A Global Coup

by Guillaume Faye

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  According to historian Ramdan Redjala, it was in 1964 that the Americans initiated their support of Algerian Islamist association Al Qiyam. This organisation, financed by the Gulf monarchies, is considered the forefather of the Islamic Salvation Front (ISF) and the precursor of current terrorism (in La Nouvelle Revue d’Histoire, September-October 2003). America was actually one of the stoutest supporters of Algerian independence. The latter was one of several points that Kennedy touched upon in his 1960 presidential campaign programme.

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  In Le Figaro (‘America’s mistake’, 07/08/2003), Islamologist Olivier Roy, member of the National Scientific Research Centre and a professor of political sciences in Paris and Princeton, demonstrated the fact that the US ‘anti-terrorist’ response to the 9/11 attacks only managed to increase global Islamic terrorist potential through its Afghan and Iraqi campaigns. He states that ‘America’s tactical choice contradicts its strategic intention’. He is convinced that it would have been far more effective for American secret services to implement a policy of prevention and active struggle against the above-mentioned plague. Driven by the NAI’s simplistic ideology, however, Washington decided, instead, to ‘flex its muscles’ for the whole world to see, with the neoconservatives relying completely on the rather primal patriotic fibre that characterises simple-minded American voters.

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  Islam is well intent on establishing itself on American soil not only through its mosques and immigration, but also through audio-visual means. Hypocritically, its purpose is to initially present itself as very accessible in nature (in accordance with the Dar-al-Sulh phase). Bridges TV is a television channel that is currently being developed in the US, one that is destined to indulge in soft Islamic proselytism. Headed by Muzzamil Hassan, the channel has close ties to the Council of American-Islamic Relations.

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  The desire to take full control of science is part of Washington’s new statal highhandedness. The notion according to which the NAI engages in a totalitarian manipulation of America’s civil society and resorts to statal deception in order to justify its own objectives is a very shocking one for common Americans, who have all been brought up to consider their country a model of transparency and free thought. And yet, one still encounters an entire current of sensibility in the USA, a current which believes that the American federal government manipulates and controls everything, dissimulates all that is inconvenient and strives to achieve secret aims, displaying a cynicism that evades all institutional control.

  Charles Levendosky authored an article that was published in The New York Times (20/o8/2003) and caused quite an uproar on the topic. The article, entitled The White House Distorts Science for Political Ends, is highly critical of the ‘American system’ and reveals several interesting, if not worrying, facts. The general gist is that, in order to justify its own policy, the American administration is exploiting and diverting the results of scientific research away from its actual conclusions, which applies to all possible domains. Levendosky proceeds to analyse a certain Democratic parliamentary report (the Waxman Report), otherwise entitled Politics and Science in the Bush Administration (August 2003). The first fact that the report points out is the existence of prestigious governmental agencies that focus on promoting research and safeguarding public health. These agencies, which have hitherto remained both independent and serious, include the National Institute of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Environmental Protection Agency, and several others.

  At the beginning of 2003, Science magazine sounded the alert when it declared: ‘The Bush Administration is invading this sector, which had thus far been preserved, and resorting to various manipulations in it’. What is truly going on, then? More than 20 scientists are reported to have been discretely asked to steer their conclusions in a certain ‘political’ direction. A good example is that of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: as a result of the pressure exerted upon them by the Protestant fundamentalists belonging to the ruling neoconservative clique, they proceeded to delete all information concerning the use of condoms and the latter’s efficacy with regard to combatting STDs and AIDS from their internet website, simply because these fundamentalists are convinced that abstinence is the only legitimate means of combatting AIDS. At the express request of the American administration, which abides by Bush’s refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and grants American industrials the ‘right to pollute’, what has also been suppressed are the warnings issued by the Environmental Protection Agency regarding the climatic dangers that stem from greenhouse gas emissions.

