Neo-Conned! Again

by D Liam O'Huallachain

  The Bush administration's obsession with this conception of America as not a simple member of the family of nations but as the divinely appointed savior of the world continues to have tragic consequences, not the least of which is the rising American military death toll overseas. Stubborn insistence upon seeing the resistance in Iraq as the fruit of “terror” and “ideological extremism” does nothing for our troops except give them a straw man to fight. It does, however, keep the neoconservative ideological thread from unraveling. Confronting our real enemy – the Iraqis who aren't “terrorists” but who simply oppose our occupation – would involve the unlikely admission that our adversaries might be simply legitimate opponents, who are fighting according to their wits and resources, in exercise of a right (theirs no less than ours) to live free of occupying forces, to control their own destiny, and to fight coercion, invasion, and foreign control. But this kind of realism is only heard on the ground. Spc. John Bandy, of Alpha Company, Task Force 2–2, 1st Infantry Division, Fallujah, said of his experience, “It's intense, that's all there is to say. The determination these guys have against our forces, these little bands of guys shooting at tanks, it's almost admirable.”1

  Meanwhile, those with their heads in the clouds remain tragically free of any such “reality check.” The respect of the simple soldier for his legitimate adversary, ready to fight to the death against tremendous odds regardless of his political or religious beliefs, is not likely to infect Bush and Co. any time soon, or puncture their overwhelming pride. And so much the worse for our troops.

  The “central front” in the “War on Terror”: who are we fighting?

  At the outset, it was said to be a question of a few “malcontents” or “criminals.” Then it became small bands of “thugs and mugs,” followed by “terrorists,” “foreign fighters,” and then, only towards the latter part of 2004, did it regularly become “FRE” – “former regime elements.”

  Nowadays, the media is fairly united in referring to “Saddam loyalists” and “foreign terrorists.” The latter, though, have pride of place in administration rhetoric, given their connection to the all-encompassing “war on terror.” How accurate is it, though, to make Iraqi fighters out to be footsol-diers in the allegedly global struggle of Islamic “misfits” against “the home of the brave”?

  One book that bears critically on this discussion is Imperial Hubris,2written by Michael Scheuer, a CIA analyst with 25 years experience. It is well written and forthright, and it does not play according to the rules of political correctness. The book is essentially about Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, and what Scheuer frequently calls “an intensifying Islamist insurgency.” He examines the response of American foreign policy to that “insurgency,” pointing out that it is essentially unthinking, incoherent, indiscriminate, and cowardly. One thing it is not, however, is based on clear objectives meshed to credible means.

  Scheuer rightly insists that we should appreciate and respect the fact that our so-called enemies, the “Islamists,” by and large, are not using “God” as a convenient “politico-marketing tool” to gain support. Rather, they are, generally speaking, people who have a sincere and in many cases deep belief in God. We may say that their conception of God is wrong, that their interpretation of His Will is wrong, or that they use means that contradict God's designs; but we cannot deny their very real convictions. An appreciation of this fact is of a piece with an honest and honorable assessment of our “enemy.” Just because men are on “the other side” does not make them insincere or hypocritical. They too can cling to a creed with faithfulness and sincerity, even if that creed doesn't include an idolatry of freedom and democracy.

  Scheuer also insists that America will obligate itself to fighting this Islamist insurgency across the globe unless the country is prepared to change the one critical part of its foreign policy that provokes that insurgency. Scheuer puts it in question form:

  Does unvarying military, economic, and political support for Israel serve substantive – vice emotional – U.S. interests, those that, by definition, affect America's security? Do we totally support Israel because it is essential to our security, or because of habit, the prowess of Israel's American lobbyists and spies, the half-true mantra that Israel is a democracy, the fear of having no control over a state we allowed to become armed with WMD, the bewildering pro-Israel alliance of liberal Democrats and Christian fundamentalists, and a misplaced sense of guilt over the Holocaust?1

  His answer:

  Like America or any state, Israel has a right to exist if it can defend itself or live peacefully with its neighbors; that is not the question. The question is whether U.S. interests require Americans to be Israel's protectors and endure the endless blood-and-treasure costs of that role. Status quo U.S. policy toward Israel will result in unending war with Islam (emphasis mine).2

  That question and answer demanded both clarity of thought and guts, because it pushed the envelope on the world's greatest taboo.

