[News] The Terrorist in the Mirror

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/
January 24, 2006


Grievances and Consequences


The Terrorist in the Mirror

By NOAM CHOMSKY

"Terror" is a term that rightly arouses strong 
emotions and deep concerns. The primary concern 
should, naturally, be to take measures to 
alleviate the threat, which has been severe in 
the past, and will be even more so in the future. 
To proceed in a serious way, we have to establish 
some guidelines. Here are a few simple ones:

(1) Facts matter, even if we do not like them.

(2) Elementary moral principles matter, even if 
they have consequences that we would prefer not to face.

(3) Relative clarity matters. It is pointless to 
seek a truly precise definition of "terror," or 
of any other concept outside of the hard sciences 
and mathematics, often even there. But we should 
seek enough clarity at least to distinguish 
terror from two notions that lie uneasily at its 
borders: aggression and legitimate resistance.

If we accept these guidelines, there are quite 
constructive ways to deal with the problems of 
terrorism, which are quite severe. It's commonly 
claimed that critics of ongoing policies do not 
present solutions. Check the record, and I think 
you will find that there is an accurate 
translation for that charge: "They present solutions, but I don't like them."

Suppose, then, that we accept these simple 
guidelines. Let's turn to the "War on Terror." 
Since facts matter, it matters that the War was 
not declared by George W. Bush on 9/11, but by 
the Reagan administration 20 years earlier.

They came into office declaring that their 
foreign policy would confront what the President 
called "the evil scourge of terrorism," a plague 
spread by "depraved opponents of civilization 
itself" in "a return to barbarism in the modern 
age" (Secretary of State George Shultz). The 
campaign was directed to a particularly virulent 
form of the plague: state-directed international 
terrorism. The main focus was Central America and 
the Middle East, but it reached to southern 
Africa and Southeast Asia and beyond.

A second fact is that the war was declared and 
implemented by pretty much the same people who 
are conducting the re-declared war on terrorism. 
The civilian component of the re-declared War on 
Terror is led by John Negroponte, appointed last 
year to supervise all counterterror operations. 
As Ambassador in Honduras, he was the hands-on 
director of the major operation of the first War 
on Terror, the contra war against Nicaragua 
launched mainly from US bases in Honduras. I'll 
return to some of his tasks. The military 
component of the re-declared War led by Donald 
Rumsfeld. During the first phase of the War on 
Terror, Rumsfeld was Reagan's special 
representative to the Middle East. There, his 
main task was to establish close relations with 
Saddam Hussein so that the US could provide him 
with large-scale aid, including means to develop 
WMD, continuing long after the huge atrocities 
against the Kurds and the end of the war with 
Iran. The official purpose, not concealed, was 
Washington's responsibility to aid American 
exporters and "the strikingly unanimous view" of 
Washington and its allies Britain and Saudi 
Arabia that "whatever the sins of the Iraqi 
leader, he offered the West and the region a 
better hope for his country's stability than did 
those who have suffered his repression" -- New 
York Times Middle East correspondent Alan Cowell, 
describing Washington's judgment as George Bush I 
authorized Saddam to crush the Shi'ite rebellion 
in 1991, which probably would have overthrown the tyrant.

Saddam is at last on trial for his crimes. The 
first trial, now underway, is for crimes he 
committed in 1982. 1982 happens to be an 
important year in US-Iraq relations. It was in 
1982 that Reagan removed Iraq from the list of 
states supporting terror so that aid could flow 
to his friend in Baghdad. Rumsfeld then visited 
Baghdad to confirm the arrangements. Judging by 
reports and commentary, it would be impolite to 
mention any of these facts, let alone to suggest 
that some others might be standing alongside 
Saddam before the bar of justice. Removing Saddam 
from the list of states supporting terrorism left 
a gap. It was at once filled by Cuba, perhaps in 
recognition of the fact that the US terrorist 
wars against Cuba from 1961 had just peaked, 
including events that would be on the front pages 
right now in societies that valued their freedom, 
to which I'll briefly return. Again, that tells 
us something about the real elite attitudes 
towards the plague of the modern age.

Since the first War on Terror was waged by those 
now carrying out the redeclared war, or their 
immediate mentors, it follows that anyone 
seriously interested in the re-declared War on 
Terror should ask at once how it was carried out 
in the 1980s. The topic, however, is under a 
virtual ban. That becomes understandable as soon 
as we investigate the facts: the first War on 
Terror quickly became a murderous and brutal 
terrorist war, in every corner of the world where 
it reached, leaving traumatized 
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societies that may never recover. What happened 
is hardly obscure, but doctrinally unacceptable, 
therefore protected from inspection. Unearthing 
the record is an enlightening exercise, with 
enormous implications for the future.

