BY Stan Goff
Part 1
On February 28, 2004, I managed to fight my way through frantic crowds at the Toussaint L’Overture International Airport in Port-au-Prince to board my scheduled flight back to Miami. The general panic grew out of the near-certainty of an impending coup d’etat against the democratically elected and still popular government of Haiti’s President Jean Bertrand Aristide and his Fanmi Lavalas Party. The coup was planned and conducted with the direct assistance of the United States Department of State and Aristide was effectively kidnapped by US armed forces at his Tabarre residence on the next evening, February 29. US Marines were summarily posted throughout the capital to protect the Haitian coup-making class from the wrath of millions of Haitians who were conducting angry demonstrations throughout the city (which were never covered by the US press).
This irrefutable fact of a US-engineered and supported coup against a democratically-elected government, at a time when the administration was spouting off about midwifing “democracy” in Iraq, became the basis of a debating ambush I successfully employed against neocon think-tanker Patrick Clawson the following November. This was also around the time that facts were coming to light — for those who didn’t already know — about US complicity in the 2003 attempted coup against another democratically-elected and popular government, that of President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. I ran a comparative analysis of these two foreign policy initiatives by the US in Part 1 and Part 2 of “Haiti and Venezuela: Coup and Empire;” and I subsequently went to Santo Domingo to interview a Dominican General who confirmed that US-approved training of the Haitian paramilitaries (who were the armed wing of the coup) had taken place in the Dominican Republic on the Constanza army base well in advance of the February 2004 events.
Few people in the United States can find either of these countries on a map, and far fewer understood the US role in each coup (Chavez reversed the coup d’etat quickly when the Venezuelan Armed Forces decided to support their Constitution and joined with a popular rebellion against the coup-makers).
While the US press was both complicit and duplicitous in these actions, and has actively assisted the cover-ups ever since, and while this sycophancy on the part of the press has contributed mightily to the appalling ignorance of Americans about their own government’s foreign policy (leaving them to believe that both Aristide and Chavez were dictators — a perfectly idiotic claim — the masses of people in Latin America and the Caribbean knew full well what had happened and were provoked into further mistrust and hostility toward the United States. To this very day, the US is harboring a fugitive named Luis Posada Carriles who was convicted of blowing up an airliner flying out of Venezuela in 1976, killing all 73 people on board. Posada is an anti-Castro terrorist and a former CIA asset, so he is a good terrorist, we must suppose.
So much for the US “global war on terrorism.”
Interestingly enough, there is also a Haitian terrorist — named Emmanuel “Toto” Constant — who is being harbored by the American government… and who lived peaceably in New York until he was arrested last year in a mortgage fraud scheme. Repeated demands from the democratically elected Haitian government (before the last coup) to extradite Constant were ignored by the US government… and oh, by the way, Constant was also a former CIA asset.
Note again, neither the press nor the Democratic Party lifted a finger to intervene in any of this… with extremely rare exceptions. In fact, Constant was protected under the administration of Bill Clinton, just as he was under George W. Bush.
I bring up these coup plots and terrorist US “allies” not merely to correct misconceptions about any real official US commitment, by either political party for that matter, to either the spread of democracy or the curtailment of terror tactics. These are both myths, and I have only scratched the surface of recent history to demonstrate the mythology. My point is also to show how US foireign policy — which I will explain is necessary to keep ignorant Americans calm and compliant — is highly provocative to people abroad; and it is this constant state of provocation that contributes more than any other single factor to external threats to our own security inside the boundaries of the United States of America.
Of course, one of the key commodities that greases the happy-machine for overfed, indebted, consumption-addicted, shockingly uninformed Americans is… no pun intended… oil. And let’s not be coy. If there were no oil in the Persian Gulf region, we would not be losing a war there right now. And we are provoking the hell out of them right now, just as we have been provoking them for decades with our support for terror regimes like the House of Saud, the Hashemite Monarchy, Shah Pahlavi, and a settler state called Israel that has designed its policy against the native Palestinians very much like the American policy was designed to rid ourselves of all those troublesome Indians. Of all of them, only Pahlavi was overthrown, and we have been treating his successors like official enemies ever since.
On September 11, 2001 – as anyone with a pulse who was more than 5-years-old at the time can remember - 12 men managed to convert four commercial jetliners into incendiary weapons with the range and accuracy of Cruise missiles. They were set to attack four targets, one a dual-target. This small team of non-state combatants successfully hit three of those targets. One of the aircraft-weapons was lost en route… probably to the White House or the US Capitol Building in Washington, DC. One plane each successfully pinpointed and struck each of the two buildings at a huge US financial center; and one hit the headquarters of the US Armed Forces. The latter was a more difficult target because it presented itself to the pilot horizontally, a fortunate thing for the occupants of the Pentagon, because only one wing was destroyed, and that wing was undergoing repairs that minimized the number of employees as well as critical technology. From a military point of view, this asymmetric attack was spectacularly successful. I have argued that it was also a political success.
