ZNet Special

ZNet | Mideast

On the US-Israeli Invasion of Lebanon

by Noam Chomsky; Al-Adab; August 23, 2006

Though there are many interacting factors, the immediate issue that lies behind the latest US-Israeli invasion of Lebanon remains, I believe, what it was in the four preceding invasions: the Israel-Palestine conflict. In the most important case, the devastating US-backed 1982 Israeli invasion was openly described in Israel as a war for the West Bank, undertaken to put an end to annoying PLO calls for a diplomatic settlement (with the secondary goal of imposing a client regime in Lebanon). There are numerous other illustrations. Despite the many differences in circumstances, the July 2006 invasion falls generally into the same pattern. Among mainstream American critics of Bush administration policies, the favored version is that “We had always approached [conflict between Israel and its neighbors] in a balanced way, assuming that we could be the catalyst for an agreement,” but Bush II regrettably abandoned that neutral stance, causing great problems for the United States (Middle East specialist and former diplomat Edward Walker, a leading moderate). The actual record is quite different: For over 30 years, Washington has unilaterally barred a peaceful political settlement, with only slight and brief deviations.

The consistent rejectionism can be traced back to the February 1971 Egyptian offer of a full peace treaty with Israel, in the terms of official US policy, offering nothing for the Palestinians. Israel understood that this peace offer would put an end to any security threat, but the government decided to reject security in favor of expansion, then mostly into northeastern Sinai. Washington supported Israel’s stand, adhering to Kissinger’s principle of “stalemate”: force, not diplomacy. It was only 8 years later, after a terrible war and great suffering, that Washington agreed to Egypt’s demand for withdrawal from its territory.

Meanwhile the Palestinian issue had entered the international agenda, and a broad international consensus had crystallized in favor of a two-state settlement on the pre-June 1967 border, perhaps with minor and mutual adjustments. In December 1975, the UN Security Council agreed to consider a resolution proposed by the Arab “confrontation states” with these provisions, also incorporating the basic wording of UN 242. The US vetoed the resolution. Israel’s reaction was to bomb Lebanon, killing over 50 people in Nabatiye, calling the attack “preventive” – presumably to “prevent” the UN session, which Israel boycotted.

The only significant exception to consistent US-Israeli rejectionism was in January 2001, when Israeli and Palestinian negotiators came close to agreement in Taba. But the negotiations were called off by Israeli Prime Minister Barak four days early, ending that promising effort. Unofficial but high-level negotiations continued, leading to the Geneva Accord of December 2002, with similar proposals. It was welcomed by most of the world, but rejected by Israel and dismissed by Washington (and, reflexively, the US media and intellectual classes).

Meanwhile US-backed Israeli settlement and infrastructure programs have been “creating facts on the ground” in order to undermine potential realization of Palestinian national rights. Throughout the Oslo years, these programs continued steadily, with a sharp peak in 2000: Clinton’s final year, and Barak’s. The current euphemism for these programs is “disengagement” from Gaza and “convergence” in the West Bank – in Western rhetoric, Ehud Olmert’s courageous program of withdrawal from the occupied territories. The reality, as usual, is quite different.

The Gaza “disengagement” was openly announced as a West Bank expansion plan. Having turned Gaza into a disaster area, sane Israeli hawks realized that there was no point leaving a few thousand settlers taking the best land and scarce resources, protected by a large part of the IDF. It made more sense to send them to the West Bank and Golan Heights, where new settlement programs were announced, while turning Gaza into “the world’s largest prison,” as Israeli human rights groups accurately call it. West Bank “Convergence” formalizes these programs of annexation, cantonization, and imprisonment. With decisive US support, Israel is annexing valuable lands and the most important resources of the West Bank (primarily water), while carrying out settlement and infrastructure projects that divide the shrinking Palestinian territories into unviable cantons, virtually separated from one another and from whatever pitiful corner of Jerusalem will be left to Palestinians. All are to be imprisoned as Israel takes over the Jordan Valley, and of course any other access to the outside world.

All of these programs are recognized to be illegal, in violation of numerous Security Council resolutions and the unanimous decision of the World Court any part of the "separation wall" that is built to “defend” the settlements is “ipso facto” illegal (U.S. Justice Buergenthal, in a separate declaration). Hence about 80-85% of the wall is illegal, as is the entire “convergence” program. But for a self-designated outlaw state and its clients, such facts are minor irrelevancies.

Currently, the US and Israel demand that Hamas accept the 2002 Arab League Beirut proposal for full normalization of relations with Israel after withdrawal in accord with the international consensus. The proposal has long been accepted by the PLO, and it has also been formally accepted by the “supreme leader” of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei. Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has made it clear that Hezbollah would not disrupt such an agreement if it is accepted by Palestinians. Hamas has repeatedly indicated its willingness to negotiate in these terms.

The facts are doctrinally unacceptable, hence mostly suppressed. What we see, instead, is the stern warning to Hamas by the editors of the New York Times that their formal agreement to the Beirut peace plan is “an admission ticket to the real world, a necessary rite of passage in the progression from a lawless opposition to a lawful government.” Like others, the NYT editors fail to mention that the US and Israel forcefully reject this proposal, and are alone in doing so among relevant actors. Furthermore, they reject it not merely in rhetoric, but far more importantly, in deeds. We see at once who constitutes the “lawless opposition” and who speaks for them. But that conclusion cannot be expressed, even entertained, in respectable circles.

