
every imperial war there is a Great Lie One of the most important
political implications of our discussion of the US governments resort to
provocations and deception to launch imperial wars is that the vast
majority of the American people are opposed to overseas wars. Government
lies at the service of military interventions are necessary to
undermine the American publics preference for a foreign policy based on
respect for self-determination of nations. The second implication
however is that the peaceful sentiments of the majority can be quickly
overturned by the political elite through deception and provocations
amplified and dramatized through their constant repetition through the
unified voice of the mass media. In other words, peaceful American
citizens can be transformed into irrational chauvinist militarists
through the propaganda of the deed where executive authority disguises
its own acts of imperial attacks as defensive and its opponents
retaliation as unprovoked aggression against a peace loving United
States.
All of the
executive provocations and deceptions are formulated by a Presidential
elite but willingly executed by a chain of command involving anywhere
from dozens to hundreds of operatives, most of whom knowingly
participate in deceiving the public, but rarely ever unmask the illegal
project either out of fear, loyalty or blind obedience.The notion, put forward by upholders of the integrity of the war policy, that given such a large number of participants, someone would have leaked the deception, the systematic provocations and the manipulation of the public, has been demonstrated to be false. At the time of the provocation and the declaration of war when Congress unanimously approved Presidential Authority to use force, few if any writers or journalists have ever raised serious questions: Executives operating under the mantle of defending a peaceful country from unprovoked treacherous enemies have always secured the complicity or silence of peacetime critics who choose to bury their reservations and investigations in a time of threats to national security. Few academics, writers or journalists are willing to risk their professional standing, when all the mass media editors and owners, political leaders and their own professional cohorts froth over standing united with our President in times of unparalleled mortal threat to the nation as happened in 1941, 1950, 1964 and 2001.
With the exception of World War Two, each of the subsequent wars led to profound civilian political disillusion and even rejection of the fabrications that initially justified the war. Popular disenchantment with war led to a temporary rejection of militarism...until the next unprovoked attack and call to arms. Even in the case of the Second World War there was massive civilian outrage against a large standing army and even large-scale military demonstrations at the end of the war, demanding the GIs return to civilian life. The demobilization occurred despite Government efforts to consolidate a new empire based on occupation of countries in Europe and Asia in the wake of Germany and Japan s defeat.
The underlying structural reality, which has driven American Presidents to fabricate pretexts for wars, is informed by a military-driven conception of empire. Why did Roosevelt not answer the Japanese imperial economic challenge by increasing the US economic capacity to compete and produce more efficiently instead of supporting a provocative boycott called by the decaying European colonial powers in Asia ? Was it the case that, under capitalism, a depression-ridden, stagnant economy and idle work force could only be mobilized by the state for a military confrontation?
In the case of the US-Korean War, could not the most powerful post-World War US economy look toward exercising influence via investments with a poor, semi-agrarian, devastated, but unified, Korea, as it was able to do in Germany, Japan and elsewhere after the war?
Twenty years after spending hundreds of billions of dollars and suffering 500,000 dead and wounded to conquer Indochina, European, Asian and US capital entered Vietnam peacefully on the invitation of its government, hastening its integration into the world capitalist market via investments and trade.
It is clear that Platos not-so noble lie, as practiced by Americas Imperial Presidents, to deceive their citizens for higher purposes has led to the use of bloody and cruel means to achieve grotesque and ignoble ends.
The repetition of fabricated pretexts to engage in imperial wars is embedded in the dual structure of the US political system, a military-driven empire and a broad-based electorate. To pursue the former it is essential to deceive the latter. Deception is facilitated by the control of mass media whose war propaganda enters every home, office and classroom with the same centrally determined message. The mass media undermine what remains of alternative information flowing from primary and secondary opinion leaders in the communities and erode personal values and ethics. While military-driven empire building has resulted in the killing of millions and the displacement of tens of millions, market-driven empire building imposes its own levy in terms of massive exploitation of labor, land and livelihoods.
As has been the case in the past, when the lies of empire wear thin, public disenchantment sets in, and the repeated cries of new threats fail to mobilize opinion. As the continued loss of life and the socio-economic costs erodes the conditions of everyday life, mass media propaganda loses its effectiveness and political opportunities appear. As after WWII, Korea , Indochina and today with Iraq and Afghanistan , a window of political opportunity opens. Mass majorities demand changes in policy, perhaps in structures and certainly an end to the war. Possibilities open for public debate over the imperial system, which constantly reverts to wars and lies and provocations that justify them.
