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Title: Wars of Terror
Author: Noam Chomsky
Date: March 2003
Language: en
Topics: terrorism, war, US foreign interventions
Source: Retrieved on 2nd August 2021 from https://chomsky.info/200303__/
Notes: Published in New Political Science.

Noam Chomsky

Wars of Terror

It is widely argued that the September 11 terrorist attacks have changed

the world dramatically, that nothing will be the same as the world

enters into a new and frightening “age of terror”—the title of a

collection of academic essays by Yale University scholars and others,

which regards the anthrax attack as even more ominous.[1]

It had been recognized for some time that with new technology, the

industrial powers would probably lose their virtual monopoly of

violence, retaining only an enormous preponderance. Well before 9/11,

technical studies had concluded that “a well-planned operation to

smuggle WMD into the United States would have at least a 90 percent

probability of success—much higher than ICBM delivery even in the

absence of [National Missile Defense].” That has become “America’s

Achilles Heel,” a study with that title concluded several years ago.

Surely the dangers were evident after the 1993 attempt to blow up the

World Trade Center, which came close to succeeding along with much more

ambitious plans, and might have killed tens of thousands of people with

better planning, the WTC building engineers reported.[2]

On September 11, the threats were realized: with “wickedness and awesome

cruelty,” to recall Robert Fisk’s memorable words, capturing the world

reaction of shock and horror, and sympathy for the innocent victims. For

the first time in modern history, Europe and its offshoots were

subjected, on home soil, to atrocities of the kind that are all too

familiar elsewhere. The history should be unnecessary to review, and

though the West may choose to disregard it, the victims do not. The

sharp break in the traditional pattern surely qualifies 9/11 as an

historic event, and the repercussions are sure to be significant. The

consequences will, of course, be determined substantially by policy

choices made within the United States. In this case, the target of the

terrorist attack is not Cuba or Lebanon or Chechnya or a long list of

others, but a state

with an awesome potential for shaping the future. Any sensible attempt

to assess the likely consequences will naturally begin with an

investigation of US power, how it has been exercised, particularly in

the very recent past, and how it is interpreted within the political

culture.

At this point there are two choices: we can approach these questions

with the rational standards we apply to others, or we can dismiss the

historical and contemporary record on some grounds or other.

One familiar device is miraculous conversion: true, there have been

flaws in the past, but they have now been overcome so we can forget

those boring and now-irrelevant topics and march on to a bright future.

This useful doctrine of “change of course” has been invoked frequently

over the years, in ways that are instructive when we look closely. To

take a current example, a few months ago Bill Clinton attended the

independence day celebration of the world’s newest country, East Timor.

He informed the press that “I don’t believe America and any of the other

countries were sufficiently sensitive in the beginning … and for a long

time before 1999, going way back to the ‘70s, to the suffering of the

people of East Timor,” but “when it became obvious to me what was really

going on … I tried to make sure we had the right policy.”

We can identify the timing of the conversion with some precision.

Clearly, it was after September 8, 1999, when the Secretary of Defense

reiterated the official position that “it is the responsibility of the

Government of Indonesia, and we don’t want to take that responsibility

away from them.” They had fulfilled their responsibility by killing

hundreds of thousands of people with firm US and British support since

the 1970s, then thousands more in the early months of 1999, finally

destroying most of the country and driving out the population when they

voted the wrong way in the August 30 referendum—fulfilling not only

their responsibilities but also their promises, as Washington and London

surely had known well before.

The US “never tried to sanction or support the oppression of the East

Timorese,” Clinton explained, referring to the 25 years of crucial

military and diplomatic support for Indonesian atrocities, continuing

through the last paroxysm of fury in September. But we should not “look

backward,” he advised, because America did finally become sensitive to

the “oppression”: sometime between September 8 and September 11, when,

under severe domestic and international pressure, Clinton informed the

Indonesian generals that the game is over and they quickly withdrew,

allowing an Australian-led UN peacekeeping force to enter unopposed.

The course of events revealed with great clarity how some of the worst

crimes of the late 20^(th) century could have been ended very easily,

simply by withdrawing crucial participation. That is hardly the only

case, and Clinton was not alone in his interpretation of what

scholarship now depicts as another inspiring achievement of the new era

of humanitarianism.[3]

There is a new and highly regarded literary genre inquiring into the

cultural defects that keep us from responding properly to the crimes of

others.

An interesting question no doubt, though by any reasonable standards it

ranks well below a different one: why do we and our allies persist in

our own substantial crimes, either directly or through crucial support

for murderous clients? That remains unasked, and if raised at the

margins, arouses shivers of horror.

Another familiar way to evade rational standards is to dismiss the

historical record as merely “the abuse of reality,” not “reality

itself,” which is “the unachieved national purpose.” In this version of

the traditional “city on a hill” conception, formulated by the founder

of realist IR theory, America has a “transcendent purpose,” “the

establishment of equality in freedom,” and American politics is designed

to achieve this “national purpose,” however flawed it may be in

execution. In a current version, published shortly before 9/11 by a

prominent scholar, there is a guiding principle that “defines the

parameters within which the policy debate occurs,” a spectrum that

excludes only “tattered remnants” on the right and left and is “so

authoritative as to be virtually immune to challenge.” The principle is

that America is an “historical vanguard.” “History has a discernible

direction and destination. Uniquely among all the nations of the world,

the United States comprehends and manifests history’s purpose.” It

follows that US “hegemony” is the realization of history’s purpose and

its application is therefore for the common good, a truism that renders

empirical evaluation irrelevant.[4]

That stance too has a distinguished pedigree. A century before Rumsfeld

and Cheney, Woodrow Wilson called for conquest of the Philippines

because “Our interest must march forward, altruists though we are; other

nations must see to it that they stand off, and do not seek to stay us.”

