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There are two sides to the coinIn his City of God, Saint Augustine tells a story about an encounter between Alexander the Great (the last ruler successfully to garrison Afghanistan) and a pirate captain he had caught on the high seas. Ordering the pirate to heave to, Alexander demands: "How dare you molest the seas as a pirate?" "How dare you molest the whole world?" retorts the plucky pirate. "I have a small boat, so I am called a thief and a pirate. You have a great navy, so you are called an emperor, and can call other men pirates."Substitute terrorist or rogue state for pirate and the episode neatly encapsulates the morality of the new world order. What Powerful States Call Terrorism May be an Inevitable Response to Injustice Terror's Greatest Recruitment Tool Hidden Agenda Behind War on Terror This War on Terrorism is Bogus UK Film at Cannes Says Terror Fears Exaggerated Free Speech: Not in Parliament Square Published on October 25,
2001 in the Guardian
What Powerful States Call Terrorism May be an Inevitable Response to Injustice by Seumas Milne For a war that, in the words of US Vice-President Dick Cheney, "may never end", the enemy is proving embarrassingly hard to define. Of course, we know all about Osama bin Laden, supposed mastermind of the twin towers attacks, and his Taliban protectors, and we have become ominously aware of the demands from within the US administration that Iraq be brought into the frame. But this campaign is intended to be something grander still. The bombs and missiles now raining down on Afghanistan have been proclaimed as the curtain-raiser of a war against terror itself, which will not cease until the scourge of political violence is dealt with once and for all. The days of toleration for any form of terrorism from Baghdad to Ballymurphy are, it is said, now over. British ministers may mutter that the war is aimed at al-Qaida and the Taliban alone - but then they are not in charge. Yet for all the square-jawed resolution on display in western capitals about the prosecution of this war, there is little agreement even within the heart of the coalition about what terrorism actually means. Both the EU and the UN are struggling to come up with an acceptable definition. The European Commission has produced a formulation so broad it would include anti-globalization protesters who smash McDonald's windows; while Kofi Annan, UN secretary-general, warned wearily that reaching a consensus would be well-nigh impossible since "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter". President Bush has pledged that the war will not cease so long as "anybody is terrorizing established governments" and Britain's latest terrorism legislation outlaws support for groups opposing any regime, including an illegal one, with violence. Pacifists apart, however, virtually everyone across the political spectrum supports terrorism in practice - or, rather, what passes for terrorism under the rubric being promulgated by western chancelleries. The transformation from terrorist to respected statesman has become a cliché of the international politics of the past 50 years, now being replayed in Northern Ireland. Almost every society, philosophy and religion has recognized the right to take up arms against tyranny or foreign occupation. In History Will Absolve Me, his 1953 trial speech after the abortive Moncada barracks attack, Fidel Castro reels off a string of thinkers and theologians - from Thomas Aquinas and John Salisbury to John Calvin and Thomas Paine - who defended the right to rebel against despots. In modern times, few would question the heroism or justice of the wartime resistance to the Nazis or of armed rebellions against British or French colonial rule, all damned as terrorists by those they fought. More recently still, the US government trained and funded the armed contra rebellion against Nicaragua - ably assisted by John Negroponte, the current US ambassador to the UN and in defiance of the international court in the Hague. Along with its faithful British ally, the US also backed the Afghan mojahedin (even before the Soviet intervention), as it is now funding opposition groups waging bombing campaigns in Iraq. So the Bush administration's problem with terrorism is evidently not about breaking the state's monopoly of violence. The right to resist occupation is in any case recognized under international law and the Geneva convention, which is one reason why routine western denunciations of Palestinian violence ring so utterly hollow. Having failed to dislodge the Israeli occupation after 34 years or implement the UN decision to create a Palestinian state after 54 years, there are few reasonable grounds to complain if those living under the occupation fight back. But the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestinian, which last week assassinated Israel's racist tourism minister in response to the Israeli assassination of its leader in August, is officially regarded as a terrorist organization by the US government, which has now successfully pressured the Palestinian leadership to ban its military wing. The tendency in recent years, encouraged by the scale of last month's