Ronald Bleier: Link to article on Bush's Permanent War Agenda

The Bush-Cheney Regime and U.S. Middle East Policy: Radical Nihilists Driving Permanent War
By Ronald Bleier
http://desip.igc.org/bushperm_war_agenda.html



Please click on the link for a paper that I presented at a Conference on the Middle East that was held at LaGuardia Community College on May 10, 2007.



I argue that the Iraq war was not for oil, or for Empire and only partly for Israel. I contend that the Bush-Cheney clique is devoted to a radical nihilist agenda of permanent war and destruction for its own sake.



Such an ideology is to be distinguished from the banal goals of Empire building since its overall purpose, is not reconstruction but destruction, as in reducing the achievements of civilization to Year Zero, and making sure they stay that way. Here are some excerpts from my article on Empire.



Observing the current chaos and devastation that is Iraq today, we can suggest that the purpose of the war was not to extend the American imperium or aggrandize U.S. Empire. Quite the opposite.



The day before the Bush clique took office in January 2001, the US was the world’s only superpower, the strongest empire, the most powerful imperial nation in history. If Empire was all they wanted, they could have simply coasted for eight years, and they would have ended up perhaps even stronger than when they started. But the Bush-Cheney agenda was not passive and it had nothing to do with the painstaking work of carefully consolidating and adding to Empire. …



If the priority in Iraq were self-interest, wholesale destruction of the invaded country would have been be avoided. Self-interest imposes limits on the Imperial power.



Confusion about Empire

One reason for popular confusion about Empire may be that an Imperial power typically uses its military might or the threat of its military might to extend, consolidate or preserve its empire. However true Empire builders characteristically are judicious in their use of the military. They generally shun the reckless profligacy and sheer waste that Bush-Cheney have exhibited. If Empire is to be advanced, not the use of power, but the threat of the use of power is often most effective. Empire builders typically use the tools of diplomacy; they forge alliances, employing the military only as a last resort. Empire builders would also work to strengthen the military, not tear it down and destroy it. They would devote adequate resources for training and equipping their military, and would seek to provide adequate health care if only for the purpose of maintaining the morale of current and incoming troops.





That Bush and Cheney’s endless war agenda is about the destruction not the extension of Empire may seem counterintuitive. When we speak of the catastrophe that is Iraq today we are taught to use such terms as mistakes and miscalculations (as in “an endless series of miscalculations") even while there is a treasure trove of evidence in the public record and evidence of covert operations that reveal the Bush’s administration’s malice, malfeasance, forethought, and deep calculation. In my article I suggest that sometimes it is necessary to take seriously even counterintuitive notions.





Counterintuitive:

Needless to say it’s counterintuitive to seriously consider a 21st Century American administration devoted to the destruction of all meaning, knowledge and value, the destruction of worlds. Such an agenda signals the exceptionalism of Bush and Cheney. The evidence indicates that theirs is an ideological, not a practical or realist or self-serving agenda since endless war is ultimately suicidal. If it’s counterintuitive to view Bush and Cheney as determined on a path not for self interest but rather for destruction and endless war, that’s in part because most of us see elements of ourselves in our government. In order to survive and thrive we are properly trained from an early age to work on behalf of our self interest. Those who don’t tend to fall by the wayside and are typically weeded out from positions of power. However sometimes circumstances conspire, not least when the society is weakened by inner or outer challenges, to bring to the fore leaders who are very successful and at the same time utterly vicious and remorseless. One such 20th century leader who arose in just such circumstances was Pol Pot, the 1970s leader of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia who did everything he could to destroy his country and kill millions of his countrymen.



I devote the last part of my paper to evidence that the Bush administration is driving the Iraqi civil war and sectarian violence by means of training, equipping and giving marching orders to both sides of the Sunni/Shiite ethnic divide. The U.S. purpose, one can gather, is to provide the rationale to maintain an indefinite occupation of Iraq and to continue to destroy Iraqi and U.S. civil society, not to mention the rest of the world.



Ronald Bleier
June 2007
http://desip.igc.org/bushperm_war_agenda.html

NYT Editorial: Bush silences whistleblowers

New York Times Editorial
Be Kind to Our Whistle-Blower Friends
May 24, 2007
The most endangered species inside the Washington Beltway is the federal worker who dares to disclose waste and mismanagement by government superiors. The vulnerability of the workers is palpable lately at the Commerce Department, where the inspector general -- who is charged with protecting, not silencing, whistle-blowers -- was found taking vengeance on two subordinates who dared to question his expense accounts. The Washington Post reports an independent investigation concluded the inspector general, Johnnie Frazier, committed ''egregious violations'' by reassigning his top deputy and counsel to peripheral jobs after they refused to sign off on expensive trips and office renovations.

The abuse is denied by Mr. Frazier, but follows the pattern of the Bush administration's muting of internal critics. Whistle-blowers have been systematically denied, demeaned and demoted by political appointees flouting laws designed to protect workers with the courage to come forward. Mr. Frazier is one of four different inspectors general in the administration under investigation for allegedly subverting their responsibilities.

The House has approved an overdue remedy that would strengthen whistle-blower protection and the penalties for retaliators. The measure is particularly important for extending protection to national security workers so they feel freer to report misconduct and gaps in antiterrorism defenses. One provision would bar a familiar tactic of retaliation -- the revocation of a complaining worker's security clearance.

The White House, of course, is threatening a veto, claiming the measure weakens national security. Tell that to Coleen Rowley, who quit the F.B.I. after documenting the agency's failure to follow up on field office warnings before the 9/11 attacks. In truth, it is vital for national security that the Senate vote final approval of the measure with the same veto-proof support shown by the House. Whistle-blowers honor government service. It is time to strike back at their tormentors.

Guardian/New York Times El Baradei's remarks re Cheney's crazies raises US ire

My current guess is that Cheney recognizes that now is not the time to attack Iran: it's simply too crazy as El Baradei says, and would have just too many obvious (domestic) repercussions, not least might be $100 or $200 oil. For the moment they're going to have to be satisfied with the destruction that they are causing in Iraq and Lebanon and Palestine and the tension they are provoking with Syria and Russia. It's interesting that Rice has gone to the trouble of highlighting El Baradei's remarks. I wonder if it's her way of fighting back against Cheney.
--Ronald
http://desip.igc.org

Chris wrote to Guardian Letters::
2nd June,2007

Dear Sir,

When Mohamed ElBaradei speaks "against the views of ``new crazies who say 'let's go and bomb Iran.''' , he speaks for most of the world. We all know whom he is talking about. We have all read the lunatic Cheney comments and the threats from the insane NeoCons who drove US/UK into the war in Iraq which has already cost nearly a million lives.

Condoleezza Rice speaks for herself and these neoCons and the utterly discredited Bush administration. She might claim to live in her daydream world but the rest of us do not, except perhaps for a small coterie living in or around Downing Street.
--Chris


Excerpts:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-6678102,00.html

Rice: U.S. Not Preparing for War Vs Iran

Saturday June 2, 2007 2:46 AM


AP Photo MF807, FS809, DO814

By ANNE GEARAN

AP Diplomatic Writer

MADRID, Spain (AP) - The U.S. is not preparing for war against Iran and Vice President Dick Cheney supports that policy, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says, taking a swipe at a U.N. official who says he's worried about ``crazies'' who want to start bombing.

``The president of the United States has made very clear what our policy is. That policy is supported by all the members of his Cabinet and by the vice president of the United States,'' Rice said Friday.

``The president has made clear that we are on a diplomatic course,'' she said in regard to U.S. opposition to Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Rice, in Spain at the close of a European visit, was asked about the comments of the chief of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency. Mohamed ElBaradei was quoted by the BBC as warning against the views of ``new crazies who say 'let's go and bomb Iran.'''

Cheney is frequently the administration's most hawkish voice on Iran, but Rice said she did not know to whom ElBaradei referred. The United States does not rule out military action but says there is no plan or intention to attack Tehran.

Cheney has not publicly advocated an assault on Iran, but he used the deck of an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf last month to warn Tehran that Washington would prevent the Islamic republic from dominating the Middle East.

Also stepping up pressure on Iran was President Bush, who demanded Friday that Iran ``immediately and unconditionally'' release four Iranian-Americans detained for alleged espionage and provide information about a former FBI agent missing in the country.

``I strongly condemn their detention at the hands of Iranian authorities,'' the president said in a written statement.

Rice was clearly annoyed by ElBaradei's remarks, which were part of an interview the International Atomic Energy Agency head gave for a documentary. The remarks were posted Friday on the BBC Web site.


[snip]
***

New York Times
Excerpts

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/02/world/middleeast/02diplo.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

June 2, 2007
Rice Plays Down Hawkish Talk About Iran
By HELENE COOPER
MADRID, June 1 — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sought Friday to minimize any sense of division within the Bush administration over Iran after the head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency delivered a pointed warning against what he called the “new crazies” pushing for military action against Tehran.

“The president of the United States has made it clear that we are on a course that is a diplomatic course,” Ms. Rice said here. “That policy is supported by all of the members of the cabinet, and by the vice president of the United States.”

Ms. Rice’s assurance came as senior officials at the State Department were expressing fury over reports that members of Vice President Dick Cheney’s staff have told others that Mr. Cheney believes the diplomatic track with Iran is pointless, and is looking for ways to persuade Mr. Bush to confront Iran militarily.

In a news conference on Friday, Ms. Rice maintained that Mr. Cheney supported her strategy of trying to deal with Iran’s nuclear ambitions through diplomacy. A senior Bush administration official separately denied that there was a deep divide between Ms. Rice and Mr. Cheney on Iran.

But, the official said, “The vice president is not necessarily responsible for every single thing that comes out of the mouth of every single member of his staff.” The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about any divide within the administration.

The reports about hawkish statements by members of Mr. Cheney’s staff first surfaced last week in The Washington Note, an influential blog put out by Steve Clemons of the left-leaning New America Foundation. The reports have alarmed European diplomats, some of whom fear that the struggle over Iran’s nuclear program may evolve into a decision by the Bush administration to resort to force against Iran.

In interviews, people who have spoken with Mr. Cheney’s staff have confirmed the broad outlines of the reports, and said that some of the hawkish statements to outsiders had been made by David Wurmser, a former Pentagon official who is now the principal deputy assistant to Mr. Cheney for national security affairs. The accounts were provided by people who expressed alarm about the statements, but refused to be quoted by name.