These are a few of the relevant facts, and they 
definitely do matter. Let's turn to the second of 
the guidelines: elementary moral principles. The 
most elementary is a virtual truism: decent 
people apply to themselves the same standards 
that they apply to others, if not more stringent 
ones. Adherence to this principle of universality 
would have many useful consequences. For one 
thing, it would save a lot of trees. The 
principle would radically reduce published 
reporting and commentary on social and political 
affairs. It would virtually eliminate the newly 
fashionable discipline of Just War theory. And it 
would wipe the slate almost clean with regard to 
the War on Terror. The reason is the same in all 
cases: the principle of universality is rejected, 
for the most part tacitly, though sometimes 
explicitly. Those are very sweeping statements. I 
purposely put them in a stark form to invite you 
to challenge them, and I hope you do. You will 
find, I think, that although the statements are 
somewhat overdrawn--purposely -- they 
nevertheless are uncomfortably close to accurate, 
and in fact very fully documented. But try for yourselves and see.

This most elementary of moral truisms is 
sometimes upheld at least in words. One example, 
of critical importance today, is the Nuremberg 
Tribunal. In sentencing Nazi war criminals to 
death, Justice Robert Jackson, Chief of Counsel 
for the United States, spoke eloquently, and 
memorably, on the principle of universality. "If 
certain acts of violation of treaties are 
crimes," he said, "they are crimes whether the 
United States does them or whether Germany does 
them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule 
of criminal conduct against others which we would 
not be willing to have invoked against us....We 
must never forget that the record on which we 
judge these defendants is the record on which 
history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these 
defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well."

That is a clear and honorable statement of the 
principle of universality. But the judgment at 
Nuremberg itself crucially violated this 
principle. The Tribunal had to define "war crime" 
and "crimes against humanity." It crafted these 
definition very carefully so that crimes are 
criminal only if they were not committed by the 
allies. Urban bombing of civilian concentrations 
was excluded, because the allies carried it out 
more barbarically than the Nazis. And Nazi war 
criminals, like Admiral Doenitz, were able to 
plead successfully that their British and US 
counterparts had carried out the same practices. 
The reasoning was outlined by Telford Taylor, a 
distinguished international lawyer who was 
Jackson's Chief Counsel for War Crimes. He 
explained that "to punish the foe--especially the 
vanquished foe--for conduct in which the 
enforcing nation has engaged, would be so grossly 
inequitable as to discredit the laws themselves." 
That is correct, but the operative definition of 
"crime" also discredits the laws themselves. 
Subsequent Tribunals are discredited by the same 
moral flaw, but the self-exemption of the 
powerful from international law and elementary 
moral principle goes far beyond this 
illustration, and reaches to just about every 
aspect of the two phases of the War on Terror.

Let's turn to the third background issue: 
defining "terror" and distinguishing it from 
aggression and legitimate resistance. I have been 
writing about terror for 25 years, ever since the 
Reagan administration declared its War on Terror. 
I've been using definitions that seem to be 
doubly appropriate: first, they make sense; and 
second, they are the official definitions of 
those waging the war. To take one of these 
official definitions, terrorism is "the 
calculated use of violence or threat of violence 
to attain goals that are political, religious, or 
ideological in nature...through intimidation, 
coercion, or instilling fear," typically 
targeting civilians. The British government's 
definition is about the same: "Terrorism is the 
use, or threat, of action which is violent, 
damaging or disrupting, and is intended to 
influence the government or intimidate the public 
and is for the purpose of advancing a political, 
religious, or ideological cause." These 
definitions seem fairly clear and close to 
ordinary usage. There also seems to be general 
agreement that they are appropriate when discussing the terrorism of enemies.

But a problem at once arises. These definitions 
yield an entirely unacceptable consequence: it 
follows that the US is a leading terrorist state, 
dramatically so during the Reaganite war on 
terror. Merely to take the most uncontroversial 
case, Reagan's state-directed terrorist war 
against Nicaragua was condemned by the World 
Court, backed by two Security Council resolutions 
(vetoed by the US, with Britain politely 
abstaining). Another completely clear case is 
Cuba, where the record by now is voluminous, and 
not controversial. And there is a long list beyond them.

