Theorizing September 11:
Social Theory, History, and
Globalization[1]
By Douglas
Kellner
Momentous
historical events, like the September 11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent
Terror War, test social theories and provide a challenge to give a convincing
account of the event and its consequences. In the following analyses, I want
first to suggest how certain dominant social theories were put in question
during the momentous and world-shaking events of September 11, and offer an
analysis of the historical background necessary to understand and contextualize
the terror attacks. I take up the claim that “everything has
changed” in the wake of September 11 and attempt to indicate both changes
and continuities to avoid one-sided exaggerations and ideological simplicities.
I argue that the terror attacks show contradictions in the nature of
globalization and new technology that requires dialectical analysis of these
phenomena. I conclude with some reflections on the implications of September
11
and the subsequent Afghanistan Terror War and 2003 war against Iraq for critical
social theory and democratic politics, envisaging a new global movement against
terrorism and militarism and for democracy, peace,
environmentalism, and social justice.
In the following study, I am
using the term “Terror War” to describe the Bush
administration’s “war against terrorism” and its use of
unilateral military force and terror as the privileged vehicles of constructing
a U.S. hegemony in the current world (dis)order. The Bush administration has
expanded its combat against Islamic terrorism into a policy of Terror War where
they have declared the right of the U.S. to strike any enemy state or
organization presumed to harbor or support terrorism, or to eliminate
“weapons of mass destruction” that could be used against the U.S.
The rightwing of the Bush administration seeks to promote Terror War as the
defining struggle of the era, coded as an apocalyptic battle between good and
evil and has already mounted major military campaigns against Afghanistan and
Iraq, with highly ambiguous and unsettling results (Kellner
2003).
Social Theory,
Falsification, and the Events of History
Social theories generalize from past
experience and provide accounts of historical events or periods that attempt to
map, illuminate, and perhaps criticize dominant social relations, institutions,
forms, trends, and events of a given epoch. In turn, they can be judged by the
extent to which they account for, interpret, and critically assess contemporary
conditions, or predict future events or developments. One major theory of the
past two decades, Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History (1992), was
strongly put into question by the events of September 11 and their
aftermath. [2] For Fukuyama, the
collapse of Soviet communism and triumph of Western capitalism and democracy in
the early 1990s constituted “the end of history.” This signified for
him “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the
universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human
government.” Although there may be conflicts in places like the Third
World, overall for Fukuyama liberal democracy and market capitalism have
prevailed and future politics will devolve around resolving routine economic and
technical problems, and the future will accordingly be rather mundane and
boring.Samuel Huntington
polemicizes against Fukuyama’s “one world: euphoria and
harmony” model in his The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of
World Order (1996). For Huntington, the future holds a series of clashes
between “the West and the Rest.” Huntington rejects a number of
models of contemporary history, including a “realist” model that
nation-states are primary players on the world scene who will continue to form
alliances and coalitions that will play themselves out in various conflicts. He
also rejects a “chaos” model that detects no discernible order or
structure. Instead, Huntington asserts that the contemporary world is
articulated into competing civilizations that are based on irreconcilably
different cultures and religions. For Huntington, culture provides unifying and
integrating principles of order and cohesion, and from dominant cultural
formations emerge civilizations that are likely to come into conflict with each
other, including Islam, China, Russia, and the West. On Huntington’s
model, religion is “perhaps the central force that motivates and
mobilizes people” and is thus the core of
civilization.Although
Huntington’s model seems to have some purchase in the currently emerging
global encounter with terrorism, and is becoming a new dominant conservative
ideology, it tends to overly homogenize both Islam and the West, as well as the
other civilizations he depicts. As Tariq Ali argues (2002), Huntington
exaggerates the role of religion, while downplaying the importance of economics
and politics.[3] Moreover,
Huntington’s model lends itself to pernicious misuse, and has been
deployed to call for and legitimate military retribution against implacable
adversarial civilizations by conservative intellectuals like Jeane Kirkpatrick,
Henry Kissinger, and members of the Bush administration.
In sum, Huntington’s
work provides too essentialist a model that covers over contradictions and
conflicts both within the West and within Islam. Both worlds have been divided
for centuries into dueling countries, ethnic groups, religious fractions, and
complex alliances that have fought fierce wars against each other and that
continue to be divided geographically, politically, ideologically, and
culturally (see Ali 2002). Moreover, Huntington’s ideal type that
contrasts East and West, based on conflicting models of civilization, covers
over the extent to which Arab and Muslim culture preserved the cultural
traditions of the Greece and Rome during the Middle Ages and thus played a major
role in constituting Western culture. Huntington downplays as well the extent to
which Western science and technology were importantly anticipated and developed
in the Middle and Far East.
Furthermore, Islam itself is a
contested terrain and in the current situation there are important attempts to
mobilize more moderate forms of Islam and Islamic countries against Osama bin
Laden’s Al Qaeda terror network and Islamic extremism (see Ahmed 2003).
Hence, Huntington’s binary model of inexorable conflict between the West
and Islam is not only analytically problematic, but covers over the crucial
battle within Islam itself to define the role and nature of religion in the
contemporary world. It also decenters the important challenge for the West to
engage the Islamic world in a productive dialogue about religion and modernity
and to bring about more peaceful, informed, and mutually beneficial relations
between the West and the Islamic world. Positing inexorable conflicts between
civilizations may well describe past history and present dangers, but it does
not help produce a better future and is thus normatively and politically
defective and
dangerous. Globalization
includes a homogenizing neo-liberal market logic and commodification, cultural
interaction, and hybridization, as well as conflict between corporations,
nations, blocs, and cultures. Benjamin Barber’s book McWorld vs.
Jihad (1996) captures both the homogenizing and conflictual elements of
globalization. Barber divides the world into a modernizing, homogenizing,
Westernizing, and secular forces of globalization, controlled by multinational
corporations, opposed to premodern, fundamentalist, and tribalizing forces at
war with the West and modernity. The provocative “Jihad” in the
title seems to grasp precisely the animus against the West in Islamic extremism.
But “Jihad” scholars argue that the term has a complex history in
Islam and often privilege the more spiritual senses as a struggle for religion
and spiritualization, or a struggle within oneself for spiritual mastery. From
this view, bin Laden’s militarization of Jihad is itself a distortion of
Islam that is contested by its
mainstream.[4] Barber’s
model also oversimplifies present world divisions and conflicts and does not
adequately present the contradictions within the West or the “Jihad”
world, although he postulates a dialectical interpenetrating of both forces and
sees both as opposed to democracy. His book does, however, point to problems and
limitations of globalization, noting dangerous conflicts and opponents, unlike
Thomas Friedman’s harmonizing duality of The Lexus and the Olive
(1999), which suggests that both poles of capitalist luxury and premodern roots
and tradition are parts of the globalization process. In an ode to
globalization, Friedman assumes the dual victory of capitalism and democracy, a
la Fukuyama, while Barber demonstrates contradictions and tensions between
capitalism and democracy within the New World (Dis)Order, as well as the
anti-democratic animus of Jihad and sectors of
McWorld.Leading dualistic
theories that posit a fundamental bifurcation between the West and Islam are
thus analytically suspicious in that they homogenize complex civilizations and
cover over differences, hybridizations, contradictions, and conflicts within
these cultures. Positing inexorable clashes between bifurcated blocs a la
Huntington and Barber fails to illuminate specific discord within the opposing
spheres and the complex relations between them. These analyses do not grasp the
complexity in the current geopolitical situation, which involves highly
multifaceted and intricate interests, coalitions, and conflicts that shift and
evolve in response to changing situations within an overdetermined and
constantly evolving historical context. As Tariq Ali points out (2002),
dualistic models of clashes of civilization also occlude the historical forces
that clashed in the September 11 attacks and the subsequent Terror
War.
Consequently, the events of
September 11 and their aftermath suggest that critical social theory needs
models that account for complexity and the historical roots and vicissitudes of
contemporary problems like terrorism rather than bifurcated dualistic theories.
Critical social theory also needs to articulate how events like September 11
produce novel historical configurations while articulating both changes and
continuities in the present
situation.[5] It requires historical
accounts of the contemporary origins of Islamic radicalism and its complicity
with U.S. imperialism, as I recount in the next section. I suggest that Chalmers
Johnson’s concept of “blowback” (2000) provides a more
convincing account than dualistic (and duelistic!) “war of
civilization” discourses of the September 11 terrorist attacks that better
contextualizes, explains, and even predicts such events. Moreover, a
historicized “blowback” model also provides cogent suggestions
concerning viable and inappropriate responses to global terrorism.
The causes of the September 11
events and their aftermath are highly multifaceted and involve, for starters,
the failure of U.S. intelligence and the destructive consequences of U.S.
interventionist foreign policy since World War II and the failure to address the
Israeli-Palestinian crisis; U.S. policies since the late 1970s that supported
Islamic Jihadist forces against the Soviet Union in the last days of the Cold
War; and the failure to take terrorist threats seriously and provide an adequate
response. In other words, there is no one cause or faction responsible for the
9/11 terror attacks, but a wide range of responsibility to be ascribed. Taking
account of the history and complexity of the issues involved, Johnson’s
model of blowback (2000) provides a useful account of how U.S. policy and
institutions contributed to producing the most destructive terrorist attacks on
U.S. territory in history with destructive consequences still threatening and
unfolding.[6]The
Bush Administrations, the CIA, and
BlowbackIn retrospect, the
events of September 11 can be seen as a textbook example of
“blowback,” a concept developed in a book with this title by
Chalmers Johnson (2000) who uses it to describe the unintended consequences of
aggressive military and covert policies, a shorthand term for describing that a
nation reaps what it sows. As Johnson notes: “The term
‘blowback,’ which officials of the Central Intelligence Agency first
invented for their own internal use, is starting to circulate among students of
international relations. It refers to the unintended consequences of policies
that were kept secret from the American people. What the daily press reports as
the malign acts of ‘terrorists’ or ‘drug lords’ or
‘rogue states’ or ‘illegal arms merchants’ often turn
out to be blowback from earlier operations” (2000: 8). The concept of
“blowback” can be applied to the September 11 events since bin Laden
and the radical Islamic forces associated with the Al Qaeda network were
supported, funded, trained, and armed by the CIA and U.S. administrations in the
late 1970s and 1980s. In this reading, the U.S.’s catastrophic failure was
not only to have not detected the danger of a terrorist attack on the U.S. and
taken action to prevent it, but to have actively contributed to producing the
groups who are implicated in the September 11 abd other terrorist assaults on
the U.S.Johnson provides a
wealth of examples of blowback from problematic U.S. foreign policy maneuvers
and covert actions which had unintended consequences, as when the U.S. became
associated with support of terrorist groups or authoritarian regimes in Asia,
Latin America, or the Middle East, and its clients turned on their sponsors. For
instance, the U.S. helped overthrow a democratically elected government in Iran
and install the autocratic Shah. When the Shah was overthrown in 1979, militants
seized the U.S. embassy and took its inhabitants hostage and since then has
maintained hostile, although intricate, relationships with the U.S.
