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9/11 An Ideal Pretext for War?
The
following article was published in The Guardian. The writer
is a former environment minister of the British Government
(from May 1997 to June 2003) who resigned during the Iraq
War in protest of his government's involvement in the war.
This
War on Terrorism is Bogus
Michael
Meacher
The
Guardian
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 "world-wide 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 were 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 catalysing 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.
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