The only meaningful support for Palestinians facing national destruction is from Hezbollah. For this reason alone it follows that Hezbollah must be severely weakened or destroyed, just as the PLO had to be evicted from Lebanon in 1982. But Hezbollah is too deeply embedded within Lebanese society to be eradicated, so Lebanon too must be largely destroyed. An expected benefit for the US and Israel was to enhance the credibility of threats against Iran by eliminating a Lebanese-based deterrent to a possible attack. But none of this turned out as planned. Much as in Iraq, and elsewhere, Bush administration planners have created catastrophes, even for the interests they represent. That is the primary reason for the unprecedented criticism of the administration among the foreign policy elite, even before the invasion of Iraq.

In the background lie more far-reaching and lasting concerns: to ensure what is called “stability” in the reigning ideology. “Stability,” in simple words, means obedience. “Stability” is undermined by states that do not strictly follow orders, secular nationalists, Islamists who are not under control (in contrast, the Saudi monarchy, the oldest and most valuable US ally, is fine), etc. Such “destabilizing” forces are particularly dangerous when their programs are attractive to others, in which case they are called “viruses” that must be destroyed. “Stability” is enhanced by loyal client states. Since 1967, it has been assumed that Israel can play this role, along with other “peripheral” states. Israel has become virtually an off-shore US military base and high-tech center, the natural consequence of its rejection of security in favor of expansion in 1971, and repeatedly since. These policies are subject to little internal debate, whoever holds state power. The policies extend world-wide, and in the Middle East, their significance is enhanced by one of the leading principles of foreign policy since World War II (and for Britain before that): to ensure control over Middle East energy resources, recognized for 60 years to be “a stupendous source of strategic power” and “one of the greatest material prizes in world history.”

The standard Western version is that the July 2006 invasion was justified by legitimate outrage over capture of two Israeli soldiers at the border. The posture is cynical fraud. The US and Israel, and the West generally, have little objection to capture of soldiers, or even to the far more severe crime of kidnapping civilians (or of course to killing civilians). That had been Israeli practice in Lebanon for many years, and no one ever suggested that Israel should therefore be invaded and largely destroyed. Western cynicism was revealed with even more dramatic clarity as the current upsurge of violence erupted after Palestinian militants captured an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, on June 25. That too elicited huge outrage, and support for Israel's sharp escalation of its murderous assault on Gaza. The scale is reflected in casualties: in June, 36 Palestinian civilians were killed in Gaza; in July, the numbers more than quadrupled to over 170, dozens of them children. The posture of outrage was, again, cynical fraud, as demonstrated dramatically, and conclusively, by the reaction to Israel's kidnapping of two Gaza civilians, the Muamar brothers, one day before, on June 24. They disappeared into Israel's prison system, joining the hundreds of others imprisoned without charge - hence kidnapped, as are many of those sentenced on dubious charges. There was some brief and dismissive mention of the kidnapping of the Muamar brothers, but no reaction, because such crimes are considered legitimate when carried out by “our side.” The idea that this crime would justify a murderous assault on Israel would have been regarded as a reversion to Nazism.

The distinction is clear, and familiar throughout history: to paraphrase Thucydides, the powerful are entitled to do as they wish, while the weak suffer as they must.

We should not overlook the progress that has been made in undermining the imperial mentality that is so deeply rooted in Western moral and intellectual culture as to be beyond awareness. Nor should we forget the scale of what remains to be achieved, tasks that must be undertaken in solidarity and cooperation by people in North and South who hope to see a more decent and civilized world.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=10811

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ZNet | Mideast

UN Security Council Acts within Constraints Set by Great Powers
Noam Chomsky interviewed by Nermeen Al Mufti

by Noam Chomsky and Nermeen Al Mufti;
The New Anatolian; August 23, 2006

UN Security Council Resolution 1701 came very late and posed a fragile ceasefire, yet there will be another war as long as the Bush-backed Israel has the pretext of "safer borders," and Bush himself is insisting on going further in his war against terrorism. Eminent Professor Noam Chomsky, in this interview with The New Anatolian, speaks about Israeli-Lebanese war and the UN Security Council.

TNA: The first question is very simple yet has never been answered: Why does Israel have the right of self-defense while the Arab countries don't? The U.S. has the same right, while Iraq doesn't!

Chomsky: The answer was given a long time ago by Thucydides (the Melian dialogue, in The Peloponnesian War, Book 5): The strong do as they can, and the weak suffer as they must. One of the leading principles of international affairs. Many Arab States declared that they will not boycott relations with Israel; in the same time (breath) they declared the war is Hezbollah's war and fault.

TNA: Do you think there was and still is an American pressure behind this, or are the Arab regimes afraid of "regime change" and doing their best to satisfy the White House?

