The Dialectics of Terrorism - Peter McLaren

excerpted from the book

Masters of War

Militarism and Blowback in the Era of American Empire

edited by Carl Boggs

Routledge, 2003, paper

p155
Manning Marable warns, "The question, 'Why Do They Hate Us?" can only be: answered from the vantage point of the Third World's widespread poverty, hunger and economic exploitation." The U.S. share of global industrial production is at about 28 percent, while the country accounts for only 4.5 percent of the world population. It continues to be the world's biggest exporter and importer. The U.S. pushes free trade worldwide, not to improve the world's standard of living, but to reap the benefits of unequal exchange, allowing stronger capitalists to appropriate surplus value from weaker parties in the trade and to favor imperialist monopolies by facilitating the cheapening of labor internationally, ensuring debt repayment, asserting intellectual property rights, regulating worldwide production, breaking down remaining barriers to speculation and capital mobility, perpetuating import quotas, restrictions, and export subsidies, and extending the ability of the U.S. to wage war to protect its industrial base.

Most of the populations in Latin America, the Middle East, and Central Asia are poorer today than at the end of the Cold War. The incomes of most Africans are no higher today than they were nearly a half-century ago.

We have entered a world where any linkage between democracy and justice has been irreparably fractured. The Manifest Destiny inscribed in the 1823 Monroe Doctrine and the Truman Doctrine of U.S. interventionism and containment that pushed the view that "the whole world should adopt the American system" find resonance in the Project for the New American Century. An alliance of social and religious conservatives, political neoconservatives, and militarists (including many who were members of the Bush padre administration), boasting the likes of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, and William Bennett, the Project for the New American Century aggressively propagandizes its vision of U.S. geopolitical world dominance and unipolar world supremacy and a grim determination to prevent the emergence of any rival superpower. In such a view, the U.S. becomes a raging colonial macrophage, engulfing and consuming all that is foreign.

Of course the U.S. is fully aware of the consequences that will follow the unfettered free trade it so ardently seeks. For instance, in 1999 the National Intelligence Council released an unclassified study on the consequences of globalization that predicted a number of scenarios, including competition among economic blocs located in Europe, Asia, and the Americas; the success of global elites in advanced capitalist nations and continued misery of the majority of the world's population; forced migration; global polarization. The report anticipates dim economic prospects for Eurasia and the Middle East where "populations will be significantly larger, poorer, more urban, and more disillusioned." The U.S. knows that the growing exports from Mexico and the Caribbean basin based on raw materials and cheap labor will lead irrevocably to a "developmental blind alley." The predictions have largely been borne out, with Argentina "enduring the worst peacetime economic crash in history" and with the unregulated juggernaut of market forces "sweeping away many of the gains of job security and a welfare state achieved by 50 years of ate-led development."

p156
John Powers writes:

Nobody wants to say it during wartime, but the cozy yet ruthless Texas business culture that produced Enron also produce our president. Bush takes pride in working like a CEO, and if you study his behavior, you find him duplicating, almost exactly, the culture of Enron. He displays the same obsession with loyalty (his number one virtue), the same habit of dishonest, short-term accounting (think of his lies about those tax cuts), the same blithe disregard for ordinary workers (his post-September 11 economic proposals all aimed at helping corporations) and the same pitiless certainty he's on the side of the free-market angels.

p159
September 17 segment of his show, [Bill] O'Reilly Factor, "no-spin" host Bill put forth a plan for action in case the Taliban did not hand over bin Laden:

If they don't, the U.S. should bomb the Afghan infrastructure to rubble-the airport, the power plants, their water facilities and the roads. This is a very primitive country. And taking out their ability to exist day to day will not be hard. Remember, the people of any country are ultimately responsible for the government they have. The Germans were responsible for Hitler. The Afghans are responsible for the Taliban. We should not target civilians. But if they don't rise up against this criminal government, they starve, period.

