BY NORM DIXON
The US ruling class has seized the golden opportunity presented by the terrible September 11 mass murders in New York and Washington — exploiting and manipulating the US people's fear, horror and anger — to launch a permanent Cold War-style war drive in the name of fighting "terrorists".
With such a vague and undefined enemy, Washington believes that, with the help of the unquestioning capitalist mass media, it can tar with the "terrorist" brush any opposition — foreign and domestic — to the US corporate elite's political and economic domination of the world.
The US rulers are gambling that a traumatised and vengeful American public will support US "anti-terrorist" military interventions, even if large numbers of US military personnel are killed — something the majority of Americans have refused to accept since the Vietnam War ended in 1975.
Washington has long labelled governments and political movements it opposes as "terrorists". The US State Department each year publishes a list of countries that "support terrorism"; for years it has included Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan, North Korea and Cuba. But until September 11, that was not enough to convince the US public to support sustained military operations against these countries.
Every government and political organisation that Washington sees as offering even the slightest hindrance to its global hegemony is now a potential target.
The world is entering a period not unlike the Cold War, when Washington massively backed a rogues' gallery of military dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, providing economic and military aid in return for their subservience to US domination and dedication to fighting "communism" (code for anti-imperialist movements).
Washington relied heavily of its puppets to fight the "war against communism", but if they were not up to the task of crushing anti-imperialist movements, or found themselves threatened, the CIA was enlisted to assassinate popular leaders or overthrow governments. If that was insufficient, direct military intervention by Washington was always an option.
Today, simply substitute "terrorism" for "communism".
'Bush Doctrine'
"From this day forward", President George Bush told the US Congress on September 20, "any nation that continues to harbour or support terrorism will be regarded ... as a hostile regime". The "first war of the 21st century" will not end, he declared, "until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated".
This theme of an unending, permanent war has been repeated by every senior Bush administration official, especially after the bombing of Afghanistan began on October 7.
On November 21, Bush outlined what is now known as the "Bush Doctrine": "Afghanistan is just the beginning of the war against terror. There are other terrorists who threaten America and our friends, and there are other nations willing to sponsor them. We will not be secure as a nation until all these threats are defeated. Across the world, and across the years, we will fight these evil ones, and we will win...
"America has a message for the nations of the world: if you harbour terrorists, you're terrorists; if you train or arm a terrorist, you are a terrorist; if you feed of fund a terrorist, you're a terrorist, and you will be held accountable by the United States and our friends."
September 11 emboldened ruling class warmongers who have for many years argued that Washington must "finish the job" left undone after the 1991 Gulf War and overthrow Saddam Hussein.
A sometimes bitter public debate has raged among US ruling-class policy-makers, academics and think-tanks during the course of the Afghan war. A wing of the government, identified with US deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz, has been pushing for Washington to deal a death blow to Saddam Hussein.
However, the faction of the US government led by Secretary of State Colin Powell has so far held these "hawks" at bay. Powell has argued for the Bush administration to stick to a more cautious approach of concentrating on ousting Afghanistan's Taliban leadership and eliminating al Qaeda before moving on to the next target.
What has divided the world's most powerful warlords was not whether Iraq should be attacked, but when and how. Until the collapse of the Taliban, a majority of the Bush administration — and it seems also of the US ruling class as a whole — was not willing to risk its fragile international "coalition" against "terrorism" by waging a much more unpopular war on Iraq.
Powell knows that an attack on Iraq will not be supported by most Arab governments. These usually pro-Western governments fear they will be swept away in the explosion of public anger and opposition that a US attack on Iraq will provoke. Most European governments share that fear (but will probably fall into line once the bombing starts).
The "Wolfowitz cabal", as it has been dubbed, is organised in part through the Defense Policy Board (DPB), a semi-official defence department panel that advises the secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld. The DPB is composed of many former high-ranking defence and state department officials, including Henry Kissinger.