atrocity in New York, has been to define terrorism increasingly in terms of methods and tactics - particularly the targeting of civilians - rather than the status of those who carry it out. Such an approach has its own difficulties. Liberation movements which most would balk at branding terrorist, including the ANC and the Algerian FLN, attacked civilian targets - as so mesmerizingly portrayed in Pontecorvo's film Battle of Algiers. But more problematic for western governments is the way such arguments can be turned against them. The concept of modern terrorism derives, after all, from the French revolution, where terror was administered by the state - as it is today by scores of governments around the world. If paramilitary groups become terrorists because they kill or injure civilians, what of those states which bomb television stations, bridges and power stations, train and arm death squads or authorize assassinations? After days when hundreds of Afghan civilians are reported to have died as a result of Anglo-American bombardment - while hundreds of thousands are fleeing for their lives - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's remark that the aim was to "frighten" the other side couldn't have more sharply posed the paradox of terror. Political violence emerges when other avenues are closed. Where people suffer oppression, are denied a peaceful route to justice and social change and have exhausted all other tactics - the point the ANC reached in the early 1960s - they are surely entitled to use force. That does not apply to adventurist and socially disconnected groups like Baader Meinhof or the Red Brigades, nor does it deal with the question of whether such force is advisable or likely to be counter-productive. Islamist "jihad" groups, especially networks like al-Qaida with a "global reach" and a religious ideology impervious to accommodation, are considered by many to be beyond any normal calculus of repression and resistance. Certainly, the September 11 atrocity was an unprecedented act of non-state terror. But such groups are also unquestionably the product of conditions in the Arab and Muslim world for which both Britain and the US bear a heavy responsibility, through their unswerving support of despotic regimes for over half a century. It was precisely that blockage of democratic development that led to the failure of secular politics, which in turn paved the way for the growth of Islamist radicalism. Groups like al-Qaida offer no future to the Muslim world, but Bin Laden and his supporters have their boots sunk deep in a swamp of grievance. As the assault on Afghanistan continues, no one should delude themselves that cutting off al-Qaida's head or destroying its Afghan lair will put an end to this eruption. Hussain Osman, one of the men alleged to have participated in London's failed bombings on July 21, recently told Italian investigators that they prepared for the attacks by watching "films on the war in Iraq," La Repubblica reported. "Especially those where women and children were being killed and exterminated by British and American soldiers...of widows, mothers and daughters that cry." It has become an article of faith that Britain was vulnerable to terror because of its politically correct antiracism. Yet Osman's comments suggest that what propelled at least some of the bombers was rage at what they saw as extreme racism. And what else can we call the belief--so prevalent we barely notice it--that American and European lives are worth more than the lives of Arabs and Muslims, so much more that their deaths in Iraq are not even counted? It's not the first time that this kind of raw inequality has bred extremism. Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian writer generally viewed as the intellectual architect of radical political Islam, had his ideological epiphany while studying in the United States. The puritanical scholar was shocked by Colorado's licentious women, it's true, but more significant was Qutb's encounter with what he later described as America's "evil and fanatic racial discrimination." By coincidence, Qutb arrived in the United States in 1948, the year of the creation of the State of Israel. He witnessed an America blind to the thousands of Palestinians being made permanent refugees by the Zionist project. For Qutb, it wasn't politics, it was an assault on his identity: Clearly Americans believed that Arab lives were worth far less than those of European Jews. According to Yvonne Haddad, a professor of history at Georgetown University, this experience "left Qutb with a bitterness he was never able to shake." When Qutb returned to Egypt he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, leading to his next life-changing event: He was arrested, severely tortured and convicted of antigovernment conspiracy in an absurd show trial. Qutb's political theory was profoundly shaped by torture. Not only did he regard his torturers as sub-human, he stretched that categorization to include the entire state that ordered this brutality, including the practicing Muslims who passively lent their support to Nasser's regime. Qutb's vast category of subhumans allowed his disciples to justify the killing of "infidels"--now practically everyone--in the name of Islam. A movement for an Islamic state was transformed into a violent ideology that would lay the intellectual groundwork for Al Qaeda. In other words, so-called Islamist terrorism was "home grown" in the West long before the July 7 attacks--from its inception it was the quintessentially modern progeny of Colorado's casual racism and Cairo's concentration camps. Why is it worth digging up this history now? Because the twin sparks that ignited Qutb's world-changing rage are currently being doused with gasoline: Arabs and Muslims are being debased in torture chambers around the world and their deaths are being discounted in simultaneous colonial wars, at the same time that graphic digital evidence of these losses and humiliations is available to anyone with a computer. And once again, this lethal cocktail of racism and torture is burning through the veins of angry young men. As Qutb's past and Osman's present reveal, it's not our tolerance for multiculturalism that fuels terrorism; it's our tolerance for the barbarism committed in our name. Into this explosive environment has stepped Tony Blair, determined to sell two of the main causes of terror as its cure. He intends to deport more Muslims to countries where they will likely face torture. And he will keep fighting wars in which soldiers don't know the names of the towns they are leveling. (According to an August 5 Knight Ridder report, a Marine sergeant in Iraq recently pumped up his squad by telling them that "these will be the good old days, when you brought...death and destruction to--what the fuck is this place called?" Someone piped in helpfully, "Haqlaniyah.") Meanwhile, in Britain, there is no shortage of the "evil and fanatic racial discrimination" that Qutb denounced. "Of course too there have been isolated and unacceptable acts of a racial or religious hatred," Blair said before unveiling his terror-fighting plan. "But they have been isolated." Isolated? The Islamic Human Rights Commission received 320 complaints of racist attacks in the wake of the bombings; the Monitoring Group has received eighty-three emergency calls; Scotland Yard says hate crimes are up 600 percent from this time last year. Not that pre-July 7 was anything to brag about: "One in five of Britain's ethnic minority voters say that they considered leaving Britain because of racial intolerance," according to a Guardian poll in March. This last statistic shows that the brand of multiculturalism practiced in Britain (and France, Germany, Canada...) has little to do with genuine equality. It is instead a Faustian bargain, struck between vote-seeking politicians and self-appointed community leaders, one that keeps ethnic minorities tucked away in state-funded peripheral ghettos while the centers of public life remain largely unaffected by the seismic shifts in the national ethnic makeup. Nothing exposes the shallowness of this alleged tolerance more than the speed with which Muslim communities are now being told to "get out" (to quote Tory MP Gerald Howarth) in the name of core national values. The real problem is not too much multiculturalism but too little. If the diversity now ghettoized on the margins of Western societies--geographically and psychologically--were truly allowed to migrate to the centers, it might infuse public life in the West with a powerful new humanism. If we had deeply multi-ethnic societies, rather than shallow multicultural ones, it would be much more difficult for politicians to sign deportation orders sending Algerian asylum-seekers to torture, or to wage wars in which only the invaders' dead are counted. A society that truly lived its values of equality and human rights, at home and abroad, would have another benefit too. It would rob terrorists of what has always been their greatest recruitment tool: our racism. The war against terrorism is a fraud. After three weeks' bombing, not a single terrorist implicated in the attacks on America has been caught or killed in Afghanistan. Instead, one of the poorest, most stricken nations has been terrorised by the most powerful - to the point where American pilots have run out of dubious "military" targets and are now destroying mud houses, a hospital, Red Cross warehouses, lorries carrying refugees. Unlike the relentless pictures from New York, we are seeing almost nothing of this. Tony Blair has yet to tell us what the violent death of children - seven in one family - has to do with Osama bin Laden. And why are cluster bombs being used? The British public should know about these bombs, which the RAF also uses. They spray hundreds of bomblets that have only one purpose; to kill and maim people. Those that do not explode lie on the ground like landmines, waiting for people to step on them. If ever a weapon was designed specifically for acts of terrorism, this is it. I have seen the victims of American cluster weapons in other countries, such as the Laotian toddler who picked one up and had her right leg and face blown off. Be assured this is now happening in Afghanistan, in your name. None of those directly involved in the September 11 atrocity was Afghani. Most were Saudis, who apparently did their planning