  Notwithstanding this welcome “wake-up call,” Scheuer's treatment of the problem has two major faults. Its first is overstating the strength and co-ordination of the “Islamist insurgency,” and especially of al-Qaeda, both prime targets of the U.S.'s “global war on terror,” or GWOT. By inflating (in my estimation) their scope, Scheuer's position unwittingly plays into the hands of those in whose interest it is to portray the struggle in Iraq as part of this “insurgency,” and therefore one between American “freedom and enlightenment” and “terrorist dead-enders.” But if the GWOT isn't what it's made out to be – as is my contention – we can be rightly suspect of any claim that Iraq is its “central front,” or, as Bush put it more recently, simply its “latest battlefield.”1

  An opposite point of view from Scheuer's comes out in a May 2005 interview of Jude Wanniski with Professor Khalid Yahya Blankenship, a Muslim scholar at Temple University, Philadelphia, carried in Wanniski's “Memo on the Margin.”2 In the course of explaining that Muslims were not disproportionately active in warfare and terrorism around the world - contrary to popular opinion as fostered by the mass media – Blankenship said:

  An instructive book on this point is My Jihad by Aukai Collins, a white American Muslim soldier-of-fortune type who actually fought the Russians in Chechnya. Early in the book he avers that transnational Muslim fighters the world over insist that they do not amount to more than 10,000 persons, even though more than that went through the CIA-sponsored “American jihad” against the Soviets in Afghanistan, which is the original source of most of the inspiration and training of those people, as documented by John Cooley in Unholy War.

  In other words, 10,000 people in a world Muslim population of 1.3 billion.

  While it is certainly true that al-Qaeda had training camps in Afghanistan both during the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s and after, much of that training, equipment, logistics, and finance came from the CIA and the Pakistani ISI security service. Many now talk of “blowback” - the notion that the “spooks” set the scene, but did not foresee the consequences, namely, the al-Qaeda people turning on their American patrons. This may be partly true, but it is far from being the whole picture. More to the point is the general inflation of the “al-Qaeda menace” in the first place, as compared to the testimony offered by people like Blankenship and Collins.

  The term “al-Qaeda” is bandied around in a careless way by the mass media. Wherever there is an explosion or an assassination, and where there are Muslims on the ground, it is automatically taken for granted that “al-Qaeda is involved,” or – on other occasions – something is “al-Qaeda linked,” “al-Qaeda inspired,” or “al-Qaeda style.”1 Following up these leads all too often reveals that the actions in question, if even caused by Muslim groups, are not carried out by people linked to al-Qaeda at all.

  Jonathan Eyal, of the Royal United Services Institute – a British military think tank – commented in October 2004 that al-Qaeda was “being sustained by the way we rather cavalierly stick the name al-Qaeda on
Iraq, Indonesia, the Philippines. There is a long tradition that if you divert all your resources to a threat, then you exaggerate it.”2 For his part, Bill Durodie, a leading security expert at King's College, London, says: “There is no real evidence that all these groups are connected.”3 In other words, this vast, global, coordinated Islamist conspiracy is largely illusory.4 For the media, however, the equation is simple: Muslims + Violence = al-Qaeda.