We may ask, however, whether such crimes as the 
state-directed attack against Nicaragua are 
really terrorism, or whether they rise to the 
level of the much higher crime of aggression. The 
concept of aggression was defined clearly enough 
by Justice Jackson at Nuremberg in terms that 
were basically reiterated in an authoritative 
General Assembly resolution. An "aggressor," 
Jackson proposed to the Tribunal, is a state that 
is the first to commit such actions as "Invasion 
of its armed forces, with or without a 
declaration of war, of the territory of another 
State," or "Provision of support to armed bands 
formed in the territory of another State, or 
refusal, notwithstanding the request of the 
invaded State, to take in its own territory, all 
the measures in its power to deprive those bands 
of all assistance or protection." The first 
provision unambiguously applies to the US-UK 
invasion of Iraq. The second, just as clearly, 
applies to the US war against Nicaragua. However, 
we might give the current incumbents in 
Washington and their mentors the benefit of the 
doubt, considering them guilty only of the lesser 
crime of international terrorism, on a huge and unprecedented scale.

It may also be recalled the aggression was 
defined at Nuremberg as "the supreme 
international crime differing only from other war 
crimes in that it contains within itself the 
accumulated evil of the whole"--all the evil in 
the tortured land of Iraq that flowed from the 
US-UK invasion, for example, and in Nicaragua 
too, if the charge is not reduced to 
international terrorism. And in Lebanon, and all 
too many other victims who are easily dismissed 
on grounds of wrong agency--right to the present. 
A week ago (January 13), a CIA predator drone 
attacked a village in Pakistan, murdering dozens 
of civilians, entire families, who just happened 
to live in a suspected al-Qaeda hideout. Such 
routine actions elicit little notice, a legacy of 
the poisoning of the moral culture by centuries of imperial thuggery.

The World Court did not take up the charge of 
aggression in the Nicaragua case. The reasons are 
instructive, and of quite considerable 
contemporary relevance. Nicaragua's case was 
presented by the distinguished Harvard University 
law professor Abram Chayes, former legal adviser 
to the State Department. The Court rejected a 
large part of his case on the grounds that in 
accepting World Court jurisdiction in 1946, the 
US had entered a reservation excluding itself 
from prosecution under multilateral treaties, 
including the UN Charter. The Court therefore 
restricted its deliberations to customary 
international law and a bilateral US-Nicaragua 
treaty, so that the more serious charges were 
excluded. Even on these very narrow grounds, the 
Court charged Washington with "unlawful use of 
force"--in lay language, international 
terrorism--and ordered it to terminate the crimes 
and pay substantial reparations. The Reaganites 
reacted by escalating the war, also officially 
endorsing attacks by their terrorist forces 
against "soft targets," undefended civilian 
targets. The terrorist war left the country in 
ruins, with a death toll equivalent to 2.25 
million in US per capita terms, more than the 
total of all wartime casualties in US history 
combined. After the shattered country fell back 
under US control, it declined to further misery. 
It is now the second poorest country in Latin 
America after Haiti--and by accident, also second 
after Haiti in intensity of US intervention in 
the past century. The standard way to lament 
these tragedies is to say that Haiti and 
Nicaragua are "battered by storms of their own 
making," to quote the Boston Globe, at the 
liberal extreme of American journalism. Guatemala 
ranks third both in misery and intervention, more storms of their own making.

In the Western canon, none of this exists. All is 
excluded not only from general history and 
commentary, but also quite tellingly from the 
huge literature on the War on Terror re-declared 
in 2001, though its relevance can hardly be in doubt.

These considerations have to do with the boundary 
between terror and aggression. What about the 
boundary between terror and resistance? One 
question that arises is the legitimacy of actions 
to realize "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..." Do such actions fall under terror 
or resistance? The quoted word are from the most 
forceful denunciation of the crime of terrorism 
by the UN General Assembly; in December 1987, 
taken up under Reaganite pressure. Hence it is 
obviously an important resolution, even more so 
because of the near-unanimity of support for it. 
The resolution passed 153-2 (Honduras alone 
abstaining). It stated that "nothing in the 
present resolution could in any way prejudice the 
right to self-determination, freedom, and 
independence," as characterized in the quoted words.
The two countries that voted against the 
resolution explained their reasons at the UN 
session. They were based on the paragraph just 
quoted. The phrase "colonial and racist regimes" 
was understood to refer to their ally apartheid 
South Africa, then consummating its massacres in 
the neighboring countries and continuing its 
brutal repression within. Evidently, the US and 
Israel could not condone resistance to the 
apartheid regime, particularly when it was led by 
Nelson Mandela's ANC, one of the world's "more 
notorious terrorist groups," as Washington 
determined at the same time. Granting legitimacy 
to resistance against "foreign occupation" was 
also unacceptable. The phrase was understood to 
refer to Israel's US-backed military occupation, 
then in its 20 th year. Evidently, resistance to 
that occupation could not be condoned either, 
even though at the time of the resolution it 
scarcely existed: despite extensive torture, 
degradation, brutality, robbery of land and 
resources, and other familiar concomitants of 
military occupation, Palestinians under 
occupation still remained "Samidin," those who quietly endured.

