Page 1 of 2 Was there an alternative?
By Noam Chomsky
We are approaching the 10th anniversary of the horrendous atrocities of
September 11, 2001, which, it is commonly held, changed the world. On May 1,
the presumed mastermind of the crime, Osama bin Laden, was assassinated in
Pakistan by a team of elite US commandos, Navy SEALs, after he was captured,
unarmed and undefended, in Operation Geronimo.
A number of analysts have observed that although Bin Laden was finally killed,
he won some major successes in his war against the US. "He repeatedly asserted
that the only way to drive the US from the Muslim world and defeat its satraps
was by drawing Americans into a series of small but expensive wars that would
ultimately bankrupt them," Eric Margolis writes. " 'Bleeding the
US,' in his words."
The United States, first under George W Bush and then Barack Obama, rushed
right into Bin Laden's trap ... Grotesquely overblown military outlays and debt
addiction ... may be the most pernicious legacy of the man who thought he could
defeat the United States - particularly when the debt is being cynically
exploited by the far right, with the collusion of the Democrat establishment,
to undermine what remains of social programs, public education, unions, and, in
general, remaining barriers to corporate tyranny.
That Washington was bent on fulfilling Bin Laden's fervent wishes was evident
at once. As discussed in my book 9-11, written shortly after those
attacks occurred, anyone with knowledge of the region could recognize "that a
massive assault on a Muslim population would be the answer to the prayers of
Bin Laden and his associates, and would lead the US and its allies into a
'diabolical trap', as the French foreign minister put it".
The senior Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst responsible for tracking
Bin Laden from 1996, Michael Scheuer, wrote shortly after that "Bin Laden has
been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war on us. [He] is out
to drastically alter US and Western policies toward the Islamic world", and
largely succeeded: "US 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, I think
it is fair to conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden's
only indispensable ally." And arguably remains so, even after his death.
The first 9/11
Was there an alternative? There is every likelihood that the jihadi movement,
much of it highly critical of Bin Laden, could have been split and undermined
after 9/11. The "crime against humanity", as it was rightly called, could have
been approached as a crime, with an international operation to apprehend the
likely suspects. That was recognized at the time, but no such idea was even
considered.
In 9-11, I quoted Robert Fisk's conclusion that the "horrendous crime"
of 9/11 was committed with "wickedness and awesome cruelty", an accurate
judgment. It is useful to bear in mind that the crimes could have been even
worse. Suppose, for example, that the attack had gone as far as bombing the
White House, killing the president, imposing a brutal military dictatorship
that killed thousands and tortured tens of thousands while establishing an
international terror center that helped impose similar torture-and-terror
states elsewhere and carried out an international assassination campaign; and
as an extra fillip, brought in a team of economists - call them "the Kandahar
boys" - who quickly drove the economy into one of the worst depressions in its
history. That, plainly, would have been a lot worse than 9/11.
Unfortunately, it is not a thought experiment. It happened. The only inaccuracy
in this brief account is that the numbers should be multiplied by 25 to yield
per capita equivalents, the appropriate measure. I am, of course, referring to
what in Latin America is often called "the first 9/11": September 11, 1973,
when the US succeeded in its intensive efforts to overthrow the democratic
government of Salvador Allende in Chile with a military coup that placed
General Augusto Pinochet's brutal regime in office.
The goal, in the words of the Richard Nixon administration, was to kill the
"virus" that might encourage all those "foreigners [who] are out to screw us"
to take over their own resources and in other ways to pursue an intolerable
policy of independent development. In the background was the conclusion of the
National Security Council that, if the US could not control Latin America, it
could not expect "to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world".
The first 9/11, unlike the second, did not change the world. It was "nothing of
very great consequence", as Henry Kissinger assured his boss a few days later.
These events of little consequence were not limited to the military coup that
destroyed Chilean democracy and set in motion the horror story that followed.
The first 9/11 was just one act in a drama which began in 1962, when John F
Kennedy shifted the mission of the Latin American military from "hemispheric
defense" - an anachronistic holdover from World War II - to "internal
security", a concept with a chilling interpretation in US-dominated Latin
American circles.
In the recently published Cambridge University History of the Cold War,
Latin American scholar John Coatsworth writes that from that time to "the
Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims,
and executions of non-violent political dissenters in Latin America vastly
exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites", including
many religious martyrs and mass slaughter as well, always supported or
initiated in Washington.
The last major violent act was the brutal murder of six leading Latin American
intellectuals, Jesuit priests, a few days after the Berlin Wall fell. The
perpetrators were an elite Salvadorean battalion, which had already left a
shocking trail of blood, fresh from renewed training at the JFK School of
Special Warfare, acting on direct orders of the high command of the US client
state.