And he was borrowing from admired sources, among them John Stuart Mill

in a remarkable essay.[5] That is one choice. The other is to understand

“reality” as reality, and to ask whether its unpleasant features are

“flaws” in the pursuit of history’s purpose or have more mundane causes,

as in the case of every other power system of past and present. If we

adopt that stance, joining the tattered remnants outside the

authoritative spectrum, we will be led to conclude, I think, that policy

choices are likely to remain within a framework that is well entrenched,

enhanced perhaps in important ways but not fundamentally changed: much

as after the collapse of the USSR, I believe. There are a number of

reasons to anticipate essential continuity, among them the stability of

the basic institutions in which policy decisions are rooted, but also

narrower ones that merit some attention.

The “war on terror” re-declared on 9/11 had been declared 20 years

earlier, with much the same rhetoric and many of the same people in

high-level positions.[6] The Reagan administration came into office

announcing that a primary concern of US foreign policy would be a “war

on terror,” particularly state-supported international terrorism, the

most virulent form of the plague spread by “depraved opponents of

civilization itself” in “a return to barbarism in the modern age,” in

the words of the Administration moderate George Shultz. The war to

eradicate the plague was to focus on two regions where it was raging

with unusual virulence: Central America and West Asia/North Africa.

Shultz was particularly exercised by the “cancer, right here in our land

mass,” which was openly renewing the goals of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, he

informed Congress. The President declared a national emergency, renewed

annually, because “the policies and actions of the Government of

Nicaragua constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national

security and foreign policy of the United States.” Explaining the

bombing of Libya, Reagan announced that the mad dog Qaddafi was sending

arms and advisers to Nicaragua “to bring his war home to the United

States,” part of the campaign “to expel America from the world,” Reagan

lamented. Scholarship has explored still deeper roots for that ambitious

enterprise. One prominent academic terrorologist finds that contemporary

terrorism can be traced to South Vietnam, where “the effectiveness of

Vietcong terror against the American Goliath armed with modern

technology kindled hopes that the Western heartland was vulnerable

too.”[7]

More ominous still, by the 1980s, was the swamp from which the plague

was spreading. It was drained just in time by the US army, which helped

to “defeat liberation theology,” the School of the Americas now

proclaims with pride.[8] In the second locus of the war, the threat was

no less dreadful: Mideast/ Mediterranean terror was selected as the peak

story of the year in 1985 in the annual AP poll of editors, and ranked

high in others. As the worst year of terror ended, Reagan and Israeli

Prime Minister Peres condemned “the evil scourge of terrorism” in a news

conference in Washington. A few days before Peres had sent his bombers

to Tunis, where they killed 75 people on no credible pretext, a mission

expedited by Washington and praised by Secretary of State Shultz, though

he chose silence after the Security Council condemned the attack as an

“act of armed aggression” (US abstaining). That was only one of the

contenders for the prize of major terrorist atrocity in the peak year of

terror. A second was a car-bomb outside a mosque in Beirut that killed

80 people and wounded 250 others, timed to explode as people were

leaving, killing mostly women and girls, traced back to the CIA and

British intelligence. The third contender is Peres’s Iron Fist

operations in southern Lebanon, fought against “terrorist villagers,”

the high command explained, “reaching new depths of calculated brutality

and arbitrary murder” according to a Western diplomat familiar with the

area, a judgment amply supported by direct coverage.

Scholarship too recognizes 1985 to be a peak year of Middle East

terrorism, but does not cite these events: rather, two terrorist

atrocities in which a single person was murdered, in each case an

American.[9] But the victims do not so easily forget.

Shultz demanded resort to violence to destroy “the evil scourge of

terrorism,” particularly in Central America. He bitterly condemned

advocates of “utopian, legalistic means like outside mediation, the

United Nations, and the World Court, while ignoring the power element of

the equation.” His administration succumbed to no such weaknesses, and

should be praised for its foresight by sober scholars who now explain

that international law and institutions of world order must be swept

aside by the enlightened hegemon, in a new era of dedication to human

rights.

In both regions of primary concern, the commanders of the “war on

terror” compiled a record of “state-supported international terrorism”

that vastly exceeded anything that could be attributed to their targets.

And that hardly exhausts the record. During the Reagan years

Washington’s South African ally had primary responsibility for over 1.5

million dead and $60 billion in damage in neighboring countries, while

the administration found ways to evade congressional sanctions and

substantially increase trade. A UNICEF study estimated the death toll of

infants and young children at 850,000, 150,000 in the single year 1988,

reversing gains of the early post-independence years primarily by the

weapon of “mass terrorism.” That is putting aside South Africa’s

practices within, where it was defending civilization against the

onslaughts of the ANC, one of the “more notorious terrorist groups,”

according to a 1988 Pentagon report.[10]

For such reasons the US and Israel voted alone against an 1987 UN

resolution condemning terrorism in the strongest terms and calling on

all nations to combat the plague, passed 153–2, Honduras abstaining. The

two opponents identified the offending passage: it recognized “the right

to self-determination, freedom, and independence, as derived from the

Charter of the United Nations, of people forcibly deprived of that right

… , particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes and foreign

occupation”—understood to refer to South Africa and the Israeli-occupied

territories, therefore unacceptable.

