I watched Bush and Cheney on CNN when the Axis of Evil speech was given and the “long war” proclaimed. Iraq, Iran, North Korea were fingered immediately as enemies to be clobbered because they might or might not be harboring terrorists who might or might not destroy us in the night. So we must strike first whenever it pleases us. “Odd,” said a fellow veteran of World War II, “that Bush and Cheney are so delighted to put us at war when, during Vietnam, they were both what we used to call draft dodgers.” But then we agreed that in our politics the sissies are always cheerleading the real guys on to go give their lives. Real soldiers like Colin Powell are less gung ho. Thus, we declared war on terrorism—an abstract noun which cannot be a war at all, as you need a country for that. Of course, there was innocent Afghanistan, which was leveled from a great height, but then what’s collateral damage—like an entire country—when you’re targeting the personification of all evil according to Time and the New York Times and the networks, et cetera?
As it proved, the conquest of Afghanistan had nothing to do with Osama. He was simply a pretext for replacing the Taliban with a relatively stable government that would allow Union Oil of California to lay its pipeline for the profit of, among others, the Cheney-Bush junta.
Background? All right. The headquarters of Unocal are, as might be expected, in Texas. In December 1997, Taliban representatives were invited to Sugarland, Texas. At that time, Unocal had already begun training Afghan men in the skills required for pipeline construction, with U.S. government approval. BBC News, December 4, 1997:
A spokesman for the company, Unocal, said the Taliban were expected to spend several days at the company’s [Texas] headquarters . . . a BBC regional correspondent says the proposal to build a pipeline across Afghanistan is part of an international scramble to profit from developing the rich energy resources of the Caspian Sea. . . . Nearly 140 people were enrolled last month in Kandahar. . . .
The Inter Press Service (IPS), reported, “Some Western business interests are warming up to the Taliban despite the movement’s” institutionalization of terror, massacres, abductions and impoverishment. CNN, October 8, 1996: “The United States wants good ties [with the Taliban] but can’t openly seek them while women are severely oppressed.” The Taliban, rather better organized than rumored, hired for PR one Laili Helms, a niece of Richard Helms, former director of the CIA.
In October 1996, the German Frankfurter Rundschau reported that Unocal “has been given the go-ahead from the new holders of power in Kabul to build a pipeline from Turkmenistan via Afghanistan to Pakistan. It would lead from Krasnovodsk on the Caspian Sea to Karachi on the Indian Ocean coast.”
This was a real coup for Unocal, as well as other candidates for pipelines, including Condoleezza’s old employer, Chevron. Although the Taliban was already notorious for its imaginative crimes against the human race, the Wall Street Journal, May 23, 1997, scenting big bucks, fearlessly announced, “Like them or not, the Taliban are the players most capable of achieving peace in Afghanistan at this moment in its history.”
The New York Times, May 26, 1997, leaped aboard the pipeline juggernaut. “The Clinton Administration has taken the view that a Taliban victory would . . . act as counterweight to Iran . . . and would offer the possibility of new trade routes that could weaken Russian and Iranian influence on the region.”
But by 1999, it was clear that the Taliban could never provide us the security we would need to protect our fragile pipelines. The arrival of Osama as warrior for Allah on the scene refocused, as it were, the bidding. New alliances were now being made. Frederick Starr of Johns Hopkins wrote in the Washington Post December 19, 2000: “. . . the United States has quietly begun to align itself with those in the Russian government calling for military action against Afghanistan and has toyed with the idea of a new raid to wipe out Osama bin Laden.” That was December. Then the Bush administration bought the idea of an invasion of Afghanistan (inspired by Sandy Berger?). Then came September and October . . . Unocal, nous voilà!
An unexpected joy of this abstract war has been the emergence of our elfin Defense Secretary Rumsfeld as a major TV comic. Since the Gulf War, we are now used to seeing foreign correspondents report, not from the field but huddled together in a briefing room at the Pentagon while, in this case, Rumsfeld works them over in front of the camera. He has a number of grins and grimaces that trigger instant laughter. His looks register: Amazement—I thought I’d heard everything. As you know, I cannot answer that. You know that—head shakes in sorrow. Will they never learn—shoulders heave. Highly selective, self-serving sound bites are served up and the correspondents are as in the dark as the rest of us about the war. Thanks to Europe—where bluebirds fly—some news gets back from the front. Also, there is USA Today, November 11, 2001, “The US combat commander in Afghanistan said Thursday that apprehending Osama bin Laden isn’t one of the missions of Operation Enduring Storm.”