Chomsky: At an emergency Arab League meeting, most of the Arab states (apart from Algeria, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen) condemned Hezbollah. In doing so, they were willing to "openly defy public opinion," as the New York Times reported. They later had to back down, including Washington's oldest and most important ally in the region, Saudi Arabia: King Abdullah said that "if the peace option is rejected due to the Israeli arrogance, then only the war option remains, and no one knows the repercussions befalling the region, including wars and conflict that will spare no one, including those whose military power is now tempting them to play with fire."

Most analysts assume - plausibly I think - that their primary concern is the growing influence of Iran, and the embarrassment caused by the fact that alone in the Arab world, Hezbollah has offered support for Palestinians under brutal attack in the occupied territories.

TNA: Was there any legal or moral justification for this war, as President George W. Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the Western media insisted?

Chomsky: We can ignore Bush and Rice, who are participants in the U.S.-Israeli invasion of Lebanon. We know very well that by Western standards, there is no moral or legal justification for the war. Sufficient proof is the fact that for many years, Israel regularly kidnapped Lebanese, sending them to prisons in Israel, including secret prisons like the notorious Camp 1391, which was exposed by accident and quickly forgotten (and in the U.S., never even reported within the mainstream). No one suggested that Lebanon, or anyone else, had the right to invade and destroy much of Israel in retaliation. As this long and ugly record makes clear, kidnapping of civilians - a far worse crime than capture of soldiers - - is considered insignificant by the U.S., UK, and other Western states, and by articulate opinion within them quite generally, when it is done by "our side." That fact was revealed very dramatically once again at the outset of the current upsurge of violence after Hamas captured an Israeli soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, on June 25. That action elicited a huge show of outrage in the West, and support for Israel's sharp escalation of its attacks in Gaza. One day before, on June 24, Israeli forces kidnapped two civilians in Gaza, a doctor and his brother, and sent them off somewhere in Israel's prison system. The event was scarcely reported, and elicited little if any comment within the mainstream. The timing alone reveals with vivid clarity that the show of outrage over the capture of Israeli soldiers is a cynical fraud, and undermines any shreds of moral legitimacy for the ensuing actions.

TNA: Is there any pretext that could justify the daily massacres in Lebanon and Gaza?

Chomsky: With a vivid imagination, one can conjure up all sorts of pretexts. In the real world, there are none. And we may add the forgotten West Bank, where the U.S. and Israel are proceeding with their plans to drive the last nails into the coffin of Palestinian national rights by their programs of annexation, cantonization, and imprisonment (by takeover of the Jordan Valley). These plans are carried out within the framework of another cynical fraud: "convergence" (Israeli "hitkansut"), portrayed in the U.S. as "withdrawal," in a remarkable public relations triumph. Also long- forgotten is the occupied Golan Heights, virtually annexed by Israel in violation of unanimous Security Council orders (but with tacit U.S. support).

TNA: I couldn't understand this Israeli arrogance. Do you?

Chomsky: The maxim of Thucydides again. And it is worth bearing in mind that Israel can go just as far as its protector in Washington permits and supports.

TNA: As an Iraqi, I understand that the ongoing war against Lebanon and Gaza is an essential part of the Bush scheme toward reshaping the region - I mean redrawing the borders drawn by the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement.

Chomsky: I doubt that most of them have even heard of Sykes-Picot. They have their own plans for the region. Primary among them is the traditional commitment to control the world's major energy resources. Those who do not fall in line can expect to be targets of subversion or aggression. That should not be surprising, at least to those familiar with the history of the past century (in fact well before).

TNA: How could we explain the role of the UN Security Council in destroying Lebanon and Gaza now, and Iraq before?

Chomsky: The Security Council acts within constraints set by the great powers, primarily the United States, by virtue of its enormous power. It can generally rely on Britain, particularly Blair's Britain, which is described sardonically in Britain's leading journal of international affairs as "the spear-carrier of the pax Americana." In the early post-war years, for obvious reasons, the UN was generally under U.S. domination, and was very popular among U.S. elites. By the mid-1960s, that was becoming less true, with decolonization and the recovery of the industrial societies from wartime devastation. Since that time, the U.S. has been far in the lead in vetoing Security Council resolutions on a wide range of issues, with Britain second, and none of the others even close. Correspondingly, elite support for the UN sharply declined in the U.S. - though, interestingly, popular support for the UN remains remarkably high, one of the many illustrations of an enormous gap between public opinion and public policy in the U.S. Over and above that crucial constraint, U.S. power allows it to shape those resolutions and actions that it is willing to accept. Other powers have their own cynical reasons for what they do, but their influence is naturally less - again, the maxim of Thucydides. Popular forces could make a substantial difference, and sometimes do, but until the prevailing "democratic deficit" is reduced, that effect will be limited.

TNA: Do you think that Iran and Syria were behind this war, as Bush said?

Chomsky: It is generally assumed that they at least gave Hezbollah authorization for the July 12 attack on the Israeli military forces at the border. However, many of the most serious analysts of Hezbollah, and of Iran, have expressed their conclusion that Hezbollah's actions are on its own initiative.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=10815

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ZNet | Terror War

"Fear! Fear!": Birth of the War on Terror
The Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism

by Brian Bogart; August 23, 2006

As soon as it came out that the apparent "new 9-11" airliner threat between the US and UK had been thwarted with the help of Pakistani Intelligence Services (ISI), it also became clear that it was a political tool for further legitimizing the lucrative "war on terror." After all, the ISI with Saudi financing and covert CIA training had created al-Qaeda in the first place,[1] to counter another "threat": Soviet communist "enslavement."