p160
John Le Carre

it's as if we have entered a new, Orwellian world where our personal reliability as comrades in the struggle [against terrorism] is measured by the degree to which we invoke the past to explain the present. Suggesting there is a historical context for the recent atrocities is by implication to make excuses for them. Anyone who is with us doesn't do that. Anyone who does, is against us.

p160
James Petras argues that we inhabit a veritable police state, at the cusp of a totalitarian regime. He writes:

One of the hallmarks of a totalitarian regime is the creation of a state of mutual suspicion in which civil society is turned into a network of secret police informers. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) soon after September 11 exhorted | every U.S. citizen to report any suspicious behavior by friends, neighbors, relatives, acquaintances, and strangers. Between September and the end of November almost 700,000 denunciations were registered. Thousands of Middle Eastern neighbors, local shop owners, and employees were denounced, as were numerous other U.S. citizens. None of these denunciations led to any arrests or even information related to September 11. Yet hundreds and thousands of innocent persons were investigated and harassed by the federal police.

p163
The new Orwellian ambiance in the U.S. can be sniffed in the words of prominent right-wing journalist Charles Krauthammer: "America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome. Accordingly, America is in a position to reshape norms-How? By unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will." Sound Nietzschean? Readers who are fans of Zarathustra might be emboldened by the words uttered by David Rockefeller at the June 1991 Bilderberg meeting in Baden, Germany: a "supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers . . . is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries." When you put Krauthammer and Rockefeller together, you complete the circuit of totalitarian logic involving "full-spectrum dominance" set in train by the juggernaut of globalized capital. Petras warns that we must start to "recognize the barbarities committed today in the name of Western victories, hegemony, democracy and free markets: the premature death of ten million Russians, twenty million African AIDS victims denied medicine by Western pharmaceutical corporations backed by their governments, the killing of one million Iraqi children by the Anglo-U.S. war and blockade, the 300 million Latin Americans living in poverty, the tens of thousands of Colombians killed thanks to U.S. military training and aid."

p165
John Pilger

There is no "war on terrorism." If there was, the SAS would be storming the beaches of Florida, where more terrorists, tyrants and torturers are given refuge than anywhere in the world.

p165
Bertell Ollman

I'm still waiting for [Bush] to declare war on Florida. Miami is a haven for terrorists, it's the terror capital of the world. All these Latin American and Cuban terrorists go there to refresh, to retire, to conduct their business. If Bush wants to make a war on terror he should start by bombing Miami and arresting the governor of Florida, even if he is his brother.... And after he's successfully done away with terrorism in Miami, then we'll talk about the next step.

It is difficult to deny that the U.S. has a calculated penchant for ignoring its own terrorists, including groups and individuals trained and financed either directly or indirectly by the U.S. military; not just the "gusano" mafia in Florida, but also fundamentalist Christian mass murderer General Efrain Rios Montt of Guatemala, Savimbi and Renamo in Angola and Mozambique, and the Nicaraguan Contras. Clearly, the U.S. has employed every conceivable tactic to ensure that socialist experiments are doomed to fail. As William Blum writes:

The boys of capital, they also chortle in their martinis about the death of socialism. The word has been banned from polite conversation. And they hope that no one will notice that every socialist experiment of any significance in the twentieth century-without exception-has either been crushed, overthrown, or invaded, or corrupted, perverted, subverted, or destabilized, or otherwise had life made impossible for it, by the United States. Not one socialist government or movement-from the Russian Revolution to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, from Communist China to the EMLN in [El] Salvador-not one was permitted to rise or fall solely on its own merits; not one was left secure enough to drop its guard against the all-powerful enemy abroad and freely and fully relax control at home.