Technically, there are no vetoes at the General 
Assembly. In the real world, a negative US vote 
is a veto, in fact a double veto: the resolution 
is not implemented, and is vetoed from reporting 
and history. It should be added that the voting 
pattern is quite common at the General Assembly, 
and also at the Security Council, on a wide range 
of issues. Ever since the mid-1960s, when the 
world fell pretty much out of control, the US is 
far in the lead in Security Council vetoes, 
Britain second, with no one else even close. It 
is also of some interest to note that a majority 
of the American public favors abandonment of the 
veto, and following the will of the majority even 
if Washington disapproves, facts virtually 
unknown in the US, or I suppose elsewhere. That 
suggests another conservative way to deal with 
some of the problems of the world: pay attention to public opinion.

Terrorism directed or supported by the most 
powerful states continues to the present, often 
in shocking ways. These facts offer one useful 
suggestion as to how to mitigate the plague 
spread by "depraved opponents of civilization 
itself" in "a return to barbarism in the modern 
age": Stop participating in terror and supporting 
it. That would certainly contribute to the 
proclaimed objections. But that suggestion too is 
off the agenda, for the usual reasons. When it is 
occasionally voiced, the reaction is reflexive: a 
tantrum about how those who make this rather 
conservative proposal are blaming everything on the US.

Even with careful sanitization of discussion, 
dilemmas constantly arise. One just arose very 
recently, when Luis Posada Carriles entered the 
US illegally. Even by the narrow operative 
definition of "terror," he is clearly one of the 
most notorious international terrorists, from the 
1960s to the present. Venezuela requested that he 
be extradited to face charges for the bombing of 
a Cubana airliner in Venezuela, killing 73 
people. The charges are admittedly credible, but 
there is a real difficulty. After Posada 
miraculously escaped from a Venezuelan prison, 
the liberal Boston Globe reports, he "was hired 
by US covert operatives to direct the resupply 
operation for the Nicaraguan contras from El 
Salvador"--that is, to play a prominent role in 
terrorist atrocities that are incomparably worse 
than blowing up the Cubana airliner. Hence the 
dilemma. To quote the press: "Extraditing him for 
trial could send a worrisome signal to covert 
foreign agents that they cannot count on 
unconditional protection from the US government, 
and it could expose the CIA to embarrassing 
public disclosures from a former operative." Evidently, a difficult problem.

The Posada dilemma was, thankfully, resolved by 
the courts, which rejected Venezuela's appeal for 
his extradition, in violation of the US-Venezuela 
extradition treaty. A day later, the head of the 
FBI, Robert Mueller, urged Europe to speed US 
demands for extradition: "We are always looking 
to see how we can make the extradition process go 
faster," he said. "We think we owe it to the 
victims of terrorism to see to it that justice is 
done efficiently and effectively." At the 
Ibero-American Summit shortly after, the leaders 
of Spain and the Latin American countries "backed 
Venezuela's efforts to have [Posada] extradited 
from the United States to face trial" for the 
Cubana airliner bombing, and again condemned the 
"blockade" of Cuba by the US, endorsing regular 
near-unanimous UN resolutions, the most recent 
with a vote of 179-4 (US, Israel, Marshall 
Islands, Palau). After strong protests from the 
US Embassy, the Summit withdrew the call for 
extradition, but refused to yield on the demand 
for an end to the economic warfare. Posada is 
therefore free to join his colleague Orlando 
Bosch in Miami. Bosch is implicated in dozens of 
terrorist crimes, including the Cubana airliner 
bombing, many on US soil. The FBI and Justice 
Department wanted him deported as a threat to 
national security, but Bush I took care of that 
by granting him a presidential pardon.

There are other such examples. We might want to 
bear them in mind when we read Bush II's 
impassioned pronouncement that "the United States 
makes no distinction between those who commit 
acts of terror and those who support them, 
because they're equally as guilty of murder," and 
"the civilized world must hold those regimes to 
account." This was proclaimed to great applause 
at the National Endowment for Democracy, a few 
days after Venezuela's extradition request had 
been refused. Bush's remarks pose another 
dilemma. Either the US is part of the civilized 
world, and must send the US air force to bomb 
Washington; or it declares itself to be outside 
the civilized world. The logic is impeccable, but 
fortunately, logic has been dispatched as deep 
into the memory hole as moral truisms.