  The American administration is also said to be pressuring scientists towards falsifying the results of their research into the harmfulness of GMOs, water quality, the dangers of industrial foods, and overfishing. According to the Waxman report, the Bush administration is active along three axes:

  1) That of manipulating the various committees of scientific governmental advisors;

  2) That of prevaricating or censoring any scientific information that contradicts America’s official policy;

  3) That of interfering into ongoing research programmes so as to steer the latter in the ‘right direction’.

  This attitude is rather similar to the practices that were once implemented in communist countries. In this regard, the American government is breaching a certain law, namely the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which guarantees the absolute independence of all scientific governmental advisors. Here is a scandalous example of this: three federal experts who had stood at the head of the Advisory Committee on Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention were thanked for their services and replaced by ‘scientists’ with ties to the lead industry, one of whom made sure that the hitherto maximal doses of lead absorption into children’s brains could be increased sevenfold with utter impunity!

  What we are faced with here is a fundamental trait that characterises the new authoritarianism embraced by the American government: no longer serving the interests of the ‘nation’, the latter only serves those of the industrials that finance neoconservative politicians. Unlike the ancient autocratic European regimes, in no way does the American ‘reason of state’ mirror the incentive of governmental arbitrariness, but, similarly to what is witnessed in a banana republic, a subservience to private interests whose roots reach deep into the governmental core.

  The conclusions presented by the Environmental Protection Agency in its reports on the atmospheric warming that results from industrial pollution have been softened through the exertion of pressure upon the experts, who were all asked to kindly resort to lies. It gets worse, however: this governmental agency has simply been refused the right to test the air quality in America, since this could inconvenience Bush’s industrial policy. In Levendosky’s eyes,

  … whenever a scientific analysis differs from the American administration’s point of view, it is simply discarded into the waste bin, along with any concerns for public well-being.

  One is thus struck by the fact that the counterpart to the NAI’s cross-border arbitrariness is actually found in the US itself, where anything that opposes the neoconservative policy is simply stifled.

  Geopolitical Elements

  In an article published by his own institute’s magazine on the 9th of May 2003, Ivan Enland, an American geopolitician and the head of the Center of Peace & Liberty at the Independent Institute of Oakland (California), states that the Iraqi campaign, which was partly intended to intimidate Iran, will, on the contrary, drive the latter to secretly develop weapons of mass destruction and increase the pace of its secret nuclear programme so as to protect itself from a possible American ‘folly’. From the author’s perspective, the NAI will have a ‘proliferation effect’ upon the world’s weapons of mass destruction, which is the opposite of the intended purpose.

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  What follows is a declaration made by Poul Nielson, the Danish European commissioner for Development, upon his
return from Baghdad, in the aftermath of the British-American ‘victory’: ‘The Americans have appropriated the Iraqi oil! I think that the USA is gradually becoming a member of the OPEC’. Echoing his statement, The New York Times wrote (28/03/2003): ‘The USA may well end up pumping Iraqi oil revenues in order to finance its costly military operation’; which is exactly what it has been doing and precisely why it has excluded the UN from all post-war oil management. This time around, France has chosen to toe the line and did not dare to resort to its veto.

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  According to Alain Bauer and Xavier Raufer (in Scorched Earth Policy, Le Figaro, 30/04/2003), America has opted for a headlong rush comparable to a ‘slash and burn’ tactic, which may initially guarantee a harvest, but, in the long term, will transform savannahs and forests into deserts:

  America’s foreign security operations, whether in the Balkans, Central Asia or the Middle-East, are increasingly becoming a global and geopolitical slash and burn tactic. […] The American policy seems to be in grave contradiction with the very objectives that it has assigned itself: the War on Terror, the war on crime, and the anti-drug war.

  From the authors’ point of view, the actual methods used by the Americans only serve to reinforce these three plagues. In the Balkans, for instance, the CIA has proceeded to ally itself to both Albanian and Kosovar criminal factions.