The base for US operations in Central America was Honduras, where the US

Ambassador during the worst years of terror was John Negroponte, who is

now in charge of the diplomatic component of the new phase of the “war

on terror” at the UN. Reagan’s special envoy to the Middle East was

Donald Rumsfeld, who now presides over its military component, as well

as the new wars that have been announced.

Rumsfeld is joined by others who were prominent figures in the Reagan

administration. Their thinking and goals have not changed, and although

they may represent an extreme position on the policy spectrum, it is

worth bearing in mind that they are by no means isolated. There is

considerable continuity of doctrine, assumptions, and actions,

persisting for many years until today. Careful investigation of this

very recent history should be a particularly high priority for those who

hold that “global security” requires “a respected and legitimate

law-enforcer,” in Brzezinski’s words. He is referring of course to the

sole power capable of undertaking this critical role: “the idealistic

new world bent on ending inhumanity,” as the world’s leading newspaper

describes it, dedicated to “principles and values” rather than crass and

narrow ends, mobilizing its reluctant allies to join it in a new epoch

of moral rectitude.[11]

The concept “respected and legitimate law-enforcer” is an important one.

The term “legitimate” begs the question, so we can drop it. Perhaps some

question arises about the respect for law of the chosen “law-enforcer,”

and about its reputation outside of narrow elite circles. But such

questions aside, the concept again reflects the emerging doctrine that

we must discard the efforts of the past century to construct an

international order in which the powerful are not free to resort to

violence at will. Instead, we must institute a new principle—which is in

fact a venerable principle: the self-anointed “enlightened states” will

serve as global enforcers, no impolite questions asked.

The scrupulous avoidance of the events of the recent past is easy to

understand, given what inquiry will quickly reveal. That includes not

only the terrorist crimes of the 1980s and what came before, but also

those of the 1990s, right to the present. A comparison of leading

beneficiaries of US military assistance and the record of state terror

should shame honest people, and would, if it were not so effectively

removed from the public eye. It suffices to look at the two countries

that have been vying for leadership in this competition: Turkey and

Colombia. As a personal aside I happened to visit both recently,

including scenes of some of the worst crimes of the 1990s, adding some

vivid personal experience to what is horrifying enough in the printed

record. I am putting aside Israel and Egypt, a separate category.

To repeat the obvious, we basically have two choices. Either history is

bunk, including current history, and we can march forward with

confidence that the global enforcer will drive evil from the world much

as the President’s speech writers declare, plagiarizing ancient epics

and children’s tales. Or we can subject the doctrines of the proclaimed

grand new era to scrutiny, drawing rational conclusions, perhaps gaining

some sense of the emerging reality. If there is a third way, I do not

see it.

The wars that are contemplated in the renewed “war on terror” are to go

on for a long time. “There’s no telling how many wars it will take to

secure freedom in the homeland,” the President announced. That’s fair

enough. Potential threats are virtually limitless, everywhere, even at

home, as the anthrax attack illustrates. We should also be able to

appreciate recent comments on the matter by the 1996–2000 head of

Israel’s General Security Service (Shabak), Ami Ayalon. He observed

realistically that “those who want victory” against terror without

addressing underlying grievances “want an unending war.” He was speaking

of Israel–Palestine, where the only “solution of the problem of

terrorism [is] to offer an honorable solution to the Palestinians

respecting their right to self-determi- nation.” So former head of

Israeli military intelligence Yehoshaphat Harkabi, also a leading

Arabist, observed 20 years ago, at a time when Israel still retained its

immunity from retaliation from within the occupied territories to its

harsh and brutal practices there.[12]

The observations generalize in obvious ways. In serious scholarship, at

least, it is recognized that “Unless the social, political, and economic

conditions that spawned Al Qaeda and other associated groups are

addressed, the United States and its allies in Western Europe and

elsewhere will continue to be targeted by Islamist terrorists.”[13]

In proclaiming the right of attack against perceived potential threats,

the President is once again echoing the principles of the first phase of

the “war on terror.” The Reagan–Shultz doctrine held that the UN Charter

entitles the US to resort to force in “self-defense against future

attack.” That interpretation of Article 51 was offered in justification

of the bombing of Libya, eliciting praise from commentators who were

impressed by the reliance “on a legal argument that violence against the

perpetrators of repeated violence is justified as an act of

self-defense”; I am quoting New York Times legal specialist Anthony

Lewis.

The doctrine was amplified by the Bush 1 administration, which justified

the invasion of Panama, vetoing two Security Council resolutions, on the

grounds that Article 51 “provides for the use of armed force to defend a

country, to defend our interests and our people,” and entitles the US to

invade another country to prevent its “territory from being used as a

base for smuggling drugs into the United States.” In the light of that

expansive interpretation of the Charter, it is not surprising that James

Baker suggested a few days ago that Washington could now appeal to

Article 51 to authorize conquest and occupation of Iraq, because Iraq

may someday threaten the US with WMD, or threaten others while the US

stands helplessly by.[14]

Quite apart from the plain meaning of the Charter, the argument offered

by Baker’s State Department in 1989 was not too convincing on other

grounds. Operation Just Cause reinstated in power the white elite of

bankers and businessmen, many suspected of narcotrafficking and money

laundering, who soon lived up to their reputation; drug trafficking “may

have doubled” and money laundering “flourished” in the months after the

invasion, the GAO reported, while USAID found that narcotics use in

Panama had gone up by 400%, reaching the highest level in Latin America.

All without eliciting notable concern, except in Latin America, and

Panama itself, where the invasion was harshly condemned.[15]

Clinton’s Strategic Command also advocated “preemptive response,” with

nuclear weapons if deemed appropriate.[16] Clinton himself forged some

new paths in implementing the doctrine, though his major contributions

to international terrorism lie elsewhere.

