Provocations as Pretexts for Imperial War: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11
By Prof. James Petras
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 Intelligence’s 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 Japan’s
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 FDR’s 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 Truman’s 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. Truman’s 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: Johnson’s 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 China’s 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 Johnson’s 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 Administration’s
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. Bush’s 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 President’s office and the National
Security Council and the general US public’s 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 country’s 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
Zelikow’s 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 Zelikow’s favorite state – Israel .
Throughout the 1990’s 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 Iraqi’s 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
regime’s 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 Aviv’s vision of a US-Israel
dominated Middle East. In 2000 the PNAC Zionist ideologues published a
strategy paper ‘Rebuilding America’s 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 Washington’s move toward Israel’s
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
Israel’s 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 President’s 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
President’s 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
government’s 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 public’s 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 opponent’s 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 GI’s 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 Plato’s not-so ‘noble lie’, as practiced by
America’s 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 today’s 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 Shenon’s book, The
Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation pinpoints
Zelikow’s 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 government’s cover-up of its complicity
in the terror attack.
Prior to 9/11 Zelikow provided a‘blueprint’ 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 Rice’s 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 President’s 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 Bush’s policy of military invasion of Iraq and targeted
Syria, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and other independent Arab and Muslim
countries and political entities. Zelikow’s ‘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 Bush’s 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 President’s
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 Washington’s past, present and future
catastrophic wars.
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