The Bush doctrine that "those who harbor 
terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists 
themselves" was promulgated when the Taliban 
asked for evidence before handing over people the 
US suspected of terrorism--without credible 
evidence, as the FBI conceded many months later. 
The doctrine is taken very seriously. Harvard 
international relations specialist Graham Allison 
writes that it has "already become a de facto 
rule of international relations," revoking "the 
sovereignty of states that provide sanctuary to 
terrorists." Some states, that is, thanks to the 
rejection of the principle of universality.

One might also have thought that a dilemma would 
have arisen when John Negroponte was appointed to 
the position of head of counter-terrorism. As 
Ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s, he was 
running the world's largest CIA station, not 
because of the grand role of Honduras in world 
affairs, but because Honduras was the primary US 
base for the international terrorist war for 
which Washington was condemned by the ICJ and 
Security Council (absent the veto). Known in 
Honduras as "the Proconsul," Negroponte had the 
task of ensuring that the international terrorist 
operations, which reached remarkable levels of 
savagery, would proceed efficiently. His 
responsibilities in managing the war on the scene 
took a new turn after official funding was barred 
in 1983, and he had to implement White House 
orders to bribe and pressure senior Honduran 
Generals to step up their support for the 
terrorist war using funds from other sources, 
later funds illegally transferred from US arms 
sales to Iran. The most vicious of the Honduran 
killers and torturers was General Alvarez 
Martínez, the chief of the Honduran armed forces 
at the time, who had informed the US that "he 
intended to use the Argentine method of 
eliminating suspected subversives." Negroponte 
regularly denied gruesome state crimes in 
Honduras to ensure that military aid would 
continue to flow for international terrorism. 
Knowing all about Alvarez, the Reagan 
administration awarded him the Legion of Merit 
medal for "encouraging the success of democratic 
processes in Honduras." The elite unit 
responsible for the worst crimes in Honduras was 
Battalion 3-16, organized and trained by 
Washington and its Argentine neo-Nazi associates. 
Honduran military officers in charge of the 
Battalion were on the CIA payroll. When the 
government of Honduras finally tried to deal with 
these crimes and bring the perpetrators to 
justice, the Reagan-Bush administration refused 
to allow Negroponte to testify, as the courts requested.

There was virtually no reaction to the 
appointment of a leading international terrorist 
to the top counter-terrorism position in the 
world. Nor to the fact that at the very same 
time, the heroine of the popular struggle that 
overthrew the vicious Somoza regime in Nicaragua, 
Dora María Téllez, was denied a visa to teach at 
the Harvard Divinity School, as a terrorist. Her 
crime was to have helped overthrow a US-backed 
tyrant and mass murderer. Orwell would not have 
known whether to laugh or weep. So far I have 
been keeping to the kinds of topics that would be 
addressed in a discussion of the War on Terror 
that is not deformed to accord with the iron laws 
of doctrine. And this barely scratches the 
surface. But let us now adopt prevailing Western 
hypocrisy and cynicism, and keep to the operative 
definition of "terror." It is the same as the 
official definitions, but with the Nuremberg 
exception: admissible terror is your terror; ours is exempt..
Even with this constraint, terror is a major 
problem, undoubtedly. And to mitigate or 
terminate the threat should be a high priority. 
Regrettably, it is not. That is all too easy to 
demonstrate, and the consequences are likely to be severe.

The invasion of Iraq is perhaps the most glaring 
example of the low priority assigned by US-UK 
leaders to the threat of terror. Washington 
planners had been advised, even by their own 
intelligence agencies, that the invasion was 
likely to increase the risk of terror. And it 
did, as their own intelligence agencies confirm. 
The National Intelligence Council reported a year 
ago that "Iraq and other possible conflicts in 
the future could provide recruitment, training 
grounds, technical skills and language 
proficiency for a new class of terrorists who are 
`professionalized' and for whom political 
violence becomes an end in itself," spreading 
elsewhere to defend Muslim lands from attack by 
"infidel invaders" in a globalized network of 
"diffuse Islamic extremist groups," with Iraq now 
replacing the Afghan training grounds for this 
more extensive network, as a result of the 
invasion. A high-level government review of the 
"war on terror" two years after the invasion 
`focused on how to deal with the rise of a new 
generation of terrorists, schooled in Iraq over 
the past couple years. Top government officials 
are increasingly turning their attention to 
anticipate what one called "the bleed out" of 
hundreds or thousands of Iraq-trained jihadists 
back to their home countries throughout the 
Middle East and Western Europe. "It's a new piece 
of a new equation," a former senior Bush 
administration official said. "If you don't know 
who they are in Iraq, how are you going to locate 
them in Istanbul or London?"' ( Washington Post).

