Organ of Alliance Marxist-Leninist
(North America) Volume
1, Issue 8; October 2003 $1.00
A L L
I A N C E ! A Revolutionary Communist Monthly
Mourning victims of 9/11 Terrorist attack
Was
9/11 a New Pearl Harbor? By Tom Wakely
UK; (special to ALLIANCE!)
Editors note.
Alliance had very early on used the analogy of Pearl Harbour - in its' analysis
of the 9/11 terrorist attack (see: World Trade Center
Terror 2001 at WTC
).
This article from the UK, focuses on the growing realisation in the UK that
"9/11" -was indeed in the interests of USA imperialism.
So profound is this realisation that senior cabinet ministers of Tony Blair
- now also use the anlaogy of "Pearl Harbour".
Divisions within the ruling
class are sometimes allowed to surface in a capitalist media keen to display
its liberal credentials. These may be of a most surprising kind, as for example
in an article by Michael Meacher, former environment minister in the
Blair cabinet, published in the Guardian newspaper on 6.9.03. Meacher
takes the Labour government to task for its support of US foreign policy
over Iraq and starts by correctly identifying the war against terrorism as
being “bogus” (i.e. spurious or counterfeit, not genuine). He points out
that long before 9/11 Bush’s cabinet intended to take control of the Gulf
region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. In support of this contention,
he quotes from a September 2000 publication entitled ‘Rebuilding America’s
Defences’ from the right wing think tank, Project for the New American
Century (PNAC). In this document can be found the following statement:
“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”. This document, drawn up by Cheney,
Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Jeb Bush among others supports an earlier one stating
that advanced industrial nations should be discouraged from challenging US
hegemony, and referring to key allies such as the UK as “the most effective
and efficient means of exercising American global leadership”.
Written a year before 9/11, the same document pinpoints North Korea, Syria
and Iran as dangerous regimes justifying the creation of a “world wide command
and control system”. Meacher argues that this blueprint for US world domination
provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during
and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism. He points out that the US
authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11. For example,
fifteen of the hijackers obtained their visas in Saudi Arabia, where the
CIA since 1987 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. It is reported that
five of the hijackers had received training at secure military installations
in the 1990s (Newsweek, September 15th 2001). Instructive intelligence leads
prior to 9/11 were not followed up, and the reaction on September 11th itself
was astonishingly slow with no fighter aircraft scrambled from US Andrews
airforce base
Continued on page twelve.
(just ten miles from Washington) until after the third plane had hit the
Pentagon.
US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, was provoked to comment, “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”. The lack of a serious attempt to capture Bin
Laden or other al-Qaida and Taliban leaders is incompatible with the idea
of a determined ‘war on terrorism’. Rather it appears that the so-called
‘war on terrorism’ is being used as a cover for achieving wider US strategic
geopolitical objectives. A key clue was provided by Tony Blair when he declared
that “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 17th 2002). Similarly, Rumsfeld was
so intent on obtaining a rationale for attacking Iraq that he repeatedly
asked that the CIA find evidence linking Iraq to 9/11, something they proved
unable to do.
There is no doubt that 9/11 offered a pretext for putting the PNAC plan into
action, oil as always being the motivating force. As a report prepared for
the US government from the Baker Institute put it, “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” so that
“military intervention” was a necessity (Sunday Herald, October 6th 2002).
Having been thwarted by the Taliban’s unexpected intransigence over oil and
gas pipelines, the 9/11 attacks provided an invaluable pretext for invading
Afghanistan. This failure to avert 9/11 despite accumulated intelligence
relating to a planned attack has a compelling historical parallel in the
assault on Pearl Harbour. Advance warning of the Japanese raid had been received
but news 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” was likely to be a long one ‘in the absence of some catastrophic
and cataclysmic event – like a new Pearl Harbour’.
Meacher rightly concludes that the 9/11 attacks allowed the US to press the
“go” button for a strategy in accordance with the PNAC agenda that would
otherwise have been politically impossible to implement. His main conclusion
is therefore 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”. So far so good - but just where does
such an analysis leave this ex-minister and lifetime supporter of the Labour
Party? His conclusion, however, is not that imperialism is the enemy of peace
and progress for humankind, but that the policy of British imperialism should
cease from being aspiration to a junior partnership with the US and instead
must be driven by its “own independent goals”.
If anyone has any illusions that such “independent goals” are anything other
than furthering the particular interests of British imperialism they will
find Mark Curtis’s recently published book ‘Web of Deceit: Britain’s real
role in the world’ (Vintage, London 2003) invaluable reading. Curtis is a
former Research Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs and
has written extensively on US and British foreign policies. This book should
be compulsory reading for those who believe in such things as the Labour
Party’s ‘ethical foreign policy’ or that Britain stands for fairness and
evenhandedness in the world. Before the war in Iraq began, the Blair government
had indulged in at least six specific violations of international law: in
conducting without UN authorisation the wars in Afghanistan and Yugoslavia;
in committing violation of international humanitarian law in bombing Yugoslavia;
in the illegal bombing of Iraq in 1998; in maintaining the illegal ‘no fly
zones’ over Iraq (a permanent ‘secret’ war) and in maintaining sanctions
against Iraq. In addition, ‘New Labour’ had been supporting and condoning
numerous further violations of international law and human rights by its
key allies such as Turkey in its Kurdish regions, Russia in Chechnya, and
Israel in the occupied territories. The reasons for this approach are not
difficult to divine since oil was (and is) the main Anglo-American interest
in the Middle East. In 1947, British planners described it as ‘a vital prize
for any power interested in world influence’; there is no reason to think
this analysis has changed.
When it came to war on Iraq, Blair made it clear that opposition by the UN
would not be seen as a bar to action by the UK. Bourgeois political culture
promotes the myth of Britain’s energetic support of the UN, whereas in fact,
open defiance of the UN is a permanent feature of British foreign policy.
Early in 2003, the two favourite pretexts for the invasion of Iraq were the
existence of weapons of mass destruction, and a putative link between the
Iraqi regime and al-Qaida. When neither of these claims could be substantiated,
Blair asserted the ‘morality’ of war against Iraq. Past brutalities against
the Kurds in northern Iraq in the 1980s were regularly invoked to support
this argument, conveniently ignoring the fact that British policy prior to
the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 had been to support Saddam’s Iraq as a counter
to Iran. At the time, this involved ignoring suppression of the Kurds, with
London opposing self-determination for the Kurdish nation in order not to
risk the destabilisation of Turkey. Far from distancing itself from Saddam's
regime on moral grounds, between 1980-1990 Britain provided £3.5 billion
in trade credits to Iraq, and sold £2.3 billion worth of machinery
and transport equipment. The Labour government has remained quiet about human
rights abuses in Turkey despite the fact that between 1994-8 the Turkish
government destroyed 3,500 Kurdish villages, made at least 1.5 million people
homeless and internally displaced and killed untold thousands more. In 2002,
even Royal Air Force pilots protested against being ordered to return to
their base in Turkey in order to allow the Turkish air force to bomb Kurds
in the ‘no fly zone’.
Curtis’s book goes on to describe the anti-democratic machinations of British
imperialism across the world and the fact that such reactionary policies
have enjoyed the full support of Labour governments. Among the lessons to
be learned from Meacher’s article is that there are bitter antagonisms among
the imperialist powers. This represents a chink in the armour of world imperialism
that has the potential to be exploited by the working masses to their advantage.
At the same time, to believe that one’s own bourgeoisie are ’better’ or more
moral than someone else’s, whatever their protestations is an inexcusable
folly. Let them be judged by their actions and not their words.
End.