In 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt appointed a handful of Wall Street lawyers and investors to posts in his administration, including James Conant, James Forrestal, and Paul Nitze. Upon Roosevelt's death (and the coinciding fall of the Third Reich), this influential group began an attempt to fill the trade vacuum left in postwar Europe. While Europeans, Soviets, and many US officials would have preferred a neutralist trade environment, these few State Department officials in the final years of the 1940s sought US trade supremacy,[2] and thus set about creating a Soviet "communist threat" that ran counter to the CIA's own National Intelligence Estimates.[3]

By 1951, this group had formed the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), which by March of that year successfully motivated Congress and the public to buy into the "threat of communist enslavement" through fear-based rhetoric in the media, setting in motion the Cold War and a US economy driven by conflict.

As CPD members moved from administration to administration regardless of party affiliation, the Cold War policy of "containment militarism" ran strong through the late 1960s. In the wake of the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam, according to Richard Falk, a split between foreign policy elites emerged: Imperialists, who sought to remilitarize the US for global conquest still using the fear-inciting Soviet "communist threat"; and managers (Trilateralists), who attempted to rally the corporate spheres of Europe, East Asia, and the US to adopt a new era of interdependent international trade.

In 1976, this split led to the first CPD-free administration in the office of President Carter, though CPD quickly regrouped to kill détente, oust Carter, and reestablish itself in the Reagan administration, using "Soviet-backed international terrorism" as the new fear factor.

Around June of 1979, according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, "The United States launched a covert operation to bolster anticommunist guerrillas in Afghanistan at least six months before the 1979 Soviet invasion of that country. We did not push the Russians into invading, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would."[4]

The US had actively recruited Afghan warlords to form terrorist groups along the northern border, forcing the USSR to conduct a full-scale invasion in December 1979 to counter the US destabilization program. Among the methods used by the US in this program was the production and distribution of textbooks to schools (madrassas), promoting the war-values of murder and fanaticism, and fostering a generation steeped in violence.

Upon taking office in January 1981, Reagan outlined his new foreign policy in a speech by Alexander Haig, which boiled down to: "International terrorism will take the place of human rights in our concern."[5] Thus, the 1979 US destabilization program using terrorist groups to lure the Soviets into Afghanistan was used by the US to call the Soviet invasion "terrorism" and to point to that invasion as a model for the newly invented phenomenon of "Soviet-backed terrorism" around the world.

This cemented the CPD's original hegemonic goal of a fear-based structure. Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union and its "communist threat," this structure still prevails, requiring new external threats to maintain today's US-global trade supremacy. Absent the old communist threat, the degree of deceit necessary to sway public opinion increasingly grew, ultimately employing first strikes against Western assets both to satisfy this demand for public acceptance and acquiescence, and to serve as pretexts for the placement of US forces in geostrategic regions. The US currently has 750,000 troops in 135 countries.[6]

What we are left with is simply "international terrorism," a perpetual "threat" straight out of the plotline of the film V for Vendetta, and one that satisfies most corporate executives and serves to cover such inconvenient truths as climate change-imperialism's product and archenemy-the raging and disproportionate conflict in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, and the criminal invasion of Iraq (not to mention that this particular "thwarted 9-11" was a timely boost for the pro-war Senator Joe Lieberman).

Immediately after 9-11, Vladimir Putin promised support for George Bush's "war on terror," with the caveat that NATO cease its eastward push. Bush agreed, and just as immediately set about pushing NATO eastward. Professor Stephen Cohen of NYU points out that with the US today openly stating that Georgia and Ukraine are to become NATO partners-and with Putin having drawn the line with Ukraine, as Russia subsidizes much of Ukraine's economy-a new and very real tension has risen between the two largest possessors of nuclear arms. In fact, a US warship and 200 Marines were recently chased out of the Russian province of Crimea by a group of protesters.[7]

The heightened illusion of what Bush calls a "global war against Islamic fascists" also serves to back Putin into a corner, as Putin must be perceived as even-handed toward Russia's 25 million Muslims.

Most people would find all of this easy to digest had they the time to read two excellent books on US post-World War II and post-Cold War imperialism respectively: Peddlers of Crisis, by Jerry Sanders, and The War on Truth, by Nafeez Ahmed. Unfortunately, few will take the time to do so, and thus the rush of fear derived from such an event as just occurred means a near total success for maintaining the Conflict Incorporated status quo.

In other words, in the last 25 years the US created the threat and, through the resultant fear, the worldwide authoritarian means to pretend to deal with it while exercising the full scope of its imperial ambitions, with friends and puppets tagging along. Moreover, that the US (and apparently now the UK) knowingly harbored al-Qaeda cells throughout the 1990s and up to and beyond 9-11 lends a new perspective to President Bush's post-9-11 promise to "make no distinction between those who committed these terrible acts and those who harbor them."