Out the window go all those demonizing stories. One’s first instinct is that the field commander’s job is now at risk. We’ve fought too many wars with no clearly defined enemy for no specific objective to indulge in another. But, no, the scenario has simply been switched from Evil Personified to “We have not said that Osama bin Laden is a target of this effort.” General Franks told reporters at his first Pentagon briefing since the war began: “What we are about,” he said, “is the destruction of the al Qa’eda network as well as the . . . Taliban that provide harbor to bin Laden and al Qa’eda.”
A helpful aide chimed in, “If tomorrow morning someone told us Osama’s dead, that doesn’t mean we’re through in Afghanistan.” Although with much fanfare we went forth to wreak our vengeance on the crazed sadistic religious zealot who slaughtered three thousand American citizens, once that “war” was under way, Osama was dropped as irrelevant and so we’re back to the Unocal pipeline, now a go-project. In the light of what we know today, it is unlikely that the Junta was ever going to capture Osama alive: he has tales to tell. One of Rumsfeld’s best numbers now is: “Where is he? Somewhere? Here? There? Somewhere? Who knows?” And we get his best twinkle. He must also be delighted—and amazed—that the Media has bought the absurd story that Osama, if alive, would still be in Afghanistan, underground, waiting to be flushed out instead of in a comfortable mansion in Osama-loving Jakarta, two thousand miles to the east and easily accessible by Flying Carpet One.
Many commentators of a certain age have noted how Hitlerian our Junta sounds as it threatens first one country for harboring terrorists and then another. It is true that Hitler liked to pretend to be the injured—or threatened—party before he struck. But he had many great predecessors not least Imperial Rome. Stephen Gowans’ War in Afghanistan: A $28 Billion Racket quotes Joseph Schumpteter, who in 1919,
described ancient Rome in a way that sounds eerily like the United States in 2001: “There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome’s allies; and if Rome had no allies, the allies would be invented. . . . The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbors.”
We have only outdone the Romans in turning metaphors like the war on terrorism, or poverty, or AIDS into actual wars on targets we appear, often, to pick at random in order to maintain turbulence in foreign lands.
As of August 1, 2002, trial balloons were going up all over Washington, D.C., to get world opinion used to the idea that “Bush of Afghanistan” had gained a title as mighty as his father’s “Bush of the Persian Gulf” and Junior was now eager to add Iraq-Babylon to his diadem. These various balloons fell upon Europe and the Arab world like so many lead weights. But something new has been added since the classic Roman Hitlerian mantra: “They are threatening us; we must attack first.” Now everyone is more or less out in the open. The International Herald Tribune (August 1, 2002) wrote:
The leaks began in earnest July 5, when the New York Times described a tentative Pentagon plan that it said called for an invasion by a US force of up to 250,000 that would attack Iraq from the north, south and west. On July 10, the Times said that Jordan might be used as a base for the invasion.
The Washington Post reported, July 28, that “many senior US military officers contend that President Saddam Hussein poses no immediate threat. . . .”
And the status quo should be maintained. Incidentally, this is the sort of debate that the founding fathers intended the Congress, not military bureaucrats, to conduct in the name of we the people. But that sort of debate has, for a long time, been denied us.
One refreshing note is now being struck in a fashion unthinkable in Imperial Rome: the cheerful admission that we habitually resort to provocation: “Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has threatened jail to anyone found to have been behind the leaks. But a retired army general, Fred Woerner, tends to see a method behind the leaks. ‘We may already be executing a plan,’ he said recently. ‘Are we involved in a preliminary psychological dimension of causing Iraq to do something to justify a US attack or make concessions? Somebody knows.’ ” That is plain.
Elsewhere in this interesting edition of the Herald Tribune wise William Pfaff (too wise and too principled to obtain a New York outlet) writes:
A second Washington debate is whether to make an unprovoked attack on Iran to destroy a nuclear power reactor being built there with Russian assistance, under inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency, within the terms of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of which Iran is a signatory. . . . No other government in the world would support such an action, other than Israel’s [which] would do so not because it expected to be attacked by Iran but because it, not unreasonably, opposes any nuclear capacity in the hands of any Islamic government.