The doctrine of preemptive strike has much earlier origins, even in

words. Forty years ago Dean Acheson informed the American Society of

International Law that legal issues do not arise in the case of a US

response to a “challenge [to its] power, position, and prestige.” He was

referring to Washington’s response to what it regarded as Cuba’s

“successful defiance” of the United States. That included Cuba’s

resistance to the Bay of Pigs invasion, but also much more serious

crimes. When Kennedy ordered his staff to subject Cubans to the “terrors

of the earth” until Castro is eliminated, his planners advised that “The

very existence of his regime … represents a successful defiance of the

US, a negation of our whole hemispheric policy of almost a century and a

half,” based on the principle of subordination to US will. Worse yet,

Castro’s regime was providing an “example and general stimulus” that

might “encourage agitation and radical change” in other parts of Latin

America, where “social and economic conditions … invite opposition to

ruling authority” and susceptibility to “the Castro idea of taking

matters into one’s own hands.” These are grave dangers, Kennedy planners

recognized, when “The distribution of land and other forms of national

wealth greatly favors the propertied classes … [and] The poor and

underprivileged, stimulated by the example of the Cuban revolution, are

now demanding opportunities for a decent living.” These threats were

only compounded by successful resistance to invasion, an intolerable

threat to credibility, warranting the “terrors of the earth” and

destructive economic warfare to excise that earlier “cancer.”[17]

Cuba’s crimes became still more immense when it served as the instrument

of Russia’s crusade to dominate the world in 1975, Washington

proclaimed. “If Soviet neocolonialism succeeds” in Angola, UN Ambassador

Daniel Patrick Moynihan thundered, “the world will not be the same in

the aftermath. Europe’s oil routes will be under Soviet control as will

the strategic South Atlantic, with the next target on the Kremlin’s list

being Brazil.” Washington’s fury was caused by another Cuban act of

“successful defiance.” When a US-backed South African invasion was

coming close to conquering newly independent Angola, Cuba sent troops on

its own initiative, scarcely even notifying Russia, and beat back the

invaders. In the major scholarly study, Piero Gleijeses observes that

“Kissinger did his best to smash the one movement that represented any

hope for the future of Angola,” the MPLA. And though the MPLA “bears a

grave responsibility for its country’s plight” in later years, it was

“the relentless hostility of the United States [that] forced it into an

unhealthy dependence on the Soviet bloc and encouraged South Africa to

launch devastating military raids in the 1980s.”[18] These further

crimes of Cuba could not be forgiven; those years saw some of the worst

terrorist attacks against Cuba, with no slight US role. After any

pretense of a Soviet threat collapsed in 1989, the US tightened its

stranglehold on Cuba on new pretexts, notably the alleged role in

terrorism of the prime target of US-based terrorism for 40 years. The

level of fanaticism is illustrated by minor incidents. For example, as

we meet, a visa is being withheld for a young Cuban woman artist who was

offered an art fellowship, apparently because Cuba has been declared a

“terrorist state” by Colin Powell’s State Department.[19] It should be

unnecessary to review how the “terrors of the earth” were unleashed

against Cuba since 1962, “no laughing matter,” Jorge Domý´nguez points

out with considerable understatement, discussing newly-released

documents.[20] Of particular interest, and contemporary import, are the

internal perceptions of the planners. Domý´nguez observes that “Only

once in these nearly thousand pages of documentation did a U.S. official

raise something that resembled a faint moral objection to

U.S.-government sponsored terrorism”: a member of the NSC staff

suggested that it might lead to some Russian reaction; furthermore,

raids that are “haphazard and kill innocents …might mean a bad press in

some friendly countries.” Scholarship on terrorism rarely goes even that

far.

Little new ground is broken when one has to turn to House Majority

leader Dick Armey to find a voice in the mainstream questioning “an

unprovoked attack against Iraq” not on grounds of cost to us, but

because it “would violate international law” and “would not be

consistent with what we have been or what we should be as a nation.”[21]

What we or others “have been” is a separate story.

Much more should be said about continuity and its institutional roots.

But let’s turn instead to some of the immediate questions posed by the

crimes of 9/11:

Who is responsible?

What are the reasons?

What is the proper reaction?

What are the longer-term consequences?

As for (1), it was assumed, plausibly, that the guilty parties were bin

Laden and his al-Qaeda network. No one knows more about them than the

CIA, which, together with US allies, recruited radical Islamists from

many countries and organized them into a military and terrorist force

that Reagan anointed “the moral equivalent of the founding fathers,”

joining Jonas Savimbi and similar dignitaries in that Pantheon.[22] The

goal was not to help Afghans resist Russian aggression, which would have

been a legitimate objective, but rather normal reasons of state, with

grim consequences for Afghans when the moral equivalents finally took

control.

US intelligence has surely been following the exploits of these networks

closely ever since they assassinated President Sadat of Egypt 20 years

ago, and more intensively since their failed terrorist efforts in New

York in 1993. Nevertheless, despite what must be the most intensive

international intelligence investigation in history, evidence about the

perpetrators of 9/11 has been elusive. Eight months after the bombing,

FBI director Robert Mueller could only inform a Senate Committee that US

intelligence now “believes” the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though

planned and implemented elsewhere.[23] And well after the source of the

anthrax attack was localized to government weapons laboratories, it has

still not been identified. These are indications of how hard it may be

to counter acts of terror targeting the rich and powerful in the future.