Who gained? The ruling elite (the minority). Who lost? The majority, everywhere. Who were the "terrorists"? Patsies. The need for a new and real (fully allowed to unfold) 9-11 has been forestalled for the moment as one waits for the other shoe to drop: the linking of Syria and Iran and whomever else to the current "investigation."

Funny how Bush administration officials denied any foreknowledge that planes could be used as weapons after 9-11, particularly when the same officials are saying that they recognized this new plot because of its similarities to one carried out by Ramzi Yousef in 1995. What a fine spin.

Predictably, US news outlets called the 24 suspects "Pakistanis," failing to mention that most if not all are British citizens, born and raised.

"If ever there was a verification that there is a war on terror, this was it," said one reporter-and that is precisely what it was intended to be. And so much for the so-called "national threat level," which apparently stays low during months of intensely high threat levels and rises after a threat is "thwarted." Why not call it the "desired national fear level"?

The state of global affairs from the US perspective can be summed up in one statement from a lengthy essay, Constant Conflict, by Major Ralph Peters: "There will be no peace. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy, and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing."[8]

Where once they shouted "Hear! Hear!" toward progress in public chambers, one can almost catch the resonant echoes of some Western leaders happily whispering in private "Fear! Fear!" while their profits soar and their people tremble. Somebody should be checking market "put options" every time such "threats" are "foiled" or "succeed."

On ABC's Nightline, Monday, August 14, former hostage Jill Carroll recounted how the Iraqi insurgency was "like a family affair… what are you gonna do, arrest them all, kill them all?"

At that moment over on C-SPAN, President Bush, in the State Department's Treaty Room, was giving the answer:

Yes.

In the very next segment on C-SPAN, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu each delivered their own declarations of war in the Knesset. All three leaders, in the US and in Israel, pointed to Syria and Iran as the new front in the "war on terror."

This during a "cease-fire."

"America has never been guided by territorial ambitions," Bush declared. "The lesson of the past week is that there's still a war on terror going on and there's still individuals that would like to kill innocent Americans to achieve political objectives."

Let's examine this assertion. The reasons for the use of the long-standing instruments of fear and militarism in the cause of navigating the contours and undulations of the Cold War are revealed in the context of the post-Cold War "war on terror," which employs the same rhetoric and means of manipulation.

Such revelations are not limited to identical methods, but also spring forth from statements voiced by the manipulators themselves. A recent example came from the wife of Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, cofounder of a plethora of single-minded think tanks ranging from the second incarnation of the Committee on the Present Danger, Hudson Institute, Heritage Foundation, Coalition for a Democratic Majority, to the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

In a 2004 Los Angeles interview, Decter stated, "We're not in the Middle East to bring sweetness and light to the world. We're there to get something we and our friends in Europe depend on. Namely, oil."[9]

Statements like these surface after years, even decades, of manipulations that use very different and far more publicly palatable rhetoric to arrive at the tipping point when pretexts "to get" what manipulators want are achieved and exploited.

Though the precise reasons have somewhat varied between the end of World War II and today, they have in common the convergent interests of influential groups with likeminded groups outside the US, who together stood to gain from imperial ambitions pursued under the cloak of American projection of force as a response to the well-fashioned threats of "communist enslavement" and "international terrorism" respectively.

All of this is and has been about control of Central Asia and counteracting or inhibiting Russian and Chinese moves to control its resources. As Zbigniew Brzezinski observes, "For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia.... Eurasia is the globe's largest continent and is geopolitically axial. That puts a premium on maneuver and manipulation in order to prevent the emergence of a hostile coalition that could eventually seek to challenge America's primacy." Importantly, he adds, "Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multicultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat,"[10] a statement that should be understood in the context of one made earlier in his book: "The public supported America's engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor."[11]

Between July 2 and July 5, 1979, in Nafeez Ahmed's words from The War on Truth, citing Philip Paull's brilliant 1982 thesis on the organized reinvention of international terrorism,

"a group of powerful elites from various countries gathered at an international conference in Jerusalem to promote and exploit the idea of 'international terrorism.' The (Jerusalem) conference (on International Terrorism, or JCIT) established the ideological foundations for the 'war on terror.' JCIT's defining theme was that international terrorism constituted an organized political movement whose ultimate origin was in the Soviet Union. All terrorist groups were ultimately products of, and could be traced back to, this single source, which-according to the JCIT-provided financial, military, and logistical assistance to disparate terrorist movements around the globe. The mortal danger to Western security and democracy posed by the worldwide scope of this international terrorist movement required an appropriate worldwide anti-terrorism offensive, consisting of the mutual coordination of Western military intelligence services."[12]

The nonexistent target of this antiterrorist program leads us to ask what the real target was.