  The comments from these security experts are contained in a review, which ran in the British Guardian, of a three-part documentary by celebrated filmmaker Adam Curtis called “The Power of Nightmares,” screened on BBC2 on October 20, 2004, and at the Cannes Film Festival on May 14 of this year. Robert Scheer, a contributing editor at the Los Angeles Times, thought enough of the program's content after seeing it that he wrote an opinion piece on it called “Is al-Qaeda Just a Bush Bogeyman?”5

  According to filmmaker Curtis, the explanation for the myth of terrorism can be traced to this: “In an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power.”1 His documentary argues – in a way consistent with the position taken by leading Islamic groups in Sudan and Lebanon on the question of al-Qaeda – that the alleged terrorist group

  is not an organized international network. It does not have members or a leader. It does not have “sleeper cells.” It does not have an overall strategy. In fact, it barely exists at all, except as an idea about cleansing a corrupt world through religious violence.2

  The review continues: “Curtis's evidence for these assertions is not easily dismissed.” One important fact the documentary brings up, for example, is that al-Qaeda did not even have a name until early 2001 when the American government decided to prosecute Bin Laden in abstentia using anti-Mafia laws that required the existence of a named criminal organization. A second is the British Home Office's statistics that between September 11, 2001, and October 2004, 664 people were arrested on suspicion of terrorism, and only 17 of them were convicted, none of whom were connected to Islamic terrorism. Nor has anyone been convicted of membership in al-Qaeda.3

  A similar air of unreality is found on other fronts of the GWOT. An article in the New Yorker by Jane Mayer4 noted the failure of prosecutors to move forward in any serious way with prosecuting the alleged perpetrators of major terrorist acts. “The criminal prosecution of terrorist suspects,” she noted, “has not been a priority for the Bush administration, which has focused, rather, on preventing additional attacks.”5 The trial of Zacarías Moussaoui – the only U.S. criminal trial of a suspect linked to the 9/11 attacks6 – was stalled for several years because the Bush administration refused to let Moussaoui call as witnesses alleged al-Qaeda members Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who are being held by the American government. This, even though three years ago Moussaoui's indictment was “a chronicle of evil,” according to then-U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft. Government lawyers claimed that producing the witnesses would disrupt their interrogation process. But is it likely that interrogators would have been put at a disadvantage if these two were brought to a courtroom for a couple of weeks to testify in America's most important case, when they have been in prison for years already? As the recent Amnesty International report on the “war on terror” put it, “Is the government concerned that bringing such detainees into the light of day might also reveal to the public how they have been treated in custody?”1

  Moussaoui pleaded guilty on April 22, 2005, to six counts of “conspiracy to engage in terrorism,” though he maintains he intended to fly an airplane into the White House in what he said was “a different conspiracy than 9/11.” During the course of his trial, he reportedly both requested and vowed to fight the death penalty,2 and his testimony has been characterized by “unpredictable, often angry courtroom ramblings …. ”3 Counter-terrorism officials quoted by the New York Times said that, after having investigated for three years, they found no evidence of any kind of plot like the one to which Moussaoui referred. His guilty plea was made in the face of the U.S. government's not having waived pursuit of execution, raising additional questions (beyond those raised over the last several years) about his competence. As it stands now his sentencing trial won't take place until early 2006.4 By pushing the conviction and execution of Moussaoui, the administration has highlighted its embarrassing record on actually doing anything to the people it believes are orchestrators of the events that launched the GWOT. Moussaoui's lawyers are expected to make just that point: “[He] now faces execution for his peripheral role in the conspiracy, while other captured operatives who were key planners of the attacks have yet to even be charged.”5 Even the Reuters story that reported his guilty plea noted that “[h]is intended role with al-Qaeda has never been clearly explained” (emphasis mine).1

  The situation in Germany is much the same in the case of those allegedly involved in the 9/11 attacks. One of the defendants in Hamburg, Mounir El Motassadeq, who in 2004 became the first person to be convicted in the planning of the 9/11 attacks, had his conviction overturned by an appeals court because, as Mayer notes, “[they] found the evidence against him too weak “(emphasis mine).2 The problem also relates to the U.S. government's refusal to produce bin al-Shibh and Mohammed as witnesses. All it has done is provide “edited summaries of testimony,” something clearly unsatisfactory to Motassadeq's defense lawyer, Gerhard Strate, who told Mayer, “We are not satisfied with the summaries. If you want to find the truth, we need to know who has been interrogating them, and under what circumstances.” He then added, “I don't know why they won't produce the witnesses. The first thing you think is that the U.S. government has something to hide.”3

