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The Price of Empire
by Alan Bock
One can understand the shock,
the horror, the unbelief as the war most Americans didn't know was going
on or didn't choose to acknowledge came home in such a brutal, deadly
fashion in lower Manhattan and the Pentagon. This was obviously a
coordinated attack, carried out with skill and stealth. Its success
reflects a failure of Intelligence and intelligence on a massive scale.
In short, the United States,
as a government and to some extent as a society, seems to have no idea how
it is perceived in much of the world and no effective defense against the
most dangerous threats to the continuing functioning of our society. It is
hardly unique in history for officials to spend their time and spin their
wheels preparing for the last war, or operating on assumptions that
haven't been valid for decades. The attacks in Washington and New York –
and possibly attacks planned elsewhere that either failed or were thwarted
– demonstrate that official intelligence in this country is sadly
ineffective.
Waiting
For Real Information
The media have been full of
speculation about which groups, organizations or states might have been
involved in these terrorist acts. I talked with Geoffrey Kemp, Middle East
expert at the Nixon International Center in Washington and hardly a dove.
Knowing a good deal more than most people about the people, players and
organizations in the Middle East, he simply refused to speculate. He
believes it could take several days for the first intelligence breaks that
could be viewed as reliable to come through.
While the operation was
clearly well-coordinated, highly professional, and had to have at least
some kind of cooperation from what Mr. Kemp referred to as foreign
"entities," it is simply impossible to be sure at this point who carried
out these terrorist attacks. A talk-show host in New Orleans with whom I
spoke, Ed Butler, suggested that
Colombian narco-traffickers might have been behind them, and they just
might have the resources and the capability.
It is difficult to wait for
reliable information, especially insofar as you understand that it might
never become available. But to respond without reliable information – to
target, just to take a recent example, an
aspirin factory rather than a real terrorist headquarters – would be
worse than ineffective. It would increase resentment.
Asking
Other Questions
Given that we don't yet know
and might never know exactly who perpetrated these terrorist acts, it
might be appropriate – even though it might be early in the game for most
Americans to be ready to consider them – to ask questions about our own
policies and posture in the world.
I talked with Chalmers
Johnson, political scientist, authority on Japan and author of
Blowback: The Costs of American Empire, published last year by
Henry Holt. He was saddened but not surprised by the attacks. His book had
come close to predicting roughly similar attacks on American soil as
resentment, hatred and hopelessness become more commonplace around the
world that the United States tries rather desultorily to run.
Certain pertinent questions
have been studiously ignored in most of the media and in most of the
centers of policy-making and analysis, says
Chalmers Johnson.
Why was the United States a target? Why was the World Trade Center the
target? Was it a symbol of capitalism or a symbol of American hegemony?
What have we done – or what has the government done in our names – to
create such intense and organized hostility?
"We have 65 major U.S.
military installations in other peoples' countries right now," Johnson
told me, and not everybody in those countries is happy about those bases'
presence. Although plenty of people have speculated, for example, that
Osama bin Laden, a Saudi national who is supposedly estranged from the
Saudi government, has been behind numerous terrorist acts and masterminds
a worldwide terrorist network, nobody has suggested that the United States
withdraw its troops or bases from Saudi Arabia. If we were simply
considering possible alternatives without preconceptions, that would
certainly be at least on the table as an option.
Failure
of Intelligence
The remarkable success of the
terrorist assault – the ability to get hijackers through airport security
and onto four or five different airplanes, to hijack all these airplanes
simultaneously, to have people available who could not only fly an
airplane reasonably competently but were willing to undertake a suicide
mission – suggests a catastrophic failure of intelligence. But it is not
just a failure of information-gathering but a failure of imagination and
understanding of how the world is, rather than how it was.
Chalmers Johnson maintains
that US defense and intelligence services have seemed incapable of
imagining the world as it really is for at least a decade, maybe longer.
He thinks that the Cold War actually ended, in terms of the Soviets posing
a genuine threat, before the Soviet Union deteriorated. Even if that's
arguable, however, the world changed profoundly in 1989 and our defense
and intelligence agencies, whether through bureaucratic inertia or the
comfort of old preconceptions or a number of other reasons, still don't
understand – and haven't even tried very hard to understand – the new
shape of the world.
Thus we are almost completely
unprepared for the dispersed, decentralized kind of terrorist threat that
was proven, yesterday, to be capable of creating incredible destruction.
Blowback
Even more important, however,
is a failure to understand just how deeply hated the United States is in
many parts of the world – and hated by people ready and able to take
desperate and ruthless actions. It's not just that most CIA analysts have
never even been to the countries they are supposed to be analyzing, nor
that they often
don't speak the language. It is that we are careless and arrogant in
our ignorance, that we exercise our hegemony without much forethought,
analysis or intelligence.
"Blowback"
is a CIA term referring to an operation that comes back to bite you, often
in unpredictable and certainly unintended way. The terrorist operations
against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon can be seen as blowback,
the unintended consequences of American hegemony, the costs that have
finally begun to be paid by Americans, on American soil, for our leaders'
casual and often thoughtless form of empire-building and maintenance.
Responding
Foolishly
The temptation US leaders will
struggle with in the next day or so is to respond intelligently and in a
measured fashion rather than blindly and disproportionately. It is almost
certain, for example, that airport security will be significantly tighter,
that access to government buildings and major office building will be more
difficult. Some of these measures may be required but some may be
overdone.
Plenty of people have compared
this attack to Pearl Harbor , and in terms of casualties and the surprise
element the comparison may be apt. Chalmers Johnson reminded me, however,
that one of the responses to Pearl Harbor was what he called a "racial
pogrom" against Japanese-Americans, almost all of whom had nothing to do
with the attack and had no sympathy for their former country. (It is a
point of pride to me that the Orange County Register was one of the
few newspapers to oppose the
internment
of Japanese-Americans in 1943 and 1943 rather than years later.)
It also can be said that Pearl
Harbor (and other affiliated activities) led to the formation of the
intelligence services that became the CIA. Perhaps the World Trade Center
assault, which exposed the ineffectiveness of the CIA as it is presently
constituted, will lead to a deconstruction of the CIA and the building of
a better information capability from the ground up. I don't think that's
likely, but I do think it would be desirable.
When
Hope Dies
Chalmers Johnson points out
one more phenomenon that makes such attacks, especially suicide attacks,
feasible.
What we have seen – perhaps
most notably in the Middle East but elsewhere as well – is a loss of hope
among wide swaths of people. It is not too difficult to understand that a
lot of Palestinians have lost hope that anything positive is likely to
happen in their lifetimes. It is also becoming more the case that Israelis
are losing hope also.
When people have no hope or
see no possibility of a decent life for themselves and their children,
then war and even suicide become less unthinkable, less unlikely. Insofar
as increasing numbers of people have lost hope for the future, perhaps we
will see more people willing to engage in what most of see as incredibly
desperate acts of violence and terrorism.
I hope Chalmers Johnson is
wrong about that one. But there is little question now that the United
States has begun to pay the price in bloodshed at home for the arrogance
and breastbeating of our almost breathtakingly ignorant foreign policy
leaders. One may hate those consequences, but until we begin to recognize
that retaliation against innocents is among the consequences of our
foreign policy, we will make little progress either in understanding
September 11 or avoiding more attacks in the future.
Alan Bock is Senior
Essayist at the Orange County Register, a
weekly columnist for WorldNetDaily
and a regular contributor to Antiwar.com.
Source:
by courtesy & © 2001 Alan
Bock & Antiwar.com
by the same author:
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