The cabal is also supported by powerful right-wing think-tanks such as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for a New American Century. All unashamedly champion a return to undisguised US world domination and share overlapping memberships with each other and the DPB.
The DPB met on September 19-20 "to discuss the ramifications of the attacks of September 11" and, according to the October 12 New York Times, "agreed on the need to turn to Iraq as soon as the initial phase of the war on Afghanistan and Mr bin Laden and his organisation is over". Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz took part in the meeting. The board sent a letter recommending this course of action to Bush.
DPB chairperson Richard Perle, who was President Ronald Reagan's assistant defence secretary, co-wrote a letter that was published in the October 1 Weekly Standard, the mouthpiece of the "Wolfowitz cabal". The letter stated: "Even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the [September 11] attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein."
Officials allied to the "Wolfowitz cabal" also unsuccessfully attempted to link the anthrax-infected letters that were sent to US media organisations and politicians — without a shred of evidence — to Iraq, hoping to trigger military action.
The Wolfowitz faction has resurrected a strategy which it and the Republican right have pushed since the end of the 1991 Gulf War. It would have Washington convert the present US-enforced "no fly zones" over northern and southern Iraq into "no drive zones" (thus preventing Iraq's troops and military vehicles entering the area).
The discredited London-based Iraqi National Congress opposition would establish itself in the "liberated" northern and southern zones; Washington would recognise the INC as the "legitimate" government of Iraq and agree to its request for military support. US troops would seize the oilfields in south-eastern Iraq to finance the regime. The INC regime, heavily backed with US air power, would attempt to overthrow the Hussein regime.
The "attack Iraq" gang is being backed by ruling class luminaries such as President Ronald Reagan's UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan's defence secretary Casper Weinberger, former Republican Party Congressional leader Newt Gingrich, President George Bush senior's secretary of state Laurence Eagleburger and former CIA director James Woolsey. Many were partisans of the Reagan administration's vicious covert wars in Angola, Mozambique, Afghanistan and Nicaragua but were sidelined by Bush senior after the Gulf War.
Most seriously, the cabal has the sympathy of Rumsfeld and vice-president Dick Cheney. Along with Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Cheney were founding members of the Project for a New American Century.
The cabal's aggressive and messianic imperialist worldview can be gleaned from comments by American Enterprise Institute's Michael Ledeen, reported in the November 20 Village Voice, which were presented at a AEI panel, chaired by Perle: "No stages. This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq, then we take a look around and see how things stand. That is entirely the wrong way to go about it...
"If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to ... piece together clever diplomatic solutions ... but just wage a total war against these tyrants, I think we will do very well. Our children will sing great songs about us years from now."
'Hawks' gain support
As the demise of the Taliban began to loom — and the need to decide on a new target for the "war on terrorism" — it seems that the debate is shifting in favour of Wolfowitz's "hawks". The success of the US military intervention and gains of the Northern Alliance have encouraged the Wolfowitz cabal to draw the parallels with their pet scheme to overthrow Hussein and install the INC.
The Bush administration has begun beating the war drums over the resurrected claim that Iraq has "weapons of mass destruction" and to disconnect the further battles in the "war on terrorism" from action against the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks.
Bush's national security adviser Condoleezza Rice told CNN on November 18 that, "we didn't need September 11 to tell us that [Hussein] is a very dangerous man who is a threat to his own people, a threat to the region and a threat to us because he is determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction". A day earlier, 2000 US troops arrived in Kuwait to join the 5000 already there. According to the Pentagon, they were sent as a "deterrent to Iraq".
On November 19, undersecretary of state for arms control John Bolton (and a Wolfowitz ally), without presenting any evidence, claimed that it was "beyond dispute" that Iraq was developing biological weapons. He stated that Washington "strongly suspects that Iraq has taken advantage of three years of no UN inspections to improve all phases of its offensive biological weapons program".