In Johnson’s sense,
September 11 is a classic example of blowback, in which U.S. policies generated
unintended consequences that had catastrophic effects on U.S. citizens, New
York, Washington, and the American and indeed global economy. As I suggest in
the following analysis, U.S. policy in Afghanistan at the end of the Cold War
and to the present contributed to the heinous events of September 11. A useful
summary by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair describes U.S. covert
operations in Afghanistan in the late 1970s that had momentous consequences:
In April of 1978 an indigenous populist coup
overthrew the government of Mohammed Daoud, who had formed an alliance with the
man the U.S. had installed in Iran, Reza Pahlevi, a.k.a. the Shah. The new
Afghan government was led by Noor Mohammed Taraki, and the Taraki administration
embarked, albeit with a good deal of urban intellectual arrogance on land
reform, hence an attack on the opium-growing feudal estates. Taraki went to the
UN where he managed to raise loans for crop substitution for the poppy
fields.
Taraki also tried to bear down on opium
production in the border areas held by fundamentalists, since the latter were
using opium revenues to finance attacks on Afghanistan's central government,
which they regarded as an unwholesome incarnation of modernity that allowed
women to go to school and outlawed arranged marriages and the bride price.
Accounts began to appear in the western press along the lines of this from the
Washington Post, to the effect that the mujahedeen liked to
"torture their victims by first cutting off their noses, ears and genitals, then
removing one slice of skin after another."
At that time the mujahedeen was not
only getting money from the CIA but from Libya's Moammar Q'addaffi who sent them
$250,000. In the summer of 1979 the U.S. State Department produced a memo making
it clear how the U.S. government saw the stakes, no matter how modern minded
Taraki might be or how feudal the Muj. It's another passage Nat might read to
the grandkids: "The United States' larger interest would be served by the demise
of the Taraki-Amin regime, despite whatever set backs this might mean for future
social and economic reforms in Afghanistan. The overthrow of the DRA [Democratic
Republic of Afghanistan] would show the rest of the world, particularly the
Third World, that the Soviets' view of the socialist course of history being
inevitable is not
accurate."[7]
In a 1998 Le Monde interview,
President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbignew Brzezinski had
bragged about how he conceived of arming Islam-extremist militants against the
Afghan government as a ploy to draw in the Soviet Union more deeply and thus
help destroy their system.[8] What
Brzezinksi proudly proclaimed as his contribution to defeat the Soviet Union in
the Cold War appears in retrospect as a highly problematic U.S. intervention in
the late 1970s that intensified civil war in Afghanistan. Overthrow of the
secular and modernizing regime in Afghanistan by Islamic fundamentalists helped
mobilize and empower the forces that would turn on the U.S. and institute a
reign of global terrorism in the current
situation.U.S. intervention in
the Afghan conflict, that now appears as the last great clash of the Cold War,
helped create the context for the current crisis. As a response to U.S.
intervention, the Soviet Union sent increased aid and personnel to prop up the
moderate modernizing Taraki regime that was opposed by Islamic fundamentalists
in Afghanistan. When Taraki was killed by Afghan army officers in September
1979, the Soviets invaded in force in December 1979 and set up a government to
avoid a fundamentalist Islamic and U.S.-backed takeover.
In the 1980s, the U.S. began
more aggressively supporting Islamic fundamentalist Jihad groups and the Afghan
project was a major covert foreign policy project of the Reagan-Bush
administration. During this period, the CIA trained, armed, and financed
precisely those Islamic fundamentalist groups who later became part of the Al
Qaeda terror network who are now the nemesis of the West, the new “evil
empire.” In the battle to defeat Soviet Communism in the Cold War, the
U.S. poured billions of dollars into Afghanistan to train “freedom
fighters” that would overthrow the purportedly communist regime. This was
a major project with overt and covert aid from the U.S., Pakistan, China, Saudi
Arabia, and other countries. The military aid went into training and arming
radical Islamic groups who would emerge with a desire to fight other wars for
Islam in the countries that had earlier supported them in their Jihad against
the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan administrations. These groups included
Osama bin Laden and those who would later form his Al Qaeda
network.Indeed, the blowback
from the Reagan-Bush-CIA Afghanistan intervention was astonishing. John K.
Cooley in his important study Unholy Wars. Afghanistan, America and
International Terrorism) (2000) documents the momentous consequences of the
U.S. and its allies sustaining the Islamists who fought to overthrow the
Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan. Egypt’s Anwar Sadat was an early
ally of the support for the Islamists against the Soviets and was repaid with
assassination by fanatic Islamics in 1981. Pakistan’s president, Zia
al-Haq, whose secret services played a major role in arming and organizing the
Islamic fighters in Afghanistan, was killed in a mysterious plane crash in 1988
and more radical Islamic forces have threatened to take over in Pakistan ever
since. The Pakistani secret services helped organize the group that became the
Taliban in the mid-1990s and the Taliban eventually took over control of most of
Afghanistan. The Taliban formed an alliance with bin Laden and his Al Qaeda
group, which used Afghanistan to form networks that engaged in terrorism
throughout the world. These Islamic fundamentalists eventually turned on the
U.S., one of the countries that had helped to fund, train, and arm
them.Not only did the U.S.
secret war in Afghanistan to organize Islamic militia against the Soviets help
create the Islamic terror network that is now the scourge of the global world,
but the same Islamic radical forces, with the complicity of the CIA and other
foreign intelligence services, produced one the most stupendous proliferations
of drugs in history. As Cooley summarizes: “Never has so much South Asian
marijuana, opium, and semi-processed opium products and heroin, reached the drug
pushers, the adult addicts, the children, and the general populations of the
West, as in the late 1990s. Much of this was another direct consequence of the
CIA's holy war of 1979-89” (2000: 5). It is, of course, impossible to
document how much tonnage of drug products were exported, but while Afghanistan
produced mostly for local consumption before 1979, according to UN figures
production in 1995-1996 had risen to 2,6000 tons of raw opium, increasing to
2,800 tons in 1997 (2000: 150). The results were skyrocketing drug addiction in
neighboring countries and massive exporting of drugs to the
West.In 1989, Soviet troops
left Afghanistan in defeat and a civil war continued for the next several years.
The first Bush administration, in one of its most cynical and fateful decisions,
decided to completely pull out of Afghanistan, rather than working to build
democracy and a viable government in that country. In retrospect, this was both
inhumane and catastrophic. Over two million people had died in the ten years of
the Afghan war, the U.S. had invested billions of dollars in overthrowing the
Russian-sponsored regime and in arming, training, and financing the Islamic
fundamentalists. But rather than help the Afghan people produce a viable
government, the first Bush administration turned away, and the most radical
extremist Islamic fundamentalist groups that the U.S. and Pakistanis had
organized took over the country after some years more of civil war, setting up
the present conflict (see Cooley 2000; Rashid 2001; and Ali
2002).While later in the 1990s,
certain U.S. interests would be attracted to the oil and gas possibilities in
Afghanistan and would cozy up to and support the Taliban, in the early 1990s,
the first Bush administration had other fish to fry, in particular Iraq –-
another Bush I intervention that had momentous consequences. For after arousing
the Arab ire and opposition to the U.S. military intervention against Iraq, at
the end of the Gulf war in 1991, the Bush administration persuaded the Saudi
government to allow the U.S. to continue to maintain military forces in the Holy
Land of Islam. This auspicious event has yet to be fully perceived in its
blowback effects. For it was the permanent positioning of U.S. troops in what
was perceived as the Islamic Holy Land, Saudi Arabia, that especially angered
bin Laden and more radical Islamic groups (Kepel, 2002, 316). When Saudi Arabia
continued to allow the presence of U.S. troops after the Gulf war, bin Laden
broke with his country and was declared persona non grata by the Saudis for his
provocative statements and behavior. It was also reported at this time that
Saudis put out a contract on bin Laden’s life, supposedly with the assent
of the first Bush Administration (Weaver 1996) and later with the assent of the
Clinton administration, although assassination attempts obviously failed, if
they were seriously attempted at all.
After civil war in Afghanistan
in the mid-1990s, the Taliban eventually took over control of much of the
country (see Rashid 2001). The Taliban were recognized by the Saudis and
Pakistanis as the legitimate government of Afghanistan, but not by the UN and
much of the rest of the world, which recognized the Northern Alliance groups
fighting the Taliban as the legitimate representative of Afghanistan. When bin
Laden and his associates were expelled from Sudan in 1996, they entered into a
fateful association with the Taliban and went to Afghanistan where they
solidified their network, developed training camps, and solicited recruits and
financing (Kepel 2002).The
Clinton administration at first engaged the Taliban government in dialogue, but
soon broke off relations and failed to deal with the bin Laden problem. For in
the 1980s and 1990s, bin Laden established an organization of former Afghanistan
holy war veterans, called Al Qaeda, “the
host.”[9] In February 1998, Al
Qaeda issued a statement, endorsed by several extreme Islamic groups, declaring
it the duty of all Muslims to kill U.S. citizens -- civilian or military -- and
their allies everywhere. The bombing of U.S. embassies in Africa later in 1998
was ascribed to the bin Laden/Al Qaeda network, and the Clinton administration
responded by shooting 70 Cruise missiles at a factory supposedly owned by bin
Laden in Sudan that produced chemical weapons and at camps in Afghanistan that
supposedly were populated by bin Laden and his group. The factory in Sudan
turned out to be a pharmaceutical company and the camps in Afghanistan were
largely deserted, producing another embarrassment for U.S. policy in the Middle
East. Clinton later claimed that his administration also was plotting to
assassinate bin Laden, but that a change of Pakistani government disrupted the
plot.[10]Although
this is rarely mentioned in the mainstream media, the George W. Bush
administration became one of the largest financial supporters of the Taliban,
providing over $100 million in early 2001 in what they described as
“humanitarian aid,” as well as a supplemental grant of $43 million
in May of 2001 for the Taliban’s promise to declare opium production
“unIslamic” and thus to cut back on a potent source of the
world’s drug trade. Critics have suggested that the Bush Administration
was acting in the interests of the Unocal oil consortium to build an oil-pipe
line across Afghanistan, and of the Enron corporation, a major contributor to
the Bush administration, which had done a feasibility study for the project.
Enron and Unocal had lavishly courted the Taliban and encouraged U.S. support of
the regime since they were deemed the group most likely to stabilize Afghanistan
and allow the pipeline to be
built.[11]In
Forbidden Truth, Brisard and Dasquie (2002) claim that under the
influence of oil companies, the Bush administration initially blocked ongoing
U.S. government investigations of terrorism, while it bargained with the Taliban
over oil rights and pipeline deals and handing over bin Laden. This evidently
led to the resignation of a FBI deputy director, John O’Neill, who was one
of the sources of the story. Brisard and Guillaume contend that the Bush
administration had been a major supporter of the Taliban until the September 11
events and had blocked investigations in the bin Laden terror network. Pursuing
these leads, the British Independent reported on October 30: "Secret
satellite phone calls between the State Department and Mullah Mohammed Omar and
the presentation of an Afghan carpet to President George Bush were just part of
the diplomatic contacts between Washington and the Taliban that continued until
just days before the attacks of 11 September."