According to former State Department official Richard Barnet, the inflation of Soviet-sponsored 'international terrorism' was useful precisely for demonizing threats to the prevailing US-dominated capitalist economic system.[13]

It is crucial to identify the architects of the JCIT's terrorism project. Thanks to Philip Paull, we know they were, "present and former members of the Israeli and United States governments, new right politicians, high-ranking former United States and Israeli intelligence officers, the anti-détente, pro-Cold War group associated with the policies of Senator Henry M. Jackson-a group of neoconservative journalists and intellectuals-and reactionary British and French politicians and publicists." (The aforementioned anti-détente, pro-Cold War group associated with the policies of Senator Henry Jackson are well known to be Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliot Abrams, Douglas Feith, Robert Kagan, Charles Horner, and James Woolsey, to name a few.)[14]

Importantly, Paull's thesis includes the entire list of the JCIT participants, many of them intimately connected to the 1976 "Team B" assault on National Intelligence Estimates and to CPD. Participants from the United States at this conference, arranged by Benjamin Netanyahu and George Bush Sr., were neoconservative organizers Norman Podhoretz (CPD) and his wife Midge Decter (CPD), Senator John Danforth, Professor Joseph Bishop (CPD), General George Keegan (Team B), Ray Cline (CPD, former CIA deputy director who had assisted with Operation Northwoods, and director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies), Jack Kemp (CPD), Lane Kirkland (CPD's connection to the AFL-CIO), journalist George Will, nuclear physicist and staunch Cold War hawk Edward Teller (CPD), Richard Pipes (Team B, CPD), Bayard Rustin (CPD's connection to the A. Philip Randolph Institute), Professor Thomas Schelling (RAND), Ben Wattenberg (CPD), Claire Sterling, and Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson. Participants also came from Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, West Germany, Canada, Ireland, and the largest contingency was comprised of Israeli military, government, and intelligence service personnel. The bulk of the international representatives not from Israel and the US were media propagandists long connected to covert operations.[15]

In 1981, some of the conference attendees published books, including Claire Sterling's The Terror Network, and Benjamin Netanyahu's International Terrorism Challenge and Response: Proceedings of the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism, asserting the existence of this Soviet-backed threat.

For a decade or more, the United States government, like the governments of most Western powers, was largely silent on the question of Soviet complicity in international terrorism. Beginning in about 1979, and culminating in 1981 with the publication of Claire Sterling's book, The Terror Network, the evidence that the Soviet Union had provided substantial supplies and training to a broad spectrum of terrorist organizations became so compelling that it was difficult to deny it.[16]

In 1982, within just a few years of this conference, Philip Paull, the masters degree student at San Francisco State University, used his thesis to demonstrate that the JCIT's literature and source documentation was profoundly flawed, with authors citing each other and altering official documents. JCIT's assertion that there was a ten-fold increase in international terrorism between 1968 and 1978 had been deliberately fabricated, and contradicted CIA data showing a decline.

According to Ahmed: "It also routinely relied on techniques of blatant disinformation, misquoting and misrepresenting Western intelligence reports, as well as recycling government sponsored disinformation published in the mainstream media. Paull thus concludes that the 1979 JCIT was:

... a successful propaganda operation... the entire notion of 'international terrorism' as promoted by the Jerusalem Conference rests on a faulty, dishonest, and ultimately corrupt information base.... The issue of international terrorism has little to do with fact, or with any objective legal definition. The issue, as promoted by the JCIT and used by the Reagan administration, is an ideological and instrumental issue. It is the ideology, rather than the reality, that dominates US foreign policy today."

Nevertheless, Ahmed continues,

The new ideology of 'international terrorism' justified the Reagan administration's shift to 'a renewed interventionist foreign policy,' and legitimized a 'new alliance between right-wing dictatorships everywhere' and the government. Thus, the administration had moved to 'legitimate their politics of state terrorism and repression,' while also alleviating pressure for the reform of the intelligence community and opening the door for 'aggressive and sometimes illegal intelligence action,' in the course of fighting the international terrorist threat.[17]

In other words, this plan was an effort to fan Cold War flames and produce stronger intelligence community cover for continued and further imperial projections, which was the primary purpose of the US-USSR Cold War in the first place, as University of Chicago professor of history Bruce Cumings and East Asia expert and former CIA analyst Chalmers Johnson assert.

Following the departure of Soviet forces in 1989, Afghanistan experienced heavy conflict between various factions; among the most brutal of these was the Northern Alliance (whose portrayal in US media after 9-11 was anything but brutal). By the mid 1990s, several factions joined to form the Taliban movement, which captured Kabul and took power in 1996, reportedly orchestrated by Pakistani intelligence and the oil company Unocal,[18] and approved by the CIA, to provide "easier" oil pipeline negotiations and the greater chance of its successful construction through Afghanistan.

These negotiations occurred during the mid to late 1990s between the Taliban and current US Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad (then a Unocal advisor). The negotiations involved Condoleeza Rice (then an advisor for Chevron), current President of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai (then an advisor for Unocal), and Enron, which paid $750,000 for the pipeline survey using a grant funded by US taxpayers.[19] However, the negotiations deteriorated in the year prior to 9-11, leading to a major US invasion plan,[20] for which wargames were conducted in January 2001.[21] From February to May 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney gathered executives from the world's major energy corporations for his Energy Task Force meetings. Maps acquired by Judicial Watch show the carving up among these corporations of Iraq's oilfields and much of its other infrastructural assets.[22]

The US had at last put its reinvented (post-Cold War) international terrorist threat to work, as envisioned by the JCIT back in 1979, again, invented and then reinvented not to counter Soviet actions, but "useful for demonizing threats to the prevailing US-dominated capitalist economic system," knowingly paving the path to the "war on terror" well before it began.

