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4 A GUIDE FOR THE
PERPLEXED Intellectual fallacies of
the 'war on
terror' By Chalmers Johnson
actual perpetrators, the 19 men who
executed the attacks in New York and Washington -
15 Saudi Arabians, two citizens of the United Arab
Emirates, one Egyptian, and one Lebanese. None of
them was particularly religious. Three were living
together in Hamburg, Germany, where they did
appear to have become more interested in Islam
than they had been in their home countries.
Mohamed Atta, the leader of the group, age 33 on
9/11, had
Egyptian and German degrees in
architecture and city planning and became highly
politicized in favor of the Palestinian cause
against Zionism only after he went abroad.
Holmes notes, "According to the classic
study of resentment [Friedrich Nietzsche's On
the Genealogy of Morals (1887)], 'every
sufferer instinctively seeks a cause for his
suffering; more specifically, an agent, a "guilty"
agent who is susceptible of pain - in short, some
living being or other on whom he can vent his
feelings directly or in effigy, under some pretext
or other.' If suffering is seen as natural or
uncaused it will be coded as misfortune instead of
injustice, and it will produce resignation rather
than rebellion. The most efficient way to incite,
therefore, is to indict." (p 64)
The role
of bin Laden was, and remains, to provide such a
hyperbolic indictment - one that men like Atta
would never have heard back in authoritarian Egypt
but that came through loud and clear in their
German exile. Bin Laden demonized the United
States, accusing it of genocide against Muslims
and repeatedly contending that the presence of US
troops in Saudi Arabia ever since the first Gulf
War in 1991 was a far graver offense than the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, even though that
had led to the death of 1 million Afghans and had
sent 5 million more into exile.
The fact
that the 9/11 plot involved the attackers' own
self-destruction suggests possible irrationality
on their part, but Holmes argues that this was
actually part of the specific narrative of blame.
Americans feel contempt for Muslims and ascribe
little or no value to Muslim lives. Therefore, to
be captured after a terrorist attack involved a
high likelihood that the Americans would torture
the perpetrator. Suicide took care of that worry
(and provided several other advantages discussed
below).
The US as 'sole remaining
superpower' Another subject about which
Holmes is strikingly original is the subtle way in
which the collapse of the former Soviet Union and
the United States' self-promotion as the sole
remaining superpower clouded our vision and
virtually guaranteed the catastrophe that ensued
in Iraq. "Because Americans ... have sunk so much
of their national treasure into a military
establishment fit to deter and perhaps fight an
enemy that has now disappeared," he argues, "they
have an almost irresistible inclination to
exaggerate the centrality of rogue states,
excellent targets for military destruction,
[above] the overall terrorist threat. They
overestimate war (which never unfolds as expected)
and underestimate diplomacy and persuasion as
instruments of American power." (pp 71-72)
Holmes draws several interesting
implications from this American overinvestment in
Cold-War-type military power. One is that the very
nature of the 9/11 attacks undermined crucial
axioms of American national security doctrine. In
a much more significant way than in the 1993
attack on the World Trade Center, a non-state
actor on the international stage successfully
attacked the United States, contrary to a
well-established belief in Pentagon circles that
only states have the capability of menacing us
militarily. Equally alarming, by employing a
strategy requiring their own deaths, the
terrorists ensured that deterrence no longer held
sway. Overwhelming military might cannot deter
non-state actors who accept that they will die in
their attacks on others. The day after 9/11,
American leaders in Washington, DC, suddenly felt
unprotected and defenseless against a new threat
they only imperfectly understood. They responded
in various ways.
One was to recast what
had happened in terms of Cold-War thinking. "To
repress feelings of defenselessness associated
with an unfamiliar threat, the decision makers'
gaze slid uncontrollably away from al-Qaeda and
fixated on a recognizable threat that was
unquestionably susceptible to being broken into
bits." (p 312) Holmes calls this fusion of bin
Laden and Saddam Hussein a "mental alchemy, the
‘reconceiving' of an impalpable enemy as a
palpable enemy". He endorses James Mann's thesis
that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz,
and others did not change the underlying
principles guiding American foreign policy in
response to the 9/11 attacks; that, in fact, they
did the exact opposite: "[T]he Bush administration
has managed foreign affairs so ineptly because it
has been reflexively implementing out-of-date
formulas in a radically changed security
environment." (p 106)
Unintended
consequences also played a role, Holmes argues:
"If conservative congressmen had not blocked
[Pennsylvania Governor] Tom Ridge's nomination as
Defense Secretary [in 2000] for the ludicrously
immaterial reason that he was wobbly on abortion,
then the Cheney-Rumsfeld group, including
Wolfowitz and [Douglas] Feith, would have been in
no position to hijack the administration's
reaction to 9/11." (pp 93-94) Rumsfeld
enthusiastically endorsed Bush's description of
his "new" policies as a "war" because the Office
of the Secretary of Defense then became the lead
agency in designing and carrying out America's
response.
There was little or no
countervailing influence. "By sheer chance,"
Holmes writes, "Rice and Powell - no doubt orderly
managers - have pedestrian minds and perhaps
deferential personalities. Neither provided a
gripping and persuasive vision of the United
States' role in the world that might have
counteracted the megalomania of the
neoconservatives, and neither was capable of
outfoxing the hard-liners in an interagency power
struggle." (p 94)
The costs of equating
al-Qaeda with Iraq and of concentrating on a
military response were high. "It meant that some
of the troops sent to Iraq in the first wave
believed, disgracefully, that they were avenging
the 3,000 dead from September 11 ... Cruel and
arbitrary behavior by some US forces helped stoke
the violent insurgency that followed." (p 307)
American confusion about the nature of the
enemy - rogue state vs non-state terrorist
organization - produced two different
counterstrategies, both of which almost certainly
made the situation worse. First, by focusing on a
rogue state (Iraq), rather than on a non-state
actor (al-Qaeda), the Pentagon drew attention to
what it came to call the "hand-off scenario" in
which a nuclear-armed rogue state might hand over
weapons of mass destruction to terrorists who
would use them against the US. To counter this
threat, the Pentagon developed a strategy of
preventive war against rogue states with the
objective of bringing about regime change in them.
The only way to prevent nuclear proliferation to
terrorist groups - so the argument went - was to
forcibly democratize Middle Eastern authoritarian
regimes, some of which had long been allied with
the United States.
The other strategy was
a return to what seemed like a form of deterrence:
a "scare the Muslims" campaign. This involved a
resort to massive "shock and awe" bombing raids on
Baghdad with the intent of demonstrating the
futility of defying the United States.
By
reacting to the threat of modern terrorism with an
attack on a substitute target - without even
bothering to calculate the enormous potential
costs involved - the Pentagon greatly
overestimated what military force could achieve.
Both the regime-change and overawe-the-Muslims
approaches carried with them potentially
devastating unintended consequences - particularly
if any of the premises, such as about who
possessed WMD, were wrong. Overly abstract ideas
were substituted for empirical knowledge of, and
logical responses to, an enemy's capabilities.
Thus, insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, two
devastated, poor countries, have managed to fight
one of the most powerful American expeditionary
forces in history to a virtual standstill. In
short, "America's bellicose response to the 9/11
provocation was not only dishonorable and
unethical, given the cruel suffering it has
inflicted on thousands of innocents, but also
imprudent in the extreme because it was bound to
produce as much hatred as fear, as much burning
desire for reprisal as quaking paralysis and
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