“The vice president and his staff fully support the president’s position on Iran” a spokeswoman for Mr. Cheney, Megan McGinn, said.

During an interview with BBC Radio broadcast Friday, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said he did not want to see another war like the one still raging in Iraq four years after the American-led invasion there.

“You do not want to give additional argument to new crazies who say, ‘Let’s go and bomb Iran,’ ” Dr. ElBaradei said. “I wake up every morning and see 100 Iraqis, innocent civilians, are dying.”

Dr. ElBaradei, who has urged Western powers to consider allowing Iran limited uranium enrichment on its own territory, is already facing criticism from Bush administration officials who say he should stick to monitoring Iran’s nuclear program and leave diplomatic policy to the six countries that have banded together to confront Tehran’s ambitions.

But several Western European officials echoed his concern, and said privately that they were worried that Mr. Cheney’s “red line” — the point at which he believed Iran was on the brink of acquiring a nuclear weapon and a military strike was necessary — may be coming soon. “We fully believe that Foggy Bottom is committed to the diplomatic track,” one European official said Wednesday, referring the State Department. “But there’s some concern about the vice president’s office.”

Dr. ElBaradei told the BBC that one could not “bomb knowledge.” Asked who the “new crazies” were, he said, “Those who have extreme views and say the only solution is to impose our will by force.”

[snip]

Wayne Madsen: US poised to Control Northern Lebanon Airrbase

US poised to take control of Kleiaat airbase!!

http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/

May 21, 2007 -- Last month, WMR reported, "Our Lebanese sources now report that a NATO base is to be built soon on the grounds of the largely abandoned airbase at Klieaat in northern Lebanon. The base will serve as the headquarters of a NATO rapid deployment force, helicopter squadrons, and Special Forces units. The base will provide training for the Lebanese army and security forces. The base was pushed by elements in the office of the US Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Bush administration had recently warned Lebanon about the presence of "Al Qaeda" teams in northern Lebanon."

Just as if acting on cue from the Bush White House, a new "terrorist group" called Fatah al-Islam commenced operations in the vicinity of the Kleiaat airbase during the evening of May 20. Fath al-Islam laid road traps to prevent Lebanese army units from Tripoli from reaching the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, the scene of fighting between the Lebanese army and Fatah al-Islam that resulted in the killing and wounding of tens of Lebanese troops.

Fatah al-Islam was reportedly started with funding and other support from the CIA and Lebanese Phalangist forces to act as a counterweight to Hezbollah.

In reality, Fatah al-Islam is designed to give the Bush administration, NATO, and the Fouad Siniora government a pretext for granting the U.S. military and NATO access to northern Lebanon and the Kleiaat airbase. Fath al-Islam's activities are already being blamed on "Al Qaeda" units operating in the north of the country.

Xymphora & Nimmo re Shin Bet and Entebbe? + Jeff and BBC article

xymphora wrote:
Entebbe: Israeli rescue from Israeli terrorist attack
Friday, June 01, 2007
http://xymphora.blogspot.com/
Is nothing sacred? A newly released file from the UK contains the claim that the terrorist hijacking which led to the dramatic rescue by Israeli commandos at Entebbe was itself was a Zionist false flag operation involving the Israeli Secret Service, the Shin Bet, and a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine double agent, working for Israel, named Wadi` Haddad. The file contains the following:

“The operation was designed to torpedo the PLO's standing in France and to prevent what they see as a growing rapprochement between the PLO and the Americans.”

Thirty-some odd years later, we still fall for the same old tricks (see also here).

***

See also Kurt Nimmo on the same subject noting among much else that this story hasn't yet made it to the mainstream media here. --RB

Jeff wrote:

While it is not unlikely that the Israeli had agents in the PFLP as well as in other Palestinian organizations and most certainly in Fatah, the appearance of this document in the British archives does not necessarily mean it is a fact. The reason given for the action, that there was a "growing rapprochement between the PLO and the Americans" is highly questionable, given that 1976 was presidential election year and the US was forbidden, thanks to pressure from the lobby, to have any contacts with the PLO. That the story has been released to the public through the British National Archives, however, is welcomed, because it should stimulate a closer examination into the circumstances of the hijack and rescue than has thus far been undertaken, and it well may be that the allegations contained in this report are correct.-JB

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/6710289.stm
Israel hijack role 'was queried'
By Dan Parkinson
BBC News

It has been seen as a daring raid by crack Israeli troops to rescue dozens of their countrymen held at the mercy of hijackers.

But newly released documents contain a claim that the 1976 rescue of hostages, kidnapped on an Air France flight and held in Entebbe in Uganda, was not all it seemed.

A UK government file on the crisis, released from the National Archives, contains a claim that Israel itself was behind the hijacking.

An unnamed contact told a British diplomat in Paris that the Israeli Secret Service, the Shin Bet, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) collaborated to seize the plane.

The flight was seized shortly after it took off from Athens and was flown to Entebbe, where 98 people were held hostage, many of them Israeli citizens.

Ugandans killed

Israeli commandos brought the crisis to an end, storming the airport and overpowering the seven hijackers and about 80 Ugandan soldiers in a 36-minute battle.

Two Israeli civilian hostages died in the shooting, and a third died later in a Nairobi hospital. One officer commanding the raiders was killed by shooting from the airport tower.

Ugandan President Idi Amin claimed the troops killed 20 Ugandan servicemen as well as all the hijackers.

The hijackers demands included a list of countries that should release Palestinians or others fighting for the Palestinian cause.

In the document, written on 30 June 1976 when the crisis was still unresolved, DH Colvin of the Paris Embassy writes of his source: "According to his information, the hijack was the work of the PFLP, with help from the Israeli Secret Service, the Shin Beit.

"The operation was designed to torpedo the PLO's standing in France and to prevent what they see as a growing rapprochement between the PLO and the Americans."

He adds: "My contact said the PFLP had attracted all sorts of wild elements, some of whom had been planted by the Israelis."

The documents also reveal that the British government debated whether or not to praise the Israeli raid after its completion.

It was decided in the days after the raid that it was not clear whether the Israeli offensive was justified under international law.

One document in the file reads: "The Israelis have been critical of the fact that the prime minister did not send a personal message of congratulations to Mr Rabin and that our public statement fell short of endorsement of the Israeli action at Entebbe."

The file also contains correspondence from UK citizens to the government expressing concern that the government had not expressed support for the Israelis.

'Collusion'

One letter reads: "I am writing to find out our policy towards terrorism. I find it deplorable that there was not a statement made congratulating Israel on the successful rescue."

But in a document dated 9 July an official cautions against such a statement because there is likely to be "no internationally agreed view about the legality of the Israeli action".

The document says the legality of it would depend on whether or not the Ugandans had helped the kidnappers.

In a draft document included in the file an official says it appears Idi Amin did collude with the hijackers.

It reads: "On balance it seems that there was a culpable degree of collusion between President Amin and the hijackers, and that the president's attitude made it much easier for the hijackers to persist in their demands."

The file does not make it clear how seriously the government took the claim that Israel also may have aided the hijackers.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/6710289.stm


http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=883

Uruknet: UN: The Salvador Option in Lebanon

This is a long article, but worthwhile for those interested in getting the real story behind the turmoil and chaos and suffering that is going on in Lebanon. It's no accident that this is going on while the Bush administration is in power and people like Eliot Abrams are driving events. --RB

Chris wrote:

An important article casting enormous doubt on the efforts to condemn Syria for the Hariri assassination. It seems exactly the same people are seeking to blame Syria for the Fatah Al-Islam problem.

Chris

The Salvador Option in Beirut
Trish Schuh, U.N. OBSERVER

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=33331

Excerpt:
According to United Press International, Stratfor's report on the Hariri crime concluded that the Lebanese assassinations were "so sophisticated that few in the world could have done it." Burton told UPI that only five nations had such advanced resources- Israel, US, Britain, France and Russia. "This type of technology is only available to government agencies." Burton then asked: "Suppose that these bombings were 'merely collateral'? That the true target in the plot is the Syrian regime itself? If Damascus were being framed, who then would be the likely suspect?"

Ronald Bleier: Bush's Permanent War Agenda

The Bush-Cheney Regime and U.S. Middle East Policy: Radical Nihilists Driving Permanent War

By Ronald Bleier
May 2007



“What I’m describing to the American people is this war on terror is going to take awhile, and Iraq is just a part of it.
- President George W. Bush, Interview with NPR/ Juan Williams, 1.29.07


When we look at the situation in Iraq today we see the destruction of a country and the unimaginable tragedy and suffering of tens of millions of peoples, only a tiny portion of which is reported in the mainstream media. By way of acknowledging some of the nightmare that is Iraq today, I’d like to quote a portion of an email sent to me by a colleague in April 2007. My friend had just attended a lecture at MIT given by an Iraqi academic now teaching in England. According to my informant, women in Iraq today,

fear going into labor at night because they are terrified they and their husbands will be killed on the way to hospital. EVERYONE fears going outside on the commonest of errands -- so much so that when people leave the house they say goodbye for the last time, since each time may well be the last. Women are afraid to leave their houses and many if not most are simply house-bound. Schools and universities are non-functioning. University professors among this lecturer's circle of friends have taught two or three classes in the past YEAR because criminal gangs/the factions have targeted professors as well as non-university professionals (doctors for instance) and have been killing them wantonly. Electrical grids and water supplies are still ravaged, with, for instance, no air conditioning in heats frequently at 120 degrees Fahrenheit (this affects women, children and family life in ways one can only imagine); queues for everything, including of course petrol - queues that give warring factions and gangs further killing opportunity.

By some estimates, excess Iraqi deaths since March 2003 exceed half a million. More than 2 million Iraqis have been forced to flee the country, the bulk to Jordan and Syria, threatening their stability. Hundreds if not more of the cream of Iraq’s professional and academic society, a bulwark against fascism have been victims of targeted assassination, similar in purpose and manner to Israeli targeted assassinations of Palestinian activists. This crime wave has forced thousands of their professional colleagues to join the massive refugee outflow.

There is also an enormous loss of blood and treasure to the coalition forces. One thing the losses on both sides have in common is the apparent disinterest and pitilessness of the Bush-Cheney clique to the enormous human and cultural and civic tragedy and suffering on all sides.