Nevertheless, despite the thin evidence, the initial conclusion about

9/11 is presumably correct.

Turning to (2), scholarship is virtually unanimous in taking the

terrorists at their word, which matches their deeds for the past 20

years: their goal, in their terms, is to drive the infidels from Muslim

lands, to overthrow the corrupt governments they impose and sustain, and

to institute an extremist version of Islam. They despise the Russians,

but ceased their terrorist attacks against Russia based in

Afghanistan—which were quite serious—when Russia withdrew. And “the call

to wage war against America was made [when it sent] tens of thousands of

its troops to the land of the two Holy Mosques over and above … its

support of the oppressive, corrupt and tyrannical regime that is in

control,” so bin Laden announced well before 9/11.

More significant, at least for those who hope to reduce the likelihood

of further crimes of a similar nature, are the background conditions

from which the terrorist organizations arose, and that provide a

reservoir of sympathetic understanding for at least parts of their

message, even among those who despise and fear them. In George Bush’s

plaintive phrase, “why do they hate us?”

The question is wrongly put: they do not “hate us,” but rather policies

of the US government, something quite different. If the question is

properly formulated, however, answers to it are not hard to find.

Forty-four years ago President Eisenhower and his staff discussed what

he called the “campaign of hatred against us” in the Arab world, “not by

the governments but by the people.” The basic reason, the NSC advised,

is the recognition that the US supports corrupt and brutal governments

and is “opposing political or economic progress,” in order “to protect

its interest in Near East oil.” The Wall Street Journal and others found

much the same when they investigated attitudes of wealthy Westernized

Muslims after 9/11, feelings now exacerbated by US policies with regard

to Israel–Palestine and Iraq.[24]

These are attitudes of people who like Americans and admire much about

the United States, including its freedoms. What they hate is official

policies that deny them the freedoms to which they too aspire.

Many commentators prefer a more comforting answer: their anger is rooted

in resentment of our freedom and democracy, their cultural failings

tracing back many centuries, their inability to take part in the form of

“globalization” in which they happily participate, and other such

deficiencies. More comforting, perhaps, but not too wise.

These issues are very much alive. Just in the past few weeks, Asia

correspondent Ahmed Rashid reported that in Pakistan, “there is growing

anger that U.S. support is allowing [Musharraf’s] military regime to

delay the promise of democracy.” And a well-known Egyptian academic told

the BBC that Arab and Islamic people were opposed to the US because it

has “supported every possible anti-democratic government in the

Arab–Islamic world …When we hear American officials speaking of freedom,

democracy and such values, they make terms like these sound obscene.” An

Egyptian writer added that “Living in a country with an atrocious human

rights record that also happens to be strategically vital to US

interests is an illuminating lesson in moral hypocrisy and political

double standards.” Terrorism, he said, is “a reaction to the injustice

in the region’s domestic politics, inflicted in large part by the US.”

The director of the terrorism program at the Council of Foreign

Relations agreed that “Backing repressive regimes like Egypt and Saudi

Arabia is certainly a leading cause of anti-Americanism in the Arab

world,” but warned that “in both cases the likely alternatives are even

nastier.”

There is a long and illuminating history of the problems in supporting

democratic forms while ensuring that they will lead to preferred

outcomes, not just in this region. And it doesn’t win many friends.[25]

What about proper reaction, question (3)? Answers are doubtless

contentious, but at least the reaction should meet the most elementary

moral standards: specifically, if an action is right for us, it is right

for others; and if wrong for others, it is wrong for us. Those who

reject that standard can be ignored in any discussion of appropriateness

of action, of right or wrong. One might ask what remains of the flood of

commentary on proper reaction—thoughts about “just war,” for example—if

this simple criterion is adopted.

Suppose we adopt the criterion, thus entering the arena of moral

discourse. We can then ask, for example, how Cuba has been entitled to

react after “the terrors of the earth” were unleashed against it 40

years ago. Or Nicaragua, after Washington rejected the orders of the

World Court and Security Council to terminate its “unlawful use of

force,” choosing instead to escalate its terrorist war and issue the

first official orders to its forces to attack undefended civilian “soft

targets,” leaving tens of thousands dead and the country ruined perhaps

beyond recovery. No one believes that Cuba or Nicaragua had the right to

set off bombs in Washington or New York or to kill US political leaders

or send them to prison camps. And it is all too easy to add far more

severe cases in those years, and others to the present.

Accordingly, those who accept elementary moral standards have some work

to do to show that the US and Britain were justified in bombing Afghans

in order to compel them to turn over people who the US suspected of

criminal atrocities, the official war aim announced by the President as

the bombing began. Or that the enforcers were justified in informing

Afghans that they would be bombed until they brought about “regime

change,” the war aim announced several weeks later, as the war was

approaching its end.

The same moral standard holds of more nuanced proposals about an

appropriate response to terrorist atrocities. Military historian Michael

Howard advocated “a police operation conducted under the auspices of the

United Nations … against a criminal conspiracy whose members should be

hunted down and brought before an international court, where they would

receive a fair trial and, if found guilty, be awarded an appropriate

sentence.”[26] That seems reasonable, though we may ask what the

reaction would be to the suggestion that the proposal should be applied

universally. That is unthinkable, and if the suggestion were to be made,

it would elicit outrage and horror.

Similar questions arise with regard to the doctrine of “preemptive

strike” against suspected threats, not new, though its bold assertion is

novel. There is no doubt about the address. The standard of

universality, therefore, would appear to justify Iraqi preemptive terror

against the US. Of course, the conclusion is outlandish. The burden of

proof again lies on those who advocate or tolerate the selective version

that grants the right to those powerful enough to exercise it. And the

burden is not light, as is always true when the threat or use of

violence is advocated or tolerated.