Last May the CIA reported that "Iraq has become a 
magnet for Islamic militants similar to 
Soviet-occupied Afghanistan two decades ago and 
Bosnia in the 1990s," according to US officials 
quoted in the New York Times. The CIA concluded 
that "Iraq may prove to be an even more effective 
training ground for Islamic extremists than 
Afghanistan was in Al Qaeda's early days, because 
it is serving as a real-world laboratory for 
urban combat." Shortly after the London bombing 
last July, Chatham House released a study 
concluding that "there is `no doubt' that the 
invasion of Iraq has `given a boost to the 
al-Qaida network' in propaganda, recruitment and 
fundraising,` while providing an ideal training 
area for terrorists"; and that "the UK is at 
particular risk because it is the closest ally of 
the United States" and is "a pillion passenger" 
of American policy" in Iraq and Afghanistan. 
There is extensive supporting evidence to show 
that -- as anticipated -- the invasion increased 
the risk of terror and nuclear proliferation. 
None of this shows that planners prefer these 
consequences, of course. Rather, they are not of 
much concern in comparison with much higher 
priorities that are obscure only to those who 
prefer what human rights researchers sometimes call "intentional ignorance."

Once again we find, very easily, a way to reduce 
the threat of terror: stop acting in ways 
that--predictably--enhance the threat. Though 
enhancement of the threat of terror and 
proliferation was anticipated, the invasion did 
so even in unanticipated ways. It is common to 
say that no WMD were found in Iraq after 
exhaustive search. That is not quite accurate, 
however. There were stores of WMD in Iraq: 
namely, those produced in the 1980s, thanks to 
aid provided by the US and Britain, along with 
others. These sites had been secured by UN 
inspectors, who were dismantling the weapons. But 
the inspectors were dismissed by the invaders and 
the sites were left unguarded. The inspectors 
nevertheless continued to carry out their work 
with satellite imagery. They discovered 
sophisticated massive looting of these 
installations in over 100 sites, including 
equipment for producing solid and liquid 
propellant missiles, biotoxins and other 
materials usable for chemical and biological 
weapons, and high-precision equipment capable of 
making parts for nuclear and chemical weapons and 
missiles. A Jordanian journalist was informed by 
officials in charge of the Jordanian-Iraqi border 
that after US-UK forces took over, radioactive 
materials were detected in one of every eight 
trucks crossing to Jordan, destination unknown.

The ironies are almost inexpressible. The 
official justification for the US-UK invasion was 
to prevent the use of WMD that did not exist. The 
invasion provided the terrorists who had been 
mobilized by the US and its allies with the means 
to develop WMD -- namely, equipment they had 
provided to Saddam, caring nothing about the 
terrible crimes they later invoked to whip up 
support for the invasion. It is as if Iran were 
now making nuclear weapons using fissionable 
materials provided by the US to Iran under the 
Shah -- which may indeed be happening. Programs 
to recover and secure such materials were having 
considerable success in the '90s, but like the 
war on terror, these programs fell victim to Bush 
administration priorities as they dedicated their 
energy and resources to invading Iraq.

Elsewhere in the Mideast too terror is regarded 
as secondary to ensuring that the region is under 
control. Another illustration is Bush's 
imposition of new sanctions on Syria in May 2004, 
implementing the Syria Accountability Act passed 
by Congress a few months earlier. Syria is on the 
official list of states sponsoring terrorism, 
despite Washington's acknowledgment that Syria 
has not been implicated in terrorist acts for 
many years and has been highly cooperative in 
providing important intelligence to Washington on 
al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups. The 
gravity of Washington's concern over Syria's 
links to terror was revealed by President Clinton 
when he offered to remove Syria from the list of 
states sponsoring terror if it agreed to 
US-Israeli peace terms. When Syria insisted on 
recovering its conquered territory, it remained 
on the list. Implementation of the Syria 
Accountability Act deprived the US of an 
important source of information about radical 
Islamist terrorism in order to achieve the higher 
goal of establishing in Syria a regime that will accept US-Israeli demands.

Turning to another domain, the Treasury 
Department has a bureau (OFAC, Office of Foreign 
Assets Control) that is assigned the task of 
investigating suspicious financial transfers, a 
central component of the "war on terror." In 
April 2004, OFAC informed Congress that of its 
120 employees, four were assigned to tracking the 
finances of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, 
while almost two dozen were occupied with 
enforcing the embargo against Cuba. From 1990 to 
2003 there were 93 terrorism-related 
investigations with $9000 in fines; and 11,000 
Cuba-related investigations with $8 million in 
fines. The revelations received the silent 
treatment in the US media, elsewhere as well to my knowledge.