and training in Germany and the United States. The camps which the Taliban allowed bin Laden to use were emptied weeks ago. Moreover, the Taliban itself is a creation of the Americans and the British. In the 1980s, the tribal army that produced them was funded by the CIA and trained by the SAS to fight the Russians. The hypocrisy does not stop there. When the Taliban took Kabul in 1996, Washington said nothing. Why? Because Taliban leaders were soon on their way to Houston, Texas, to be entertained by executives of the oil company, Unocal. With secret US government approval, the company offered them a generous cut of the profits of the oil and gas pumped through a pipeline that the Americans wanted to build from Soviet central Asia through Afghanistan. A US diplomat said: "The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did." He explained that Afghanistan would become an American oil colony, there would be huge profits for the West, no democracy and the legal persecution of women. "We can live with that," he said. Although the deal fell through, it remains an urgent priority of the administration of George W. Bush, which is steeped in the oil industry. Bush's concealed agenda is to exploit the oil and gas reserves in the Caspian basin, the greatest source of untapped fossil fuel on earth and enough, according to one estimate, to meet America's voracious energy needs for a generation. Only if the pipeline runs through Afghanistan can the Americans hope to control it. So, not surprisingly, US Secretary of State Colin Powell is now referring to "moderate" Taliban, who will join an American-sponsored "loose federation" to run Afghanistan. The "war on terrorism" is a cover for this: a means of achieving American strategic aims that lie behind the flag-waving facade of great power. The Royal Marines, who will do the real dirty work, will be little more than mercenaries for Washington's imperial ambitions, not to mention the extraordinary pretensions of Blair himself. Having made Britain a target for terrorism with his bellicose "shoulder to shoulder" with Bush nonsense, he is now prepared to send troops to a battlefield where the goals are so uncertain that even the Chief of the Defence Staff says the conflict "could last 50 years". The irresponsibility of this is breathtaking; the pressure on Pakistan alone could ignite an unprecedented crisis across the Indian sub-continent. Having reported many wars, I am always struck by the absurdity of effete politicians eager to wave farewell to young soldiers, but who themselves would not say boo to a Taliban goose. In the days of gunboats, our imperial leaders covered their violence in the "morality" of their actions. Blair is no different. Like them, his selective moralising omits the most basic truth. Nothing justified the killing of innocent people in America on September 11, and nothing justifies the killing of innocent people anywhere else. By killing innocents in Afghanistan, Blair and Bush stoop to the level of the criminal outrage in New York. Once you cluster bomb, "mistakes" and "blunders" are a pretence. Murder is murder, regardless of whether you crash a plane into a building or order and collude with it from the Oval Office and Downing Street. If Blair was really opposed to all forms of terrorism, he would get Britain out of the arms trade. On the day of the twin towers attack, an "arms fair", selling weapons of terror (like cluster bombs and missiles) to assorted tyrants and human rights abusers, opened in London's Docklands with the full backing of the Blair government. Britain's biggest arms customer is the medieval Saudi regime, which beheads heretics and spawned the religious fanaticism of the Taliban. If he really wanted to demonstrate "the moral fibre of Britain", Blair would do everything in his power to lift the threat of violence in those parts of the world where there is great and justifiable grievance and anger. He would do more than make gestures; he would demand that Israel ends its illegal occupation of Palestine and withdraw to its borders prior to the 1967 war, as ordered by the Security Council, of which Britain is a permanent member. He would call for an end to the genocidal blockade which the UN - in reality, America and Britain - has imposed on the suffering people of Iraq for more than a decade, causing the deaths of half a million children under the age of five. That's more deaths of infants every month than the number killed in the World Trade Center. There are signs that Washington is about to extend its current "war" to Iraq; yet unknown to most of us, almost every day RAF and American aircraft already bomb Iraq. There are no headlines. There is nothing on the TV news. This terror is the longest-running Anglo-American bombing campaign since World War Two. The Wall Street Journal reported that the US and Britain faced a "dilemma" in Iraq, because "few targets remain". "We're down to the last outhouse," said a US official. That was two years ago, and they're still bombing. The cost to the British taxpayer? £800 million so far. According to an internal UN report, covering a five-month period, 41 per cent of the casualties are civilians. In northern Iraq, I met a woman whose