There is, of course, an easy counter to such elementary observations: WE

are good, and THEY are evil. That doctrine trumps virtually any

argument. Analysis of commentary and much of scholarship reveals that

its roots commonly lie in that crucial principle, which is not argued

but asserted. None of this, of course, is an invention of contemporary

power centers and the dominant intellectual culture, but it is,

nevertheless, instructive to observe the means employed to protect the

doctrine from the heretical challenge that seeks to confront it with the

factual record, including such intriguing notions as “moral

equivalence,” “moral relativism,” “anti-Americanism,” and others.

One useful barrier against heresy, already mentioned, is the principle

that questions about the state’s resort to violence simply do not arise

among sane people. That is a common refrain in the current debate over

the modalities of the invasion of Iraq. To select an example at the

liberal end of the spectrum, New York Times columnist Bill Keller

remarks that “the last time America dispatched soldiers in the cause of

‘regime change,’ less than a year ago in Afghanistan, the opposition was

mostly limited to the people who are reflexively against the American

use of power,” either timid supporters or “isolationists, the

doctrinaire left and the soft-headed types Christopher Hitchens

described as people who, ‘discovering a viper in the bed of their child,

would place the first call to People for the Ethical Treatment of

Animals’.” To borrow the words of a noted predecessor, “We went to war,

not because we wanted to, but because humanity demanded it”; President

McKinley in this case, as he ordered his armies to “carry the burden,

whatever it may be, in the interest of civilization, humanity, and

liberty” in the Philippines.[27]

Let’s ignore the fact that “regime change” was not “the cause” in

Afghanistan—rather, an afterthought late in the game—and look more

closely at the lunatic fringe. We have some information about them. In

late September 2001, the Gallup organization surveyed international

opinion on the announced US bombing. The lead question was whether,

“once the identity of the terrorists is known, should the American

government launch a military attack on the country or countries where

the terrorists are based or should the American government seek to

extradite the terrorists to stand trial?” As we recently learned, eight

months later identity of the terrorists was only surmised, and the

countries where they were based are presumed to be Germany, the UAE, and

elsewhere, but let’s ignore that too. The poll revealed that opinion

strongly favored judicial over military action, in Europe

overwhelmingly. The only exceptions were India and Israel, where

Afghanistan was a surrogate for something quite different. Follow-up

questions reveal that support for the military attack that was actually

carried out was very slight.

Support for military action was least in Latin America, the region that

has the most experience with US intervention. It ranged from 2% in

Mexico to 11% in Colombia and Venezuela, where 85% preferred extradition

and trial; whether that was feasible is known only to ideologues. The

sole exception was Panama, where only 80% preferred judicial means and

16% advocated military attack; and even there, correspondents recalled

the death of perhaps thousands of poor people (Western crimes, therefore

unexamined) in the course of Operation Just Cause, undertaken to kidnap

a disobedient thug who was sentenced to life imprisonment in Florida for

crimes mostly committed while he was on the CIA payroll. One remarked

“how much alike [the victims of 9/11] are to the boys and girls, to

those who are unable to be born that December 20 [1989] that they

imposed on us in Chorrillo; how much alike they seem to the mothers, the

grandfathers and the little old grandmothers, all of them also innocent

and anonymous deaths, whose terror was called Just Cause and the

terrorist called liberator.”[28]

I suspect that the director of Human Rights Watch Africa (1993–1995),

now a Professor of Law at Emory University, may have spoken for many

others around the world when he addressed the International Council on

Human Rights Policy in Geneva in January 2002, saying that “I am unable

to appreciate any moral, political or legal difference between this

jihad by the United States against those it deems to be its enemies and

the jihad by Islamic groups against those they deem to be their

enemies.”[29]

What about Afghan opinion? Here information is scanty, but not entirely

lacking. In late October, 1000 Afghan leaders gathered in Peshawar, some

exiles, some coming from within Afghanistan, all committed to

overthrowing the Taliban regime. It was “a rare display of unity among

tribal elders, Islamic scholars, fractious politicians, and former

guerrilla commanders,” the press reported. They unanimously “urged the

US to stop the air raids,” appealed to the international media to call

for an end to the “bombing of innocent people,” and “demanded an end to

the US bombing of Afghanistan.” They urged that other means be adopted

to overthrow the hated Taliban regime, a goal they believed could be

achieved without further death and destruction.

A similar message was conveyed by Afghan opposition leader Abdul Haq,

who was highly regarded in Washington, and received special praise as a

martyr during the Loya Jirga, his memory bringing tears to the eyes of

President Hamid Karzai. Just before he entered Afghanistan, apparently

without US support, and was then captured and killed, he condemned the

bombing and criticized the US for refusing to support efforts of his and

of others “to create a revolt within the Taliban.” The bombing was “a

big setback for these efforts,” he said, outlining his efforts and

calling on the US to assist them with funding and other support instead

of undermining them with bombs. The US, he said, “is trying to show its

muscle, score a victory and scare everyone in the world. They don’t care

about the suffering of the Afghans or how many people we will lose.” The

prominent women’s organization RAWA, which received some belated

recognition in the course of the war, also bitterly condemned the

bombing.

In short, the lunatic fringe of “soft-headed types who are reflexively

against the American use of power” was not insubstantial as the bombing

was undertaken and proceeded. But since virtually no word of any of this

was published in the US, we can continue to comfort ourselves that

“humanity demanded” the bombing.[30]

There is, obviously, a great deal more to say about all of these topics,

but let us turn briefly to question (4).