Epilogue
Our telegraphic survey of imperial policy-making refutes the conventional and commonplace notion that the decision making process leading up to war is open, public and carried out in accordance with the constitutional rules of a democracy. On the contrary, as is commonplace in many spheres of political, economic, social and cultural life, but especially in questions of war and peace, the key decisions are taken by a small Presidential elite behind closed doors, out of sight and without consultation and in violation of constitutional provisions. The process of provoking conflict in pursuit of military goals is never raised before the electorate. There are never investigations by independent investigatory committees.
The closed nature of the decision making process does not detract from the fact that these decisions were public in that they were taken by elected and non-elected public officials in public institutions and directly affected the public. The problem is that the public was kept in the dark about the larger imperial interests that were at stake and the deception that would induce them to blindly submit to the decisions for war. Defenders of the political system are unwilling to confront the authoritarian procedures, the elite fabrications and the unstated imperial goals. Apologists of the military-driven empire builders resort to irrational and pejorative labeling of the critics and skeptics as conspiracy theorists. For the most part, prestigious academics conform closely to the rhetoric and fabricated claims of the executors of imperial policy.
Everywhere and at all times groups, organizations and leaders meet in closed meetings, before going public. A minority of policymakers or advocates meet, debate and outline procedures and devise tactics to secure decisions at the official meeting. This common practice takes place when any vital decisions are to be taken whether it is at local school boards or in White House meetings. To label the account of small groups of public officials meeting and taking vital decisions in closed public meetings (where agendas, procedures and decisions are made prior to formal open public meetings) as conspiracy theorizing is to deny the normal way in which politics operate. In a word, the conspiracy labelers are either ignorant of the most elementary procedures of politics or they are conscious of their role in covering up the abuses of power of todays state terror merchants.
Professor Zelikow Where do we go from here?
The key figure in and around the Bush Administration who actively promoted a new Pearl Harbor and was at least in part responsible for the policy of complicity with the 9/11 terrorists was Philip Zelikow. Zelikow, a prominent Israel-Firster, is a government academic, whose expertise was in the nebulous area of catastrophic terrorism events which enabled US political leaders to concentrate executive powers and violate constitutional freedoms in pursuit of offensive imperial wars and in developing the public myth. Philip Shenons book, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation pinpoints Zelikows strategic role in the Bush Administration in the lead up to 9/11, the period of complicit neglect, in its aftermath, the offensive global war period, and in the governments cover-up of its complicity in the terror attack.
Prior
to 9/11 Zelikow provided ablueprint for the process of an executive
seizing extreme power for global warfare. He outlined a sequence in
which a catastrophic terrorist event could facilitate the absolute
concentration of power, followed by the launching of offensive wars for
Israel (as he publicly admitted). In the run-up to 9/11 and the multiple
wars, he served as a member of National Security Adviser Condoleeza
Rices National Security Council transition team (2000-2001), which had
intimate knowledge of terrorist plans to seize US commercial flights, as
Rice herself publicly admitted (conventional hijackings was her term).
Zelikow was instrumental in demoting and disabling the counter-terrorism
expert Richard Clark from the National Security Council, the one agency
tracking the terrorist operation. Between 2001-2003, Zelikow was a
member of the Presidents Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. This was
the agency, which had failed to follow-up and failed to pursue the key
intelligence reports identifying terrorist plans. Zelikow, after playing
a major role in undermining intelligence efforts to prevent the
terrorist attack, became the principle author of the 2002 National
Security Strategy of the United States, which prescribed Bushs policy of
military invasion of Iraq and targeted Syria, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas
and other independent Arab and Muslim countries and political entities.
Zelikows National Security Strategy paper was the most influential
directive shaping the global state terrorist policies of the Bush
regime. It also brought US war policies in the closest alignment with
the regional military aspirations of the Israeli state since the
founding of Israel . Indeed, this was why the former Israeli Prime
Minister Netanyahu stated at Bar Ilan University that the 9/11 attack
and the US invasion of Iraq were good for Israel (see Haaretz, April
16, 2008).
Finally
Zelikow, as Bushs personal appointee as the Executive Director of the
9/11 Commission, coordinated the cover-up of the Administration policy
of complicity in 9/11 with the Vice Presidents office. While Zelikow is
not considered an academic heavyweight, his ubiquitous role in the
design, execution and cover-up of the world-shattering events
surrounding 9/11 and its aftermath mark him as one of the most dangerous
and destructive political influentials in the shaping and launching of
Washingtons past, present and future catastrophic wars.
James Petras forthcoming book, Zionism and US Militarism, is due from Clarity Press, Atlanta , in August 2008.
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