Many people reject the idea that the U.S. exports terrorism. Some no doubt find it difficult to understand why a powerful nation such as the U.S. needs to employ what are generally considered to be the weapons of the weak. Michael Klare asserts that "Throughout history, the weapon of those who see themselves as strong in spirit but weak in power has been what we call terrorism. Terrorism is the warfare of the weak against the strong: if you have an army you wage a war; if you lack an army you engage in suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism. (Remember: this is exactly what the American Revolution looked like to the British, the strong force in 1775.)"

Chomsky takes issue with this view of terrorism. He explains that, far from being a weapon of the weak, terrorism is primarily the weapon of the strong:

That is the culture in which we live and it reveals several facts. One is the fact that terrorism works. It doesn't fail. It works. Violence usually works. That's world history. Secondly, it's a very serious analytic error to say, as is commonly done, that terrorism is the weapon of the weak. Like other means of violence, it's primarily a weapon of the strong, overwhelmingly, in fact. It is held to be a weapon of the weak because the strong also control the doctrinal systems and their terror doesn't count as terror.

The late Eqbal Ahmad makes the point that the moral revulsion against terrorism is highly selective. He writes that "We are to feel the terror of those groups which are officially disapproved. We are to applaud the terror of those groups of whom officials do approve." In this context it is impossible not to seriously question the odious role of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or Whisc, based in Fort Benning, Georgia (until January this year, Whisc was called the "School of the Americas," or SOA). Since 1946, SOA has trained more than 60,000 Latin American soldiers and policemen. Its graduates constitute a veritable rogues gallery of the continent's most notorious torturers, mass murderers, dictators, and state terrorists.

How can the U.S. condemn other countries for human rights abuses and acts of terror and not recognize that it houses, educates, and graduates some of the most notorious butchers in the Americas? If the U.S. really believes that supporting terrorists makes you as guilty as the terrorists themselves, then it would have to put on trial most of its military and political leadership over the last handful of administrations, and more. Alexander Cockburn reports that in recent years the U.S. has been charged by the United Nations and human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International with tolerating torture in its prison system. Methods of torture range from putting prisoners into solitary confinement in concrete boxes, twenty-three hours a day, for years on end, to activating 50,000-volt shocks through a mandatory electric stun-belt worn by prisoners.

The U.S. began serious experiments in torture during the Vietnam War. One experiment involved three prisoners being anesthetized and having their skulls opened up. Electrodes were planted into their brains. They were revived, given knives, and put in a room. CIA psychologists activated the electrodes in order provoke the prisoners to attack one another, but the prisoners did not respond as expected. So the electrodes were removed, the prisoners shot, and their bodies burned.

If we want to discuss torture, we have to account for why more than 80 U.S. companies have, over the last decade, been involved in the marketing and export of equipment used to torture-more than any other country in the world. The major recipients of these "exports" were Brazil, Israel, Russia, Taiwan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. The U.S., Great Britain, China, France, and Russia are among the main providers of torture training throughout the world. In the case of the United States, we have evidence of intelligence training manuals produced and used at Fort Benning, Georgia, that advocated execution, torture, beatings, and blackmail. And to find examples of known involvement of U.S. agencies in torture, we need look no further than Operation Condor "which coordinated the military intelligence operations against opponents of the regimes of Augusto Pinochet of Chile, Afredo Stroessner of Paraguay, Jorge Videla of Argentina, and Hugo Banzer of Bolivia, and was led by former Secretary of State Kissinger and General Vernon Walters."

p169
The U.S. exercises managed trade that combines protection of home markets with aggressive intervention to secure monopoly market advantages and investment profits. The U.S. continues to operate a "selective" openness in designated product areas (with U.S. affiliates) while Euro-U.S. policymakers and their employees in the IMF-World Bank insist that countries in the Third World eliminate all trade barriers, subsidies, and regulations for products and services in all sectors. The U.S. preaches market fundamentalism to the Third World while protecting its own domestic economic sectors. The U.S. operates as the Alpha Male of a neo-mercantilist imperialism and uses its military might to back itself up. Petras notes that

So-called globalization grew out of the barrel of a gun-an imperial state gun. To further protect overseas capital, the U.S. and the EU created a new NATO doctrine which legitimates offensive wars outside of Europe against any country that threatens vital economic interests (their MNCs). NATO has been expanded to incorporate new client states in eastern Europe and new peace associates" among the Baltic states and the former republics of the USSR In other words, the imperial state military alliances incorporate more states, involving more state apparatuses than before-to ensure the safe passage of Euro-U.S. MNCs into their countries and the easy flow of profits back to their headquarters in the U.S. and western Europe.

