This
War On Terrorism Is Bogus
By Michael Meacher
The Guardian, UK
07 September, 2003
Massive
attention has now been given - and rightly so - to the reasons why Britain
went to war against Iraq. But far too little attention has focused on
why the US went to war, and that throws light on British motives too.
The conventional explanation is that after the Twin Towers were hit,
retaliation against al-Qaida bases in Afghanistan was a natural first
step in launching a global war against terrorism. Then, because Saddam
Hussein was alleged by the US and UK governments to retain weapons of
mass destruction, the war could be extended to Iraq as well. However
this theory does not fit all the facts. The truth may be a great deal
murkier.
We now know that
a blueprint for the creation of a global Pax Americana was drawn up
for Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary),
Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), Jeb Bush (George Bush's younger
brother) and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled
Rebuilding America's Defences, was written in September 2000 by the
neoconservative think tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
The plan shows Bush's
cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether
or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says "while the unresolved
conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for
a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue
of the regime of Saddam Hussein."
The PNAC blueprint
supports an earlier document attributed to Wolfowitz and Libby which
said the US must "discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging
our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role".
It refers to key allies such as the UK as "the most effective and
efficient means of exercising American global leadership". It describes
peacekeeping missions as "demanding American political leadership
rather than that of the UN". It says "even should Saddam pass
from the scene", US bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain
permanently... as "Iran may well prove as large a threat to US
interests as Iraq has". It spotlights China for "regime change",
saying "it is time to increase the presence of American forces
in SE Asia".
The document also
calls for the creation of "US space forces" to dominate space,
and the total control of cyberspace to prevent "enemies" using
the internet against the US. It also hints that the US may consider
developing biological weapons "that can target specific genotypes
[and] may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a
politically useful tool".
Finally - written
a year before 9/11 - it pinpoints North Korea, Syria and Iran as dangerous
regimes, and says their existence justifies the creation of a "worldwide
command and control system". This is a blueprint for US world domination.
But before it is dismissed as an agenda for rightwing fantasists, it
is clear it provides a much better explanation of what actually happened
before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis.
This can be seen in several ways.
First, it is clear
the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11.
It is known that at least 11 countries provided advance warning to the
US of the 9/11 attacks. Two senior Mossad experts were sent to Washington
in August 2001 to alert the CIA and FBI to a cell of 200 terrorists
said to be preparing a big operation (Daily Telegraph, September 16
2001). The list they provided included the names of four of the 9/11
hijackers, none of whom was arrested.
It had been known
as early as 1996 that there were plans to hit Washington targets with
aeroplanes. Then in 1999 a US national intelligence council report noted
that "al-Qaida suicide bombers could crash-land an aircraft packed
with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA,
or the White House".
Fifteen of the 9/11
hijackers obtained their visas in Saudi Arabia. Michael Springman, the
former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, has stated that since
1987 the CIA had been illicitly issuing visas to unqualified applicants
from the Middle East and bringing them to the US for training in terrorism
for the Afghan war in collaboration with Bin Laden (BBC, November 6
2001). It seems this operation continued after the Afghan war for other
purposes. It is also reported that five of the hijackers received training
at secure US military installations in the 1990s (Newsweek, September
15 2001).
Instructive leads
prior to 9/11 were not followed up. French Moroccan flight student Zacarias
Moussaoui (now thought to be the 20th hijacker) was arrested in August
2001 after an instructor reported he showed a suspicious interest in
learning how to steer large airliners. When US agents learned from French
intelligence he had radical Islamist ties, they sought a warrant to
search his computer, which contained clues to the September 11 mission
(Times, November 3 2001). But they were turned down by the FBI. One
agent wrote, a month before 9/11, that Moussaoui might be planning to
crash into the Twin Towers (Newsweek, May 20 2002).
All of this makes
it all the more astonishing - on the war on terrorism perspective -
that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself. The first
hijacking was suspected at not later than 8.20am, and the last hijacked
aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06am. Not a single fighter plane
was scrambled to investigate from the US Andrews airforce base, just
10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the
Pentagon at 9.38 am. Why not? There were standard FAA intercept procedures
for hijacked aircraft before 9/11. Between September 2000 and June 2001
the US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase suspicious
aircraft (AP, August 13 2002). It is a US legal requirement that once
an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes
are sent up to investigate.
Was this inaction
simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of,
the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been deliberately
stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority? The
former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, has said: "The
information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11
was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or
FBI to assert a defence of incompetence."
Nor is the US response
after 9/11 any better. No serious attempt has ever been made to catch
Bin Laden. In late September and early October 2001, leaders of Pakistan's
two Islamist parties negotiated Bin Laden's extradition to Pakistan
to stand trial for 9/11. However, a US official said, significantly,
that "casting our objectives too narrowly" risked "a
premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance
Mr Bin Laden was captured". The US chairman of the joint chiefs
of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that "the goal has
never been to get Bin Laden" (AP, April 5 2002). The whistleblowing
FBI agent Robert Wright told ABC News (December 19 2002) that FBI headquarters
wanted no arrests. And in November 2001 the US airforce complained it
had had al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in its sights as many as 10 times
over the previous six weeks, but had been unable to attack because they
did not receive permission quickly enough (Time Magazine, May 13 2002).
