Neo-Conned! Again

by D Liam O'Huallachain

  One might inquire into the basis for the apparently near universal acceptance of this doctrine in Western intellectual commentary. Examination will quickly reveal that it is based on two principles. First, our leaders have proclaimed it, so it must be true, a principle familiar in North Korea and other stellar models. Second, we must suppress the fact that by proclaiming the doctrine after other pretexts have collapsed, our leaders are also declaring that they are among the most accomplished liars in history, since in leading their countries to war they proclaimed with comparable passion that the “sole question” is whether Saddam had disarmed. But now we must believe them. Also obligatory is the dispatch deep into the memory hole of the ample record of professed noble efforts to bring democracy, justice, and freedom to the benighted.

  It is, again, the merest truism that pronouncements of virtuous intent by leaders carry no information, even in the technical sense: they are completely predictable, including the worst monsters. But this truism also fades when it confronts the overriding need to reject the principle of universality.

  The doctrine presupposed by Western commentary is accepted by some Iraqis too: one percent agreed that the goal of the invasion is to bring democracy to Iraq according to U.S.-run polls in Baghdad in October 2003 – long before the atrocities in April and the revelations of torture. Another five percent felt that the goal is to help Iraqis. Most of the rest took for granted that the goal is to gain control of Iraq's resources and use Iraq as a base for reorganizing the Middle East in U.S. interests2 – a thought virtually inexpressible in enlightened Western commentary, or dismissed with horror as “anti-Americanism,” “conspiracy theory,” “radical and extremist,” or some other intellectual equivalent of four-letter words among the vulgar. In brief, Iraqis appear to take for granted that what is unfolding is a scenario familiar from the days of Britain's creation of modern Iraq, accompanied by the predictable and therefore uninformative professions of virtuous intent, but also by secret internal documents in which Lord Curzon and the Foreign Office developed the plans to establish an “Arab facade” that Britain would rule behind various “constitutional fictions.” The contemporary version is provided by a senior British official quoted in the Daily Telegraph: “The Iraqi government will be fully sovereign, but in practice it will not exercise all its sovereign functions.”1

  Let us return to Negroponte and the principle of universality. As his appointment as Ambassador2 reached Congress, the Wall Street Journal praised him as a “Modern Proconsul,” who learned his trade in Honduras in the 1980s, during the Reaganite phase of the current incumbents in Washington. The veteran Journal correspondent Carla Anne Robbins reminds us that in Honduras he was known as “the proconsul,” as he presided over the second largest embassy in Latin America, with the largest CIA station in the world – perhaps to transfer full sovereignty to this centerpiece of world power.3

  Robbins observes that Negroponte has been criticized by human rights activists for “covering up abuses by the Honduran military” – a euphemism for large-scale state terror – “to ensure the flow of U.S. aid” to this vital country, which was “the base for Washington's covert war against Nicaragua.” The main task of proconsul Negroponte was to supervise the bases in which the terrorist mercenary army was armed, trained, and sent to do its work, including its mission of attacking undefended civilian targets, so the U.S. military command informed Congress. The policy of attacking such “soft targets” while avoiding the Nicaraguan army was confirmed by the State Department and defended by leading American liberal intellectuals, notably New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, who was the designated spokesman for the left in television commentary. He chastised Human Rights Watch for its sentimentality in condemning U.S. international terrorism and failing to understand that it must be evaluated by “pragmatic criteria.” A “sensible policy,” he urged, should “meet the test of cost-benefit analysis,” an analysis of “the amount of blood and misery that will be poured in, and the likelihood that democracy will emerge at the other end” – “democracy” as U.S. elites determine, their unquestionable right. Of course, the principle of universality does not apply: others are not authorized to carry out large-scale international terrorist operations if their goals are likely to be achieved.

  On the wall of my office at MIT, I have a painting given to me by a Jesuit priest, depicting the Angel of Death standing over the figure of Salvadoran Archbishop Romero, whose assassination in 1980 opened that grim decade of international state terrorist atrocities, and right before him the six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, whose brains were blown out in 1989, bringing the decade to an end. The Jesuit intellectuals, along with their housekeeper and her daughter, were murdered by an elite battalion armed and trained by the current incumbents in Washington and their mentors. It had already compiled a bloody record of massacres in the U.S.run international terrorist campaign that Romero's successor described as a “war of extermination and genocide against a defenseless civilian population.” Romero had been killed by much the same hands, a few days after he pleaded with President Carter not to provide the junta with military aid, which “will surely increase injustice here and sharpen the repression that has been unleashed against the people's organizations fighting to defend their most fundamental human rights.” The repression continued with U.S. aid after his assassination, and the current incumbents carried it forward to a “war of extermination and genocide.”