Several questions arise, chief among them: how long can this devastation continue? Due to a confluence of forces, not least consideration of Israeli interests, there is no consensus in Congress to put a brake on the war momentum that the Bush administration has achieved.

Perhaps the most useful question is still: Why did we go to war in the first place? As a springboard to my argument I’d like to use a fairly conventional and economical statement of the reasons for the Iraq war by Ghali Hassan, writing for the Global Research website. In his article, “Iraq’s Death Squads: An Instrument of the Occupation,” he begins, as he says, by stating the obvious.

The U.S. did not invade Iraq to establish “democracy” and to “free Iraqis”. The U.S. invaded and destroyed Iraq in order to humiliate and divide Muslims – Arabs in particular – protect Israel’s Zionist expansion and control Iraq’s natural wealth.

The contradiction between Israel’s goals and bringing democracy to the Middle East was also mentioned by NYT op ed columnist Robert Wright. He asks

What if the Iraqi people, once empowered by democracy, decided they didn’t want their country to be a U.S. aircraft carrier? … After all, America is bound to use bases on behalf of itself and key allies, and one key ally is Israel. What were the chances this would sit well with an Arab Muslim nation…

It’s not for oil
A more controversial point raised by Ghali Hassan is the one about controlling Iraq’s natural resources. One of the mantras of the anti-war left is that the invasion of Iraq has been and still is a war for oil. But is this correct? As a number of observers have pointed out, there’s no evidence that oil was the Bush’s administration’s priority, nor that the oil companies were pushing for this war. Even Noam Chomsky, a major proponent of the war for oil theory has lately noticed that it seems that the war has, if anything, put Iraq’s oil reserves in jeopardy. If the real goal of U.S. policy was to ensure a reliable and cheap oil supply they would have done everything in their power to keep Saddam Hussein in place. Bush and Cheney would not have embarked upon a policy that predictably would destabilize the region.

But why would the security conscious Bush administration embark on an illegal, wildly unpopular war if they knew in advance that it was going to destabilize a key region of the world? That they knew in advance is hardly open to question. Cheney himself as Secretary of Defense in the George H. W. Bush administration in 1991 argued that for the U.S. get involved in regime change in Iraq “strikes me as a classic definition of a quagmire."

As we move well into the fifth year of the Iraq war, a few brave voices are daring to suggest that the catastrophe that is now Iraq was not a result of a colossal mistake but is rather the result of conscious, deliberate intention. Nicholas Kristof’s remarkable op ed column, entitled “Iran’s Operative in the White House,” where he wondered whether Bush administration policies which seemed to empower Iran’s most hard-line elements were driven by “malice” or “ineptitude.”

It may be helpful to consider whether the drive for Empire and the broad nature of what we mean by Imperialism, accurately describe the Bush administration’s wars against Afghanistan and Iraq and the war many believe they still hope to initiate against Iran.

Observing the current chaos and devastation that is Iraq today, we can suggest that the purpose of the war was not to extend the American imperium or aggrandize U.S. Empire. Quite the opposite.

The day before the Bush clique took office in January 2001, the US was the world’s only superpower, the strongest empire, the most powerful imperial nation in history. If Empire was all they wanted, they could have simply coasted for eight years, and they would have ended up perhaps even stronger than when they started. But the Bush-Cheney agenda was not passive and it had nothing to do with the painstaking work of carefully consolidating and adding to Empire.

The concern that the Bush administration is not about growing Empire, but about weakening it, perhaps fatally, was expressed by none other than President Carter’s National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the foremost spokespersons for American Empire. In a mid March 2007 interview on NPR, Brzezinski warned that the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq might spiral into an utterly destructive war with Iran. Indeed, in February 2007, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee he surprisingly wondered out loud whether the Bush administration might deliberately provoke war with Iran by staging some sort of incident or provocation. Even more to our present purpose, he went on in the question and answer portion of his testimony to assert that the U.S.’s Iran policy has worked against its own interests. Brzezinski spoke of the “exceedingly hostile” U.S. attitude toward Iran


which has gelled together a kind of residual national sentiment, particularly in support of the nuclear program. And I think our policy has unintentionally- I hope unintentionally; maybe it was devilishly clever, but I think unintentionally helped Ahmadinejad consolidate himself in power…
(emphasis added)

Why would Brzezinski broadly hint that the Bush administration might be intentionally shoring up support for the most hard line elements in Iran? Is he not suggesting that approach would ease their path to a disastrous war? Such a theory would also fit well with their otherwise arbitrary decision to include Iran as part of the Axis of Evil in 2002.

Had Bush and Cheney wanted to extend the U.S. Empire, they would have acted in a manner calculated to enhance their advantages and enrich their coffers. They would have acted for their perceived benefit and self-interest. If the priority in Iraq was self-interest, wholesale destruction of the invaded country would have been be avoided. Self-interest imposes limits on the Imperial power.

Confusion about Empire
One reason for popular confusion about Empire may be that an Imperial power typically uses its military might or the threat of its military might to extend, consolidate or preserve its empire. However true Empire builders characteristically are judicious in their use of the military. They generally shun the reckless profligacy and sheer waste that Bush-Cheney have exhibited. If Empire is to be advanced, not the use of power, but the threat of the use of power is often most effective. Empire builders typically use the tools of diplomacy; they forge alliances, employing the military only as a last resort. Empire builders would also work to strengthen the military, not tear it down and destroy it. They would devote adequate resources for training and equipping their military, and would seek to provide adequate health care if only for the purpose of maintaining the morale of current and incoming troops. Their privatization scheme for the military speaks volumes about their underlying motivations. Jeremy Schahill, the author of a recently published book on Blackwater, The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army (Nation Books) has asserted that the Bush administration has proven to be the most anti-military administration in history.

Stephen Smith/ The first days of the occupation
At the very beginning of the occupation of Iraq the Bush administration gave evidence that their intention was to destroy the country when they allowed or encouraged the ruin of Iraq’s cultural heritage.

Six months after the occupation, Stephen Smith, writing for electronicIraq.net had sufficient perspective to point to this crucial issue and to suggest an appropriate theory.

Heavy suspicion remains that failure of the US to protect heritage sites, more than negligence, was a deliberate oversight designed as a kind of cultural 'shock and awe' that would devastate a sense of shared culture among Iraqis, leaving a blank page for the imprint of the US occupying force and the reconstruction to follow. If proven, this would be cultural genocide not witnessed during this civilization and indeed rarely experienced over the 7,000-year time span of these lost collections.

Smith quotes senior Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk who asks the appropriate questions.

"But for Iraq, this is Year Zero; with the destruction of the antiquities in the Museum of Archaeology and the burning of the National Archives and then the Koranic library, the cultural identity of Iraq is being erased. Why? Who set these fires? For what insane purpose is this heritage being destroyed?"

Both Smith and Fisk have suggested answers to their own questions. Yes, allowing the trashing of Iraq’s cultural heritage was a deliberate oversight (if that’s the right word) intended to reduce the country to a blank page, to year Zero. And Fisk also gets it right by suggesting that the purpose, to destroy Iraqi civil life, destroy its sense of cultural heritage was perhaps clinically insane in the sense that it cannot have any constructive purpose.

A war for Israel

Writing at the very beginning of the invasion in March 2003, conservative journalist Patrick Buchanan pretty much identified the purposes of the war.

"We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America's interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords. We charge them with deliberately damaging U.S. relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people's right to a homeland of their own. We charge that they have alienated friends and allies all over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris, and bellicosity.

If there is anything missing from Buchanan’s argument it would be the deeper intention behind the war policy of the Bush administration. That intention, much easier to see today than in March 2003, is to bring Iraq back to Year Zero, to rub it out as a political and civil entity.

Activist and journalist Naomi Klein went to Baghdad in 2004 and published an article in Harper’s Magazine (September 2004) entitled “Baghdad Year Zero.” Her subtitle is: “Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia.” She attributes to one faction in the Bush administration the belief that “Iraq was so contaminated that it needed to be rubbed out and remade from scratch.” She was right about the first part: the only thing the neocons – or the ones making policy in Vice President Cheney’s office -- wanted to do to Iraq was to destroy it. They have been called radical nationalists. But nationalists also have as their priority the self-interest of their nation or their tribe. I see the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld clique rather as radical nihilists, bent on permanent war and destruction for its own sake. According to Wikipedia, one of the definitions of Nihilism is the irrational desire to destroy meaning, knowledge and value and it embraces suicide and mass murder. Note the distinction between radical nationalists as they have been called and radical nihilists. Nationalists, for good or ill generally have an agenda of self aggrandizement or self interest, not self destruction.

We’re in a better position now to answer the question: why did Bush and Cheney invade Iraq. They did it in pursuit of an endless war agenda. They used the terror events of 9/11 as their rationale to go to war against Afghanistan. From there they braved the tough uphill slog in the face of prodigious popular opposition to get to Baghdad. From Baghdad they may have assumed it would be downhill to Teheran, which as Hillary, and Obama and Edwards have assured us, is not off the table.

Counterintuitive
Needless to say it’s counterintuitive to seriously consider a 21st Century American administration devoted to the destruction of all meaning, knowledge and value, the destruction of worlds. Such an agenda signals the exceptionalism of Bush and Cheney. The evidence indicates that theirs is an ideological, not a practical or realist or self-serving agenda since endless war is ultimately suicidal. If it’s counterintuitive to view Bush and Cheney as determined on a path not for self interest but rather for destruction and endless war, that’s in part because most of us see elements of ourselves in our government. In order to survive and thrive we are properly trained from an early age to work on behalf of our self interest. Those who don’t tend to fall by the wayside and are typically weeded out from positions of power. However sometimes circumstances conspire, not least when the society is weakened by inner or outer challenges, to bring to the fore leaders who are very successful and at the same time utterly vicious and remorseless. One such 20th century leader who arose in just such circumstances was Pol Pot, the 1970s leader of the Kymer Rouge in Cambodia who did everything he could to destroy his country and kill millions of his countrymen.

Endless war – A public declaration
The case for a Bush-Cheney agenda for destruction should begin with their public statements, and their openly proclaimed policies. If we examine every single major and minor domestic and international policy initiative of the Bush administration from Iraq on down, we may find that they fit the pattern of deliberate destruction.