None of this assembled evidence, all of which comes from sources already
in the public domain, is compatible with the idea of a real, determined
war on terrorism.
The catalogue of
evidence does, however, fall into place when set against the PNAC blueprint.
From this it seems that the so-called "war on terrorism" is
being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical
objectives. Indeed Tony Blair himself hinted at this when he said to
the Commons liaison committee: "To be truthful about it, there
was no way we could have got the public consent to have suddenly launched
a campaign on Afghanistan but for what happened on September 11"
(Times, July 17 2002). Similarly Rumsfeld was so determined to obtain
a rationale for an attack on Iraq that on 10 separate occasions he asked
the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to 9/11; the CIA repeatedly came
back empty-handed (Time Magazine, May 13 2002).
In fact, 9/11 offered
an extremely convenient pretext to put the PNAC plan into action. The
evidence again is quite clear that plans for military action against
Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well before 9/11. A report prepared
for the US government from the Baker Institute of Public Policy stated
in April 2001 that "the US remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma.
Iraq remains a destabilising influence to... the flow of oil to international
markets from the Middle East". Submitted to Vice-President Cheney's
energy task group, the report recommended that because this was an unacceptable
risk to the US, "military intervention" was necessary (Sunday
Herald, October 6 2002).
Similar evidence
exists in regard to Afghanistan. The BBC reported (September 18 2001)
that Niaz Niak, a former Pakistan foreign secretary, was told by senior
American officials at a meeting in Berlin in mid-July 2001 that "military
action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October".
Until July 2001 the US government saw the Taliban regime as a source
of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of hydrocarbon
pipelines from the oil and gas fields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan,
through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. But, confronted
with the Taliban's refusal to accept US conditions, the US representatives
told them "either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or
we bury you under a carpet of bombs" (Inter Press Service, November
15 2001).
Given this background,
it is not surprising that some have seen the US failure to avert the
9/11 attacks as creating an invaluable pretext for attacking Afghanistan
in a war that had clearly already been well planned in advance. There
is a possible precedent for this. The US national archives reveal that
President Roosevelt used exactly this approach in relation to Pearl
Harbor on December 7 1941. Some advance warning of the attacks was received,
but the information never reached the US fleet. The ensuing national
outrage persuaded a reluctant US public to join the second world war.
Similarly the PNAC blueprint of September 2000 states that the process
of transforming the US into "tomorrow's dominant force" is
likely to be a long one in the absence of "some catastrophic and
catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor". The 9/11 attacks allowed
the US to press the "go" button for a strategy in accordance
with the PNAC agenda which it would otherwise have been politically
impossible to implement.
The overriding motivation
for this political smokescreen is that the US and the UK are beginning
to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy supplies. By 2010 the Muslim
world will control as much as 60% of the world's oil production and,
even more importantly, 95% of remaining global oil export capacity.
As demand is increasing, so supply is decreasing, continually since
the 1960s.
This is leading
to increasing dependence on foreign oil supplies for both the US and
the UK. The US, which in 1990 produced domestically 57% of its total
energy demand, is predicted to produce only 39% of its needs by 2010.
A DTI minister has admitted that the UK could be facing "severe"
gas shortages by 2005. The UK government has confirmed that 70% of our
electricity will come from gas by 2020, and 90% of that will be imported.
In that context it should be noted that Iraq has 110 trillion cubic
feet of gas reserves in addition to its oil.
A report from the
commission on America's national interests in July 2000 noted that the
most promising new source of world supplies was the Caspian region,
and this would relieve US dependence on Saudi Arabia. To diversify supply
routes from the Caspian, one pipeline would run westward via Azerbaijan
and Georgia to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Another would extend eastwards
through Afghanistan and Pakistan and terminate near the Indian border.
This would rescue Enron's beleaguered power plant at Dabhol on India's
west coast, in which Enron had sunk $3bn investment and whose economic
survival was dependent on access to cheap gas.
Nor has the UK been
disinterested in this scramble for the remaining world supplies of hydrocarbons,
and this may partly explain British participation in US military actions.
Lord Browne, chief executive of BP, warned Washington not to carve up
Iraq for its own oil companies in the aftermath of war (Guardian, October
30 2002). And when a British foreign minister met Gadaffi in his desert
tent in August 2002, it was said that "the UK does not want to
lose out to other European nations already jostling for advantage when
it comes to potentially lucrative oil contracts" with Libya (BBC
Online, August 10 2002).
The conclusion of
all this analysis must surely be that the "global war on terrorism"
has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for
a wholly different agenda - the US goal of world hegemony, built around
securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the
whole project. Is collusion in this myth and junior participation in
this project really a proper aspiration for British foreign policy?
If there was ever need to justify a more objective British stance, driven
by our own independent goals, this whole depressing saga surely provides
all the evidence needed for a radical change of course.
Michael Meacher
MP was environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003