husband and four children were among the deaths listed in the report. He was a shepherd, who was tending his sheep with his elderly father and his children when two planes attacked them, each making a sweep. It was an open valley; there were no military targets nearby. "I want to see the pilot who did this," said the widow at the graveside of her entire family. For them, there was no service in St Paul's Cathedral with the Queen in attendance; no rock concert with Paul McCartney. The tragedy of the Iraqis, and the Palestinians, and the Afghanis is a truth that is the very opposite of their caricatures in much of the Western media. Far from being the terrorists of the world, the overwhelming majority of the Islamic peoples of the Middle East and south Asia have been its victims - victims largely of the West's exploitation of precious natural resources in or near their countries. There is no war on terrorism. If there was, the Royal Marines and the SAS would be storming the beaches of Florida, where more CIA-funded terrorists, ex-Latin American dictators and torturers, are given refuge than anywhere on earth. There is, however, a continuing war of the powerful against the powerless, with new excuses, new hidden agendas, new lies. Before another child dies violently, or quietly from starvation, before new fanatics are created in both the east and the west, it is time for the people of Britain to make their voices heard and to stop this fraudulent war - and to demand the kind of bold, imaginative non-violent initiatives that require real political courage. The other day, the parents of Greg Rodriguez, a young man who died in the World Trade Center, said this: "We read enough of the news to sense that our government is heading in the direction of violent revenge, with the prospect of sons, daughters, parents, friends in distant lands dying, suffering, and nursing further grievances against us. "It is not the way to go...not in our son's name." The 9/11 attacks gave the US an ideal pretext to use force to secure its global domination by Michael Meacher Massive attention has now been given - and rightly so - to the reasons why Britain went to war against Iraq. But far too little attention has focused on why the US went to war, and that throws light on British motives too. The conventional explanation is that after the Twin Towers were hit, retaliation against al-Qaida bases in Afghanistan was a natural first step in launching a global war against terrorism. Then, because Saddam Hussein was alleged by the US and UK governments to retain weapons of mass destruction, the war could be extended to Iraq as well. However this theory does not fit all the facts. The truth may be a great deal murkier. We now know that a blueprint for the creation of a global Pax Americana was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defense secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), Jeb Bush (George Bush's younger brother) and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses, was written in September 2000 by the neoconservative think tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC). The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says "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." The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document attributed to Wolfowitz and Libby which said the US must "discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role". It refers to key allies such as the UK as "the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership". It describes peacekeeping missions as "demanding American political leadership rather than that of the UN". It says "even should Saddam pass from the scene", US bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently... as "Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has". It spotlights China for "regime change", saying "it is time to increase the presence of American forces in SE Asia". The document also calls for the creation of "US space forces" to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent "enemies" using the internet against the US. It also hints that the US may consider developing biological weapons "that can target specific genotypes [and] may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool". Finally - written a year before 9/11 - it pinpoints North Korea, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes, and says their existence justifies the creation of a "worldwide command and control system". This is a blueprint for US world domination. But before it is dismissed as an agenda for rightwing fantasists, it is clear it provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis. This can be seen in several ways. First, it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11. It is known that at least 11 countries provided advance warning to the US of the 9/11 attacks. Two senior Mossad experts were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the CIA and FBI to a cell of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation (Daily Telegraph, September 16 2001). The list they provided included the names of four of the 9/11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested. It had been known as early