The Bush administration made no secret of their desire for endless war from the first moments after the terror events of 911. On message and unified almost as if they knew of the attacks in advance, they insisted that we were in a war on terror. The remedy, they urged could not merely be a police action: this was war. As they consolidated a revolutionary, aggressive program of war, with no little assist from the anthrax attacks, the Bush-Cheney team were finally comfortable for the first time since they took office. Now they had something that they had sorely lacked earlier: an agenda. And a heady, action packed agenda it turned out to be: the Patriot act, two wars, enemy combatants, torture, indefinite detention, Guantanamo, suspension of habeas corpus, warrantless wiretapping, the evisceration of the positive role of virtually all government agencies, illegal massive surveillance of mail, phone and email traffic; construction of concentration camps, a doubling of their inherited military and secret agencies budgets, the hyper trashing of health, safety and environmental regulations, the destruction of the economy through their targeted tax cuts and corporate giveaways– what did I leave out?. Note that their entire agenda has been one of destruction of civil life everywhere, leaving only a police state to enforce their revolutionary and widely unpopular policies.

There is an abundance of circumstantial evidence indicating that the violence and the inability to pursue normal civil and political life that characterizes Iraq in 2007 is a result of deliberate planning, not the result of miscalculations or misjudgments. We can begin with two high profile actions taken by Paul Bremer that dramatically turned the invasion into a tragic occupation. .

The context of Bremer’s still unsatisfactorily explained actions is Bush’s early cashiering of General Jay Garner who was the first official chosen to lead the post-war reconstruction efforts in Iraq. Garner began his tenure in March 2003. He hoped to implement early elections, 90 days after the fall of Baghdad with a view to an independent Iraq. Garner said: “I don’t’ think [Iraqis] need to go by the U.S. plan…. it’s their country… their oil.”

Less than two months later, in May 2003, Paul Bremer who was selected to head the Coalition Provisional Authority replaced Garner. Bremer immediately scotched the plan for early elections, and by the time he left, about 13 months later, he did just about as much damage to Iraq as someone in his position could manage.

Less than a month after he took office, Bremer issued Order Number 2, in effect disbanding the Iraqi army and putting 400,000 Iraqi soldiers out of work. This immediately created a large pool of disgruntled armed youths for the insurgency.

Secondly, he fired thousands of schoolteachers and removed Ba’ath party members from top government positions. The effect was to rob the country of its most experienced people who could have played a key role if reconstruction was the goal.

Covert Death Squads
We move now to the covert aspect of the Bush-Cheney plan for Iraq. One particularly telling pattern of actions is evident from the title of Ghali Hassan’s paper, “Iraq’s Death Squads: An Instrument of Occupation.” If such a pattern of activity could be demonstrated it would go far toward subverting the mainstream notion that victory means putting an end to sectarian violence since it would be evident that the coalition forces are covertly driving the violence, largely through their sponsorship and direction of both Shia and Sunni death squads.

Gali Hassan summarizes the situation when he writes that the aim of the campaign of assassinations and the activity of the death squads “ is to create a climate of terror and incite civil war among Iraqis in order to justify the Occupation of Iraq and the fraudulent “war on terror.”

A.K. Gupta
A. K. Gupta is a freelance writer and editor of the Indypendent in NYC has written several articles for Z Magazine on the militias. In “Iraq: Militias and Civil War: “The Pentagon is using militias in sectarian battles,” (Z Magazine, December 2006) he explains that the rise of the militias is a disincentive to the Iraqi national police and army forces. He explains that by one means or another Iraq’s national forces are starved of resources and allowed to deteriorate to the point of uselessness. Instead of creating a process insuring accountability and transparency, and instead of seeking out strong and dedicated Iraqi leaders, the U.S. has overseen a system where corruption has become an integral part of the process. In the end recruits aren’t paid for months, training isn’t adequate. As a result recruits leave in droves and those who stay are unreliable and have little or no loyalty to a national force.

Gupta explains that the militias were organized and overseen by the U.S. military to step into the vacuum left by the national forces. They were originally deployed against the Sunni resistance but have since been involved in Shia against Shia violence, particularly U.S. backed Shia militias fighting against the nationalist al-Sadr forces.

Gupta and others also document the involvement of U.S. personnel who have played key roles. One of these is Steven Casteel, is identified by Gupta as the “federal overseer of the effort” to train the Iraqi police. A veteran of the Latin America’s dirty wars, Casteel’s name, Gupta writes,

keeps surfacing in reference to militias. While Casteel was referred to as the “senior advisor” to the Iraqi Ministry of Interior, this was just a euphemism. Like other Americans serving as “senior advisors” to Iraqi ministries under the Coalition Provisional Authority, Casteel was actually running the ministry until the CPA went out of business on June 28, 2004.

Max Fuller
Max Fuller, a researcher who writes regularly for the Global Research website has also been tracking evidence of U.S. involvement and direction of Iraqi militia and death squad activity since at least 2005. In “For Iraq The Salvador Option Becomes Reality, “ and in a follow up article the same year, “Crying Wolf: Media Disinformation and Death Squads in Occupied Iraq,” , he presents evidence that the bitter spiral of sectarian tit for tat Shiite Sunni death squad style killings that is making civil life impossible for most Iraqis is an organized campaign driven by the occupation forces.

He notes for example the case of Yasser Salihee, a journalist for Knight Ridder who investigated the steady stream of extra judicial killings in 2004 and 2005. Salihee describes what happens to the death squad victims.

“Characteristically the victims’ hands are tied or handcuffed behind their backs and they have been blindfolded. In most cases they also appear to have been whipped with a cord, subjected to electric shocks or beaten with a blunt object and shot to death often with single bullets to the head.” Investigating the bodies, Salihee found that eyewitnesses claimed many of the victims were seized by men wearing commando uniforms in white Toyota Land Cruisers with police markings.” Three days after Salihee’s last article was published on June 27, 2005, he was fatally shot by a U.S. sniper at a routine checkpoint.” Max Fuller concluded.

What is possible is that both sides of the apparent sectarian violence are run as part of a huge CIA-lead intelligence operation designed to split Iraq at the seams. I tentatively suggest that the intelligence apparatus at the Interior Ministry is contriving attacks on Sunnis and that British and US special forces in conjunction with the intelligence apparatus at the Iraqi Defence Ministry are fabricating insurgent bombings of Shias.

In his most recent article on the subject, published in March 2007, Fuller’s subtitle is “Proof of US orchestration of Death Squads Killings in Iraq, He cites two survivors of the notorious Jadiriyah detention facility which was infamously raided by U.S. troops in November of 2005 when they discovered some 170 detainees suffering from “horrific conditions, many of them clearly the victims of obscene tortures.”

Despite the wide publicity of this incident, amazingly the prisoners were returned to Iraqi custody, proof Fuller thinks of U.S. involvement in the death squads. One victim was distinguished Professor of Pedagogy, Professor Samaree [first name not given] whose condition was so bad when the Americans found him, that he and a dozen others were taken to a local hospital. Afterwards Professor Samaree, one of whose sons resides in the States, like the others was to be returned to prison, but he managed to escape. He subsequently fled to Europe where he is claiming political asylum.

Another Jadiriyah survivor, Abbas Z. Abid, was arrested in August 2005 and spent 14 months in prison before he was finally released in October 2006, having undergone imprisonment and torture eleven months after the U.S. intervention. Fuller claims that such accounts demonstrate U.S. complicity.

These stories, and relevant accompanying information, published by the Brussels Tribunal were offered, Fuller writes, to a range of mainstream media organizations such as the New Yorker, the New Statesman, the Independent, The Big Issue and Z Magazine, all of whom rejected it. Fuller concludes that the Jadiriyah story was “simply off the agenda.” One can understand why the right wing and the mainstream center would find them off-putting. But why would a radical left organ like Z Magazine also find such evidence discomforting. Perhaps because it would raise difficult questions about the U.S. mission in Iraq.

Conclusion
A less blinkered view of the dynamics of the violence in Iraq would make it easier to respond to critics who argue that if we withdraw, chaos if not genocide will follow. The nugget of truth in such a response is that so much depends on how we leave, assuming that we can muster the political will to do what the American people and the international community demand. If there were good will on the American side it’s not beyond the abilities of diplomats to arrange for example for a serious international conference which might deal with the most critical issues. Needless to say, no positive action can take place with a U.S. presence in the country. Total withdrawal will always be the first requirement.

The harder question is what do we do about Israel’s needs. Leaving Iraq to the Iraqis, while it could not for the foreseeable future pose a security threat to Israel by any stretch of the imagination, would be perceived as a defeat for them, for the power of the Israel Lobby and for the right wing and the neocons.

Withdrawal would not be such a terrible conundrum if Israel’s interest in dominating the Middle East were not at stake. Since Israel has such power to press its interest within and without of the U.S. government, it’s difficult to see now how we extricate ourselves, not to mention how we begin to put things right in Iraq. One thing we can do is look clearly at the evidence exposing the source of much of the violence.

The End






NOTES

1.See Lancet’s October 11, 2006 survey which calculated excess deaths went though June 2006.
2. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=HAS20061207&articleId=4071
3. “The Neocon Paradox” (4.24.07)
4. March 2007
5. Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army by Jeremy Scahill - Feb 2007)Interview broadcast on CNN-Books TV, March 31, 2007.
6. Stephen Smith, electronicIraq.net, Electronic Iraq, September 4, 2003.
7. Patrick J. Buchanan, “Whose War?, March 24, 2003.
June 2005
8. November 2005
9. “Silence of the Lambs? Proof of US orchestration of Death Squads Killings in Iraq,”
10. Max Fuller Global Research, March 14, 2007.
11. available online

Michael Parenti: Conspiracy Phobia on the Left

From Dirty Truths by Michael Parenti
(1996, City Lights Books)
(Pages 172 - 191)

THE JFK ASSASSINATION II:
CONSPIRACY PHOBIA
ON THE LEFT
http://www.questionsquestions.net/documents2/conspiracyphobia.html

Almost as an article of faith, some individuals believe that conspiracies are either kooky fantasies or unimportant aberrations. To be sure, wacko conspiracy theories do exist. There are people who believe that the United States has been invaded by a secret United Nations army equipped with black helicopters, or that the country is secretly controlled by Jews or gays or feminists or black nationalists or communists or extraterrestrial aliens. But it does not logically follow that all conspiracies are imaginary.