Contrary to the popular caricature in the West of Osama bin Laden – probably the main author of this asymmetric military strike – he is, in fact, a very serious, well-educated, rational, and canny Saudi Arabian political actor who has, since at least 1990, determined to overthrow the ruling regime in his home country. The attack of 9-11 was likely constructed as a means of weakening the Saudi rulers’ international and domestic position by catalyzing a crisis for the House of Saud’s essential patron: the United States.
Facing the inevitability of a planned US invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 – which bin Laden surely knew of from his extensive contacts within Pakistani intelligence – and knowing that he Taliban government (which saw bin Laden as a terrible political liability) had already attempted to negotiate back-channel plans to betray bin Laden to the US, it is also conceivable that comuniqués about the October invasion (which were passed along to the Pakistanis by the US in July, 2001) motivated bin Laden to “let slip the dogs of war.”
There could have been little doubt on the part of bin Laden and his closest associates that both the criticality and symbolism of a coordinated attack against a financial, political, and military nerve center inside the US would not only create the pretext for the planned invasion of Afghanistan, but that it would also precipitate wider US operations in the region. The administration’s neo-con mandarins had already listed Iraq as an eventual target for the US – requiring only the catalyst of another “Pearl Harbor.” Bin Laden could only welcome a “clash of civilizations” US overreach in this global strategic hub.
There is nothing like an invasion and occupation to mobilize popular sentiment against the Saudi’s patron, leaving the House of Saud with the stigma of the obsequious US client, but the stench of Zionism as well. Once regional resentment is cultivated throughout Southwest Asia, given the falling standard of living in Saudi Arabia and general discontent with the ruling family, the anti-establishment virus of Wahhabism – paradoxically, the state-sponsored religious cult – could give language and structure to a Saudi uprising against the US-secured House of Saud.
The attacks of 9-11 were the first major offensive in a war for Saudi Arabia, still the richest remaining oil patch on the planet, where a newly minted government of Wahhabist insurgents would inherit a vast reservoir of development capital, as well as gain phenomenal leverage in the international arena.
The last act in the Cold War, building a fundamentalist-inspired and articulated opposition to secular pan-Arab nationalism (opposition which included Wahhabism, as well as Hezbollah and Hamas - the latter two once supported by the US-Israeli axis) had morphed into the first act in an epoch we have just begun to discern.
Bin Laden did not “hate freedom and democracy.” His demands were for the US to drop its provocative support of the House of Saud and Israel.
Bin Laden did not calculate the attacks for maximum effect. In sections that will follow, I will explain just a few attacks that are perfectly feasible, and relatively easy to plan and execute, which could create far greater loss of life, limb, land, and property. His calculation was that of a judo fighter, who uses his opponent’s weight and momentum to advantage. It is not an intellectual stretch beyond bin Laden’s capacity, or that of many others for that matter, to assume that the ferocity of a regional response by the United States – and the corresponding propaganda war against the residents and cultures of that region – would take an instrumental lie – that most Muslims hate Americans and want to attack them – and convert it into a reality with the further provocations of war and occupation.
When I was working as a security analyst studying the nuclear power industry, we warned any and all who would listen that the 103 licensed nuclear reactors in the United States were – in the words of Gordon Thompson – pre-deployed weapons of mass destruction waiting for activation. In fact, had bin Laden’s soldiers wanted to simply destroy as much as possible – as opposed to gain a political advantage – they would have attacked the Indian Point nuclear reactor just outside New York City, and with a bit of wind-and-weather luck rendered huge swaths of the Eastern Seaboard uninhabitable for centuries) a la Chernobyl.
The attacks of 9-11 were not motivated by irrational hatred. They were carefully calculated and limited. The targets were both strategic and symbolic: the financial, political, and military headquarters of the American Empire.
It is essential that we rebut this “irrational hatred” premise. It is not only wrong; it prevents us from seeing the real underlying determinants of a genuinely more dangerous world – one that cannot be described as Good versus Evil, but as a world system that is on a collision course with itself.
The United States of America is an imperial core in deep crisis.
End of Part 1
Permission to reprint online granted provided the repost links to the original at this site.
Posted by stan in Analysis