as 1996 that there were plans to hit Washington targets with airplanes. Then in 1999 a US national intelligence council report noted that "al-Qaida suicide bombers could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House". Fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers obtained their visas in Saudi Arabia. Michael Springman, the former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, has stated that since 1987 the CIA had been illicitly issuing visas to unqualified applicants from the Middle East and bringing them to the US for training in terrorism for the Afghan war in collaboration with Bin Laden (BBC, November 6 2001). It seems this operation continued after the Afghan war for other purposes. It is also reported that five of the hijackers received training at secure US military installations in the 1990s (Newsweek, September 15 2001). Instructive leads prior to 9/11 were not followed up. French Moroccan flight student Zacarias Moussaoui (now thought to be the 20th hijacker) was arrested in August 2001 after an instructor reported he showed a suspicious interest in learning how to steer large airliners. When US agents learned from French intelligence he had radical Islamist ties, they sought a warrant to search his computer, which contained clues to the September 11 mission (Times, November 3 2001). But they were turned down by the FBI. One agent wrote, a month before 9/11, that Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers (Newsweek, May 20 2002). All of this makes it all the more astonishing - on the war on terrorism perspective - that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself. The first hijacking was suspected at not later than 8.20am, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06am. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from the US Andrews Air Force base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 am. Why not? There were standard FAA intercept procedures for hijacked aircraft before 9/11. Between September 2000 and June 2001 the US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase suspicious aircraft (AP, August 13 2002). It is a US legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate. Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority? The former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, has said: "The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defense of incompetence." Nor is the US response after 9/11 any better. No serious attempt has ever been made to catch Bin Laden. In late September and early October 2001, leaders of Pakistan's two Islamist parties negotiated Bin Laden's extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for 9/11. However, a US official said, significantly, that "casting our objectives too narrowly" risked "a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance Mr Bin Laden was captured". The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that "the goal has never been to get Bin Laden" (AP, April 5 2002). The whistleblowing FBI agent Robert Wright told ABC News (December 19 2002) that FBI headquarters wanted no arrests. And in November 2001 the US air force complained it had had al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in its sights as many as 10 times over the previous six weeks, but had been unable to attack because they did not receive permission quickly enough (Time Magazine, May 13 2002). None of this assembled evidence, all of which comes from sources already in the public domain, is compatible with the idea of a real, determined war on terrorism. The catalogue of evidence does, however, fall into place when set against the PNAC blueprint. From this it seems that the so-called "war on terrorism" is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives. Indeed Tony Blair himself hinted at this when he said to the Commons liaison committee: "To be truthful about it, there was no way we could have got the public consent to have suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan but for what happened on September 11" (Times, July 17 2002). Similarly Rumsfeld was so determined to obtain a rationale for an attack on Iraq that on 10 separate occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to 9/11; the CIA repeatedly came back empty-handed (Time Magazine, May 13 2002). In fact, 9/11 offered an extremely convenient pretext to put the PNAC plan into action. The evidence again is quite clear that plans for military action against Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well before 9/11. A report prepared for the US government from the Baker Institute of Public Policy stated in April 2001 that "the US remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma. Iraq remains a destabilizing influence to... the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East". Submitted to Vice-President Cheney's energy task group, the report recommended that because this was an unacceptable risk to the US, "military intervention" was necessary (Sunday Herald, October 6 2002). Similar evidence exists in regard to Afghanistan. The BBC reported (September 18 2001) that Niaz Niak, a former Pakistan foreign secretary, was told by senior American officials at a meeting