Conspiracy is a legitimate concept in law: the collusion of two or more people pursuing illegal means to effect some illegal or immoral end. People go to jail for committing conspiratorial acts. Conspiracies are a matter of public record, and some are of real political significance. The Watergate break-in was a conspiracy, as was the Watergate cover-up, which led to Nixon's downfall. Iran-contra was a conspiracy of immense scope, much of it still uncovered. The savings and loan scandal was described by the Justice Department as "a thousand conspiracies of fraud, theft, and bribery," the greatest financial crime in history.

Conspiracy or Coincidence?

Often the term "conspiracy" is applied dismissively whenever one suggests that people who occupy positions of political and economic power are consciously dedicated to advancing their elite interests. Even when they openly profess their designs, there are those who deny that intent is involved. In 1994, the officers of the Federal Reserve announced they would pursue monetary policies designed to maintain a high level of unemployment in order to safeguard against "overheating" the economy. Like any creditor class, they preferred a deflationary course. When an acquaintance of mine mentioned this to friends, he was greeted skeptically, "Do you think the Fed bankers are deliberately trying to keep people unemployed?" In fact, not only did he think it, it was announced on the financial pages of the press. Still, his friends assumed he was imagining a conspiracy because he ascribed self-interested collusion to powerful people.

At a World Affairs Council meeting in San Francisco, I remarked to a participant that U.S. leaders were pushing hard for the reinstatement of capitalism in the former communist countries. He said, "Do you really think they carry it to that level of conscious intent?" I pointed out it was not a conjecture on my part. They have repeatedly announced their commitment to seeing that "free-market reforms" are introduced in Eastern Europe. Their economic aid is channeled almost exclusively into the private sector. The same policy holds for the monies intended for other countries. Thus, as of the end of 1995, "more than $4.5 million U.S. aid to Haiti has been put on hold because the Aristide government has failed to make progress on a program to privatize state-owned companies" (New York Times 11/25/95).

Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: "Do you actually think there's a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?" For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together - on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot - though they call it "planning" and "strategizing" - and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than political and corporate elites and their hired specialists. To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.

Yet there are individuals who ask with patronizing, incredulous smiles, do you really think that the people at the top have secret agendas, are aware of their larger interests, and talk to each other about them? To which I respond, why would they not? This is not to say that every corporate and political elite is actively dedicated to working for the higher circles of power and property. Nor are they infallible or always correct in their assessments and tactics or always immediately aware of how their interests are being affected by new situations. But they are more attuned and more capable of advancing their vast interests than most other social groups.

The alternative is to believe that the powerful and the privileged are somnambulists, who move about oblivious to questions of power and privilege; that they always tell us the truth and have nothing to hide even when they hide so much; that although most of us ordinary people might consciously try to pursue our own interests, wealthy elites do not; that when those at the top employ force and violence around the world it is only for the laudable reasons they profess; that when they arm, train, and finance covert actions in numerous countries, and then fail to acknowledge their role in such deeds, it is because of oversight or forgetfulness or perhaps modesty; and that it is merely a coincidence how the policies of the national security state so consistently serve the interests of the transnational corporations and the capital-accumulation system throughout the world.

Kennedy and the Left Critics

In the winter of 1991-92 Oliver Stone's film JFK revived popular interest in the question of President John Kennedy's assassination. As noted in part I of this article, the mainstream media launched a protracted barrage of invective against the movie. Conservatives and liberals closed ranks to tell the public there was no conspiracy to murder the president for such things do not happen in the United States.

Unfortunately, some writers normally identified as on the Left have rejected any suggestion that conspiracy occurred. While the rightists and centrists were concerned about preserving the legitimacy of existing institutions and keeping people from seeing the gangster nature of the state, the leftists had different concerns, though it was not always clear what these were.

Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, and others challenge the notion that Kennedy was assassinated for intending to withdraw from Vietnam or for threatening to undo the CIA or end the cold war. Such things could not have led to his downfall, they argue, because Kennedy was a cold warrior, pro-CIA, and wanted a military withdrawal from Vietnam only with victory. Chomsky claims that the change of administration that came with JFK's assassination had no appreciable effect on policy. In fact, the massive ground war ordered by Johnson and the saturation bombings of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos ordered by Nixon represented a dramatic departure from Kennedy's policy. On some occasions, Chomsky says he refuses to speculate: "As for what JFK might have done [had he lived], I have nothing to say." Other times he goes on to speculate that Kennedy would not have "reacted differently to changing situations than his close advisers" and "would have persisted in his commitment to strengthen and enhance the status of the CIA" (Z Magazine, 10/92 and 1/93).

The evidence we have indicates that Kennedy observed Cambodian neutrality and negotiated a cease-fire and a coalition government in Laos, which the CIA refused to honor. We also know that the surviving Kennedy, Robert, broke with the Johnson administration over Vietnam and publicly stated that his brother's administration had committed serious mistakes. Robert moved with the tide of opinion, evolving into a Senate dove and then a peace candidate for the presidency, before he too was murdered. The two brothers worked closely together and were usually of like mind. While this does not provide reason enough to conclude that John Kennedy would have undergone a transition comparable to Robert's, it still might give us pause before asserting that JFK was destined to follow in the direction taken by the Johnson and Nixon administrations.

In the midst of this controversy, Chomsky wrote a whole book arguing that JFK had no intention of withdrawing from Vietnam without victory. Actually, Kennedy said different things at different times, sometimes maintaining that we could not simply abandon Vietnam, other times that it ultimately would be up to the Vietnamese to fight their own war.1

One of Kennedy's closest aides, Kenneth O'Donnell, wrote that the president planned to withdraw from Vietnam after the 1964 elections. According to Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, who headed military support for the clandestine operations of the CIA, Kennedy dictated "the rich parts" of NSAM 263, calling for the withdrawal not only of all U.S. troops but all Americans, meaning CIA officers and agents too. Prouty reflects that the president thereby signed "his own death warrant." The Army newspaper Stars and Stripes ran a headline: "President Says - All Americans Out by 1965." According to Prouty: "The Pentagon was outraged. JFK was a curse word in the corridors."

Concentrating on the question of withdrawal, Chomsky says nothing about the president's unwillingness to escalate into a ground war. On that crucial point all Chomsky offers is a speculation ascribed to Roger Hilsman that Kennedy might well have introduced U.S. ground troops in South Vietnam. In fact, the same Hilsman, who served as Kennedy's Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, the officer responsible for Vietnam, noted in a long letter to the New York Times (1/20/92) that in 1963 "President Kennedy was determined not to let Vietnam become an American war - that is, he was determined not to send U.S. combat troops (as opposed to advisers) to fight in Vietnam nor to bomb North Vietnam." Other Kennedy aides such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and General Maxwell Taylor made the same point. Taylor said, "The last thing he [Kennedy] wanted was to put in our ground forces . . . I don't recall anyone who was strongly against [the recommendation], except one man and that was the President." Kennedy opposed the kind of escalation embarked upon soon after his death by Lyndon Johnson, who increased U.S. troops in Vietnam from 17,000 to approximately 250,000 and committed them to an all-out ground war.

Kennedy and the CIA

Chomsky argues that the CIA would have had no grounds for wanting to kill JFK, because he was a dedicated counterinsurgent cold warrior. Chomsky arrives at this conclusion by assuming that the CIA had the same reading of events in 1963 that he has today. But entrenched power elites are notorious for not seeing the world the way left analysts do. To accept Chomsky's assumptions we would need a different body of data from that which he and others offer, data that focuses not on the Kennedy administration's interventionist pronouncements and policies but on the more private sentiments that festered in intelligence circles and related places in 1963.

To offer a parallel: We might be of the opinion that the New Deal did relatively little for working people and that Franklin Roosevelt actually was a tool of the very interests he publicly denounced as "economic royalists." From this we might conclude that the plutocrats had much reason to support FDR's attempts to save big business from itself. But most plutocrats dammed "that man in the White House" as a class traitor. To determine why, you would have to look at how they perceived the New Deal in those days, not at how we think it should be evaluated today.

In fact, President Kennedy was not someone the CIA could tolerate, and the feeling was mutual. JFK told one of his top officials that he wanted "to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds" (New York Times, 4/25/66). He closed the armed CIA camps that were readying for a second Bay of Pigs invasion and took a number of other steps designed to bring the Agency under control. He fired its most powerful and insubordinate leaders, Director Allen Dulles, Deputy Director Charles Cabell, and Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell. He tried to reduce its powers and jurisdiction and set strict limits as to its future actions, and he appointed a high-level committee to investigate the CIA's past misdeeds.

In 1963, CIA officials, Pentagon brass, anti-Castro Cuban �migr�s, and assorted other right-wingers, including FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, hated JFK and did not believe he could be trusted with the nation's future. They referred to him as "that delinquent in the White House." Roger Craig records the comments of numerous Dallas police officers who wanted to see Kennedy done away with. Several years ago, on a San Francisco talk show on station KGO, I heard a listener call in as follows: "this is the first time I'm saying this. I worked for Army intelligence. In 1963 I was in Japan, and the accepted word around then was that Kennedy would be killed because he was messing with the intelligence community. When word came of his death, all I could hear was delighted comments like 'We got the bastard'."

In his book First Hand Knowledge, CIA operative Robert Morrow noted the hatred felt by CIA officers regarding Kennedy's "betrayal" in not sending the U.S. military into the Bay of Pigs fiasco. One high-level CIA Cuban �migr�, Eladio del Valle, told Morrow less than two weeks before the assassination: "I found out about it last night. Kennedy's going to get it in Dallas."2 Morrow also notes that CIA director Richard Helms, "knew that someone in the Agency was involved" in the Kennedy assassination, "either directly or indirectly, in the act itself - someone who would be in a high and sensitive position . . . Helms did cover up any CIA involvement in the presidential assassination."

Several years after JFK's murder, President Johnson told White House aide Marvin Watson that he "was convinced that there was a plot in connection with the assassination" and that the CIA had something to do with it (Washington Post, 12/13/77). And Robert Kennedy repeatedly made known his suspicions that the CIA had a hand in the murder of his brother.