Why should the Treasury Department devote vastly 
more energy to strangling Cuba than to the "war 
on terror"? The basic reasons were explained in 
internal documents of the Kennedy-Johnson years. 
State Department planners warned that the "very 
existence" of the Castro regime is "successful 
defiance" of US policies going back 150 years, to 
the Monroe Doctrine; not Russians, but 
intolerable defiance of the master of the 
hemisphere, much like Iran's crime of successful 
defiance in 1979, or Syria's rejection of 
Clinton's demands. Punishment of the population 
was regarded as fully legitimate, we learn from 
internal documents. "The Cuban people [are] 
responsible for the regime," the Eisenhower State 
Department decided, so that the US has the right 
to cause them to suffer by economic 
strangulation, later escalated to direct terror 
by Kennedy. Eisenhower and Kennedy agreed that 
the embargo would hasten Fidel Castro's departure 
as a result of the "rising discomfort among 
hungry Cubans." The basic thinking was summarized 
by State Department official Lester Mallory: 
Castro would be removed "through disenchantment 
and disaffection based on economic 
dissatisfaction and hardship so every possible 
means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the 
economic life of Cuba in order to bring about 
hunger, desperation and the overthrow of the 
government." When Cuba was in dire straits after 
the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington 
intensified the punishment of the people of Cuba, 
at the initiative of liberal Democrats. The 
author of the 1992 measures to tighten the 
blockade proclaimed that "my objective is to 
wreak havoc in Cuba" (Representative Robert 
Torricelli). All of this continues until the present moment.

The Kennedy administration was also deeply 
concerned about the threat of Cuban successful 
development, which might be a model for others. 
But even apart from these standard concerns, 
successful defiance in itself is intolerable, 
ranked far higher as a priority than combating 
terror. These are just further illustrations of 
principles that are well-established, internally 
rational, clear enough to the victims, but 
scarcely perceptible in the intellectual world of the agents.

If reducing the threat of terror were a high 
priority for Washington or London, as it 
certainly should be, there would be ways to 
proceed--even apart from the unmentionable idea 
of withdrawing participation. The first step, 
plainly, is to try to understand its roots. With 
regard to Islamic terror, there is a broad 
consensus among intelligence agencies and 
researchers. They identify two categories: the 
jihadis, who regard themselves as a vanguard, and 
their audience, which may reject terror but 
nevertheless regard their cause as just. A 
serious counter-terror campaign would therefore 
begin by considering the grievances , and where 
appropriate, addressing them, as should be done 
with or without the threat of terror. There is 
broad agreement among specialists that 
al-Qaeda-style terror "is today less a product of 
Islamic fundamentalism than of a simple strategic 
goal: to compel the United States and its Western 
allies to withdraw combat forces from the Arabian 
Peninsula and other Muslim countries" (Robert 
Pape, who has done the major research on suicide 
bombers). Serious analysts have pointed out that 
bin Laden's words and deeds correlate closely. 
The jihadis organized by the Reagan 
administration and its allies ended their 
Afghan-based terrorism inside Russia after the 
Russians withdrew from Afghanistan, though they 
continued it from occupied Muslim Chechnya, the 
scene of horrifying Russian crimes back to the 19 
th century. Osama turned against the US in 1991 
because he took it to be occupying the holiest 
Arab land; that was later acknowledged by the 
Pentagon as a reason for shifting US bases from 
Saudi Arabia to Iraq. Additionally, he was 
angered by the rejection of his effort to join the attack against Saddam.

In the most extensive scholarly inquiry into the 
jihadi phenomenon, Fawaz Gerges concludes that 
after 9/11, "the dominant response to Al Qaeda in 
the Muslim world was very hostile," specifically 
among the jihadis, who regarded it as a dangerous 
extremist fringe. Instead of recognizing that 
opposition to Al Qaeda offered Washington "the 
most effective way to drive a nail into its 
coffin" by finding "intelligent means to nourish 
and support the internal forces that were opposed 
to militant ideologies like the bin Laden 
network," he writes, the Bush administration did 
exactly what bin Laden hoped it would do: resort 
to violence, particularly in the invasion of 
Iraq. Al-Azhar in Egypt, the oldest institution 
of religious higher learning in the Islamic 
world, issued a fatwa, which gained strong 
support, advising "all Muslims in the world to 
make jihad against invading American forces" in a 
war that Bush had declared against Islam. A 
leading religious figure at al-Azhar, who had 
been "one of the first Muslim scholars to condemn 
Al Qaeda [and was] often criticized by 
ultraconservative clerics as a pro-Western 
reformer, ruled that efforts to stop the American 
invasion [of Iraq] are a `binding Islamic duty'." 
Investigations by Israeli and Saudi intelligence, 
supported by US strategic studies institutes, 
conclude that foreign fighters in Iraq, some 
5-10% of the insurgents, were mobilized by the 
invasion, and had no previous record of 
association with terrorist groups. The 
achievements of Bush administration planners in 
inspiring Islamic radicalism and terror, and 
joining Osama in creating a "clash of civilizations," are quite impressive.