Thus, just as Bush senior
turned on Saddam Hussein whom he supported in the 1980s and 1990s, so too did
Bush Junior turn on the Taliban whom he had been generously sustaining,
supposedly with the hopes that his friends could do energy deals with them. The
Taliban, of course, were a highly theocratic and repressive fundamentalist
regime that some have described as “clerical fascism” (Chip Berlet),
or “reactionary tribalism” (Robert Antonio). Their treatment of
women was notorious, as was their cultural totalitarianism that led to banning
of books, media, destruction of Buddhist statues, and other outrages (see
Raschid 2001 and Kepel 2002).
The Taliban practice a form of
Islam called “Deobandism,” influenced by a 19th century
sect that tried to purify Islam of its modern aspects (see Rashid 2000: 88-90),
much as the Saudis version of "Wahabbism" followed strict Islamic law, while
rejecting much of the modern world. The Taliban went further than the Saudis in
trying to purify Islam in a particular anti-modern version, by following an
especially reactionary strain of Muslim fundamentalism, rejected by the more
mainstream Sunni and Shiite Islamic schools. The Taliban have also been the host
of Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda network since they were expelled from Sudan
in 1996, at U.S. pressure and insistence. Although bin Laden and Al Qaeda were
designated enemies of the U.S. since their evident involvement in a series of
terrorist crimes, the Bush Administration continued to provide support to the
Taliban group that hosted and protected them until the September 11 terror
attacks.Moreover, there has
been a close relation between the Bush and bin Laden families for generations.
Salem bin Laden, head of the family empire and Osama’s eldest brother,
reportedly invested in George W. Bush’s first business venture, Arbusto
Energy. According to several sources, the deal was brokered by Bush’s
friend James Bath, who was also involved in the infamous BCCI bank scandals and
was allegedly a CIA agent recruited by W’s father, as well as a business
agent for the bin Laden family.[12]
The bin Laden family has also been involved in other ventures with the Bush
family. Internet commentator Sally Slate cited an interesting passage from a PBS
Frontline Web-site on the bin Laden and Bush
connection:
Like his father in 1968, Salem [bin Laden]
died in a 1988 air crash . . . in Texas. He was flying a BAC 1–11 which
had been bought in July 1977 by Prince Mohammed Ben Fahd. The plane's flight
plans had long been at the center of a number of investigations. According to
one of the plane's American pilots, it had been used in October 1980 during
secret Paris meetings between U.S. and Iranian emissaries. Nothing was ever
proven, but Salem bin Laden's accidental death revived some speculation that he
might have been "eliminated" as an embarrassing witness. In fact, an inquiry was
held to determine the exact circumstances of the accident. The conclusions were
never
divulged."[13]This
shocking report indicates that the Bush and bin Laden families might have been
involved in covert political activities, as well as business deals, including
the “October Surprise,” one of the most controversial stories of the
Reagan-Bush years. It has long been claimed that representatives from the
Reagan-Bush election team in 1980 negotiated with Iranians to hold Americans
hostage until after the 1980 election, depriving then President Carter of an
“October Surprise” from release of the long-held U.S. hostages in
Iran that might give Carter the
election.[14] This story suggests
the longtime, secretive, and highly complex relations between the Bush and the
bin Laden families. It is highly suspicious that bin Laden’s father and
Salem bin Laden, whom had inherited control of the family’s empire of
business and political interests after his father’s death both died in
Texas airplane crashes. As I note below, the Bush and bin Laden families were
involved in many enterprises. Unraveling these threads will no doubt be one of
the most important and revealing tasks for future
historians.Whatever the bizarre
and shady past relations between the Bush and bin Laden family, it is striking
that relations between the families continued up until September 11. It has been
widely reported that the bin Laden family had been an investor in the Carlyle
investment group, in which James Baker and George H.W. Bush are major
partners.[15] Moreover, Bush senior
and the bin Ladens were allegedly involved in the earlier major global scandal
of its era, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) that funneled
the money of spies, criminals, shady businesses, and the CIA during the
Reagan-Bush era (see Brewton 1992; Cooley 2000; and Brisard and Dasquie 2002).
The official spin-line of Bush
and bin Laden family spokespeople is that the family has long expelled and
condemned their wayward son Osama and cannot be held responsible for Al Qaeda
crimes. But as Sally Slate notes: “Last Thursday on ABC's
Primetime, Carmen bin Laden, the estranged wife of Osama's brother
Yeslam, told Diane Sawyer, in regard to Osama's standing in Saudi Arabia, "What
I have heard is he has the backing of some of the royal family. They think the
same way. Not all of them, but some of them. You have to understand, I think in
Saudi Arabia Osama bin Laden has a little following. And in my opinion, this is
what makes him dangerous. . . . Because he has, I think, he has the backing of a
lot of people there."[16]
Other commentators have claimed
that the bin Laden/Al Qaeda network has been supported by wealthy Saudis,
including members of bin Laden’s family, and that up until the September
11 terror attacks, there were close connections between the Bush administration,
the Saudis, and the Taliban. A November 2001 PBS Frontline on “The
Saudi Time Bomb” made clear the support of bin Laden, the Taliban, and the
Al Qaeda network by Saudi Arabian groups. It also revealed that many in the bin
Laden Al Qaeda network and the Saudis shared a similar Wahabbi interpretation of
Islam that is rooted in an 18th century attempt to return to the
early version of Islam, is highly puritanical and repressive of women, and is
exceptionally hostile to the West. The Saudis helped fund the Taliban and set up
throughout the world fundamentalist Wahabbi Islamic schools that became
recruiting grounds for bin Laden and the Al Qaeda network. Other Saudis directly
contributed to Al Qaeda through “charitable” foundations or other
means.Not only did the Bush
family have a long and mysterious history of dealings with the bin Laden and
other dubious Saudi families who funded the Al Qaeda network, but, as noted,
Bush senior and friends would strongly benefit from the war through their
connections with the Carlyle group which heavily invests in the military-defense
sector and include as investors the bin Laden family, election-thief and Bush
family friend James Baker, and George H.W. Bush, leading the conservative
Judicial Watch group to insist that Bush Senior resign from the group because of
conflict of interests. A shocking FBI memo later revealed that the agency was
ordered by the Bush administration to stop investigating connections between the
Al Qaeda network and bin Laden family and to “lay off the bin
Ladens,” no doubt because of the longtime Bush/bin Laden family
connections.[17] The
Bush-Baker-Cheney-Saudi band have, of course, long been involved in Mid-East oil
wheeling and dealing and assorted sordid business deals and political intrigue
in the area. Many believe that the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan was at least
partly motivated by an interest in controlling the flow of Mid-East oil and
enhancing these business interests –- as was the last Bush-Cheney
operation, the Gulf War.[18] Reports
abound of the tremendous oil reserves in Central Asia and the need to build
pipelines across Afghanistan that would secure passage. Using U.S. government
sources, Michael Klare writes that the Caspian Sea basin “harbors as much
as 270 billion barrels of oil, or about one-fifth of the world’s total
proven reserves of petroleum. (Only the The Persian Gulf, with 675 billion
barrels in proven reserves, holds a larger supply.) The Department of Energy
also estimates that the Caspian Sea region houses some 665 trillion cubic feet
of natural gas, representing one-eight of the world’s gas reserves”
(Klare 2001: 2). Moreover, “the untapped oil of the Caspian Sea
basin...was estimated by the Department of State in 1997 to be worth some $4
trillion” (Klare 2001:
15).The oil-focused machinators
in the Bush administration were focusing on different ways to control the flow
of Caspian Sea basin oil, including pipelines that would be built across
Afghanistan. The desirability of secure terrain around the pipeline led,
according to some, to Bush administration support of the Taliban who had
promised to build the pipeline and create internal security to protect it. But
when it was obvious that the Taliban could not be trusted and were involved with
the bin Laden network and terrorism, Bush-Cheney turned on their former allies,
as did Bush senior-Cheney-Powell against Saddam Hussein, whom had been a U.S.
ally throughout the 1980s and whom some believed came to power in Iraq with CIA
backing (see Kellner
1992).[19]Of
course, it would be a mistake to reduce events like the Gulf War or Afghanistan
Terror War to oil and one needs to factor in the military interests,
geopolitical goals, and specific agendas of the various Bush administrations.
Rather than providing causal analyses that reduce complex events to one factor
or dimension, issues like the Gulf War (see Kellner 1992) or Afghan war require
multifactored analysis that includes economic, political, military, cultural,
and other relevant aspects. In
any case, the events of the September 11 terrorist attacks should be seen in the
context of several U.S. administrations and CIA support for the perpetrators of
the monstrous assaults on the United States from the late 1970s, through the
Reagan-Bush years, to the present. This is not to simply blame U.S. policy in
Afghanistan for the terrorist assault of September 11, but it is to provide some
of the context in which the events can be interpreted. During the hysterical
fear of terrorism in the aftermath of the September 11 and anthrax attacks,
there was a surge of patriotism whereby many argued that anyone who mentioned
political causes of Arab hostility toward the U.S. was part of the “blame
America” crowd. Indeed, even liberals resisted the “blowback”
thesis as illicitly blaming the victim. It is rather a question, first, of
gaining historical understanding of the context and situation concerning those
radical Islamic sectors of the Arab and Islamic world who have declared Jihad
war against the U.S. Secondly, it is a question of ascribing responsibility for
those in the U.S. foreign policy establishment who helped organize, fund, train,
and arm the terrorists now plaguing the U.S. If we do not understand the past
not only are we condemned to repeat it, but we have no chance of constructing an
intelligent, enlightened, and peaceful future.
There are, of course, other
aspects of U.S. foreign policy over the past decades which have helped generate
enemies of the United States in the Middle East and elsewhere, such as excessive
U.S. support for Israel and inadequate aid for the Palestinians, U.S. backing of
authoritarian regimes, and innumerable misdeeds of the U.S. empire over the past
decades that have been documented by Chomsky, Herman, Johnson, Vidal, and other
critics of U.S. foreign policy. Yet, while there were no doubt a multiplicity of
contributing factors, the September 11 events can be read as a blowback of major
policies of successive U.S. administrations and the CIA who trained, funded,
supported, and armed the cadres alleged to have carried out the terrorist
attacks on the United States. The obvious lesson is that it is highly dangerous
and potentially costly to align one’s country with terrorist cadres; that
support of groups or individuals who promote terrorism is likely to come back to
haunt you; and that it is hazardous to make Machiavellian pacts with obviously
brutal and treacherous forces in violent parts of the world..
