[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
Contents
Preface to the First Edition
Introduction
Part 1. Thought Control: The Case of the Middle East
Part 2. Middle East Terrorism and the American Ideological System
Part 3. Libya in U.S. Demonology
Part 4. The U.S. Role in the Middle East
Part 5. International Terrorism: Image and Reality
Part 6. The World after September 11
Part 7. U.S./Israel-Palestine
Notes
Preface to the First Edition (1986)
St. Augustine tells the story of a pirate captured by Alexander the Great, who asked him "how he dares molest
the sea." "How dare you molest the whole world?" the pirate replied: "Because I do it with a little ship only, I
am called a thief; you, doing it with a great navy, are called an Emperor."
The pirate's answer was "elegant and excellent," St. Augustine relates. It captures with some accuracy the
current relations between the United States and various minor actors on the stage of international terrorism:
Libya, factions of the PLO, and others. More generally, St. Augustine's tale illuminates the meaning of the
concept of international terrorism in contemporary Western usage, and reaches to the heart of the frenzy over
selected incidents of terrorism currently being orchestrated, with supreme cynicism, as a cover for Western
violence.
The term "terrorism" came into use at the end of the eighteenth century, primarily to refer to violent acts of
governments designed to ensure popular submission. That concept plainly is of little benefit to the practitioners
of state terrorism, who, holding power, are in a position to control the system of thought and expression. The
original sense has therefore been abandoned, and the term "terrorism" has come to be applied mainly to "retail
terrorism" by individuals or groups.1 Whereas the term was once applied to emperors who molest their own
subjects and the world, now it is restricted to thieves who molest the powerful - though not entirely restricted:
the term still applies to enemy emperors, a category that shifts with the needs of power and ideology.
Extricating ourselves from such practices, we use the term "terrorism" to refer to the threat or use of violence
to intimidate or coerce (generally for political, religious, or other such ends), whether it is the terrorism of the
emperor or of the thief.
The pirate's maxim explains the recently evolved concept of "international terrorism" only in part. It is
necessary to add a second feature: an act of terrorism enters the canon only if it is committed by "their side,"
not ours. That was the guiding doctrine of the public relations campaign about "international terrorism"
launched by the Reagan Administration as it came to office. It relied on scholarship claiming to have
established that the plague is a "Soviet-inspired" instrument, "aimed at the destabilization of Western
democratic society," as shown by the alleged fact that terrorism is not "directed against the Soviet Union or any
of its satellites or client states," but rather occurs "almost exclusively in democratic or relatively democratic
countries."2
The thesis is true, in fact true by definition, given the way the term "terrorism" is employed by the emperor
and his loyal coterie. Since only acts committed by "their side" count as terrorism, it follows that the thesis is
necessarily correct, whatever the facts. In the real world, the story is quite different. The major victims of
international terrorism3 in the past several decades have been Cubans, Central Americans, and inhabitants of
Lebanon, but none of this counts, by definition. When Israel bombs Palestinian refugee camps killing many
civilians - often without even a pretense of "reprisal" - or sends its troops into Lebanese villages in
"counterterror" operations where they murder and destroy, or hijacks ships and dispatches hundreds of hostages
to prison camps under horrifying conditions, this is not "terrorism"; in fact, the rare voices of protest are
thunderously condemned by loyal party liners for their "anti-Semitism" and "double standard," demonstrated by
their failure to join the chorus of praise for "a country that cares for human life" (Washington Post), whose
"high moral purpose" (Time) is the object of never-ending awe and acclaim, a country which, according to its
admirers, "is held to a higher law, as interpreted for it by journalists" (Walter Goodman).4
Similarly, it is not terrorism when paramilitary forces operating from U.S. bases and trained by the CIA
bombard Cuban hotels, sink fishing boats and attack Russian ships in Cuban harbors, poison crops and
livestock, attempt to assassinate Castro, and so on, in missions that were running almost weekly at their peak.5
These and many similar actions on the part of the emperor and his clients are not the subject of conferences and
learned tomes, or of anguished commentary and diatribes in the media and journals of opinion.