JFK's enemies in the CIA, the Pentagon, and elsewhere fixed on his refusal to provide air coverage for the Bay of Pigs, his unwillingness to go into Indochina with massive ground forces, his no-invasion guarantee to Krushchev on Cuba, his overtures for a rapprochement with Castro and professed willingness to tolerate countries with different economic systems in the Western hemisphere, his atmospheric-test-ban treaty with Moscow, his American University speech calling for reexamination of U.S. cold war attitudes toward the Soviet Union, his antitrust suit against General Electric, his curtailing of the oil-depletion allowance, his fight with U.S. Steel over price increases, his challenge to the Federal Reserve Board's multibillion-dollar monopoly control of the nation's currency,3 his warm reception at labor conventions, and his call for racial equality. These things may not have been enough for some on the Left but they were far too much for many on the Right.

Left Confusions and the Warren Commission

Erwin Knoll, erstwhile editor of the Progressive, was anther left critic who expressed hostility toward the conspiracy thesis and Oliver Stone's movie in particular. Knoll admitted he had no idea who killed Kennedy, but this did not keep him from asserting that Stone's JFK was "manipulative" and provided false answers. If Knoll had no idea who killed Kennedy, how could he conclude that the film was false?

Knoll said Stone's movie was "a melange of fact and fiction" (Progressive, 3/92). To be sure, some of the dramatization was fictionalized - but regarding the core events relating to Clay Shaw's perjury, eyewitness reports at Dealey Plaza, the behavior of U.S. law officers, and other suspicious happenings, the movie remained faithful to the facts unearthed by serious investigators.

In a show of flexibility, Knoll allows that "the Warren Commission did a hasty, slipshod job" of investigation. Here too he only reveals his ignorance. In fact, the Commission sat for fifty-one long sessions over a period of several months, much longer than most major investigations. It compiled twenty-six volumes of testimony and evidence. It had the investigative resources of the FBI and CIA at its disposal, along with its own professional team. Far from being hasty and slipshod, it painstakingly crafted theories that moved toward a foreordained conclusion. From the beginning, it asked only a limited set of questions that seemed to assume Oswald's guilt as the lone assassin.

The Warren Commission set up six investigative panels to look into such things as Oswald's background, his activities in past years and on the day of the assassination, Jack Ruby's background, and his activities on the day he killed Oswald. As Mark Lane notes, there was a crying need for a seventh panel, one that would try to discover who killed President Kennedy. The commission never saw the need for that undertaking, having already made up its mind.

While supposedly dedicated to bringing the truth to light, the Warren Commission operated in secrecy. The minutes of its meetings were classified top secret, and hundred of thousands of documents and other evidence were sealed for seventy-five years. The Commission failed to call witnesses who heard and saw people shooting from behind the fence on the grassy knoll. It falsely recorded the testimony of certain witnesses, as they were to complain later on, and reinterpreted the testimony of others. All this took careful effort. A "hasty and slipshod" investigation would show some randomness in its errors. But the Commission's distortions consistently moved in the same direction in pursuit of a prefigured hypothesis.

Erwin Knoll talks disparagingly of the gullible U.S. public and says he "despises" Oliver Stone for playing on that gullibility. In fact, the U.S. public has been anything but gullible. It has not swallowed the official explanation the way some of the left critics have. Surveys show that 78 percent of the public say they believe there was a conspiracy. Both Cockburn in the Nation and Chomsky in Z Magazine dismiss this finding by noting that over 70 percent of the people also believe in miracles. But the fact that people might be wrong about one thing does not mean they are wrong about everything. Chomsky and Cockburn are themselves evidence of that.

In any case, the comparison is between two opposite things. Chomsky and Cockburn are comparing the public's gullibility about miracles with its unwillingness to be gullible about the official line that has been fed to them for thirty years. If anyone is gullible it is Alexander Cockburn who devoted extra column space in the Nation to support the Warren Commission's tattered theory about a magic bullet that could hit both Kennedy and Connolley while changing direction in mid-air and remaining in pristine condition.

Chomsky says that it is a "curious fact that no trace of the wide-ranging conspiracy appears in the internal record, and nothing has leaked" and "credible direct evidence is lacking" (Z Magazine, 1/93, and letter to me, 12/15/92). But why would participants in a conspiracy of this magnitude risk everything by maintaining an "internal record" (whatever that is) about the actual murder? Why would they risk their lives by going public? Many of the participants would know only a small part of the picture. But all of them would have a keen sense of the immensely powerful and sinister forces they would be up against were they to become too talkative. In fact, a good number of those who agreed to cooperate with investigators met untimely deaths. Finally, what credible direct evidence was ever offered to prove that Oswald was the assassin?

Chomsky is able to maintain his criticism that no credible evidence has come to light only by remaining determinedly unacquainted with the mountain of evidence that has been uncovered. There has even been a decision in a U.S. court of law, Hunt vs. Liberty Lobby, in which a jury found that President Kennedy had indeed been murdered by a conspiracy involving, in part, CIA operatives E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis, and FBI informant Jack Ruby.4

Nixon advisor H.R. Haldeman admits in his memoir: "After Kennedy was killed, the CIA launched a fantastic coverup." And "In a chilling parallel to their coverup at Watergate, the CIA literally erased any connection between Kennedy's assassination and the CIA."

Indeed, if there was no conspiracy, why so much secrecy and so much cover-up? If Oswald did it, what is there to hide and why do the CIA and FBI still resist a full undoctored disclosure of the hundreds of thousands of pertinent documents? Would they not be eager to reveal everything and thereby put to rest doubts about Oswald's guilt and suspicions about their own culpability?

The remarkable thing about Erwin Knoll, Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, and others on the Left who attack the Kennedy conspiracy findings is they remain invincibly ignorant of the critical investigations that have been carried out. I have repeatedly pointed this out in exchanges with them and they never deny it. They have not read any of the many studies by independent researchers who implicate the CIA in a conspiracy to kill the president and in the even more protracted and extensive conspiracy to cover up the murder. But this does not prevent them from dismissing the conspiracy charge in the most general and unsubstantiated terms.

Let's Hear It for Structuralism

When pressed on the matter, left critics like Cockburn and Chomsky allow that some conspiracies do exist but they usually are of minor importance, a distraction from the real problems of institutional and structural power. A structural analysis, as I understand it, maintains that events are determined by the larger configurations of power and interest and not by the whims of happenstance or the connivance of a few incidental political actors. There is no denying that larger structural trends impose limits on policy and exert strong pressures on leaders. But this does not mean that all important policy is predetermined. Short of betraying fundamental class interests, different leaders can pursue different courses, the effects of which are not inconsequential to the lives of millions of people. Thus, it was not foreordained that the B-52 carpet bombing of Cambodia and Laos conducted by Nixon would have happened if Kennedy, or even Johnson or Humphrey, had been president. If left critics think these things make no difference in the long run, they better not tell that to the millions of Indochinese who grieve for their lost ones and for their own shattered lives.

It is an either-or world for those on the Left who harbor an aversion for any kind of conspiracy investigation: either you are a structuralist in your approach to politics or a "conspiracist" who reduces historical developments to the machinations of secret cabals, thereby causing us to lose sight of the larger systemic forces. As Chomsky notes: "However unpleasant and difficult it may be, there is no escape from the need to confront the reality of institutions and the policies and actions they largely shape." (Z Magazine, 10/92).

I trust that one of the institutions he has in mind is the CIA. In most of its operations, the CIA is by definition a conspiracy, using covert actions and secret plans, many of which are of the most unsavory kind. What are covert operations if not conspiracies? At the same time, the CIA is an institution, a structural part of the national security state. In sum, the agency is an institutionalized conspiracy.

As I pointed out in published exchanges with Cockburn and Chomsky (neither of whom responded to the argument), conspiracy and structure are not mutually exclusive dynamics. A structural analysis that a priori rules out conspiracy runs the risk of not looking at the whole picture. Conspiracies are a component of the national security political system, not deviations from it. Ruling elites use both conspiratorial covert actions and overtly legitimating procedures at home and abroad. They finance everything from electoral campaigns and publishing houses to mobsters and death squads. They utilize every conceivable stratagem, including killing one of their own if they perceive him to be a barrier to their larger agenda of making the world safe for those who own it.

The conspiracy findings in regard to the JFK assassination, which the movie JFK brought before a mass audience, made many people realize what kind of a gangster state we have in this country and what it does around the world. In investigating the JFK conspiracy, researchers are not looking for an "escape" from something "unpleasant and difficult," as Chomsky would have it, rather they are raising grave questions about the nature of state power in what is supposed to be a democracy.

A structuralist position should not discount the role of human agency in history. Institutions are not self-generating reified forces. The "great continuities of corporate and class interest" (Cockburn's phrase) are not disembodied things that just happen of their own accord. Neither empires nor national security institutions come into existence in a fit of absent-mindedness. They are actualized not only by broad conditional causes but by the conscious efforts of live people. Evidence for this can be found in the very existence of a national security state whose conscious function is to recreate the conditions of politico-economic hegemony.

Having spent much of my life writing books that utilize a structuralist approach, I find it ironic to hear about the importance of structuralism from those who themselves do little or no structural analysis of the U.S. political system and show little theoretical grasp of the structural approach. Aside from a few Marxist journals, one finds little systemic or structural analysis in left periodicals including ones that carry Chomsky and Cockburn. Most of these publications focus on particular issues and events - most of which usually are of far lesser magnitude than the Kennedy assassination.

Left publications have given much attention to conspiracies such as Watergate, the FBI Cointelpro, Iran-Contra, Iraq-gate, CIA drugs-for-guns trade, BCCI, and savings-and-loans scandals. It is never explained why these conspiracies are important while the FJK assassination is not. Chip Berlet repeatedly denounces conspiracy investigations while himself spending a good deal of time investigating Lyndon LaRouche's fraudulent financial dealings, conspiracies for which LaRouche went to prison. Berlet never explains why the LaRouche conspiracy is a subject worthy of investigation but not the JFK conspiracy.

G. William Domhoff points out: "If 'conspiracy' means that these [ruling class] men are aware of their interests, know each other personally, meet together privately and off the record, and try to hammer out a consensus on how to anticipate and react to events and issues, then there is some conspiring that goes on in CFR [the Council for Foreign Relations], not to mention the Committee for Economic Development, the Business Council, the National Security Council, and the Central Intelligence Agency." After providing this useful description of institutional conspiracy, Domhoff then conjures up a caricature that often clouds the issue: "We all have a tremendous tendency to want to get caught up in believing that there's some secret evil cause for all of the obvious ills of the world." Conspiracy theories "encourage a belief that if we get rid of a few bad people, everything will be well in the world."