Consequently, the conjuncture
of Islamic radicalism with the failure of subsequent U.S. administrations to
take seriously the threats that terrorist groups posed helped to make possible
the September 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S., as did the failure of U.S.
intelligence agencies. More specifically, the Bush administration downplayed the
threats of terrorism. An explosive article by Michael Hirsch and Michael Isikoff
on “What Went Wrong” published in the May 28 Newsweek,
however, contained a series of revelations of how the Bush administration had
missed signals of an impending attack and systematically weakened U.S. defenses
against terrorism and the bin Laden network. According to the Newsweek
story, the Clinton administration national security advisor Sandy Berger had
become “’totally preoccupied’ with fears of a domestic terror
attack and tried to warn Bush’s new national security advisor Condoleezza
Rice of the dangers of a bin Laden attack.” But while Rice ordered a
security review “the effort was marginalized and scarcely mentioned in
ensuing months as the administration committed itself to other priorities, like
National Missile Defense (NMD [i.e. National Missile Defense]) and
Iraq.”Moreover,
Newsweek reported that John Ashcroft, U.S. Attorney General, was eager to
set a new rightwing law and order agenda and was not focused on the dangers of
terrorism, while other Bush administration high officials also had their
ideological agendas to pursue at the expense of protecting the country against
terror attacks. Ashcroft reportedly shut down wiretaps of Al Qaeda-related
suspects connected to the 1998 bombing of African embassies and cut $58 million
from a FBI request for an increase in its anti-terrorism budget (while at the
same time switching from commercial to government jets for his own personal
flight). On September 10, when Ashcroft sent a request for budget increases to
the White House, it covered 68 programs, none of them related to
counter-terrorism. Nor was counter-terrorism in a memorandum he sent to his
heads of departments stating his seven priorities. According to Newsweek,
in a meeting with FBI chief Louis Freeh, he rebuffed Freeh’s warnings to
take terrorism seriously and turned down a FBI request for hundreds of
additional agents to be assigned to tracking
terrorists.[20] In the Newsweek
summary:
It wasn’t that Ashcroft and others were
unconcerned about these problems, or about terrorism. But the Bushies had an
ideological agenda of their own. At the Treasury Department, Secretary Paul
O’Neill’s team wanted to roll back almost all forms of government
intervention, including laws against money laundering and tax havens of the kind
used by terror groups. At the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld wanted to revamp the
military and push his pet project, NMD. Rumsfeld vetoed a request to divert $800
million from missile defense into counterterrorism. The Pentagon chief also
seemed uninterested in a tactic for observing bin Laden left over from the
Clinton administration: the CIA’s Predator surveillance plane. Upon
leaving office, the Clintonites left open the possibility of sending the
Predator back up armed with Hellfire missiles, which were tested in February
2001. But through the spring and summer of 2001, when valuable intelligence
could have been gathered, the Bush administration never launched even an unarmed
Predator. Hill sources say DOD [Department of Defense] didn’t want the CIA
treading on its turf.
A
Time magazine cover story later in the summer by Michael Elliot,
“The Secret History” (Aug. 4, 2002), provides more detail concerning
how the Clinton administration had together a program to attack Al Qaeda in
November 2001, when the contested election battle in Florida was raging. The
Clinton administration was not able to implement the plan, however, because:
“With less than a month left in office, they did not think it appropriate
to launch a major initiative against Osama bin Laden.” Clinton
administration officials claim that Bush’s National Security Advisor
Condoleezza Rice was fully informed of this plan, and that Clinton National
Security Advisor Sandy Berger stressed the need for a major initiative against
bin Laden and Al Qaeda, but nothing was done. Moreover, the head of
anti-terrorist operations in the Clinton administration, Richard Clarke, who
stayed on for the Bush administration, had himself drawn up the plan and urged
its implementation when the Bush team took office. According to Time:
Clarke’s proposals called for the
‘breakup’ of Al Qaeda cells and the arrest of their personnel. The
financial support for its terrorist activities would be systematically attacked,
its assets frozen, its funding from fake charities stopped. Nations where Al
Qaeda was causing trouble —- Uzbekistan, the Philippines, Yeman –-
would be given aid to fight the terrorists. Most important, Clarke wanted to see
a dramatic increase in covert action in Afghanistan to ‘eliminate the
sanctuary’ where Al Qaeda had its terrorist training camps and bin Laden
was being protected by the radical Islamic Taliban regime... In the words of a
senior Bush administration official, the proposals amounted to
‘emervything we’ve done since
9/11.
Unfortunately, fighting
terrorism was not a priority in the Bush administration that was hell bent in
pushing through its rightwing and procorporate agenda, and so the plan for
attacks on Al Qaeda went through the usual 1001 layers of bureaucracy, finally
reaching Bush and his inner circle in early September, too late to prevent the
September 11 attacks. As these revelations unfolded in summer 2002, Democrats
and others called for blue-ribbon commissions to study intelligence and policy
failures that made possible the September 11 terrorist attacks. Republicans, led
by Vice-President Dick Cheney, predictably attacked the patriotism of anyone who
ascribed blame to the U.S. government concerning the September 11 attacks.
Moreover, according to Democratic Senate Majority leader Tom Daschle, Cheney had
repeatedly urged him not to hold hearings on U.S. policies or failures that led
to the September 11 attacks. Bush administration spokespeople attacked as well
California Senator Dianne Feinstein who retorted in a
memo:
I was deeply concerned as to whether our house
was in order to prevent a terrorist attack. My work on the Intelligence
Committee and as chair of the Technology and Terrorism Subcommittee had given me
a sense of foreboding for some time. I had no specific data leading to a
possible attack.
In fact, I was so concerned that I contacted
Vice President Cheney's office that same month [i.e. July 2001] to urge that he
restructure our counter-terrorism and homeland defense programs to ensure better
accountability and prevent important intelligence information from slipping
through the cracks.
Despite repeated efforts by myself and staff,
the White House did not address my request. I followed this up last September
2001 before the attacks and was told by 'Scooter' Libby that it might be another
six months before he would be able to review the material. I told him I did not
believe we had six months to
wait.[21]
This is highly shocking and
calls attention to the key responsibility of Vice President Dick Cheney in
failing to produce an adequate response to the dangers of terrorism. A year
previous, in May 2001, the Bush administration announced that
“Vice-President Dick Cheney is point man for [the Bush] administration...
on three major issues: energy, Global warming, and domestic terrorism.” On
a May 19, 2002 Meet the Press, Cheney acknowledged that he had been
appointed head of a Bush administration task force on terrorism before September
11, and claimed that he had some meetings on the topic. Yet Cheney and others in
the Bush administration seemed to disregard several major reports that cited the
dangers of terrorist attacks, including congressional reports by former Senators
Gary Hart and Howard Rudman in early 2001 that had called for a centralization
of information on terrorism, but it appeared that the Bush administration failed
to act on these recommendations. Obviously, Cheney concentrated on energy
issues, to the detriment of paying attention to terrorism and should thus be
held in part responsible for Bush administration ignoring of pre-September 11
terrorist threats.[22]
As I write in summer 2003, so
far the Bush administration has blocked serious investigations into U.S.
government failure to stop the September 11 terror attacks and it remains to be
seen if such investigations will ever be carried out. In any case, there is no
doubt that but the September 11 attacks were one of most significant events of
recent history and in the next section I will discuss some aspects of what it
tells us about contemporary society, globalization, and the present moment.
September 11 and Terror War:
Has Everything Changed?In
the aftermath of September 11, there was a wealth of commentary arguing that
“everything has changed,” that the post-September 11 world is a
different one, less innocent, more serious, and significantly altered, with
momentous modifications in the economy, polity, culture and everyday life. There
were some doubters such as historian Alan Brinkley who stated in a New York
Times interview (Sept. 14, 2002): “I’m skeptical that this is a
great rupture in the fabric of
history.”[23] Time alone will
tell the depth of the magnitude of change, but there are enough significant
shifts that have occurred already to see September 11 as a transformational
event that has created some dramatic alterations in both the U.S. and global
society, signaling reconfigurations and novelties in the current world.
In the context of U.S.
politics, September 11 was so far-reaching and catastrophic that it flipped the
political world upside down, put new issues on the agenda, and changed the
political, cultural, and economic climate almost completely overnight. To begin,
there was a dramatic reversal of the fortunes of George W. Bush and the Bush
administration. Before September 11, Bush’s popularity was rapidly
declining. After several months of the most breathtaking hardright turn perhaps
ever seen in U.S. politics, Bush seemed to lose control of the agenda with the
defection of Vermont Republican Senator Jim Jeffords to the Democratic Party in
May 2001. Jeffords’ defection gave the Democrats a razor-thin control of
Congress and the ability to block Bush’s programs and to advance their own
(see Kellner 2001, Chapter Eleven). Bush seemed disengaged after this setback,
spending more and more time at his Texas ranch. He was widely perceived as
incompetent and unqualified, and his public support was seriously
eroding.With the terror attacks
of September 11, however, the bitter partisanship of the previous months
disappeared and Bush was the beneficiary of a extraordinary outburst of
patriotism. Support for the Bush administration was strongly fuelled by the
media that provided 24/7 coverage of the heroism of the fireman, police, and
rescue workers at the World Trade Center. The response of ordinary citizens to
the tragedy showed American courage, skill, and dedication at its best, as
rescue workers heroically struggled to save lives and deal with the immense
problems of removing the Trade Center ruins. New York City and the country
pulled together in a remarkable display of community, heroism, and resolve,
focused on in the ongoing media coverage of the tragedy. There was an explosion
of flags and patriotism and widespread desire for military retaliation, fanned
by the media.The U.S.
media’s demonizing coverage of bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network of
terrorists and constant demand for strong military retaliation precluded
developing broader coalitions and more global and less militarist approaches to
the problem of terrorism. The anthrax attacks, unsolved as I write in summer
2003, fueled media hysteria and mass panic that terrorism could strike anyone at
any time and any place. Bush articulated the escalating patriotism, vilification
of the terrorists, and the demand for stern military retaliation, and a
frightened nation supported his policies, often without seeing their broader
implications and threat to democracy and world
peace.There was a brief and
ironical ideological flip-flop of Bush administration policy, in which it
temporarily put aside the unilateralism that had distinguished its first months
in office in favor of a multilateral approach. As the Bush administration
scrambled to assemble a global coalition against terrorism with partners such as
Pakistan, China, and Russia, that it had previously ignored or in the case of
China even provoked, illusions circulated that the U.S. would pursue a more
multilateral global politics. Yet the U.S. largely chose to fight the
Afghanistan war itself, eschewing NATO, UN, or other multilateral support. One
could indeed argue that the failures of the Afghan intervention to capture bin
Laden, Mullah Omar, and other top Al Qaeda and Taliban leadership was a result
of the U.S. choosing a unilateral military policy rather than a more
multilateral approach (see Kellner
2003b).With the collapse of the
Taliban and the defacto conclusion of the intense military phase of the
Afghanistan Terror War by December 2001, morover, the Bush administration
intensified its unilateral approach and only many months later invited in a more
multilateral policing force. Moreover, the Bush doctrine articulated in his
January 2002 State of the Union address projected an “axis of evil”
threatened by U.S. military action, called for unprecedented military action and
build-up, and evoked an image of an era of war via U.S. military intervention
throughout the world for the foreseeable future. The threat of a new militarism
as the defining feature of the Bush era was intensified as his administration
came to formulate his doctrine of “preemptive strikes” during the
summer of 2002 and the Bush and Blair largely unilateral war against Iraq in
April 2003. Previous to
September 11, the Bush administration had been rabidly pro “free
markets” and anti-government, and it was forced by the September 11 events
to recognize the need for stronger government programs. There was widespread
consensus that federal funds and programs were necessary to help rebuild New
York, provide increased domestic security, and regulate industries like the
airplane business, which showed itself to be woefully lacking in security
measures. Yet it should be noted that the main government interventions
undertaken by the Bush administration were in the areas of “homeland
security” and a gigantic military build-up. These included a highly
illiberal rightwing law and order program of unleashing government agencies to
surveil, arrest, and detain those suspected of being terrorists in what many see
as the most outrageous assault on civil liberties and the open society in U.S.
history. There have been no serious initiatives in the area of investing to
rebuild infrastructure of cities, highways, or the public health system.