  I keep the painting there to remind myself daily of the real world, but it has turned out to serve another instructive purpose. Many visitors pass through the office. Those from Latin America almost unfailingly recognize it. Those from north of the Rio Grande virtually never do. From Europe, recognition is perhaps 10 percent. We may consider another useful thought experiment. Suppose that in Czechoslovakia in the 1980s, security forces armed and trained by the Kremlin had assassinated an Archbishop who was known as “the voice of the voiceless,” then proceeded to massacre tens of thousands of people, consummating the decade with the brutal murder of Vaclav Havel and half a dozen other leading Czech intellectuals. Would we know about it? Perhaps not, because the Western reaction might have gone as far as nuclear war, so there would be no one left to know. The distinguishing criterion is, once again, crystal clear. The crimes of enemies take place; our own do not, by virtue of our exemption from the most elementary of moral truisms.

  Let us move on to some hard problems. Terrorism poses a number of them. First and foremost, of course, the phenomenon itself, which really is threatening, even keeping to the subpart that passes through the doctrinal filters: their terrorism against us. It is only a matter of time before terror and WMD are united, perhaps with horrendous consequences, as has been discussed in the specialist literature long before the September 11 atrocities.

  But apart from the phenomenon, there is the problem of a definition of “terror.” That too is taken to be a hard problem, the subject of scholarly literature and international conferences. At first glance, it might seem odd that it is regarded as a hard problem. There are what seem to be satisfactory definitions – not perfect, but at least as good as others regarded as unproblematic: for example, the official definitions in the U.S. Code and Army Manuals in the early 1980s when the “war on terror” was launched, or the quite similar official formulation of the British government, which defines “terrorism” as “the use, or threat, of action which is violent, damaging or disrupting, and is intended to influence the government or intimidate the public and is for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, or ideological cause.” These are the definitions that I have been using in writing about terrorism for the past twenty years, ever since the Reagan administration declared that the war on terror would be a prime focus of its foreign policy, replacing human rights, the proclaimed “soul of our foreign policy” before.1

  On closer look, however, the problem becomes clear, and it is indeed hard. The official definitions are unusable, because of their immediate c
onsequences. One difficulty is that the definition of terrorism is virtually the same as the definition of the official policy of the U.S., and other states, called “counter-terrorism” or “low-intensity warfare” or some other euphemism. That again is close to a historical universal, to my knowledge. Japanese imperialists in Manchuria and North China, for example, were not aggressors or terrorists, but were protecting the population and the legitimate governments from the terrorism of “Chinese bandits.” To undertake this noble task, they were compelled, reluctantly, to resort to “counter-terror,” with the goal of establishing an “earthly paradise” in which the people of Asia could live in peace and harmony under the enlightened guidance of Japan. The same is true of just about every other case I have investigated. But now we do face a hard problem: it will not do to say that the enlightened states are officially committed to terrorism. And it takes little effort to demonstrate that the U.S. engages in large-scale international terrorism according to its own definition of the term, quite uncontroversially in a number of crucial cases.

  There is, then, a hard problem of defining “terrorism,” rather like the problem of defining “war crime.” How can we define it in such a way as to violate the principle of universality, exempting ourselves but applying it to selected enemies? And these have to be selected with some precision. The U.S. has had an official list of states sponsoring terrorism ever since the Reagan years. In all these years, only one state has been removed from the list: Iraq, in order to permit the U.S. to join the U.K. and others in providing badly needed aid for Saddam Hussein, continuing without concern after he carried out his most horrifying crimes.1 There has also been one near-example. Clinton offered to remove Syria from the list if it agreed to peace terms offered by the U.S. and Israel. When Syria insisted on recovering the territory that Israel conquered in 1967, it remained on the list of states sponsoring terrorism, and continues to be on the list despite the acknowledgment by Washington that Syria has not been implicated in sponsoring terror for many years and has been highly cooperative in providing important intelligence to the U.S. on al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups. As a reward for Syria's cooperation in the “war on terror,” last December Congress passed legislation calling for even stricter sanctions against Syria, near unanimously (the Syria Accountability Act). The legislation was recently implemented by the President, thus depriving the U.S. of a major source of information about radical Islamist terrorism in order to achieve the higher goal of establishing in Syria a regime that will accept U.S.-Israeli demands – not an unusual pattern, though commentators continually find it surprising no matter how strong the evidence and regular the pattern, and no matter how rational the choices in terms of clear and understandable planning priorities.

  The Syria Accountability Act offers another striking illustration of the rejection of the principle of universality. Its core demand refers to UN Security Council Resolution 520, calling for respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Lebanon, violated by Syria because it still retains in Lebanon forces that were welcomed there by the U.S. and Israel in 1976 when their task was to carry out massacres of Palestinians. The congressional legislation, and news reporting and commentary, overlook the fact that Resolution 520, passed in 1982, was explicitly directed against Israel, not Syria, and also the fact that while Israel violated this and other Security Council resolutions regarding Lebanon for 22 years, there was no call for any sanctions against Israel, or even any call for reduction in the huge unconditional military and economic aid to Israel. The silence for 22 years includes many of those who now signed the Act condemning Syria for its violation of the Security Council resolution ordering Israel to leave Lebanon. The principle is accurately formulated by a rare scholarly commentator, Steven Zunes: it is that “Lebanese sovereignty must be defended only if the occupying army is from a country the United States opposes, but is dispensable if the country is a U.S. ally.”1 The principle, and the news reporting and commentary on all of these events, again make good sense, given the overriding need to reject elementary moral truisms, a fundamental doctrine of the intellectual and moral culture.