To this simplistic notion Peter Dale Scott responds: "I believe that a true understanding of the Kennedy assassination will lead not to a few bad people but to the institutional and parapolitical arrangements which constitute the way we are systematically governed." In sum, national security state conspiracies are components of our political structure, not deviations from it.

Why Care About JFK?

The left critics argue that people who are concerned about the JFK assassination are romanticizing Kennedy and squandering valuable energy. Chomsky claims that the Nazi-like appeals of rightist propagandists have a counterpart on the Left: "It's the conspiracy business. Hang around California, for example, and the left has just been torn to shreds because they see CIA conspiracies . . . secret governments [behind] the Kennedy assassination. This kind of stuff has just wiped out a large part of the left" (Against the Current 56, 1993). Chomsky offers no evidence to support this bizarre statement.

The left critics fear that people will be distracted or misled into thinking well of Kennedy. Cockburn argues that Kennedy was nothing more than a servant of the corporate class, so who cares how he was killed (Nation 3/9/92 and 5/18/92). The left critics' hatred of Kennedy clouds their judgment about the politcal significance of his murder. They mistake the low political value of the victim with the high political importance of the assassination, its implications for democracy, and the way it exposes the gangster nature of the state.

In 1894 Captain Alfred Dreyfus was a conservative militarist. Clemenceau once conjectured that if the man's name had not been Dreyfus, he would have been an anti-Dreyfusard. Does that mean that the political struggle waged around l'affaire Dreyfus was a waste of time? The issue quickly became larger than Dreyfus, drawn between Right and Left, between those who stood with the army and the anti-Semites and those who stood with the republic and justice.

Likewise Benigno Aquino, a member of the privileged class in the Philippines, promised no great structural changes, being even more conservative than Kennedy. Does this mean the Filipino people should have dismissed the conspiracy that led to his assassination as an event of no great moment, an internal ruling-class affair? Instead, they used it as ammunition to expose the hated Marcos regime.

Archbishop Romero of El Salvador was a member of the Salvadoran aristocracy. He could not have risen to the top of the church hierarchy otherwise. But after he began voicing critical remarks about the war and concerned comments about the poor, he was assassinated. If he had not been murdered, I doubt that Salvadoran history would have been much different. Does this mean that solidarity groups in this country and El Salvador should not have tried to make his murder an issue that revealed the homicidal gangster nature of the Salvadoran state? (I posed these questions to Chomsky in an exchange in Z Magazine, but in his response, he did not address them.)

Instead of seizing the opportunity, some left writers condescendingly ascribe a host of emotional needs to those who are concerned about the assassination cover-up. According to Max Holland, a scribe who seems to be on special assignment to repudiate the JFK conspiracy: "The nation is gripped by a myth . . . divorced from reality," and "Americans refuse to accept their own history." In Z Magazine (10/92) Chomsky argued that "at times of general malaise and social breakdown, it is not uncommon for millenarian movements to arise." He saw two such movements in 1992: the response to Ross Perot and what he called the "Kennedy revival" or "Camelot revival." Though recognizing that the audiences differ, he lumps them together as "the JFK-Perot enthusiasms." Public interest in the JFK assassination, he says, stems from a "Camelot yearning" and the "yearning for a lost Messiah."

I, for one, witnessed evidence of a Perot movement involving millions of people but I saw no evidence of a Kennedy revival, certainly no millenarian longing for Camelot or a "lost Messiah." However, there has been a revived interest in the Kennedy assassination, which is something else. Throughout the debate, Chomsky repeatedly assumes that those who have been troubled about the assassination must be admirers of Kennedy. In fact, some are, but many are not. Kennedy was killed in 1963; people who today are in their teens, twenties, thirties, and forties - most Americans - were not old enough to have developed a political attachment to him.

The left critics psychologize about our illusions, our false dreams, our longings for Messiahs and father figures, or inability to face unpleasant realities the way they can. They deliver patronizing admonitions about our "conspiracy captivation" and "Camelot yearnings." They urge us not to escape into fantasy. They are the cognoscenti who guide us and out-left us on the JFK assassination, a subject about which they know next to nothing and whose significance they have been unable to grasp. Having never read the investigative literature, they dismiss the investigators as irrelevant or irrational. To cloak their own position with intellectual respectability, they fall back on an unpracticed structuralism.

It is neither "Kennedy worship" nor "Camelot yearnings" that motivates our inquiry, but a desire to fight back against manipulative and malignant institutions so that we might begin to develop a system of accountable rule worthy of the name democracy.





1 Kennedy's intent to withdraw is documented in the Gravel edition of the Pentagon Papers ("Phased Withdrawal of U.S. Forces, 1962-1964," vol. 2, pp. 160-200). It refers to "the Accelerated Model Plan . . .. for a rapid phase out of the bulk of U.S. military personnel" and notes that the administration was "serious about limiting the U.S. commitment and throwing the burden onto the South Vietnamese themselves." But "all the planning for phase-out . . . was either ignored or caught up in the new thinking of January to March 1964" (p. 163) - the new thinking that came after JFK was killed and Johnson became president.

2 Del Valle's name came up the day after JFK's assassination when Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade announced at a press conference that Oswald was a member of del Valle's anti-communist "Free Cuba Committee." Wade was quickly contradicted from the audience by Jack Ruby, who claimed that Oswald was a member of the leftish Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Del Valle, who was one of several people that New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison sought out in connection with the JFK assassination, was killed the same day that Dave Ferrie, another suspect met a suspicious death. When found in Miami, del Valle's body showed evidence of having been tortured, bludgeoned, and shot.

3 The bankers of the Federal Reserve System print paper money, then lend it to the government at an interest. Kennedy signed an executive order issuing over $4 billion in currency notes through the U.S. Treasury, thus bypassing the Fed's bankers and the hundreds of millions of dollars in interest that would normally be paid out to them. These "United States Notes" were quickly withdrawn after JFK's assassination.

4 See Mark Lane, Plausible Denial; Was the CIA Involved in the Assassination of JFK? (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991). For testimony of another participant see Robert Morrow: First Hand Knowledge: How I Participated in the CIA-Mafia Murder of President Kennedy (New York: S.P.I. Books, 1992).

Michael Worsham (1997) Cockburn, Chomsky (and I.F. Stone) Pass on JFK Conspiracy

JFK CONSPIRACY: THE INTELLECTUAL DISHONESTY AND COWARDICE OF ALEXANDER COCKBURN AND NOAM CHOMSKY
by Michael Worsham
When JFK came out in 1991, I felt Oliver Stone hit the nail on the head. During 1992, some progressive/liberal writers, including Alexander Cockburn of The Nation, criticized Stone, and said there was no conspiracy, and even if there was, it did not matter because Kennedy, despite his great personal charisma, dynamic speaking, etc., was underneath, the same as all the other power-hungry and money-loving capitalists.

I asked Alexander Cockburn about JFK when he visited TAMU in 1992 (with the help of Danny Yeager and The Touchstone), but he seemed bored talking about Kennedy. As I sat and chatted with Mr. Cockburn along with the rest of the Touchstone gang (as it existed back in 1992) around a table at a local College Station restaurant, I was extremely puzzled and just could not understand how someone as educated, well-read, and perceptive about so many national and world affairs as Mr. Cockburn could really believe a complete load of crap like the Warren Commission report. It just did not make sense.

I learned a little later that Noam Chomsky also took the position that there was no conspiracy. Most of what I know about Mr. Chomsky is what I read in his occasional editorials in the now-defunct Lies Of Our Times magazine, and through the movie Manufacturing Consent (a biography of Mr. Chomsky worth watching, especially for the section on the N.Y. Times and East Timor).

Now, an answer as to why these and other progressive writers smart enough to know better, support (at least publicly) the Warren Commission has surfaced in the Jan-Feb issue of Probe (the newsletter of Citizens for Truth about the Kennedy Assassination, http://www.webcom.com/ctka).

According to a Probe article by Ray Marcus, back in early 1969 Mr. Chomsky met with several Kennedy experts and spent several hours looking at and discussing assassination photos. Mr. Chomsky even cancelled several appointments to have extra time. There was a followup meeting with Mr. Chomsky, which also lasted several hours. These meetings were ostensibly to try to do something to reopen the case. According to the Probe article, Mr. Chomsky indicated he was very interested, but had to give the matter careful consideration before committing.
After the meeting, Selwyn Bromberger, an MIT philosophy professor who had sit in on the discussion, said to the author: "If they are strong enough to kill the President and strong enough to cover it up, then they are too strong to confront directly . . . if they feel sufficiently threatened, they may move to open totalitarian rule." According to the author, Mr. Chomsky had given every indication that he believed there was a conspiracy at these meetings. However, Mr. Chomsky never got involved with trying to reopen the case.

The same Probe article mentions that (the late) I.F. Stone, another leading progressive writer of the past, also took a position supportive of the Warren Commission in I.F. Stone's Weekly for Oct. 5, 1964.

Alexander Cockburn now writes for CounterPunch, a solid bi-weekly newsletter associated with the liberal Institute for Policy Studies. CounterPunch is fine, and worth reading, although its articles are never authored. CounterPunch also overly dwells on Washington D.C. politicians, like the tabloids, except that CounterPunch emphasizes financial instead of sexual misdeeds—i.e., it follows the money. (Recently CounterPunch was also the only organization of about 20 which refused my renewal check, subject to a simple agreement not to release my name or pester me with junk mail—more on this in a future issue of The Touchstone).

It has now become clear to me that leading progressive/left/liberal thinkers and writers like I.F. Stone, Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn will only criticize the monied and powerful to the extent that they think it is safe for them to do. This is no different in principle from what the mainstream news media does: critiques are within a constrained margin of what is acceptable and not acceptable to the powers that be.

The only difference is that Mr. Chomsky and Mr. Cockburn have much wider margins than ABC (now owned by Disney), NBC (owned by General Electric), CBS (owned by Westinghouse), The Washington Post (with long ties to the intelligence community), and the N.Y. Times (so biased that the previously mentioned Lies Of Our Times was created to combat the rampant disinformation).