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  According to Martin Wollacott, a British specialist on foreign policy issues, ‘America has been weakened by its victory in Iraq’ (The Age, 05/05/2003). The Iraqi campaign has led to a Pyrrhic victory, one that poses more problems than it actually resolves. This is, first of all, due to the fact that America has failed to form a genuine coalition, antagonising not only its own allies, but also global public opinion. The next reason lies in the fact that, by pretending to be able to manage Iraq and the Middle-East in a proconsular fashion, the USA has accepted a burden that is impossible to bear. Thirdly, all of this has isolated the US from the rest of the world (and from the UN as well), as they all watch America sink into this quagmire, without ever attempting to help it.

  For Wollacott, Buchanan and numerous others, the aggressiveness displayed by the neoconservatives is a catastrophe afflicting the US more than the ‘rest of the world’. Wollacott notes:

  Ultimately, America has weakened itself because it has failed to develop what historian and foreign policy expert Walter Russel Mead calls “a coherent and applicable strategy to maintain American hegemony in times of peace”.

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  Despite the presence of 5,000 soldiers deployed by NATO and 11,500 American ones, Afghanistan has fallen into the depths of anarchy. Various warlords have established themselves there, as have the Taliban. Islamists Gullbudin Heykmatyar and Mullah Omar (Bin Laden’s assistant) have rekindled the holy war. Politically speaking, the Americans have already lost this war.

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  In an article entitled The USA Privatises Iraq, published by Libération on June the 26th 2003, European MP Sami Naïr (MRC) expresses the view that, due to business and oil-related motivations, the USA has been implementing a ‘cynical colonisation in Iraq’. He quotes the words of Thomas Friedman, the foreign affairs commentator at The New York Times: ‘We now have a 51st state comprising 23 million people. For we have just adopted a new baby called Baghdad’. In addition, Naïr mentions the comments made by Max Boot (of the highly popular USA Today), who, in an article entitled American Imperialism? No Need to Run Away from Label, declares without flinching that any armed opposition in Iraq is doomed to fail because

  … more than 125,000 American troops occupy Mesopotamia. They are supported through the resources of the world’s richest economy. In a race for the control of Iraq, America can outmatch and crush anyone who opposes it.

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  Here is yet another sign of the NAI’s impudence, the like of which none have ever seen: the insistence on exempting all American nationals from facing legal action before the International Court of Justice (ICJ). It is as if US Army members were to be exempt or exempted from answering for potential ‘war crimes’. Is such an expectation not an admission of the fact that American militaries do commit such crimes? Washington has even threatened EU candidate countries with sanctions should they sign the ICJ protocols.

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  American historian William S. Lind believes that American neo-imperialism represents a hegemonic flare-up akin to Charles Quint’s during the 16th century, whose rise ended in defeat against France and led to the vanquishing of Philip II ‘s Invincible Armada at the hands of admiral Drake (StageRight.com, USA, 24/02/2003). His analysis states:

  The real question is not that of knowing whether the American dynamic towards global hegemony will be successful; for it will not. The question is for us to find out why this objective has become a priority.

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  Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s Secretary of Defence, embodies the NAI’s central figure. In spite of his cheekily vulgar humour, Rumsfeld is the true theoretician behind the new doctrine. As the leader of the neoconservatives already in 1998, he sent Bill Clinton a letter asking him to attack Iraq. His 2003 plan had already been devised at that time. It is actually Rumsfeld that represents the real partisan of a global coup and the genuine advocate of excessive American militarism. Dan Schorr, an editorialist at the National Public Radio, had this to say about him:

  He displays great skill in hiding his own ideology behind a few jokes, and yet belongs to those who believe that America must carve its own empire. He is one of those supporters of pre-emptive war who wish to remain unrivalled on our planet.

  Mentioning him in his memoirs, Henry Kissinger writes: ’Of all the despots that I’ve dealt with, none was more ruthless than Rumsfeld’.