in Berlin in mid-July 2001 that "military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October". Until July 2001 the US government saw the Taliban regime as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of hydrocarbon pipelines from the oil and gas fields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. But, confronted with the Taliban's refusal to accept US conditions, the US representatives told them "either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs" (Inter Press Service, November 15 2001). Given this background, it is not surprising that some have seen the US failure to avert the 9/11 attacks as creating an invaluable pretext for attacking Afghanistan in a war that had clearly already been well planned in advance. There is a possible precedent for this. The US national archives reveal that President Roosevelt used exactly this approach in relation to Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. Some advance warning of the attacks was received, but the information never reached the US fleet. The ensuing national outrage persuaded a reluctant US public to join the second world war. Similarly the PNAC blueprint of September 2000 states that the process of transforming the US into "tomorrow's dominant force" is likely to be a long one in the absence of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor". The 9/11 attacks allowed the US to press the "go" button for a strategy in accordance with the PNAC agenda which it would otherwise have been politically impossible to implement. The overriding motivation for this political smokescreen is that the US and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy supplies. By 2010 the Muslim world will control as much as 60% of the world's oil production and, even more importantly, 95% of remaining global oil export capacity. As demand is increasing, so supply is decreasing, continually since the 1960s. This is leading to increasing dependence on foreign oil supplies for both the US and the UK. The US, which in 1990 produced domestically 57% of its total energy demand, is predicted to produce only 39% of its needs by 2010. A DTI minister has admitted that the UK could be facing "severe" gas shortages by 2005. The UK government has confirmed that 70% of our electricity will come from gas by 2020, and 90% of that will be imported. In that context it should be noted that Iraq has 110 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves in addition to its oil. A report from the commission on America's national interests in July 2000 noted that the most promising new source of world supplies was the Caspian region, and this would relieve US dependence on Saudi Arabia. To diversify supply routes from the Caspian, one pipeline would run westward via Azerbaijan and Georgia to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Another would extend eastwards through Afghanistan and Pakistan and terminate near the Indian border. This would rescue Enron's beleaguered power plant at Dabhol on India's west coast, in which Enron had sunk $3bn investment and whose economic survival was dependent on access to cheap gas. Nor has the UK been disinterested in this scramble for the remaining world supplies of hydrocarbons, and this may partly explain British participation in US military actions. Lord Browne, chief executive of BP, warned Washington not to carve up Iraq for its own oil companies in the aftermath of war (Guardian, October 30 2002). And when a British foreign minister met Gadaffi in his desert tent in August 2002, it was said that "the UK does not want to lose out to other European nations already jostling for advantage when it comes to potentially lucrative oil contracts" with Libya (BBC Online, August 10 2002). The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the "global war on terrorism" has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda - the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project. Is collusion in this myth and junior participation in this project really a proper aspiration for British foreign policy? If there was ever need to justify a more objective British stance, driven by our own independent goals, this whole depressing saga surely provides all the evidence needed for a radical change of course. Michael Meacher MP was environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003 Published on May 14, 2005
by Reuters
UK Film at Cannes Says Terror Fears Exaggerated by Erik Kirschbaum A British documentary arguing U.S. neo-conservatives have exaggerated the terror threat is set to rock the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday, the way "Fahrenheit 9/11" stirred emotions here a year ago. "The Power of Nightmares" re-injected politics into the festival that seemed eager to steer clear of controversy this year after American Michael Moore won top honours in 2004 for his film deriding President Bush's response to terror. At a screening late on Friday ahead of its gala on Saturday, "The Power of Nightmares" by filmmaker and senior BBC producer Adam Curtis kept an audience of journalists and film buyers glued to their seats and taking notes for a full 2-1/2 hours. The film, a non-competition entry, argues that the