Mr. Chomsky and Mr. Cockburn are also really no different than Dan Rather. Mr. Rather publicly supports the Warren Commission, but has a private position on the assassination we have not heard. On specials about Kennedy, Mr. Rather will spout some mealy-mouthed nonsense like "The mystery of the assassination burns like an eternal flame" while the camera pans over Rather's shoulder to the Kennedy torch that burns at Arlington Cemetery.

To some extent Mr. Chomsky and Mr. Cockburn practice what the Kennedy research community is often accused of—they have created a cottage industry—standard left-wing/liberal criticisms of power. Their critiques are well-meaning and accurate, and provide a comfortable if not wealthy living, but don't really make a substantial dent in the problems they write about. Mr. Chomsky has been writing for over 30 years now, yet how many people have even heard of Noam Chomsky—even after the feature film about him (Manufacturing Consent) was produced? Has corporate power been reigned in any? How many Americans know about East Timor?

I hope these and all progressive writers will develop the courage to speak all of the truth that they know, or at least be honest about it, because even repeated, sharp, and direct-to-the-point criticisms of power, are not worth much if they are deliberately mis-aimed against the most important and critical problem: That forces in the supposedly constitutional democracy of the U.S. will murder democratically elected leaders like John F. Kennedy (and progressive leaders like Robert F. Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.) and get away with it.

The Nation: Stephen Glain: EXODUS The Flight of Millions From Iraq Threatens the Entire Region

EXODUS The Flight of Millions From Iraq Threatens the Entire Region

The Nation, 5.26.07, Issue dated 6.11.07

Nafeez Ahmed: The State's Culpabilty: The Strategy of Tension: NATO's Secret Armies

The Strategy of Tension

Nafeez Ahmed


We are at War against International Terrorism,

defending our Values and our Civilization.
http://nafeez.blogspot.com/2007/05/strategy-of-tension.html
(Thanks to 911blogger.com for the pointer.)

Western anti-terror legislation does not allow the state to be considered in any way culpable for terrorist activities. As far as our elected representatives are concerned, terrorism is a problem of loosely associated groups of reactionary fanatics “attacking our freedoms”. The assumption, never explicitly stated for then it would be revealed, and easily and permanently ridiculed, is that the state is innocent, immune to indulging in such barbaric practices. Written into the rule of law itself, this assumption posits the state as a paternal Fuhrer, a God figure whom we must all entrust our lives and liberties to.

Yet whichever way you look at it, international terrorism has its origins in the state itself. There are many ways of understanding this, but perhaps the most pertinent for our purposes is contemporary history. We don’t need to go very far back either. Only twenty odd years, to the era of the Cold War, when we were also getting Trigger-Happy trying to defend the “Free World” from the “Evil Empire” of International Communism, as Ronald Reagan put it so aptly.

The “strategy of tension” denotes a highly secretive series of interconnected covert operations conducted jointly by the CIA and MI6 largely in Western Europe during the this period. Well-documented by several respected historians, confirmed by official inquiries, and corroborated by former intelligence officials, the “strategy of tension” is one of those unsavoury moments in contemporary history that we don’t learn about in school, or even university.

My favourite book on the subject, and the most authoritative in my view, is Dr. Daniele Ganser’s NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (2004). Published in the UK as part of the “Contemporary Security Studies” series of London-based academic press Routledge, Ganser’s study is the first major historical work to bring the “strategy of tension” into the mainstream of scholarship.

During the Cold War, indeed through to the late 1980s, the United States, United Kingdom, and Western European governments and secret services, participated in a sophisticated NATO-backed operation to engineer terrorist attacks inside Western Europe, to be blamed on the Soviet Union. The objective was to galvanize public opinion against leftwing policies and parties, and ultimately to mobilize popular support for purportedly anti-Soviet policies at home and abroad – most of which were really designed to legitimize brutal military interventions against nationalist independence movements in the “Third World”.

Ganser was a Senior Researcher at the Center for Security Studies in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, before he moved to Basel University to teach history. Citing the transcripts of European parliamentary inquiries; the few secret documents that have been declassified; interviews with government, military and intelligence officials; and so on, Ganser shows how intimately the British were involved.

In fact, it wasn’t even an American idea – it was very much ours. The strategy of tension began on the order of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who in July 1940 called for the establishment of a secret army to “set Europe ablaze by assisting resistance movements and carrying out subversive operations in enemy held territory.” (p. 40) By 4th October 1945, the British Chiefs of Staff and the Special Operations branch of MI6 directed the creation of what Ganser describes as a “skeleton network” capable of expansion either in war or to service clandestine operations abroad: “Priority was given in carrying out these tasks to countries likely to be overrun in the earliest stages of any conflict with the Soviet Union, but not as yet under Soviet domination.” (p. 41) In the ensuing years, Col. Gubbins’ Special Operations branch of MI6 cooperated closely with Frank Wisner’s CIA covert action department Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) on White House orders, and in turn coordinated US and UK Special Forces, to establish stay-behind secret armies across western Europe. (p. 42)

Among the documents Ganser brings to attention is the classified Field Manual 30-31, with appendices FM 30-31A and FM 30-31B, authored by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to train thousands of stay-behind officers around the world. The field manual was published in the 1987 parliamentary report of the Italian parliamentary investigation into the terrorist activities of “P2”, the CIA-MI6 sponsored Italian anti-communist network. As Ganser observes: “FM 30-31 instructs the secret soldiers to carry out acts of violence in times of peace and then blame them on the Communist enemy in order to create a situation of fear and alertness. Alternatively, the secret soldiers are instructed to infiltrate the left-wing movements and then urge them to use violence.” In the manual’s own words:

“There may be times when Host Country Governments show passivity or indecision in the face of Communist subversion and according to the interpretation of the US secret services do not react with sufficient effectiveness… US army intelligence must have the means of launching special operations which will convince Host Country Governments and public opinion of the reality of the insurgent danger. To reach this aim US army intelligence should seek to penetrate the insurgency by means of agents on special assignment, with the task of forming special action groups among the most radical elements of the insurgency… In case it has not been possible to successfully infiltrate such agents into the leadership of the rebels it can be useful to instrumentalize extreme leftist organizations for one’s own ends in order to achieve the above described targets… These special operations must remain strictly secret. Only those persons which are acting against the revolutionary uprising shall know of the involvement of the US Army…” (p. 234-297)

The existence of this secret operation exploded into public controversy when in August 1990 upon the admissions in parliament by Italian Prime Minister http://www.threemonkeysonline.com/article_nato_gladio_terrorism_strategy_of_tension.htm|Giulio Andreotti,]] the existence of ‘Gladio’ was exposed as a secret sub-section of Italian military-intelligence services, responsible for domestic bombings blamed on Italian Communists. Ganser documents in intricate detail how a subversive network created by elements of western intelligence services – particularly that of the US and UK - orchestrated devastating waves of terrorist attacks blamed on the Soviet Union, not only in Italy, but also in Spain, Germany, France, Turkey, Greece, i.e. throughout western Europe. Despite a number of European parliamentary inquiries; an European Union resolution on the Gladio phenomenon; NATO’s close-doors admissions to European ambassadors; confirmations of the international operation from senior CIA officials; and other damning documentary evidence; NATO, the CIA and MI6 have together consistently declined to release their secret files on the matter.

The Strategy of Tension simply isn’t part of our historical consciousness. Very few historians of the Cold War are fully conversant with it, let alone academics working in international relations and political science. This is despite the fact that it played an instrumental role in physically constructing a threat, projected into the USSR, which did not ultimately exist. Ipso facto, the Strategy of Tension belongs to the waste-bin of history.

The immense fear and chaos generated by the impact of the Operation Gladio phenomenon throughout western Europe was instrumental in legitimizing the interventionist policies of the Anglo-American alliance in the South, throughout the Cold War period. Although the Soviet Union was supposed to be the real threat and source of terror, and thus the ultimate object of the over 70 military interventions conducted since 1945 [see William Blum’s Killing Hope (London: Zed, 1995)] the Soviet threat was in fact actively exaggerated ideologically – and even physically constructed through clandestine operations – to mobilize the comprehensive militarization of western societies. This does not mean that many government officials did not believe their own propaganda. But we now know that there was a secretive sub-section of the Western intelligence community, known only to very few members of elected governments, that was involved in this.

The number of people who were killed across the “Third World” as a consequence of this militarization process is shocking, its implications genuinely difficult to absorb. According to Dr. J. W. Smith, a US development economist who runs the Institute for Economic Democracy in Arizona, in our glorious self-evidently noble fight to defend the “Free World” from imminent Soviet attacks, invasions, and general inconceivably irrational hell-bent pure evilness, Western states:

“… were responsible for violently killing 12 to 15 million people since WW II and causing the death of hundreds of millions more as their economies were destroyed or those countries were denied the right to restructure to care for their people. Unknown as it is, and recognizing that this has been standard practice throughout colonialism, that is the record of the Western imperial centers of capital from 1945 to 1990” [Smith, Economic Democracy: The Political Struggle of the 21st Century (2003)]

12 to 15 million people from 1945 to 1990.

I have to repeat these figures to myself to absorb their implications.

Repeat these figures to yourself.

Six million Jews in the Second World War, and now 12 to 15 million innocents in the post-WWII period. The former in the name of German lebensraum. The latter in the name of the free market.

Yet as a society, as a Civilization, we are oblivious, utterly blind, to our historic complicity in the systematic destruction of "Other" societies who fail to conform to our (deluded) self-image of universal prosperity.

It is a blindness with which we remain afflicted.

Consider Blair’s rendition of the “War on Terror” in early 2007, as “a clash not between civilizations”, but rather “about civilization.” The War on Terror is therefore a continuation of “the age-old battle between progress and reaction, between those who embrace the modern world and those who reject its existence.”

And what is this "progress", this "modernity" that should be embraced? The "progress" that slaughtered millions of men, women and children across continents, in Nicaragua, El Salvador, in Somalia, Rwanda, in Kenya, Malaya, in Oman, Iraq, etc. etc. (in no particular order and with significant omissions)?

If this is modernity then I must be a backward, semi-feudal ignoramus. Along with most of the population of the entire world. But then, who cares what the world says? Bush, Blair, and their enlightened ilk are no doubt the modern civilized ones. As long as they do what they think is right. Right???