  Returning to Iraq, when Saddam was removed from the list of states supporting terrorism, Cuba was added to replace it, perhaps in recognition of the sharp escalation in international terrorist attacks against Cuba in the late 1970s, including the bombing of a Cubana airliner killing 73 people and many other atrocities. These were mostly planned and implemented in the U.S., though by that time Washington had moved away from its former policy of direct action in bringing “the terrors of the earth” to Cuba – the goal of the Kennedy administration, reported by historian and Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger in his biography of Robert Kennedy, who was assigned responsibility for the terror campaign and regarded it as a top priority. By the late 1970s Washington was officially condemning the terrorist acts while harboring and protecting the terrorist cells on U.S. soil in violation of U.S. law. The leading terrorist, Orlando Bosch, regarded as the author of the Cubana airline bombing and dozens of other terrorist acts according to the FBI, was given a presidential pardon by George Bush number one, over the strong objections of the Justice Department. Others like him continue to operate with impunity on U.S. soil, including terrorists responsible for major crimes elsewhere as well for whom the U.S. refuses requests for extradition (from Haiti, for example).

  We may recall one of the leading components of the “Bush doctrine” – now Bush 2: “Those who harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves,” and must be treated accordingly; the President's words when announcing the bombing of Afghanistan because of its refusal to turn over suspected terrorists to the U.S., without evidence, or even credible pretext as later quietly conceded. Harvard international-relations specialist Graham Allison describes this as the most important component of the Bush Doctrine. It “unilaterally revoked the sovereignty of states that provide sanctuary to terrorists,” he wrote approvingly in Foreign Affairs, adding that the doctrine has “already become a de facto rule of international relations.” That is correct, in the technical sense of “rule of international relations.”

  Unreconstructed literalists might conclude that Bush and Allison are calling for the bombing of the United States, but that is because they do not comprehend that the most elementary moral truisms must be forcefully rejected: there is a crucial exemption to the principle of universality, so deeply entrenched in the reigning intellectual culture that it is not even perceived, hence not mentioned.

  Again, we find illustrations daily. The Negroponte appointment is one example. To take another, a few weeks ago the Palestinian leader Abu Abbas died in a U.S. prison in Iraq. His capture was one of the most heralded achievements of the invasion. A few years earlier he had been living in Gaza, participating in the Oslo “peace process” with U.S.-Israeli approval, but after the second Intifida began, he fled to Baghdad, where he was arrested by the U.S. army and imprisoned because of his role in the hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985. The year 1985 is regarded by scholarship as the peak year of terrorism in the 1980s; Mideast terrorism was the top story of the year, in a poll of editors. Scholarship identifies two major crimes in that year: the hijacking of the Achille Lauro, in which one person, a crippled American, was brutally murdered; and an airplane hijacking with one death, also an American. There were, to be sure, some other terrorist crimes in the region in 1985, but they do not pass through the filters. One was a car-bombing outside a mosque in Beirut that killed 80 people and wounded 250 others, timed to explode as people were leaving, killing mostly women and girls; but this is excluded from the record because it was traced back to the CIA and British intelligence. Another was the action that led to the Achille Lauro hijacking in retaliation, a week later: Shimon Peres's bombing of Tunis with no credible pretext, killing 75 people, Palestinians and Tunisians, expedited by the U.S. and praised by Secretary of State Shultz, then unanimously condemned by the UN Security Council as an “act of armed aggres
sion” (US abstaining). But that too does not enter the annals of terrorism (or perhaps the more severe crime of “armed aggression”), again because of agency. Peres and Shultz do not die in prison, but receive Nobel prizes, huge taxpayer gifts for reconstruction of what they helped destroy in occupied Iraq, and other honors. Again, it all makes sense once we comprehend that elementary moral truisms must be sent to the flames.

  Sometimes denial of moral truisms is explicit. A case in point is the reaction to the second major component of the “Bush Doctrine,” formally enunciated in the National Security Strategy of September 2002, which was at once described in the main establishment journal Foreign Affairs as a “new imperial grand strategy” declaring Washington's right to resort to force to eliminate any potential challenge to its global dominance. The NSS was widely criticized among the foreign policy elite, including the article just cited, but on narrow grounds: not that it was wrong, or even new, but that the style and implementation were so extreme that they posed threats to U.S. interests. Henry Kissinger described “The new approach [as] revolutionary,” pointing out that it undermines the 17th century Westphalian system of international order, and of course the UN Charter and international law. He approved of the doctrine but with reservations about style and tactics, and with a crucial qualification: it cannot be “a universal principle available to every nation.” Rather, the right of aggression must be reserved to the U.S., perhaps delegated to chosen clients. We must forcefully reject the most elementary of moral truisms: the principle of universality. Kissinger is to be praised for his honesty in forthrightly articulating prevailing doctrine, usually concealed in professions of virtuous intent and tortured legalisms.