In the longer term, I suspect that the crimes of 9/11 will accelerate

tendencies that were already underway: the Bush doctrine on preemption

is an illustration. As was predicted at once, governments throughout the

world seized upon 9/11 as a “window of opportunity” to institute or

escalate harsh and repressive programs. Russia eagerly joined the

“coalition against terror,” expecting to receive tacit authorization for

its shocking atrocities in Chechnya, and was not disappointed. China

happily joined for similar reasons. Turkey was the first country to

offer troops for the new phase of the US “war on terror,” in gratitude,

as the Prime Minister explained, for the US contribution to Turkey’s

campaign against its miserably-repressed Kurdish population, waged with

extreme savagery and relying crucially on a huge flow of US arms,

peaking in 1997; in that single year arms transfers exceeded the entire

post-war period combined up to the onset of the counterinsurgency

campaign. Turkey is highly praised for these achievements and was

rewarded by grant of authority to protect Kabul from terror, funded by

the same superpower that provided the means for its recent acts of state

terror, including some of the major atrocities of the grisly 1990s.

Israel recognized that it would be able to crush Palestinians even more

brutally, with even firmer US support. And so on throughout much of the

world.

Many governments, including the US, instituted measures to discipline

the domestic population and to carry forward unpopular measures under

the guise of “combating terror,” exploiting the atmosphere of fear and

the demand for “patriotism”—which in practice means: “You shut up and

I’ll pursue my own agenda relentlessly.” The Bush administration used

the opportunity to advance its assault against most of the population,

and future generations, serving the narrow corporate interests that

dominate the administration to an extent even beyond the norm.

One major outcome is that the US, for the first time, has major military

bases in Central Asia. These help to position US corporate interests

favorably in the current “great game” to control the resources of the

region, but also to complete the encirclement of the world’s major

energy resources, in the Gulf region. The US base system targeting the

Gulf extends from the Pacific to the Azores, but the closest reliable

base before the Afghan war was Diego Garcia. Now that situation is much

improved, and forceful intervention should be facilitated.

The Bush administration also exploited the new phase of the “war on

terror” to expand its overwhelming military advantages over the rest of

the world, and to move on to other methods to ensure global dominance.

Government thinking was clarified by high officials when Prince Abdullah

of Saudi Arabia visited the US in April to urge the administration to

pay more attention to the reaction in the Arab world to its strong

support for Israeli terror and repression. He was told, in effect, that

the US did not care what he or other Arabs think. A high official

explained that “if he thought we were strong in Desert Storm, we’re 10

times as strong today. This was to give him some idea what Afghanistan

demonstrated about our capabilities.” A senior defense analyst gave a

simple gloss: others will “respect us for our toughness and won’t mess

with us.” That stand has many precedents too, but in the post-9/11 world

it gains new force. It is reasonable to speculate that such consequences

were one goal of the bombing of Afghanistan: to warn the world of what

the “legitimate enforcer” can do if someone steps out of line. The

bombing of Serbia was undertaken for similar reasons: to “ensure NATO’s

credibility,” as Blair and Clinton explained —not referring to the

credibility of Norway or Italy. That is a common theme of statecraft.

And with some reason, as history amply reveals. Without continuing, the

basic issues of international society seem to me to remain much as they

were, but 9/11 surely has induced changes, in some cases, with

significant and not very attractive implications.

[1] Strobe Talbott and Nayan Chanda (eds), The Age of Terror (New York:

Basic Books, 2001). The editors write that with the anthrax attacks,

which they attribute to bin Laden, “anxiety became a certainty.”

[2] Study cited by Charles Glaser and Steve Fetter, “National Missile

Defense and the Future of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy,” International

Security 261 (2001). Richard Falkenrath, Robert Newman and Bradley

Thayer, America’s Achilles Heel: Nuclear, Biological and Chemical

Terrorism and Covert Attack (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). Barton

Gellman, “Broad Effort Launched after ’98 Attacks,” Washington Post,

December 20, 2001. ISSN 0739–3148 print/ISSN 1469–9931

online/03/010113–15 ÆÉ 2003 Caucus for a New Political Science DOI:

10.1080/0739314032000071253

[3] Joseph Nevins, “First the Butchery, Then the Flowers: Clinton and

Holbrooke in East Timor,” Counterpunch, May 16–31, 2002. On the

background, see Richard Tanter, Mark Selden and Stephen Shalom (eds),

Bitter Flowers. Sweet Flowers: East Timor, Indonesia, and the World

Community (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001); Chomsky, A New

Generation Draws the Line (London, New York: Verso, 2001).

[4] Hans Morgenthau, The Purpose of American Politics (New York:

Vintage, 1964); Andrew Bacevich, “Different Drummers, Same Drum,”

National Interest, Summer 2001. Greatly to his credit, Morgenthau took

the highly unusual step of abandoning this conventional stance,

forcefully, in the early days of the Vietnam War.

[5] Wilson, “Democracy and Efficiency,” Atlantic Monthly, 1901, cited by

Ido Oren, Our Enemies and Us: America’s Rivalries and the Making of

Political Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). For some

discussion of Mill’s classic essay on intervention, see my Peering into

the Abyss of the Future (Delhi: Institute of Social Sciences, 2002,

Fifth Lakdawala Memorial Lecture).

[6] For further detail on the first phase of the “war on terror,” and

sources here and below, see Alexander George (ed.), Western State

Terrorism (Cambridge, UK: Polity—Blackwell, 1991), and sources cited.