It is clear now that the spread of globalization has not helped the world's poor: from 1960 to 1980, the gross domestic product in Latin America grew by 75 percent per person, but from 1980 to 2000-a period of massive globalization, market liberalization, and international investment-the gross domestic product rose only 6 percent. In Africa, the gross domestic product rose by a third from 1960 to 1980 but over the next twenty years lost nearly half of that gain. Ted Fishman comments:

The lethal double dynamic begins with the dirt poor whom the spread of global capitalism has not helped. Half the planet lives on less than two dollars a day, a billion people on half of that. For them, globalization has meant little in terms of real income gain. Oxfam recently recalculated the statistics in the World Bank study on developing countries, this time not weighted for population, and determined that incomes for people in countries that are pursuing a global program grew just 1.5 percent. For one in three of these countries, incomes actually rose more slowly than in states that resisted reforms.

p170
The U.S. is the largest arms dealer in the world, and its weapons manufacturers stand to-forgive the metaphor-"make a killing" in the current war on terrorism. Currently, about 85,000 private firms profit from the military contracting system. The Carlyle Group (which removed its web site after the September 11 attacks), a privately owned American $12-billion dollar international merchant bank or equity firm, and the eleventh largest military contractor in the country, invests heavily in the arms sector and makes its money from military conflicts and weapons spending. It retains Bush padre as a senior consultant (Bush has been allowed to buy into Carlyle's investments, which involve at least 164 countries). Carlyle's chairman and managing director is former U.S. Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci (and former roommate of Donald Rumsfeld) and its partners include former U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III, George Soros, Richard Darman (Reagan aide and GOP operative), and Fred Makek (Bush hijo's campaign manager). The Carlyle Group ; has in the past done business with the bin Laden family, including deals involving the aerospace industry.

p172
[John] McMurtry claims that the U.S. has created a new form of totalitarianism: the old totalitarian culture of the "Big Lie" is marked by "a pervasive overriding of the distinction between fact and fiction by saturating mass media falsehoods." This Big Lie is disseminated by round-the-clock, centrally controlled multi-media which are watched, read or heard by people across the globe day and night without break in the occupation of public consciousness instead of national territories." McMurtry writes that "in the old totalitarian culture of the Big Lie, the truth is hidden. In the new totalitarianism, there is no line between truth and falsehood. The truth is what people can be conditioned to believe." And conditioned they certainly are.

p173
President Bush's central position, around which his justification for the war pivots - the preservation of democracy and civil liberties - is plagued by a profound contradiction. In a speech before Congress he piously intoned that terrorists "hate what they see right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government." He went on to say: "They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other. They want to overthrow existing governments in many Muslim countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan." He ended by saying: "This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom."

But how could this be true, since any coalition that includes the bonapartist rulers and corrupt monarchs of countries in the Muslim Crescent such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan cannot seriously abide by the principles stated by Bush. Each of these countries restricts freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, religion, and movement. Jordan is a monarchy in which the security forces engage in torture and "extrajudicial" killings. The establishment of political parties is prohibited in Saudi Arabia, which has a religious police force-the mouttawa-to enforce a very conservative form of Islam. Egyptian security forces regularly arrest and torture people under the banner of fighting terrorism. Clearly, Bush's characterization of the U.S. as the pinnacle of civilization and every country that fails to support the U.S. war in Afghanistan as evil barbarians is absurd. Has Bush been educated in a capitalist madras? One would think so after listening to what he said at an October 11 press conference:

How do I respond when I see that in some Islamic countries [there] is vitriolic hatred for America? I'll tell you how I respond: I'm amazed. I'm amazed that there's such misunderstanding of what our country is about that people would hate us. I am-like most Americans, I just can't believe it because I know how good we are"

p174
The world has become more attuned to the hypocritical and pernicious exercise of U.S. double standards, to what, in the words of Eqbal Ahmad, could be termed "a new pathology of power." American concepts of justice are riven with a perfidiously stage-managed spin. How else to explain how the U.S. can celebrate democracy within its own borders and lay waste to it outside of them? How can the U.S. justify its economical, logistical, and military support of undemocratic regimes, some of which are involved in the worst atrocities? And how can the U.S. government pillory those critics who raise such questions for the public record? How can the U.S. overlook its complicity in forty years of support for terrorist military dictatorships in Guatemala after the CIA overthrew the democratically elected Arbenz regime in 1954? What kind of racist arithmetic makes U.S. casualties more important than, for instance, the 250,000 dead of indigenous Guatemala, cruelly tortured and executed by the U.S.-backed Guatemalan military? How can the U.S. overlook infamous operations like JM Wave and Mongoose that killed innocent Cuban civilians, with operations that included the placing of cement powder by U.S. agents operating in Cuba in the tankers transporting milk from the countryside to Havana?" How can it escape its support of military dictatorships-and the rivers of blood that ensued-throughout the Americas? Can it forget its support of the murderous Contras? The world will judge the U.S. not solely in terms of its payback against the odious actions of Osama bin Laden and his followers but in terms of its own past actions, such as the "collateral damage" resulting from its regular bombing campaigns against "rogue" nations. Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter admitted that the U.S. does not want to disarm Iraq because that would mean a lifting of sanctions; in fact, the U.S. deliberately put pressure on weapons inspectors to provoke a confrontation with Iraqi officials so that weapons inspectors could be pulled out-in other words, they weren't kicked out by Iraq but pulled out by the U.S.

p176
Bush strides into the international theater with both Bible and sword. Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful armed forces ever assembled in history, he wields his sword arm to protect and expand U.S. interests worldwide; with the Bible of Christian fundamentalism he blesses this very expansionism. His confidant, Robert Kaplan, author of The Coming Anarchy, a neoconservative vision of a world divided between the civilized and unmolested regions of the rich and the battered wastelands of the chaos-riven poor, advises in his new book, Warrior Politics, that the rich employ military brutality to crush all soldiers of anarchy that might spring up from the deserts of hopelessness.

No doubt Bush is following Kaplan's advice. Bush was raised an Episcopalian but after marriage he became a Methodist. In 1985, Billy Graham's famously genteel God-power channeled by a fire-and-brimstone rhetoric was apparently strong enough to sear into oblivion even the most minute grains of cocaine from Bush hijo's unsaved heart. After accepting Jesus as Lord, Bush was later inspired to make "Jesus Day" an official holiday in Texas. Announcing to Texas evangelist James Robinson that God wanted him to be President, Bush went on record that non-Christians would not make it into heaven. According to a recent Washington Post article, Bush now stands at the head of the Protestant fundamentalist movement in the United States.

For the first time since religious conservatives became a modern political movement, the president of the United States has become the movement's de facto leader-a status even Ronald Reagan, though admired by Christian conservatives, never earned. Christian publications, radio, and television shower Bush with praise, while preachers from the pulpit treat his leadership as an act of providence. A procession of religious leaders who have met with him testify to his faith, while Web sites encourage people to fast and pray for the president.'