  Not only is Donal Rumsfeld the very symbol of American inconsequence, but also that of the imbrication between the personal business interests of American leaders and imperialism. In 2000, he had already taken charge of Zürich-based ABB company, enabling it to sign a 200-million-dollar contract to supply North Korea with nuclear reactors! Two years later, in 2002, he declared that same country to be a ‘terrorist state’, a condemnation that was especially due to North Korea’s refusal to freeze its nuclear programme, which had actually been purchased from Rumsfeld himself (The Guardian, 09/05/2003). Let us also bear in mind that in 1983, Rumsfeld had been sent to Baghdad by Secretary of State George Schultz in order to renew the political talks with Iraq. Upon his return, he praised Saddam Hussein, declaring that he had become his ‘friend’. His secret mission had, however, been aimed at obtaining a contract that would allow the Bechtel oil company (whose long-term manager was none other than Schultz himself!) to construct a pipeline between Iraq and Jordan.

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  In the unrefined jargon used by neoconservative imperialists, the expression ‘the USA and its allies’ is ultimately used as a synonym for ‘America and its vassals’. Following the ‘seizure’ of Baghdad, George W. Bush made the following proclamation on board the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier:

  In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. […] In this battle, we have fought for the cause of liberty and for the peace of the world.

  Such political cant is as Orwellian as it is post-Soviet.

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  The USA has often pushed the countries it intended to attack towards committing an ‘initial act of aggression’ (Pearl Harbor), as part of an ancient tactic inspired by the Greeks and Romans. It is a known fact that, a mere few days before the invasion of Kuwait, April Glaspie, the American ambassador to Iraq in 1991, told Saddam Hussein that the USA was not interested in becoming involved in a quarrel that it considered to be ‘Arab business’ (Herbert Schiller, Manipulating Hearts and Minds, Boulder, Colorado, 1992).

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  In a response against the now famous comments made by G. W. Bush’s Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, according to which France, Germany and Belgium now represented the ‘old Europe’ due to their opposition
to the military campaign in Iraq, Graham F. Fuller wrote an article entitled Old Europe or Old America, which was published in The International Herald Tribune and caused a sensation overseas. In it, he develops the idea that the imperialistic, unilateralist and ruthless policy implemented by the neoconservatives mirrors a nostalgic longing for long bygone days, a longing that is not suited to the 21st century at all. Fuller is a former CIA official (the vice-president of the National Intelligence Council, to be precise) and the author of The Future of Political Islam.

  In a study titled South Gate: Mexico Comes to California, which appeared in The American Conservative on May the 19th 2003, Roger D. McGrath describes California’s ‘Mexicanisation’ through the example of South Gate, while highlighting the resulting degradation of public order and Third-Worldisation:

  While we are engaged overseas in remodelling other countries in our own image, many of our cities are being remodelled in the image of Mexican villages. Nowhere is this more obvious than in California.

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  Also in The American Conservative, James Bovard expresses the conviction that the USA is gradually becoming a ‘semi-police state’ where, ever since 9/11, ‘a spate of federal dispositions has reduced the freedom of Americans without improving their security’. He proceeds to strongly criticise the Patriot Act (the new American law regarding domestic security), whose inspiration has come from John Ashcroft, the American Minister for Justice, and which limits public liberties while simultaneously increasing the level of surveillance targeting individuals, especially by means of electronic and informatic espionage and the denunciation of suspicious events and people. In his view, this constitutes a return to McCarthyism, only in a worse form:

  Criticising the domestic policy of the Bush administration is assimilated with aiding both America’s enemies and the terrorists.

  Several authors, including professor Edward S. Herman of the Wharton School University of Columbia (in Manufacturing Consent), expand on the idea that the USA has become a semi-dictatorial entity governed by a Big-Brother, which they refer to as ‘Orwellian’. America is thus said to be engaging in such global propaganda and disinformation that it far surpasses the late USSR in terms of subtleness and efficacy.