The senior CIA analyst responsible for tracking 
Osama bin Laden from 1996, Michael Scheuer, 
writes that "bin Laden has been precise in 
telling America the reasons he is waging war on 
us. None of the reasons have anything to do with 
our freedom, liberty, and democracy, but have 
everything to do with U.S. policies and actions 
in the Muslim world." Osama's concern "is out to 
drastically alter U.S. and Western policies 
toward the Islamic world," Scheuer writes: "He is 
a practical warrior, not an apocalyptic terrorist 
in search of Armageddon." As Osama constantly 
repeats, "Al Qaeda supports no Islamic insurgency 
that seeks to conquer new lands." Preferring 
comforting illusions, Washington ignores "the 
ideological power, lethality, and growth 
potential of the threat personified by Osama bin 
Laden, as well as the impetus that threat has 
been given by the U.S.-led invasion and 
occupation of Muslim Iraq, [which is] icing on 
the cake for al Qaeda." "U.S. forces and policies 
are completing the radicalization of the Islamic 
world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying 
to do with substantial but incomplete success 
since the early 1990s. As a result, [Scheuer 
adds,] it is fair to conclude that the United 
States of America remains bin Laden's only indispensable ally."

The grievances are very real. A Pentagon advisory 
Panel concluded a year ago that "Muslims do not 
`hate our freedom,' but rather they hate our 
policies," adding that "when American public 
diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to 
Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than 
self-serving hypocrisy." The conclusions go back 
many years. In 1958, President Eisenhower puzzled 
about "the campaign of hatred against us" in the 
Arab world, "not by the governments but by the 
people," who are "on Nasser's side," supporting 
independent secular nationalism. The reasons for 
the "campaign of hatred" were outlined by the 
National Security Council: "In the eyes of the 
majority of Arabs the United States appears to be 
opposed to the realization of the goals of Arab 
nationalism. They believe that the United States 
is seeking to protect its interest in Near East 
oil by supporting the status quo and opposing 
political or economic progress." Furthermore, the 
perception is understandable: "our economic and 
cultural interests in the area have led not 
unnaturally to close U.S. relations with elements 
in the Arab world whose primary interest lies in 
the maintenance of relations with the West and 
the status quo in their countries," blocking democracy and development.

Much the same was found by the Wall Street 
Journal when it surveyed the opinions of "moneyed 
Muslims" immediately after 9/11: bankers, 
professionals, businessmen, committed to official 
"Western values" and embedded in the neoliberal 
globalization project. They too were dismayed by 
Washington's support for harsh authoritarian 
states and the barriers it erects against 
development and democracy by "propping up 
oppressive regimes." They had new grievances, 
however, beyond those reported by the NSC in 
1958: Washington's sanctions regime in Iraq and 
support for Israel's military occupation and 
takeover of the territories. There was no survey 
of the great mass of poor and suffering people, 
but it is likely that their sentiments are more 
intense, coupled with bitter resentment of the 
Western-oriented elites and corrupt and brutal 
rulers backed by Western power who ensure that 
the enormous wealth of the region flows to the 
West, apart from enriching themselves. The Iraq 
invasion only intensified these feelings further, much as anticipated.

There are ways to deal constructively with the 
threat of terror, though not those preferred by 
"bin Laden's indispensable ally," or those who 
try to avoid the real world by striking heroic 
poses about Islamo-fascism, or who simply claim 
that no proposals are made when there are quite 
straightforward proposals that they do not like. 
The constructive ways have to begin with an 
honest look in the mirror, never an easy task, always a necessary one.

This was the Amnesty International Annual Lecture 
hosted by TCD, delivered by Noam Chomsky at 
Shelbourne Hall, the Royal Dublin Society, January 18, 2006.

Noam Chomsky's most recent book is 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/080507967X/counterpunchmaga>Imperial 
Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World..


The Freedom Archives
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