fear of terrorism has come to pervade politics in the United States and Britain even though much of that angst is based on carefully nurtured illusions. It says Bush and U.S. neo-conservatives, as well as British Prime Minister Tony Blair, are exaggerating the terror threat in a manner similar to the way earlier generations of leaders inflated the danger of communism and the Soviet Union. It also draws especially controversial symmetries between the history of the U.S. movement that led to the neo-cons and the roots of the ideas that led to radical Islamism -- two conservative movements that have shaped geopolitics since 1945. Curtis's film portrays neo-cons Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Donald Rumsfeld as counterparts to Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri in the two respective movements. "During the Cold War conservatives exaggerated the threat of the Soviet Union," the narrator says. "In reality it was collapsing from within. Now they're doing the same with Islamic extremists because it fits the American vision of an epic battle." ILLUSORY FEAR OF TERROR In his film, Curtis argues that Bush and Blair have used what he says is the largely illusory fear of terror and hidden webs of organized evil following the September 11, 2001, attacks to reinforce their authority and rally their nations. In Bush's government, those underlings who put forth the darkest scenarios of the phantom threat have the most influence, says Curtis, who also devotes segments of his film to criticize unquestioning media and zealous security agencies. He says al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has a far less powerful organization than feared. But he is careful to avoid suggestions that terror attacks won't happen again. Included are experts who dismiss fears of a "dirty bomb" as exaggerated. "It was an attempt at historical explanation for September 11," Curtis said, describing his film in the Guardian newspaper recently. "Up to this point, nobody had done a proper history of the ideas and groups that have created our modern world." But Curtis said there were worlds of difference between his film and Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," which won the "Golden Palm" and gave the festival a charged political atmosphere that prompted this year's return to a more conservative program. "Moore is a political agitprop filmmaker," he said. "I am not. You'd be hard pushed to tell my politics from watching it." "The Power of Nightmares" was a three-part documentary aired in Britain and won a British film and television industry award (Bafta) this year. "Is this really Britain?" wondered The Independent. Peace campaigner Maya Evans was seized by 14 police officers, arrested, hauled before the Bow Street magistrates, ordered to pay a £100 fine and given a criminal record. Her offence? Reading aloud the names of British troops killed in Iraq, while standing alone near the Cenotaph on Whitehall. The 25-year-old vegan chef from Hastings was the first person to be convicted under a new law that forbids unauthorised protests within 1 km of Parliament Square. "Read those words again, slowly." Surely this is the kind of law that belongs in a police state, rather than a democracy built on the freedom of speech? Not necessarily, said The Guardian. The new law creates a security cordon around Westminster - understandable enough in the current climate. But using it against a harmless, solitary protester was foolish. It makes "an ass" of the law. On the contrary, said Andreas Whittam Smith in The Independent: that's what this law was designed for - to target individual protesters. The relevant section of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 was included specifically to "gag Brian Haw", the peace campaigner whose tents and tattered flags have been part of the landscape of Parliament Square for four and a half years. Haw was duly arrested last week, but – to the fury of MPs – a magistrate ruled that the legislation does not apply to him, since his vigil began before it came into force. So he can stay put, while the law he inspired allows police to evict anyone else from the vicinity. Expressing opinions is a dangerous business these days, said Philip Johnston in The Daily Telegraph. Last week the author Lynette Burrows argued on a live radio broadcast that gay men should not be able to adopt. The next day she was telephoned by a policewoman, following a complaint that she made a "homophobic" comment on air. She was told that, although she had not committed a crime, it was "policy" to record details of such complaints; so Mrs Burrows is now presumably on "some sinister register" of people with unacceptable views. Perhaps these two assaults on freedom are isolated incidents, said the Daily Mail. "But aren't they also a warning of what Britain is becoming under a government that: shows utter contempt for our traditions of law and liberty?" Tony Blair seems to have forgotten what he told us two years ago, when justifying the Iraq war: "I pass protesters every day at Downing Street. I may not like what they call me, but I thank God they can. That's called freedom." |
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