  Though the U.S. has since then “finally” given Motassadeq's lawyers some of what they want, the same critique will no doubt apply. According to Sabine Westphalen, a German court spokeswoman, “A six-page summary of information [Mohammed and al-Shibh] had revealed under questioning”4 will be presented in court, but it won't be any more reliable than previous summaries, absent an explanation of how it was obtained. One of the German court's concerns is that the witnesses may have been tortured, thus calling into question the reliability of their testimony.5 Ultimately there's no reason to believe that any explanation will ever be provided, as “the Americans had turned down requests for other information … and made clear no more material would be forthcoming.”6

  All of this begs the essential question: why are people all over the world being bombarded by the myth of the terrorist threat if the Bush administration is failing to cooperate seriously with even the one or two trials that will supposedly make “terrorists” pay for their crimes? Curtis replies: “Almost no one questions this myth about al-Qaeda because so many people have got an interest in keeping it alive.”1 Think about the fortunes to be made in security consultancy, security seminars, security gadgets, counter-terror weapons, anti-terrorist software, homeland security, security training agencies, and a host of related businesses, all dealing in colossal sums of money, with much of it coming out of the public purse. But Curtis goes further, citing

  the suspiciously circular relationship between the security services and much of the media since September 2001: the way in which official briefings about terrorism, often unverified or unverifiable by journalists, have become dramatic press stories which – in a jittery media-driven democracy – have prompted further briefings and further stories. Few of these ominous announcements are retracted if they turn out to be baseless. There is no fact-checking about al-Qaeda.2

  The second main criticism of Scheuer's thesis is related to the first: his book seems to take at face value the official version of the event that launched the GWOT, the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It isn't necessary to enter into speculation or conspiracy theory to understand that there is a huge gap between the facts and the “official story.” It is clearly problematic when people are said to make cellular phone calls on a plane from an attitude where it is technologi
cally impossible to do so, or when steel girders are said to melt due to a fire that never reached the temperature required for them to do so. These and so many others are questions of fact, and not interpretation. It is all reminiscent of the Warren Commission, which concluded that there was no “conspiracy” in the murder of President Kennedy. Few believed that then, and even fewer believe it now.

  So many inconsistencies relating to the “war on terror” and the event that kicked it off are available in the public domain, it is impossible to believe that an intelligent man like Scheuer would be unaware of them. Many were neatly summarized in a piece appearing in the British press some two years ago by British M.P. and former U.K. Environment Minister Michael Meacher, titled “This War on Terrorism Is Bogus” (The Guardian, September 6, 2003, online). Leaving them out of discussion in a book dealing with the GWOT seems hard to justify, but perhaps Scheuer's primary concern was to avoid the distraction of accusations of “conspiracy-mon-gering,” and focus on the essential point: if 9/11 was the beginning of a global attack by Islamists against the U.S., it can't simply be attributed to an “intelligence failure.” It is the fruit of what American policy has provoked. Much the way the Iraq debacle is neither the fault of “intelligence” agencies nor a question of participants in the “global Islamist insurgency” seeking an opportunity to fight American troops. It too is a disaster of a policy that we have chosen.

  Internet warfare

  Contributing to the “war on terror” mystique created by Bush and Co. is the frequent discovery by the press of Internet-based claims of responsibility for events in Iraq. Various and sundry cells of the global jihad, we are told, make routine postings indicating their role in this or that suicide attack or car bombing. More often than not these claims, as reported, are inconsistent and unverifiable. How, then, to take them seriously?