p178
... the infrastructure for a transition to a fascist state is already in place-we have the Patriot Act, we have the military tribunals, we have the Office of Homeland Security, we have the necessary scapegoats, we have the Office of Strategic Influence working hand in hand with the U.S. Army's Psychological Operations Command (PSYOPS) operating domestically, we have the strongest military in the world, we have the military hawks in control of the Pentagon, we have pummeled an evil nation into prehistory while turning Central Asia into a zone of containment, and shown that we can kill mercilessly and control media reporting in the theater of operations, burying stories of civilian atrocities. `According to a UN report, unarmed women and children were pursued and killed by American helicopters in the village of Niazi Kala in Afghanistan, even as they fled to shelter or tried to rescue survivors.)' And we have a "leader" who is little more than a glorified servant of the military industrial complex-and one who is able to admit this publicly while arousing little opposition.

p178
Carlos Fuentes remarks:

We can recall the blindness, bordering on oligophrenia, of the U.S. government when it fed milk to vipers who responded with venom. Saddam Hussein is a product of U.S. policy to limit and fence in the triumphant and intolerant Ayatollahs of Iran. Osama bin Laden is a product of forceful U.S. diplomacy to counter the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. From Castillo Armas in Guatemala to Pinochet in Chile, it was U.S. diplomacy that imposed the bloodiest dictatorships in Latin America. In Vietnam, even though armies faced armies, the civilians were the greatest casualty, transforming yesterday's exceptions-Guernica, Coventry, Dresden-to today's rule: the main and sometimes only victims of modern conflicts are innocent civilians.'

p180
"To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies, and pause to America's friends. They encourage people of goodwill to remain silent in the face of evil."

p180
Attorney General John Ashcroft

If America is to be great in the future, it will be if we understand that our source is not civic and temporal, but our source is godly and eternal."

"Civilized people-Muslims, Christians and Jews- all understand that the source of freedom and human dignity is the Creator." Ashcroft made these remarks in front of a group of Christian broadcasters.

At the same event he proclaimed:

"Civilized people of all religious faiths are called to the defense of His creation. We are a nation called to defend freedom-a freedom that is not the grant of any government or document, but is our endowment from God."

p181

[Joel] Kovel

"From a purely logical standpoint, the idea that any particular people would be special, or good, or chosen by a higher power, is a pathetically childish illusion, with no greater claim on the truth than a four-year-old's belief that his mommy prefers him over all others.

p182
Christian fundamentalists see nuclear annihilation as a sign that Jesus Christ is about to return to Earth to prevent humankind from destroying itself; only those who heed God's Word are to be protected from the holocaust.

p182
John Le Carre

To imagine that God fights wars is to credit Him with the worst follies of mankind. God, if we know anything about Him, which I don't profess to, prefers effective food drops, dedicated medical teams, comfort and good tents for the homeless and bereaved, and, without strings, a decent acceptance of our past sins and a readiness to put them right. He prefers us less greedy, less arrogant less evangelical and less dismissive of life's losers. It's not a new world order, not yet, and it's not God's war.

p182
Mark Twain

"Patriotism means being loyal to our country all the time and to its government when it deserves it.

p183
Lewis Lapham

"Were [Thomas] Paine still within reach of the federal authorities, Attorney General John Ashcroft undoubtedly would prosecute him for blasphemy under a technologically enhanced version of the Alien and Sedition Acts." Moreover:

Paine would have recognized the government now situated in Washington as royalist in sentiment, "monarchical" and "aristocratical" in its actions, Federalist in its mistrust of freedom, imperialist in the bluster of its military pretensions, evangelical in its worship of property. In the White House we have a President `) appointed by the Supreme Court; at the Justice Department, an Attorney General believing that in America "we have no king but Jesus"; in both houses of Congress, a corpulent majority that on matters of tax and regulatory policy votes its allegiance to the principles of hereditary succession and class privilege.

p184
David North

The Bush foreign policy "is being shaped by ruthless and reckless sections of the U.S. ruling elite who are aggressively demanding the use of war as a means of realizing the global geostrategic and economic ambitions of American imperialism."

Masters of War

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