Moreover, Bush’s proposed “economic stimulus” package largely
consisted of tax breaks for the wealthy rather than new government programs to
help the poor and those losing their jobs during a severe economic downturn.
Moreover, government bailouts
went mainly to Bush administration allies such as the airlines industry with no
funds for job retraining and support for workers laid-off. Hence, although
September 11 created an amazing reversal of fortune for George W. Bush, it has
so far not produced any fundamental restructuring of the U.S. economy or polity,
outside of rightwing law and order programs and tightened airport and domestic
security. The September 11 terror attacks and subsequent anthrax attacks did,
however, point to a vulnerability to terrorism and danger not previously
experienced by Americans on U.S. soil.
The new vulnerability caused a
reversal of priorities, both national and personal, for many people, and made it
clear that the U.S. had to address problems of globalization and terrorism --
issues that were far from the hearts and minds of the average U.S. citizen. For
a while, irony was out and seriousness was in, and a new sobriety replaced the
usual American concern with triviality and diversion. Americans, like people in
most of the world, had to learn to live with finitude, contingency, risk, and
other concepts that were previously philosophical categories and were now
realities of everyday life. There was a sudden sense that everything could
change within days or weeks, and that technologies which were part and parcel of
everyday life, such as airplanes or mail delivery, could be weapons of
destruction. Furthermore, fears proliferated that technological weapons of mass
destruction threatened Americans anywhere and anytime, creating new forms of
insecurity and anxiety which the media fuelled with hysteric coverage of the
anthrax attacks, endless accounts of terrorist networks, and highly dramatized
reports of the Afghanistan Terror
War.Crucially, the September 11
events dramatized that globalization is a defining reality of our time and that
the much-celebrated flow of people, ideas, technology, media, and goods could
have a down side as well as an upside, and expensive costs as well as benefits.
The 9/11 terror attacks also call attention to the complex and unpredictable
nature of a globally-connected networked society and the paradoxes, surprises,
and unintended consequences that flow from the multidimensional processes of
globalization. Al Qaeda presented an example of a hidden and secretive
decentered network dedicated to attacking the U.S. and their Afghanistan base
represented what theorists called “wild zones” or “zones of
turmoil” that existed out of the boundaries of “safe zones” of
globalized metropoles like Wall Street and Northern Virginia (see Mann 2001 and
Urry 2002). Globalization thus generates its Other, its opponents, just as it
destroys tradition and incorporates otherness into its modernizing and
neo-liberal market.For the
first time, the American people were obliged to perceive that it had serious
enemies throughout the globe and that global problems had to be addressed. No
longer could the U.S. enjoy the luxury of isolationism, but was forced to
actively define its role within a dangerous and complex global environment.
Moreover, the terror attacks of 9/11 put in question much conventional wisdom
and forced U.S. citizens and others to reflect upon the continued viability of
key values, practices, and institutions of a democratic society. In particular,
the events of September 11 force the rethinking of globalization, new
technology, democracy, and national and global security. 9/11 and its aftermath
demonstrate the significance of globalization and the ways that global,
national, and local scenes and events intersect in the contemporary world. The
terror spectacle also pointed to the fundamental contradictions and ambiguities
of globalization, undermining one-sided pro or anti-globalization
positions.9/11 was obviously a
global event that dramatized an interconnected and conflicted networked
society where there is a constant worldwide flow of people, products,
technologies, ideas and the like. September 11 could only be a mega-event in a
global media world, a society of the spectacle (Debord 1970), where the
whole world is watching and participates in what Marshall McLuhan (1964) called
a global village. The 9/11 terror spectacle was obviously constructed as a media
event to circulate terror and to demonstrate to the world the vulnerability of
the epicenter of global capitalism and American power.
Thus, September 11 dramatized
the interconnected networked globe and the important role of the media in which
individuals everywhere can simultaneously watch events of global significance
unfold and participate in the dramas of globalization. Already, Bill Clinton had
said before September 11 that terrorism is the downside, the dark side, of
globalization, and after 9/11 Colin Powell interpreted the terrorist attacks in
similar fashion. Worldwide terrorism is threatening in part because
globalization relentlessly divides the world into have and have-nots, promotes
conflicts and competition, and fuels long simmering hatreds and grievances
-– as well as bringing people together, creating new relations and
interactions, and new hybridities. This is the objective ambiguity of
globalization that both brings people together and brings them into conflict,
that creates social interaction and inclusion, as well as hostilities and
exclusions, and that potentially tears regions and the world apart while
attempting to pull things together. Moreover, as different groups gain access to
technologies of destruction and devise plans to make conventional technologies,
like the airplane, instruments of destruction then dangers of unexpected terror
events, any place and any time proliferate and become part of the frightening
mediascape of the new
millennium.Globalization is
thus messier and more dangerous than previous theories had indicated. Moreover,
global terrorism and megaspectacle terror events are possible because of the
lethality and power of new technology, and its availability to groups and
individuals that previously had restricted access. In a perverted distortion of
Andrew Feenberg’s theory of the reconstruction and democratization of
technology (1999, 2002), terrorist groups seek technologies of mass destruction
in the past monopolized by the state and take instruments of mass transportation
and communication run by corporations and the state, like airlines and mail
delivery, and reconvert these instruments into weapons of mass destruction, or
at least of mass terror. I might parenthetically note here the etymology of the
term terrorism, which, according to most scholars, derives from the Latin verb
terrere, “to cause to tremble or quiver.” It began to be used during
the French Revolution, and especially after the fall of Robespierre and the
“reign of terror,” or simply, “the Terror” in which
enemies of the revolution were subjected to imprisonment, torture and beheading,
the first of many modern examples of state terrorism.
Hence, September 11 exhibited a
technological terror that converts benign instruments like airlines and
buildings into instruments of mass destruction. Within a short time after the
911 terror attacks, in early October, the mail system was polluted by anthrax.
Since infected letters were sent to politicians and corporate media, there was
maximum public attention on the dangers on a lethal anthrax attack, making
postal work, mail delivery, and the opening of mail a traumatic event, infused
with fear. This is exactly the goal of terrorism and media hysteria over anthrax
attacks went far in promoting war fever and hysterical fear that led the public
to unquestionably support whatever military retaliation, or domestic politics,
the Bush administration choose to exert. Curiously, while the Bush
administration seemed at first to blame the Al Qaeda network and then Iraq for
the anthrax attacks, it appears that the military high grade of anthrax has the
genetic footprint of U.S. laboratories in Fort Detrick Maryland. But eventually
the FBI and academic experts believe the source of the attacks was an individual
working for the U.S. defense and biological weapons establishment (see note 11).
It is clear from September 11
that the new technologies disperse power, empowering angry disempowered people,
leveling the playing field and distributing the use and application of
information technology and some technologies of mass destruction. Many military
technologies can be obtained by individuals and groups to use against the
superpowers and the access to such technology produces a situation of
asymmetrical war where weaker individuals and groups can go after superpowers.
The possibility of new forms of cyberwar, and terrorist threats from chemical,
biological, or nuclear weapons, creates new vulnerabilities in the national
defense of the overdeveloped countries and provides opportunities for weaker
nations or groups to attack stronger ones. Journalist William Greider, for
instance, author of Fortress America: The American Military and the
Consequences of Peace, claims that: "A deadly irony is embedded in the
potential of these new technologies. Smaller, poorer nations may be able to
defend themselves on the cheap against the intrusion of America's overwhelming
military strength" (abcsnew.com, 11/01/99) -- or exercise deadly terrorism
against civilian populations.
Hence, the U.S. discovered that
it is vulnerable domestically to terrorist attack. Likewise, it is becoming
clear that the more technologically advanced a society is, the more vulnerable
it is to cyberwar. There are now, of course, serious worries about the Internet
and cyberterrorism disrupting the global economy and networked society. It is
somewhat strange that terrorist groups have not, in fact, gone after the
Internet, and attempted to shut it down since they were obviously attempting to
disrupt global business by attacking the World Trade Center and airlines
industry. Already Paul Virilio evoked the frightening possibility of the
collapse of the Internet through a major technological “event” that
would cause its shutdown —- disruptions previewed by hacker attacks,
worms, and viruses over the past
years.[24]Rather,
the Al Qaeda terror network used the Internet, as it used globalization, to move
its communication, money, people, propaganda, and terror. Curiously, then,
September 11 dramatizes that all of the most positive aspects of globalization
and new technology can be turned against the U.S., or, in general, positive
aspects of globalization can turn into their opposite, as in Adorno and
Horkheimer’s “dialectic of Enlightenment” in which reason,
science, technology, and other instruments of Enlightenment turned into their
opposites in the hands of German fascism and other oppressive social groups
(1972 [1946]). For globalization makes possible global terror networks as well
as networks of commerce and communication. The circulation of commodities,
technologies, ideas, money and people can facilitate networks of terror, as well
as trade and travel. The Internet makes possible the spreading of hate and
terror, as well as knowledge and culture. Computers can be an integral part of a
terror network just as they are part of businesses everywhere and many of our
own everyday lives. And biotechnology, which promises such extravagant medical
advances and miracles, can provide weapons of mass destruction, as well as
medicines and positive
forces.Thus, September 11 and
its aftermath exhibits the contradictions and ambiguities of globalization, the
Internet, biotechnology, and technology in general in the contemporary age.