The military agenda was perfect for those who longed for a new Pearl Harbor for economic gain at the hands of "international terrorists." The groundwork was complete; the evil mastermind created, and all that was needed to pursue the Unocal pipeline and myriad corporate ambitions was a legitimate excuse for taking control of the region. The CIA was still negotiating the pipeline deal in August 2001 with troops already positioned in surrounding states. Thus, the next step was a trigger, a pretext to galvanize public opinion.

The crux of Philip Paull's thesis is that the JCIT represented a precisely coordinated and globally oriented propaganda network for the purposes of selling pretexts for war. This is what the so-called "war on terror" really is, and Americans would not have accepted it without a massive media propaganda campaign accompanying an "attack" against the United States, or with the kind of enlightenment about such tyrannical behavior that a truly competent education system should provide.

Therefore, Bush's two statements, that "America has never been guided by territorial ambitions," and "The lesson of the past week is that there's still a war on terror going on and there's still individuals that would like to kill innocent Americans to achieve political objectives," are utterly false and tragically true respectively. One, America has always been guided by imperialist expansion and requires constant covers for so doing; and two, individuals do wish to kill innocent Americans to achieve political objectives-individuals in Bush's own administration and individuals who will continue to bribe officials in any administration to achieve the same objectives of lucrative power over the common people.

That said, people of the world everywhere, prepare yourselves for Bush's "freedom agenda," his "forward strategy of freedom," and the "unstoppable power of freedom."

Prepare yourselves, because "freedom" in Bushwellian and the language of American foreign policy means war: hot war, with Predators and bullets for all.


A human rights activist for 45 years, Brian Bogart is the first graduate student in Peace Studies from the University of Oregon. He can be reached at bdbogart@gmail.com

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[1] Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Truth (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2005), p. 10.

[2] Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis (Boston: South End Press, 1983), pp. 54-55. This trade or "dollar gap" was of deep concern to influential US defense industry executives, who were severely impacted by the postwar economic downturn in the period from 1946 to 1950, and many of whom had during this time lobbied top officials in Washington's military circles. A turnaround occurred in 1948 and profoundly so after the adoption of NSC-68's recommendations in December 1950. For further insight, see Frank Kofsky's Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948.

[3] Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency 2001; CIA's Analysis of the Soviet Union, 1947-1999: ORE 22-48, April 1948, Possibility of Direct Soviet Military Action During 1948; ORE 22-48, September 1948, (Addendum) Possibility of Direct Soviet Military Action During 1948-49; ORE 46-49, May 1949, Possibility of Direct Soviet Military Action During 1949.

[4] Cited by Agence France Press, 14 January 1998. See also Greg Guma, "Cracks in the Covert Iceberg," Toward Freedom, May 1998, p. 2; Leslie Fienberg, "Brzezinski brags, blows cover: US intervened in Afghanistan first," Workers World, 12 March 1998; Corroborated by former DCI Robert Gates in his memoirs, From the Shadows.

[5] "Excerpts from Haig's Remarks at First News Conference as Secretary of State," New York Times, 19 January 1981, p. 1. Haig's subsequent ouster from the administration as it took a far sharper turn to the right is equated (by Jerry Sanders in Peddlers of Crisis, p. 341) with George Kennan's ouster from the Truman administration, both of which have in common the rise in stature of Paul Nitze.

[6] Chalmers Johnson interview, Why We Fight, film directed by Eugene Jarecki (Sony Pictures Classics, 2005).

[7] Stephen Cohen, interview by Charlie Rose, Charlie Rose Show, Public Broadcasting System, "The New American Cold War," 28 June 2006.

[8] Ralph Peters, "Constant Conflict: a look behind the philosophy and practice of the US push for domination of the world's economy and culture." (US Army War College: Parameters, Summer 1997, pp. 4-14). At the time he wrote this article, Major Ralph Peters was assigned to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, where he was responsible for future warfare. Prior to becoming a Foreign Area Officer for Eurasia, he served exclusively at the tactical level. Peters is a graduate of the US Army Command and General Staff College, and holds a masters degree in international relations. Over the past several years, his professional and personal research travels have taken Peters to Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Ossetia, Abkhazia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Pakistan, Turkey, Burma, Laos, Thailand, and Mexico, as well as the countries of the Andean Ridge.

[9] Midge Decter interview, The Warren Olney Show, Los Angeles, 21 May 2004.

[10] Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Truth (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2005), pp. 338-339.

[11] Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), pp. 24-25. Some nations have regrettably studied and adopted methods or perspectives of defeated powers (e.g., Paul Nitze's fascination with Albert Speer's 1946 statement-in a personal interview with Nitze-asserting that Germany would have won World War II had it suffered a Pearl Harbor at the outset to galvanize the public; and France's use of torture in Vietnam and Algeria). Indeed, former Nazis and Japanese counterparts were employed by the US following the war for the purposes of espionage in the affairs of the Soviet Union and Korea and to extract a greater understanding of barbaric methods used in warfare.

[12] Ibid., p. 3.

[13] Ibid., p. 4.