The consequences of this hemispheric plague still reverberate.
From kidnapping and torture to assassination
All of this, and much more like it, is dismissed as of little consequence, and
forgotten. Those whose mission is to rule the world enjoy a more comforting
picture, articulated well enough in the current issue of the prestigious (and
valuable) journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London.
The lead article discusses "the visionary international order" of the "second
half of the twentieth century" marked by "the universalization of an American
vision of commercial prosperity". There is something to that account, but it
does not quite convey the perception of those at the wrong end of the guns.
The same is true of the assassination of Osama bin Laden, which brings to an
end at least a phase in the "war on terror" re-declared by president George W
Bush on the second 9/11. Let us turn to a few thoughts on that event and its
significance.
On May 1, 2011, Bin Laden was killed in his virtually unprotected compound by a
raiding mission of 79 Navy SEALs, who entered Pakistan by helicopter. After
many lurid stories were provided by the government and withdrawn, official
reports made it increasingly clear that the operation was a planned
assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law,
beginning with the invasion itself.
There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as
presumably could have been done by 79 commandos facing no opposition - except,
they report, from his wife, also unarmed, whom they shot in self-defense when
she "lunged" at them, according to the White House.
A plausible reconstruction of the events is provided by veteran Middle East
correspondent Yochi Dreazen and colleagues in the Atlantic. Dreazen, formerly
the military correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, is senior correspondent
for the National Journal Group covering military affairs and national security.
According to their investigation, White House planning appears not to have
considered the option of capturing Bin Laden alive: "The administration had
made clear to the military's clandestine Joint Special Operations Command that
it wanted Bin Laden dead, according to a senior US official with knowledge of
the discussions. A high-ranking military officer briefed on the assault said
the SEALs knew their mission was not to take him alive."
The authors add: "For many at the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency
who had spent nearly a decade hunting Bin Laden, killing the militant was a
necessary and justified act of vengeance." Furthermore, "capturing bin Laden
alive would have also presented the administration with an array of nettlesome
legal and political challenges". Better, then, to assassinate him, dumping his
body into the sea without the autopsy considered essential after a killing - an
act that predictably provoked both anger and skepticism in much of the Muslim
world.
As the Atlantic inquiry observes, "The decision to kill Bin Laden outright was
the clearest illustration to date of a little-noticed aspect of the Obama
administration's counter-terror policy. The Bush administration captured
thousands of suspected militants and sent them to detention camps in
Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay. The Obama administration, by contrast,
has focused on eliminating individual terrorists rather than attempting to take
them alive."
That is one significant difference between Bush and Obama. The authors quote
former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who "told German TV that the US
raid was 'quite clearly a violation of international law' and that Bin Laden
should have been detained and put on trial", contrasting Schmidt with US
attorney general Eric Holder, who "defended the decision to kill Bin Laden
although he didn't pose an immediate threat to the Navy SEALs, telling a House
panel ... that the assault had been 'lawful, legitimate and appropriate in
every way'."
The disposal of the body without autopsy was also criticized by allies. The
highly regarded British barrister Geoffrey Robertson, who supported the
intervention and opposed the execution largely on pragmatic grounds,
nevertheless described Obama's claim that "justice was done" as an "absurdity"
that should have been obvious to a former professor of constitutional law.
Pakistan law "requires a colonial inquest on violent death, and international
human rights law insists that the 'right to life' mandates an inquiry whenever
violent death occurs from government or police action. The US is therefore
under a duty to hold an inquiry that will satisfy the world as to the true
circumstances of this killing."
Robertson usefully reminds us that "[i]t was not always thus. When the time
came to consider the fate of men much more steeped in wickedness than Osama bin
Laden - the Nazi leadership - the British government wanted them hanged within
six hours of capture. President [Harry] Truman demurred, citing the conclusion
of Justice Robert Jackson that summary execution 'would not sit easily on the
American conscience or be remembered by our children with pride ... the only
course is to determine the innocence or guilt of the accused after a hearing as
dispassionate as the times will permit and upon a record that will leave our
reasons and motives clear'."
Eric Margolis comments, "Washington has never made public the evidence of its
claim that Osama bin Laden was behind the 9/11 attacks," presumably one reason
why "polls show that fully a third of American respondents believe that the US
government and/or Israel were behind 9/11", while in the Muslim world
skepticism is much higher. "An open trial in the US or at the Hague would have
exposed these claims to the light of day," he continues, a practical reason why
Washington should have followed the law.
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