Globalization has upsides and downsides, costs and benefits, which are often
interconnected, and is consequently intrinsically ambiguous. New technologies
can be used positively or negatively and in fact are at once potentially
empowering and productive and disempowering and destructive, and are thus
fraught with contradictions. Often, the positives and negatives of globalization
and new technology are intertwined, as when the free and open society enabled
the free movement of terrorists; the open architecture of the Internet enabled
terrorists to communicate, circulate money, and organize their terror attacks;
and the networked society of globalization, with its dark sides, enabled
terrorists to attack the very symbols of American global wealth and
power.Certainly bin
Laden’s Al Qaeda network represents bad globalization, most would agree,
and the perverted use of technology. But in a sense the Al Qaeda Jihad is the
reverse image of McWorld, which imposes its Jihad on tradition and local
culture, wanting to create the world in its image. Just as Al Qaeda dreams of
imposing a radical premodern Islam on the world, taking over and destroying
Western infidel culture and imposing a homogenized Islamic fundamentalism, so
too does McDonald’s want to destroy local and traditional eating habits
and cuisine and replace them with a globalized and universalized
menu. Hence, whereas theories
of globalization, the Internet, and cyberculture tended to be on the whole
one-sided, either pro or con, September 11 and its aftermath showed the
objective ambiguity and contradictions of these phenomena and need for a more
dialectical and contextualizing optic. On one hand, the events showed the
fundamental interdependence of the world, dramatizing how activities in one part
of the world effected others and the need for more global consciousness and
politics. September 11 exposed the dangers and weaknesses inherent in
constructions of Fortress America, and the untenability of isolationism and
unilateralist policies. It made evident that we are in a global world with
global problems, which require global solutions. On the other hand, as the Bush
administration pursued increasingly unilateralist policies after seeming to make
gestures toward a multilateralist response, the aftermath of September 11 shows
the limited possibilities for a single nation to impose its will on the world
and to dominate the complex environment of the world economy and
politics. September 11 also
revealed the failures of the laissez-faire conservative economics, which claimed
that there was a market solution to every problem. Just as Grand Theft 2000
revealed the failure of voting technology, the voting registration process, the
very system of voting, as well as the failure of the media and judicial system
(see Kellner 2001), so too did September 11 reveal the massive failure of U.S.
intelligence agencies, the National Security State, and the U.S. government to
protect the people in the country, as well as cities and monuments, against
terrorist attack. The privatization undergone by the airlines industry left
travelers vulnerable to the hijacking of airplanes; the confused and ineffectual
response by the federal government to the anthrax attacks uncovered the
necessity of a better public health system, as well as more protection and
security against terrorist attacks. Going after the terror networks disclosed
the need for tighter financial regulation, better legal and police coordination,
and an improved intelligence and national security apparatus. Rebuilding New
York City and the lives of those affected by the terror attacks showed the need
for a beneficent welfare state that would provide for its citizens in their time
of need. Thus, September 11
ends the fantasies of Reagan-Bush conservative economics that the market alone
can solve all social problems and provide the best mechanism for every industry
and sector of life. The Bush-Enron scandals also reveal the utter failures of
neo-liberalism and the need for a stronger and more effective polity for the
U.S. to compete and survive in a highly complex world economy and polity (see
Kellner 2003b, Chapter 9). On
the whole, September 11 and its aftermath have made the world a much more
dangerous place. Regional conflicts from the Israel-Palestine hostilities in the
Middle East to India-Pakistan conflict to discord in Africa, the Philippines,
Columbia, and elsewhere have used Bush administration discourse against
terrorism to suppress human rights, to legitimate government oppression, and to
kill political opponents throughout the world. Bush administration unilateralism
in pursuing the war against terror throughout the world, including against an
imagined “axis of evil” not directly related to the Al Qaeda terror
network, has weakened multilateral agreements and forces from NATO to the UN and
has increased collective insecurity immensely. The Bush administration
polarizing policy of “you are with us or against us” has divided
alliances, is ever more isolating the U.S. and is producing a more polarized and
conflicted world. The alarming build-up of U.S. military power is escalating a
new militarism and producing proliferating enemies and resentment against the
U.S., now being increasingly seen as a rogue superpower. Finally, aggressive
U.S. military action throughout the world, failed propaganda in the Arab world,
and what is perceived as growing U.S. arrogance and belligerence is producing
more enemies in the Arab world and elsewhere that will no doubt create dangerous
blowback effects in the
future. Not only has Bush
administration unilateralist foreign policy endangered the U.S. to new attacks
and enemies, but Bush administration domestic policy has also weakened
democracy, civil liberties, and the very concept of a free and open society.
Draconian anti-terror laws embodied in the so-called “USA Patriot
Act” have immeasurably increased government powers of surveillance,
arrest, and detention. The erection of military prison camps for suspected
terrorists, the abrogation of basic civil liberties, and the call for military
trials undermines decades of progress in developing a democratic policy,
producing the most regressive U.S. domestic policies in
history. Bush administration
economic policy has also done little to strengthen the “new
economy,” largely giving favors to its major contributors in the oil,
energy, and military industries. Bush administration censorship of Web-sites,
e-mail and wireless communication, refusal to release government documents, and
curtailment of the information freedom act signals the decline of the
information society and perhaps of a free and open democratic society.
Traditional Bush family secrecy explains part of the extreme assaults on open
flow of information and freedom, but there are also signs that key members of
the Bush administration are contemptuous of democracy itself and threaten to
drastically cut back democratic rights and
freedoms. Thus, Bush
administration policy has arguably exploited the tragedy of September 11 for
promoting its own political agenda and interests and threatens to undermine the
U.S. and world economy and American democracy in the process. September 11 thus
represents a clear and present danger to the U.S. economy and democracy as well
as the threat of terror attacks. Of course, many people lost loved ones in the
September 11 terror attacks and their lives will never be the same. Other
individuals have returned to the routines and patterns of their pre-September 11
life, and there are thus continuities in culture and everyday life as well as
differences and changes. It is not clear if there will be a significant and
lasting resurgence of civic re-engagement, but more people now realize that
global politics are now perceived as highly significant and that there should be
more focus and debates on this terrain than
previously. Still, many
corporate and political interests and individual citizens pursue business as
usual at the same time that significant differences are enforced in the economy
and politics. There are, however, intelligent and destructive ways to fight
global terrorism and such a virulent global problem requires a global and
multilateral solution, demanding alliances of a complex array of countries on
the legal, police, economic, and military front. In this global context, there
are serious dangers that the Bush administration will make the problem of
terrorism worse and will immeasurably weaken the U.S. and the global economy and
polity in the process. In the name of containing terrorism, the Bush
administration is both championing curtailment of civil liberties and the public
sphere domestically and promoting military solutions to terrorism which
legitimates other repressive regimes to suppress human rights and democracy and
to themselves use military and police methods to deal with their respective
regime’s opponents and critics –- as was evident in the
India-Pakistan dispute, the intensification of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
and numerous other actions around the world following the Bush administration
Afghanistan intervention.[25] In
this situation, it is now becoming increasingly important to seek global
solutions to global problems, to defend democracy and social justice, and to
criticize both militarism and terrorism.
For Democracy and
Against Terrorism and Militarism
In conclusion, I want to argue that in the
light of the Bush administration attacks on democracy and the public sphere in
the United States and elsewhere in the name of a war against terrorism, there
should be a strong reaffirmation of the basic values and institutions of
democracy and a call for global solutions to global problems. Progressive social
movements should thus struggle against terrorism, militarism, and social
injustice and for democracy, peace, environmentalism, human rights, and social
justice. Rather than curtailing democracy in the naming of fighting terrorism we
need to strengthen democracy in the name of its survival and indeed the survival
of the planet against the forces of violence and destruction. Rather than
absolve Bush administration domestic and foreign policy from criticism in the
name of patriotism and national unity, as the administration’s supporters
demand, we need more than ever a critical dialogue on how to defeat terrorism
and how to strengthen democracy throughout the world.
Democracy is in part a dialogue
that requires dissent and debate as well as consensus. Those who believe in
democracy should oppose all attempts to curtail democratic rights and liberties
and a free and open public sphere. Democracy also involves the cultivation of
oppositional public spheres and as in the 1960s on a global scale there should
be a resurrection of the local, national, and global movements for social
transformation that emerged as a reaction to war and injustice in the earlier
era. This is not to call for a return to the 1960s, but for the rebirth of a
global movement for peace and justice that builds on the lessons of the past as
it engages the realities of the
present.
In addition to
re-affirming democracy, we should be against terrorism and militarism. This is
not to argue for an utopic pacifism, but to argue against militarism in the
sense that the military is offered as the privileged solution to the problem of
terrorism and in which the military is significantly expanded, as in the Bush
administration massive military build-up, and promotion of unilateral military
action. Thus, while I would argue that military action against terrorism is
legitimate, I would oppose U.S. unilateralism militarism outside of the bounds
of recognized military conventions and law, and would favor more multilateral
action in the context of global law and coalitions.
There is little doubt that that
the Bin Laden and Al Qaeda terrorists are highly fanatical and religious in
their ideology and actions, of a sort hard to comprehend by Western categories.
In their drive for an apocalyptic Jihad, they believe that their goals will be
furthered by creating chaos, especially war between radical Islam and the West.
Obviously, dialogue is not possible with such groups, but equally as certain an
overreactive military response that causes a large number of innocent civilian
deaths in a Muslim country could trigger precisely such an apocalyptic explosion
of violence as was dreamed of by the fanatic terrorists. It would seem that such
a retaliatory response was desired by the Bin Laden group which carried out the
terrorist attacks on the U.S. Thus, to continue to attack Arab and Islamic
countries could be to fall into the Bin Laden gang’s trap and play their
game -– with highly dangerous consequences.
Further, we need to reflect on
the global economic, social, environmental and other consequences of promoting
militarism and an era of warfare against terrorism. Evoking and fighting an
“axis of evil” called for by the Bush administration is highly
dangerous, irrational, and potentially apocalyptic. It is not clear that the
global economy can survive constant disruption of warfare. Nor can the
environment stand constant bombardment and warfare, when ecological survival is
already threatened by unrestrained capitalist development (see Wilson 2002). To
carry out continued military intervention, whether against an “axis of
evil” or any country that is said to support terrorism by the Bush
administration, risks apocalypse of the most frightening kind. Continued
large-scale bombing of Iraq, Iran, Syria or any Arab countries, especially after
growing anger following the U.S./U.K. war against Iraq in 2003, could trigger an
upheaval in Pakistan, with conceivable turmoil in Saudi Arabia and other Moslem
countries. It could also help produce a dangerous escalation of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, already at a state of white-hot intensity, whose
expansion could engulf the Middle East in flames.
Thus, while it is reasonable to
deem international terrorism a deadly threat on a global scale and to take
resolute action against terrorism, what is required is an intelligent
multifaceted and multilateral response. This would require a diplomatic
consensus that a global campaign against terrorism is necessary which requires
the arrest of members of terrorist networks, the regulation of financial
institutions that allow funds to flow to terrorists, the implementation of
national security measures to protect citizens against terrorism, and the
world-wide criminalization of terrorist networks that sets international,
national, and local institutions against the terrorist threat. Some of these
measures have already begun and the conditions are present to develop an
effective and resolute global campaign against terrorism.
There is a danger, however,
that excessive unilateral American military action would split a potential
coalition, creating uncontrollable chaos that could destroy the global economy
and create an era of apocalyptic war and misery such as Orwell evoked in
1984. We are living in a very dangerous period and must be extremely
careful and responsible in appraising responses to the events of September 11
and other terrorist attacks bound to happen. This will require the mobilization
of publics on a local, national, and global level to oppose both terrorism and
militarism and to seek productive solutions to the social problems that generate
terrorism, as well as to terrorism
itself.
Consequently, while I
would support a global campaign against terrorism, I believe that we cannot
depend on war or large-scale military action to solve the problem of global
terrorism. Terrorists should be criminalized and international and national
institutions should go after terrorist networks and those who support them with
the appropriate legal, financial, judicial, and political instruments. Before
and during Bush administration military intervention in Afghanistan, an
intelligent campaign was underway that had arrested many participants and
supporters of the bin Laden and other terror networks, that had alerted publics
throughout the world to the dangers of terrorism, and that had created the
conditions of possibility for a global campaign against terror. But we need
global movements and institutions to oppose purely militarist attacks on
terrorism and that legitimate the suppression of democracy in the name of the
war against terrorism.