Standards for the emperor and his court are unique in two closely related respects. First, their terrorist acts are
excluded from the canon; second, while terrorist attacks against them are regarded with extreme seriousness,
even requiring violence in "self-defense against future attack" as we will see, comparable or more serious
terrorist attacks against others do not merit retaliation or preemptive action, and if undertaken would elicit fury
and a fearsome response. The significance of such terrorist attacks is so slight that they need barely be reported,
surely not remembered. Suppose, for example, that a seaborne Libyan force were to attack three American
ships in the Israeli port of Haifa, sinking one of them and damaging the others, using East German-made
missiles. There is no need to speculate on the reaction. Turning to the real world, on June 5,1986, "a seaborne
South African force attacked three Russian ships in the southern Angolan harbour of Namibe, sinking one of
them," using "Israeli-made Scorpion [Gabriel] missiles."6
If the Soviet Union had responded to this terrorist attack against commercial shipping as the U.S. would have
done under similar circumstances - perhaps by a firebombing that would have destroyed Johannesburg, to judge
by the action-response scale of U.S. and Israeli "retaliation" - the U.S. might well have considered a nuclear
strike as legitimate "retaliation" against the Communist devil. In the real world, the USSR did not respond, and
the events were considered so insignificant that they were barely mentioned in the U.S. press.7
Suppose that Cuba were to have invaded Venezuela in late 1976 in self-defense against terrorist attack, with
the intent of establishing a "New Order" there organized by elements under its control, killing 200 Americans
manning an air defense system, heavily shelling the U.S. Embassy and finally occupying it for several days
during its conquest of Caracas in violation of a cease-fire agreement.8 Turning again to the real world, in 1982
Israel attacked Lebanon under the pretext of protecting the Galilee against terrorist attack (fabricated for the
U.S. audience, as tacitly conceded internally), with the intent of establishing a "New Order" there organized by
elements under its control, killing 200 Russians who were manning an air defense system, heavily shelling the
Russian Embassy and finally occupying it for two days during its conquest of West Beirut in violation of a
cease-fire agreement. The facts were casually reported in the U.S., with the context and crucial background
ignored or denied. There was, fortunately, no Soviet response, or we would not be here today to discuss the
matter.
In the real world, we assume as a matter of course that the Soviet Union and other official enemies, most of
them defenseless, will calmly endure provocations and violence that would elicit a furious reaction, verbal and
military, if the emperor and his court were the victims.
The stunning hypocrisy illustrated by these and innumerable other cases, some discussed below, is not
restricted to the matter of international terrorism. To mention a different case, consider the World War II
agreements that allocated control over parts of Europe and Asia to the several Allied powers and called for
withdrawal at specified times. There was great outrage over (in fact, outrageous) Soviet actions in Eastern
Europe modeled closely on what the U.S. had done in the areas assigned to Western control under wartime
agreements (Italy, Greece, South Korea, etc.); and over the belated Soviet withdrawal from northern Iran, while
the U.S. violated its wartime agreements to withdraw from Portugal, Iceland, Greenland, and elsewhere, on the
grounds that "military considerations" make such withdrawal "inadvisable," the Joint Chiefs of Staff argued
with State Department concurrence. There was - and to this day is - no outrage over the fact that West German
espionage operations, directed against the USSR, were placed under the control of Reinhard Gehlen, who had
conducted similar operations for the Nazis in Eastern Europe, or that the CIA was sending agents and supplies
to aid armies encouraged by Hitler fighting in Eastern Europe and the Ukraine as late as the early 1950s as part
of the "roll-back strategy" made official in NSC-68 (April 1950).9 Soviet support for armies encouraged by
Hitler fighting in the Rockies in 1952 might have elicited a different reaction.10
Examples are legion. One of the most notorious is the example regularly offered as the ultimate proof that
Communists cannot be relied upon to live up to agreements: the 1973 Paris Peace treaty concerning Vietnam
and its aftermath. The truth is that the U.S. announced at once that it would reject every term of the scrap of
paper it had been compelled to sign, and proceeded to do so, while the media, in a display of servility that goes
beyond the norm, accepted the U.S. version of the treaty (violating every essential element of-it) as the actual
text, so that U.S. violations were "in accord" with the treaty while the Communist reaction to these violations
proved their innate treachery. This example is now regularly offered as justification for the U.S. rejection of a
negotiated political settlement in Central America, demonstrating the usefulness of a well-run propaganda
system.11
As noted, "international terrorism" (in the specific Western sense) was placed in the central focus of attention
by the Reagan Administration as it came into office in 1981.12 The reasons were not difficult to discern, though
they were - and remain - inexpressible within the doctrinal system.