Without naming Iraq, Bolton claimed al Qaeda was "trying to acquire a rudimentary biological weapons capability, possibly with support from a state". He said that the US was "not prepared, at this time, to comment whether rogue states may have assisted bin Laden" to acquire biological weapons.
On November 26, Bush openly expanded the definition of what constitutes "terrorism" when he stated: "If they develop weapons of mass destruction that will be used to terrorise nations, they will be held accountable ... So part of the war on terror is to deny weapons ... getting into the hands of nations that will use them."
Bush demanded that Iraq allow in UN weapons inspectors "to prove to the world [Hussein] is not developing weapons of mass destruction". Quizzed about what would be the US response if the Iraqi leader refused, Bush threatened, "He'll find out".
State Department spokesperson Richard Boucher added that, "The red lines [this and previous administrations] have stated for military action against Iraq was always development of weapons of mass destruction."
UN inspectors were pulled out of Iraq in 1998 ahead of four nights of air attacks ordered by US President Bill Clinton. Iraq has not allowed inspections to resume until the sanctions imposed on the country are lifted. Baghdad points out that the UN could find no evidence of the continued existence of weapons of mass destruction — nuclear, biological or chemical — and the UN Security Council should have lifted the sanctions.
Scott Ritter, an UNSCOM weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, has backed Iraq's claim. "Under the most stringent on-site inspection regime in the history of arms control, Iraq's biological weapons programs were dismantled, destroyed or rendered harmless during the course of hundreds of no-notice inspections", Ritter wrote in the October 19 British Guardian. "[Iraq's] major biological weapons production facility ... was blown up by high explosive charges and all its equipment destroyed...
"Moreover, Iraq was subjected to intrusive, full-time monitoring of all facilities with a potential biological application. Breweries, animal feed factories, vaccine and drug manufacturing facilities, university research laboratories and all hospitals were subject to constant, repeated inspections ... The UN never once found evidence that Iraq had either retained biological weapons or associated production equipment, or was continuing work in the field."
The debate continues inside the US regime. Condoleezza Rice was reported in the December 1 New York Times as saying that there "isn't any sense of timing" about when Washington would force the inspection issue with Iraq. "We have Iraq on the radar screen. But we are really very focused right now on phase one, on Afghanistan."
In the same edition of the NYT, Powell was quoted as saying that reports that "something is on the verge of happening" against Iraq have "no particular underpinning substance" to them.
On December 2, the British Observer reported that it had "learnt" that Bush had ordered the CIA and senior military commanders to draw up detailed plans for a military operation against Iraq which could begin "within months". The plans sounded very similar to the cabal's scenario to install and recognise the INC as the government of Iraq. The Observer has often served as a conduit for the Wolfowitz cabal's more outrageous claims. It was the Observer that claimed that "evidence was mounting" linking Iraq to the anthrax-laced letters.
However, Richard Armitage, US deputy secretary of state and a close ally of Powell, told the Observer that military action against Iraq was not imminent but would come at "a place and time of our choosing".
Until the US ruling-class faction fight over Iraq is settled, it seems that Washington is cynically seeking "compromise" targets. It also seems the British government is particularly keen to launch attacks on "al Qaeda training camps" in Somalia, partly because London does not support attacks on Iraq at this stage. US and British warships are patrolling the Somalian coast, supposedly to prevent bin Laden reaching there.
The British Sunday Times on November 25 reported that Bush and Blair had agreed that "the momentum created by the anti-terror coalition's successes must be maintained with swift action elsewhere". Air strikes on Somalia could occur as early as January.
Yemen has also been mentioned as a likely target, but in that case the strikes would have the approval of Yemen's government. The targets would be opponents of the Yemeni government.
Clearly, such attacks would be designed primarily to maintain the US and British people on a war footing — in preparation for more strategic military action — rather than to seriously endanger "terrorists".
Conveniently, Washington claims that al Qaeda "sleeper cells" are present in as many as 60 countries around the world.
From Green Left Weekly, December 12, 2001.
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