Another
lesson of September 11 is that it is now totally appropriate to be completely
against terrorism, to use the term in the arsenal of critical social theory, and
to declare it unacceptable and indefensible in the modern world. There was a
time when it was argued that one person’s “terrorism” was
another person’s “national liberation movement,” or
“freedom fighter,” and that the term was thus an ideological concept
not to be used by politically and theoretically correct discourse -– a
position that Reuters purportedly continues to
follow.
In terms of
modern/postmodern epistemological debates, I would argue against absolutism and
universalism and for providing a contextual and historical account of terms like
terrorism. There were times in history when “terrorism” was an
arguably defensible tactic used by those engaged in struggles against fascism,
such as in World War II, or in national liberation struggles, such as in the
movements against oppressive European and later U.S. empire and colonialism. In
the current situation, however, when terrorism is a clear and present danger to
innocent civilians throughout the world, it seems unacceptable to advocate,
carry out, or defend terrorism against civilian populations because of the
lethality of modern weapons, the immorality of indiscriminate crime, and the
explosiveness of the present situation when terror on one side could unleash
genocidal, even species-cidal, terror as a retaliatory
response.
It is therefore
neither the time for terrorism nor reckless unilateral military intervention,
but for a global campaign against terrorism that deploys all legal, political,
and morally defensible means to destroy the network of terrorists responsible
for the September 11 events, but also that is for democracy. Such a global
response would put terrorist groups on warning that their activity will be
strongly opposed, and that “terrorism” will be construed as a moral
and political malevolence not to be accepted or defended. But a progressive
global campaign should also not accept militarism, the erection of a
police-military state, and the undermining of democracy in the name of fighting
terrorism.
Thus, while I would
support a global campaign against terrorism, especially the al Qaeda network,
that could include military action under UN or other global auspices, I would
not trust U.S. unilateral military action for reasons of U.S. failures in the
region and its sustained history of supporting the most reactionary social
forces (see Kellner 2003b). Indeed, one of the stakes of the current crisis, and
of globalization itself, is whether the U.S. empire will come to dominate the
world, or whether globalization will constitute a more democratic, cosmopolitan,
pluralistic, and just world, without domination by hegemonic states or
corporations. Now more than ever global institutions and movements are needed to
deal with global problems and those who see positive potential in globalization
should renounce all national solutions to the problem of terrorism and seek
global ones. Consequently, while politicians like Bill Clinton and Colin Powell
have deemed terrorism “the dark side of globalization,” it can also
be seen as an unacceptable response to misguided and destructive imperial
national policies which themselves must be transformed if a world without terror
is possible.
Finally, this will
require the anti-globalization movement to rethink its nature, agenda, and
goals. There may well be a “clash of civilizations” occurring today
between the globalizing forces of transnational capital and resistance to global
capitalism by heterogeneous configurations of individuals, groups, and social
movements. But in its first stages the movement against capitalist globalization
tended to be defined more by what it was against than what it was for, hence,
the common term “anti-globalization movement.” A new social movement
for the millennium must, however, define itself by what it is for as well as
against. In the wake of September 11, I am suggesting that local, national, and
global democratic movements should be for democracy, peace, environmentalism,
and social justice and against war, militarism, and terrorism, as well as the
multiplicity of injustices that social movements are currently fighting. Now,
more than ever, we are living in a global world and need new global movements
and politics to address global problems and achieve global
solutions.
References
Achcar, Gilbert (2002) The Clash of
Barbarisms. New York; Monthly Review
Press.
Ahmed, Akbar S. (2003)
Islam Under Siege. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity
Press.
Barber, Benjamin R.
(1995) Jihad vs. McWorld. New York: Ballatine
Books.
Blumenthal, Sidney (2003)
The Clinton Wars. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux.
Brewton, Pete (1992)
The Mafia, CIA & George Bush. New York: SPI
Books.
Chomsky, Noam (2001)
9-11. New York: Seven Seals Press.
Debord, Guy (197o) Society of the
Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red.
Feenberg,
Andrew
Friedman, Thomas (1999)
The Lexus and the Olive Tree. New York: Farrar, Straus,
Giroux.
Fukuyama, Francis (1992)
The End of History. New
York:
Hatfield, J. H. (2000)
Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of An American President.
New York: Soft Skull
Press.
Huntington, Samuel (1996)
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York:
Touchstone Books.
Johnson,
Chalmers (2000) Blowback. The Costs and Consequences of American Empire.
New York: Henry Holt.
Kellner,
Douglas (2001) Grand Theft 2000. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and
Littlefield.
Kellner, Douglas
(2003b) From 9/11 to Terror War: Dangers of the Bush Legacy. Lanham, Md.:
Rowman and Littlefield.
Kepel,
Gilles (2002) Jihad. The Trail of Political Islam. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press.
Klare, Michael (2001) Resource
Wars. The New Landscape of Global conflict. New York: Metropolitan
Books.
Kovel, Joel (2002) The
Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World. London: Zed
Books.
McLuhan, Marshall (1964) Understanding
Media. New York: Signet
Press.
Palast, Greg (2002)
The Best democracy Money Can Buy. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity
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Rashid, Ahmed (2000)
Taliban. Militant Islam, Oil & Fundamentalism in Central Asia. New
Haven: Yale University
Press.
____________ (2002)
Jihad. The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Sick, Gary
(1980) The October Surprise. New
York:
Vidal, Gore (2002)
Perpetual War For Perpetual Peace. How We Got To Be So Hated. New York:
Thunder Mouth Press/Nation
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________ (2003)
Dreaming War. Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta. New York: Thunder
Mouth Press/Nation Books.
Vidal,
Gore (2003) Dreaming War. Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta. New
York: Thunder Mouth Press/Nation
Books.
Wilson, E.O. (2002)
The Future of Life. New York:
Knopf.
Notes
[1]
This text is extracted from my study From 9/11 to Terror War: Dangers of the
Bush Legacy (Kellner 2003b) which continues work done in my books The
Persian Gulf TV War (Kellner 1992), Grand Theft 2000 (Kellner 2001)
and Media Spectacle (Kellner 2003a). I first presented the analysis in
this project at the University of Kansas a couple of weeks after the September
11 attacks and thank the Department of Sociology for the invitation and a lively
discussion. I then began writing up the analysis and presenting it on my
Web-site, producing an experiment in writing contemporary history as it evolved,
thus circulating a first-draft on the Internet with weekly updates and revision.
Thanks to Rhonda Hammer and Richard Kahn for continuous support and critical
analysis of my September 11 studies and to Kahn for administering the
Web-site.
[2]
Fukujama’s 1992 book was an expansion of a 1989 article published in the
conservative journal The National Interest. His texts generated a
tremendous amount of controversy and were seen by some as a new dominant
ideology proclaiming the triumph of Western ideals of capitalism and democracy
over all of their opponents. With a quasi-Hegelian gloss, Fukuyama proclaimed
the victory of the Ideas of neo-Liberalism and the “end of history,”
and his work prompted both skepticism (“it ain’t over, til its
over”) and impassioned critique. If terrorism and the Bush administration
militarism soon pass from the historical scene and a neo-liberal globalization
driven by market capitalism and democracy returns to become the constitutive
force of the new millennium, Fukuyama would end up being vindicated after all.
But in the current conflictual state of the world, his views appear off the mark
and put in question by the present
situation.[3]
Ali also notes (2002: 282f) that after the September 11 attacks, Huntington
modified his “clash of civilization” thesis to describe the post
Cold War era as an “age of “Muslim wars,” with Muslims
fighting each other, or their specific enemies (see Huntington essay in
Newsweek, Special Davos Edition (Dec-Jan. 2001-2). As Ali maintains,
besides being a highly questionable overview of the present age, it contradicts
his previous model, reducing Huntington’s thought to
incoherency.[4]
For an astute analysis of the different senses of Jihad and a sharp critique of
the Islamic terrorists’ distortions of Islam, see Raschid 2002 and Ahmed
2003.[5]
I provide my own historical and theoretical account of the background to the
events of September 11 in this chapter. Put abstractly, such a theory would
combine the Hegelian-Marxian perspectives of a globalized world and the
vicissitudes of capitalism and the contemporary era with concrete historical
study of specific events, like the September 11 terrorist acts, and the lessons
for contemporary social theory and democratic politics. It would combine
historical, political, economic, and cultural analysis in a multiperspectivist
model that eschews reductionistism and simplistic monocasual models. In the
light of the importance of the media in the construction of the September 11
spectacle and subsequent Terror War, I also employ the tools of cultural studies
and media
critique.[6]
In addition to Johnson 2000 that I am utilizing to provide a conceptual overview
of the concept of blowback and to interpret the September 11 terrorist acts, I
am also drawing upon a series of studies of U.S. foreign policy and Afghanistan,
including Rashid 2001; Cooley 2000; Kepel 2002; Achbar 2002; and Vidal 2003. I
also draw upon Mary Ann Weaver, “Blowback,” Atlantic Monthly
(May 1996), available at www.theatlantic.com/issues/96may/blowback.htm; a
collection of articles contextualizing the events at The Nation web site,
especially Dilip Hiro, “The Cost of an Afghan
‘Victory,’” at www.thenation.com; articles
collected at www.counterpoint.com; and a variety of other books
and articles that I will cite as I proceed.
[7]
See Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, “The Price. Was it
Really Worth it, Mrs. Albright?“ Counterpoint, September 26,
2001. See their archive for useful daily postings on the current crisis at
http://www.counterpunch.org/wtcarchive.html.[8]
The 1998 Le Monde interview with Brzezinski is posted October 8, 2001 at
http://www.counterpunch.org/wtcarchive.html. For a full account of the
background of the Brezezinski-Carter decision to intervene in Afghanistan
politics and the Soviet response, see Cooley 2000:
9ff.
[9]
Gilles Kepel claims that the name “Al Qaeda” emerged around 1986
when bin Laden began making a data bank of members of the Jihad network, with Al
Qaeda signifying “the base” (2002, 314); on the bin Laden network,
see also Brisard and Dasquie
2002.[10]
According to one account, it was “irrational hatred” of Sudan by the
Clinton administration that prevented the West from gaining access to
Sudan’s detailed files on Al Qaeda, which they were reportedly willing to
share with the West, but which were repeatedly refused; see David Rose,
"Resentful west spurned Sudan’s key terror files,” Guardian,
Sept. 30, 2001 and “The Osama Files,” Vanity Fair (Jan. 2002:
64ff). Rose especially blames Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright who reportedly blocked the FBI from gaining the Sudan files, on the
grounds that Sudan was a “terrorist state.” Three days later, the
Clinton administration bombed Sudan in retaliation for the Al Qaeda bombings of
U.S. embassies in Africa. A Clinton administration member, Gayle Smith, however,
claims that the Sudanese were not serious about sharing their intelligence files
and did not provide any useful information on the bin Laden group (see Los
Angeles Times (Dec. 7, 2001: B15). In his 2003 memoirs, Sidney Blumental
claims that Clinton wanted to more aggressively fight bin Laden and terrorism,
waging “a mostly secret war that was largely screened from the
public.” According to Blumenthal, FBI director Louis Freeh’s
“hostility to the White House dictated his lack of cooperation with the
war against bin Laden.” Blumenthal claims that Clinton planned to follow
up the cruise missiles on Al Qaeda and wanted to drop Special Ops troops into
the mountains of Afghanistan in a surprise attack, but the Pentagon blocked the
plan, saying such an attack would be too risky. A twisted, tortured tale of
failed U.S. policy in the region remains to be told.