[7] David Rapoport, “The Fourth Wave,” Current History, America at War,

December 2001.

[8] 999, cited by Adam Isacson and Joy Olson, Just the Facts

(Washington, DC: Latin America Working Group and Center for

International Policy, 1999), p. ix.

[9] See Current History, op. cit.

[10] 980–1988 record; see “Inter-Agency Task Force, Africa Recovery

Program/Economic Commission,” in South African Destabilization: The

Economic Cost of Frontline Resistance to Apartheid (New York: UN, 1989),

p. 13, cited by Merle Bowen, Fletcher Forum, Winter 1991. Children on

the Front Line (New York and Geneva: UNICEF, 1989). ANC, Joseba Zulaika

and William Douglass, Terror and Taboo (New York and London: Routledge,

1996), p. 12. On expansion of US trade with South Africa after Congress

authorized sanctions in 1985 (overriding Reagan’s veto), see Gay

McDougall and Richard Knight, in Robert Edgar (ed.), Sanctioning

Apartheid (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990).

[11] Zbigniew Brzezinski, “If We Fight, It Must Be in a Way to

Legitimize Global US Role,” Guardian Weekly, August 22–28, 2002. Michael

Wines, “The World: Double Vision; Two Views of Inhumanity Split the

World, Even in Victory,” New York Times, June 13, 1999. Wars of Terror

119

[12] Anthony Shadid Bush, “US Rebuffs Second Iraq Offer on Arms

Inspection,” Boston Globe, August 6, 2002. Ami Ayalon, director of

Shabak, 1996–2000, interview, Le Monde, December 22, 2001; reprinted in

Roane Carey and Jonathan Shanin, The Other Israel (New York: New Press,

2002). Harkabi, cited by Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk, Le Monde

diplomatique, February 1986.

[13] Sumit Ganguly, Current History, op. cit.

[14] James Baker, Op-Ed, New York Times, August 25, 2002. On Panama, see

my Deterring Democracy (New York and London: Verso, 1991; New York: Hill

& Wang, 1992, extended edn), Chapters 4, 5.

[15] Ibid., and my Year 501 (Boston: South End, 1993), Chapter 3.

[16] STRATCOM,“Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence,” 1995, partially

declassified. For quotes and sources, see my New Military Humanism

(Monroe, Maine: Common Courage, 1999), Chapter 6.

[17] Acheson, see ibid., Chapter 7. Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting

Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill, NC:

University of North Carolina, 2002); my Profit over People (New York:

Seven Stories, 1999).

[18] Gleijeses, op. cit.

[19] Alix Ritchie, “Cuban Artist Program May Get Bush-whacked,”

Provincetown Banner, August 29, 2002.

[20] The “@@@@ $%& Missile Crisis,” Diplomatic History 242 (2000).

[21] Eric Schmitt, “House G.O.P. Leader Warns Against Iraq Attack,” New

York Times, August 9, 2002.

[22] Reagan, cited by Samina Amin, International Security 265

(2001/2002). Savimbi was “one of the few authentic heroes of our times,”

Jeane Kirkpatrick declared at a Conservative Political Action

convention, where he “received enthusiastic applause after vowing to

attack American oil installations in his country.” Colin Nickerson,

“Sarimbi Finds Support on the Right,” Boston Globe, February 3, 1986.

[23] Walter Pincus, “The 9–11 Masterminds may have been in Afghanistan,”

Washington Post Weekly, June 10–16.

[24] For sources and background discussion, see my World Orders Old and

New (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, extended edition 1996),

pp. 79, 201f.; 9–11 (New York: Seven Stories, 2001).

[25] Rashid, “Is Terror Worse than Oppression?,” Far Eastern Economic

Review, August 1, 2002. AUC professor El-Lozy, writer Azizuddin

El-Kaissouni, and Warren Bass of the CFR, quoted by Joyce Koh, “

‘Two-faced’ US policy blamed for Arab hatred,” Straits Times

(Singapore), August 14, 2002.

[26] “What’s in a Name? How to Fight Terrorism,” Foreign Affairs,

January/February 2002; talk of October 30, 2001 (Tania Branigan,

Guardian, October 31.

[27] Keller, Op-Ed, New York Times, August 24, 2002. McKinley and many

others; see Louis A. Pérez, The War of 1898 (Chapel Hill, NC: University

of North Carolina, 1998).

[28] Ricardo Stevens, October 19, cited in NACLA Report on the Americas

XXXV:3 (2001).

[29] Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, “Upholding International Legality Against

Islamic and American Jihad,” in Ken Booth and Tim Dunne (eds), Worlds in

Collision: Terror and the Future of Global Order (New York: Palgrave,

2002).

[30] A media review by Jeff Nygaard found one reference to the Gallup

poll, a brief notice in the Omaha World-Herald that “completely

misrepresented the findings.” Nygaard Notes Independent Weekly News and

Analysis, November 16, 2001, reprinted in Counterpoise 53/4 (2001).

Karzai on Abdul Haq, Elizabeth Rubin, New Republic, July 8, 2002. Abdul

Haq, interview with Anatol Lieven, Guardian, November 2, 2001. Peshawar

gathering, Barry Bearak, New York Times, October 25, 2001; John

Thornhill and Farhan Bokhari, Financial Times, October 25, 26, 2001;

John Burns, New York Times, October 26, 2001; Indira Laskhmanan, Boston

Globe, October 25, 26, 2001. RAWA website. The information was available

throughout in independent (“alternative”) journals, published and

electronic, including Znet (www.zmag.org).