[14] All are members of the Project for the New American Century and are current or former Bush administration officials or advisors. Charles Horner, along with other PNAC members Daniel Pipes, Stephen Hadley, Kenneth Adelman, and Peter Rodman, and CPD members Kenneth Jensen, John Moore, and Robert Turner-as well as Caspar Weinberger and many other pro-interventionists-created and/or serve or have served on the board of the United States Institute of Peace. (Hadley, Pipes, and Adelman are also CPD members.) This compelled me to design an independent peace studies program, as USIP funds the majority of peace and conflict studies graduate programs in the US, and sends out annual surveys to its recipients.

[15] Philip Paull, "International Terrorism": The Propaganda War, San Francisco State University, California, June 1982. Other JCIT participants cited by Paull (info circa 1982): Canada-David Barrett (former premier of British Columbia); France-Professor Annie Kriegel (University of Paris, Nanterre), Jacques Soustelle (correspondent for l'Aurore, former governor of Algeria 1955-6, charged with subversion for attempted OAS coup 1962, 1962-8 in exile, author of La longue marche d'Israel 1968); Ireland-Frank Cluskey (Irish Labour Party); Israel-Menachem Begin, Shimon Peres, Professor Mordechai Abir, Major-General Meir Amit (Knesset member and business executive, former chief Mossad 1963-8, director Al Aman military intelligence 1961-3), Mordechai Ben-Ari (president El-Al Airlines 1967-77, former commanding officer Haganah 1948, active in Alliyah "B" Austria and Eastern Europe 1948-50), Asher Ben-Natan (special advisor to Ministry of Defense 1976-8, ambassador to France 1970-5 and West Germany 1965-9, director general of Ministry of Defense 1965), Vladmir Bukovsky (author and Soviet émigré), Ambassador Walter Eytan, Ambassador Michael Comay, Major-General Shlomo Gazit (director Al Aman military intelligence 1973-9, director Department of Military Intelligence and Coordinator of Activities in Occupied Territories 1967-74, Intelligence Branch IDF 1964-7), General Chaim Herzog (business executive and lawyer, permanent representative to the United Nations 1975-8, first governor of the West Bank 1967, director Al Aman military intelligence 1948-50 1959-62, chief Security Department of Jewish Agency 1947-8, media expert), Yitzak Navon (president of Israel 1978-[83], former chair Knesset Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee, chairman World Zionist Council 1973-8), Gideon Rafael (ambassador to United Kingdom 1973-8, senior political advisor to Foreign Ministry 1972-3, former United Nations ambassador, intelligence service Foreign Ministry), Brigadier-General Meir Shamgar (justice of the Supreme Court 1975-[95], military advocate general and legal advisor to Ministry of Defense 1968-75), Major-General Aharon Yariv (director Center for Strategic Studies Tel-Aviv University 1977-?, minister of information 1974-5, special advisior to prime minister 1972-3, director Al Aman military intelligence); Italy-Manlio Brosio (former secretary general NATO), Piero Luigi Vigna (attorney general Florence); Netherlands-Harry Van Den Bergh (member of parliament), Edward Van Theyjn (deputy leader Socialist Party), Joop Den Uyl (prime minister 1973-77); United Kingdom-Lord Chalfont (Arthur Gwynne Jones, director IBM-UK 1973, foreign editor New Statesman 1970-1, minister of state Foreign Commonwealth Office 1964-70, British Army staff and intelligence appointments 1940-61, Russian expert), Brian R. Crozier (cofounder and director Institute for the Study of Conflict 1970-?, chairman Forum World Features 1965-74, editor Conflict Studies 1970-5, former publisher Economist Foreign Report, correspondent for National Review), Michael Elkins (BBC correspondent, Israel), Rt. Hon. Hugh Fraser (conservative MP, minister of defense for RAF 1964, Special Air Service World War II), Paul B. Johnson (journalist and broadcaster, New Statesman 1955-70, author of Enemies of Society 1977), Robert Moss (coauthor of The Spike 1980, former editor of confidential Economist Foreign Report, author of new book Death Beam […"this spy-vs-spy thriller reveals how an unknowing world reaches the brink of total war 'when the Soviets perfect an incomparably powerful death beam…and point it at the United States'"-PP], now with Heritage Foundation), Rt. Hon. Merlyn Rees (home secretary 1976-9, secretary of state for Northern Ireland 1974-6, undersecretary Ministry of Defense 1965-8); West Germany-Eric Blumenfeld (member of Bundestag), Hans Joseph Horchem (Hamburg Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution), Gerard Loewenthal (journalist). Use Google.com for comprehensive up-to-date information on all names in these notes and this paper.

[16] James Q. Wilson, "Thinking About Terrorism," July 1981.

[17] Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Truth (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2005), p. 4.

[18] Unocal headquarters are located in Sugarland, Texas; Tom DeLay's congressional base.

[19] Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Truth (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2005), p. 20.

[20] Paul Thompson, The Terror Timeline (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), pp. 119, 121-123.

[21] Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Truth (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2005), pp. 28-29.

[22] Oilfields and assets maps from Dick Cheney's 2001 Energy Task Force meetings, released by Judicial Watch, 17 July 2003. See also "The Struggle for Iraq: The New Looting," 28 May 2004 (and previous New York Times articles on the looting of Iraq).

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