[11]
On the background of the Unocal pipeline project, see Rashid 2001, Chapters 12
and 13. In the Southeast Asian press, there have been speculations that the U.S.
policy in Afghanistan under Bush II was to stabilize the country under Taliban
rule to enable the Unocal-corporation to build a gas pipe-line across
Afghanistan and exploit its potential natural gas and oil resources. See Ranjit
Devrag who writes:
Where the "great game" in Afghanistan was once
about czars and commissars seeking access to the warm water ports of the Persian
Gulf, today it is about laying oil and gas pipelines to the untapped petroleum
reserves of Central Asia. According to testimony before the U.S. House of
Representatives in March 1999 by the conservative think tank Heritage
Foundation, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan together have 15
billion barrels of proven oil reserves. The same countries also have proven gas
deposits totaling not less than nine trillion cubic meters. Another study by the
Institute for Afghan Studies placed the total worth of oil and gas reserves in
the Central Asian republics at around U.S.$3 trillion at last year's prices.
Not only can Afghanistan play a
role in hosting pipelines connecting Central Asia to international markets, but
the country itself has significant oil and gas deposits. During the Soviets'
decade-long occupation of Afghanistan, Moscow estimated Afghanistan's proven and
probable natural gas reserves at around five trillion cubic feet and production
reached 275 million cubic feet per day in the mid-1970s. But sabotage by
anti-Soviet mujahideen (freedom fighters) and by rival groups in the
civil war that followed Soviet withdrawal in 1989 virtually closed down gas
production and ended deals for the supply of gas to several European countries.
Natural gas production and
distribution under Afghanistan's Taliban rulers is the responsibility of the
Afghan Gas Enterprise which, in 1999, began repair of a pipeline to
Mazar-i-Sharif city. Afghanistan's proven and probable oil and condensate
reserves were placed at 95 million barrels by the Soviets. So far, attempts to
exploit Afghanistan's petroleum reserves or take advantage of its unique
geographical location as a crossroads to markets in Europe and South Asia have
been thwarted by the continuing civil strife.
In 1998, the California-based
UNOCAL, which held 46.5 percent stakes in Central Asia Gas (CentGas), a
consortium that planned an ambitious gas pipeline across Afghanistan, withdrew
in frustration after several fruitless years. The pipeline was to stretch
1,271km from Turkmenistan's Dauletabad fields to Multan in Pakistan at an
estimated cost of $1.9 billion. An additional $600 million would have brought
the pipeline to energy-hungry India.
From OnLine Asia Times,
October 6, 2001 (http://atimes.com/global-econ/CJ06Dj01.html).After
the collapse of the Enron corporation in Fall 2001, it was reported that one of
its many projects was promotion of the Unocal oil and gas pipeline across
Afghanistan; see the documents assembled in www.bushwatch.com and note 19
below.[12]
See Brewton 1992: 221ff; Beatty and Gwynne 1993; Hatfield 2000: 55-56; and
Brisard and Dasquie 2002. According to Hatfield (2000: 56), after Bath’s
shady business deals were exposed, Bush denied ever doing business with Bath,
with whom he had served in the Texas National Guard and was reportedly good
friends. But inspection of later court papers revealed that Bath indeed invested
in Bush’s Arbusto oil company, along with the bin Laden family. Bush
Senior has also had longtime relations with members of the bin Laden family and
other Saudis who provided money to the bin Laden network. For Bath’s
colorful story, including business and bank scandals and illegal support for the
contras, and alleged recruitment into the CIA by George H.W. Bush, see Brewton
1992. BBS reported as well on bin Laden investment in Bush’s oil company
on November 7, 2001 and Bush administration orders to U.S. specialagent to back
off the bin Laden family and Saudi royals after Bush became president; see the
summary and detailed reporting in “U.S. agents told: Back off bin
Laden,” smh.com.au, Nov. 7,
2001.
[13]
Sally Slate’s explosive column is available,
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Commentary/Slate103001/slate103001.html;
the PBS
Frontline commentary is at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/who/family.html.
An editor’s note
was added to the Frontline report cited above stating: “The above
paragraph is inaccurate. Salem bin Laden was piloting a light aircraft, not a
BAC 1–11, when he crashed. As for 'secret Paris meetings between U.S. and
Iranian emissaries' in October 1980, such meetings have never been confirmed."
For sources that claim that such meetings took place and that George H.W. Bush
was involved in the negotiations, see the sources in note 16 below. For the
official bin Laden family position that Osama is an outcast, see Michael Moss,
“Bin Laden Family Strives to Re-establish Its Reputation,” New
York Times (Oct. 28, 2001). A BBC report, however, indicated that
several members of the bin Laden family were connected with groups suspected
of
supporting and financing terrorist networks (see see the summary and detailed
reporting in “U.S. agents told: Back off bin Laden,” smh.com.au,
Nov. 7,
2001).
[14]
On the October Surprise, see Sick 1990 and the documents assembled by Robert
Parry in www.consortiumnews.com.
[15]
See the assembled documents from various sources including the Wall Street
Journal and New York Times that document the elder Bush’s
connection with the Carlyle group at www.bushwatch.com, as well as Oliver
Burkeman and Julian Borger, “The ex-president’s club,”
Guardian (October 31, 2001); Dan Briody, “Caryle’s way.
Making a mint inside ‘the iron triangle’ of defense, government, and
industry,” Red Herring, Jan. 8, 2002; and Tim Shorrock,
“Crony capitalism Goes Global.” The Nation (April 1, 2002:
11-16. The bin Laden family sold their Carlyle fund interests after September 11
and members of the family in the U.S. fled the country by private jet following
the September 11 terror acts and the Bush and bin Laden family connections
became a source of embarrassment to the Bush family that so far has not been
systematically explored by the
media.[16]
See note 30 above for the Sally Slate source; the tape of Saudis clerics
visiting bin Laden that was found in Afghanistan and released to great fanfare
and controversy in December 2001 documents the strong support for bin Laden in
Saudi Arabia, an issue I discuss
later.[17]
See Greg Palast, “FBI and U.S. Spy Agents Say Bush Spiked bin Laden Probes
Before September 11.” The Guardian (Nov. 7, 2001). Palast’s
article is collected on his home page that has a lot of other interesting
reports on Bush administration activities; see www.gregpalast.com and the collection of
his articles in Palast
2002.[18]
See Wayne Madsen, “Afghanistan, the Taliban, and the Bush Oil Team”
who claims that Afghanistan interim president Hamid Karzai was a top adviser to
the Unocal Corporation interested in the Central Asian Gas pipeline, that Enron
did the feasibility study for the project, that Cheney’s Halliburton
company was set to do the construction work, and that the Bush administration
top representative in Afghanistan today, Zalymay Zhalilzad, had also been a
Unocal adviser and see member of the Bush administration GOP (Grand Oil Plan)
(see democrats.com [January 2002] and
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MAD201A.html.
[19]
Some critics are skeptical that creation of an oil pipeline across Afghanistan
is a major motivation for the Bush administration’s Terror War policy.
See, for instance, “No War for Oil!” The American Prospect
(August 12, 2002): 27-30. While it would be a mistake to reduce Bush
administration policy to serving oil industry interests, there is no doubt but
that the oil-obsessed Bushites have long been viewing the prospects of
controlling Caspian Sea basin oil and natural gas. Moreover, since the
Afghanistan invasion, as I note later in this study, U.S. bases have been built
throughout the area, deals have been made with the Afghanistan and Pakistan
government for oil pipelines to be built that follow the original Unical/Enron
plans, and one imagines that the ultimate insider/realist legitimation for the
extent of the U.S. military involvement in the region is to gain access to oil
supplies in case Persian Gulf supplies are threatened or become depleted. For an
excellent account of the role of oil “resource” politics and how the
drive to control oil supplies has been fueling U.S. post-Cold War policy, see
Klare
2001.[20]
In “Ashcroft Knew,” Bruce Shapiro names Ashcroft “the official
responsible for the most dramatic failures of September 11” (Salon,
May 23, 2002). Ashcroft will indeed emerge as one of the villains of this book,
in part because of his stunning incompetence and failures to address the dangers
of terrorism due to his fanatic obsession to push through a rightwing law and
order agenda. But Ashcroft also carried out the most systematic assault on civil
liberties in U.S. history and emerges as a clear and present danger to
constitutional democracy. Yet in my reading, it is the collective responsibility
of the Bush administration to fail to heed warnings of imminent terror attacks
and its systematically carrying out policies that made them more likely, an
argument I expand in Chapter 1 and elsewhere in this
book.[21]
The Feinstein memo is found at www.senate.gov/~feinstein/
Releases02/attacks.htm).
[22]See
CBS News, “New Terror Task Force. Cheney To Lead at Terrorist
Threats to U.S.,” May 8, 2001. A June 30, 2001 CNN report headlined
“Cheney is point man for administration” noting that Cheney would be
in charge of task forces on three major issues: energy, Global warming, and
domestic terrorism.” We know that Cheney concentrated on energy issues, to
the detriment of paying attention to terrorism, and there should be an inquiry
into what he did and did not do as head of the Bush administration
anti-terrorism task force. A www.disasterrelief.org
Web-site on May 11 also posted a report that states that: “Bush asked Vice
President Dick Cheney to lead the task force, which will explore how attacks
against U.S. citizens or personnel at home and overseas may be detected and
stopped.” To prevent future terror attacks on the U.S., it would thus be
highly important to see exactly what Cheney did or did not do and address the
problems revealed. See discussions of Cheney, Enron, and the oil industries in
9.2, 11.3, and elsewhere in this
study.[23]
Brinkley elaborated his position in a forum at Columbia University on October 5,
2001; see http://www.columbia.edu/
cu/news/01/10/historical_reflection_9_11.html.
[24]
For Virilio, every technology has its accident that accompanies it, so the
airplane’s accident is the crash, the automobile a wreck, and a ship its
sinking. For Virilio, the accident the Internet faces is “the accident of
accidents,” as he calls it, the entire collapse of the global system of
communication and information, and thus the global economy. On Virilio, see
Kellner
1999.[25]
Human Rights Watch has released a report that has documented how a wide spectrum
of countries have used the war against terrorism to legitimate intensified
repression of its domestic opponents and military action against foreign
adversaries. See http://www.hrw.org/press/2002/02/usmil0215.htm