The Administration was committed to three related policies, all achieved with considerable success: 1) transfer
of resources from the poor to the rich; 2) a large-scale increase in the state sector of the economy in the
traditional way, through the Pentagon system, a device to compel the public to finance high technology industry
by means of the state-guaranteed market for the production of high technology waste and thus to contribute to
the program of public subsidy, private profit, called "free enterprise"; and 3) a substantial increase in U.S.
intervention, subversion and international terrorism (in the literal sense). Such policies cannot be presented to
the public in the terms in which they are intended. They can be implemented only if the general population is
properly frightened by monsters against whom we must defend ourselves.
The standard device is an appeal to the threat of what the President called "the monolithic and ruthless
conspiracy" bent on world conquest - President Kennedy, as he launched a rather similar program13 - Reagan's
"Evil Empire." But confrontation with the Empire itself would be a dangerous affair. It is far safer to do battle
with defenseless enemies designated as the Evil Empire's proxies, a choice that conforms well to the third plank
in the Reagan agenda, pursued for quite independent reasons: to ensure "stability" and "order" in Washington's
global domains. The "terrorism" of properly chosen pirates, or of such enemies as Nicaragua or Salvadoran
peasants who dare to defend themselves against international terrorist attack, is an easier target, and with an
efficiently functioning propaganda system, it can be exploited to induce a proper sense of fear and mobilization
among the domestic population.
It is in this context that "international terrorism" replaced human rights as "the Soul of our foreign policy" in
the 1980s, human rights having achieved this status as part of the campaign to reverse the notable improvement
in the moral and intellectual climate during the 1960s - termed the "Vietnam syndrome" - and to overcome the
dread "crisis of democracy" that erupted in the same context as large elements of the general population became
organized for political action, threatening the system of elite decision, public ratification, called "democracy" in
Western parlance.14
In what follows, I will be concerned with international terrorism in the real world, focusing attention primarily
on the Mediterranean region. "Mideast/Mediterranean terrorism" was selected as the top story of 1985 by
editors and broadcasters - primarily American -polled by the Associated Press; the poll was taken before the
terrorist attacks at the Rome and Vienna airports in December, which probably would have eliminated
remaining doubts.15 In the early months of 1986, concern over Mideast/Mediterranean terrorism reached a
fever pitch, culminating in the U.S. bombing of Libya in April. The official story is that this courageous action
aimed at the leading practitioner of international terrorism achieved its goal. Qaddafi and other major criminals
are now cowering in their bunkers, tamed by the brave defender of human rights and dignity. But despite this
grand victory over the forces of darkness, the issue of terrorism emanating from the Islamic world and the
proper response for the democracies that defend civilized values remains a leading topic of concern and debate,
as illustrated by numerous books, conferences, articles and editorials, television commentary, and so on. Insofar
as any large or elite public can be reached, the discussion strictly observes the principles just enunciated:
attention is restricted to the terrorism of the thief, not the emperor and his clients; to their crimes, not ours. I
will, however, not observe these decencies.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]