Part 1 (1/2)

PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE.

GORE VIDAL.

Introduction.

Gore Vidal.

It is a law of physics (still on the books when last I looked) that in nature there is no action without reaction. The same appears to be true in human nature- that is, history. In the last six years, two dates are apt to be remembered for longer than usual in the United States of Amnesia: April 19, 1995, when a much-decorated infantry soldier called Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 innocent men, women, and children. Why? McVeigh told us at eloquent length, but our rulers and their media preferred to depict him as a s.a.d.i.s.tic, crazed monster-not a good person like the rest of us-who had done it just for kicks. On September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden and his Islamic terrorist organization struck at Manhattan and the Pentagon. The Pentagon Junta in charge of our affairs programmed their president to tell us that bin Laden was an ”evildoer” who envied us our goodness and wealth and freedom.

None of these explanations made much sense, but our rulers for more than half a century have made sure that we are never to be told the truth about anything that our government has done to other people, not to mention, in McVeigh's case, our own. All we are left with are blurred covers of Time and Newsweek where monstrous figures from Hieronymus Bosch stare out at us, h.e.l.lfire in their eyes, while the New York Times and its chorus of imitators spin complicated stories about mad Osama and cowardly McVeigh, thus convincing most Americans that only a couple of freaks would ever dare strike at a nation that sees itself as close to perfection as any human society can come. That our ruling junta might have seriously provoked McVeigh (a heartland American hero of the Gulf War) and Osama, a would-be Muslim Defender of the Faith, was never dealt with.

Things just happen out there in the American media, and we consumers don't need to be told the why of anything. Certainly those of us who are in the why-business have a difficult time getting through the corporate-sponsored American media, as I discovered when I tried to explain McVeigh in Vanity Fair, or when, since September 11, my attempts to get published have met with failure.

Another silenced September voice was that of Arno J. Mayer, professor emeritus of history at Princeton, whose piece ent.i.tled ”Untimely Reflections” was turned down everywhere in the United States, including by The Nation, where I have been a contributing editor for many years (and where my untimely reflections on September 11 were also turned down). Mayer published his piece in the French newspaper Le Monde. He wrote, in part: Until now, in modern times, acts of individual terror have been the weapon of the weak and the poor, while acts of state and economic terror have been the weapons of the strong. In both types of terror it is, of course, important to distinguish between target and victim. This distinction is crystal clear in the fatal hit on the World Trade Center: the target is a prominent symbol and hub of globalizing corporate financial and economic power; the victim the hapless and partly subaltern workforce. Such distinction does not apply to the strike on the Pentagon: it houses the supreme military command-the ultima ratio regmun-of capitalist globalization even if it entails, in the Pentagon's own language, ”collateral” damage to human life.

In any case, since 1947 America has been the chief and pioneering perpetrator of ”preemptive” state terror, exclusively in the Third World and therefore widely dissembled. Besides the unexceptional subversion and overthrow of governments in compet.i.tion with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Was.h.i.+ngton has resorted to political a.s.sa.s.sinations, surrogate death squads, and unseemly freedom fighters (e.g., bin Laden). It masterminded the killing of Lumumba and Allende; and it unsuccessfully tried to put to death Castro, Khadafi, and Saddam Hussein; and vetoed all efforts to rein in not only Israel's violation of international agreements and U.S. resolutions but also its practice of preemptive state terror.

I should point out that Le Monde is a moderately conservative highbrow publication and, for decades, a supporter of Israel. Arno Mayer himself spent ”school days” in a German concentration camp.

My own September 11 piece was subsequently published in Italian, in a book like this one. To everyone's astonishment it was an instant best-seller, and then translated in a dozen other languages. With both bin Laden and McVeigh, I thought it useful to describe the various provocations on our side that drove them to such terrible acts.

September 11, 2001 (A tuesday).

According to the Koran, it was on a Tuesday that Allah created darkness. Last September 11 when suicide pilots were cras.h.i.+ng commercial airliners into crowded American buildings, I did not have to look to the calendar to see what day it was: Dark Tuesday was casting its long shadow across Manhattan and along the Potomac River. I was also not surprised that despite the seven or so trillion dollars that we have spent since 1950 on what is euphemistically called ”Defense,” there would have been no advance warning from the FBI or CIA or Defense Intelligence Agency.

While the Bus.h.i.+tes have been eagerly preparing for the last war but two-missiles from North Korea, clearly marked with flags, would rain down on Portland, Oregon, only to be intercepted by our missile-s.h.i.+eld balloons-the foxy Osama bin Laden knew that all he needed for his holy war on the infidel were fliers willing to kill themselves along with those random pa.s.sengers who happened to be aboard hijacked airliners.

The telephone keeps ringing. In summer I live south of Naples, Italy. Italian newspapers, TV, radio want comment. So do I. I have written lately about Pearl Harbor. Now I get the same question over and over: Isn't this exactly like Sunday morning, December 7, 1941? No, it's not, I say. As far as we now know, we had no warning of Tuesday's attack. Of course, our government has many, many secrets that our enemies always seem to know about in advance but our people are not told of until years later, if at all. President Roosevelt provoked the j.a.panese to attack us at Pearl Harbor. I describe the various steps he took in a book, The Golden Age. We now know what was on his mind: coming to England's aid against j.a.pan's ally, Hitler, a virtuous plot that ended triumphantly for the human race. But what was-is-on bin Laden's mind?

For several decades there has been an unrelenting demonization of the Muslim world in the American media. Since I am a loyal American, I am not supposed to tell you why this has taken place, but then it is not usual for us to examine why anything happens; we simply accuse others of motiveless malignity. ”We are good,” G.W. proclaims, ”They are evil,” which wraps that one up in a neat package. Later, Bush himself put, as it were, the bow on the package in an address to a joint session of Congress where he shared with them-as well as with the rest of us somewhere over the Beltway-his profound knowledge of Islam's wiles and ways: ”They hate what they see right here in this Chamber.” I suspect a million Americans nodded sadly in front of their TV sets. ”Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and a.s.semble and disagree with each other.” At this plangent moment what American's gorge did not rise like a Florida chad to the bait? Should the forty-four-year-old Saudi Arabian, bin Laden, prove to be the prime mover, we still know surprisingly little about him. The six-foot seven-inch Osama enters history in 1979 as a guerrilla warrior working alongside the CIA to defend Afghanistan against the invading Soviets. Was he anticommunist? Irrelevant question. He wants no infidels of any sort in the Islamic world. Described as fabulously wealthy, Osama is worth ”only” a few million dollars, according to a relative. It was his father who created a fabulous fortune with a construction company that specialized in building palaces for the Saudi royal family. That company is now worth several billion dollars, presumably shared by Osama's fifty-four brothers and sisters. Although he speaks perfect English, he was educated entirely at Jiddah. He has never traveled outside the Arabian Peninsula. Several siblings lived in the Boston area and have given large sums to Harvard. We are told that much of his family appears to have disowned him and many of his a.s.sets in the Saudi kingdom have been frozen.

Where does Osama's money now come from? He is a superb fund-raiser for Allah but only within the Arab world; contrary to legend, he has taken no CIA money. He warned the Saudi king that Saddam Hussein was going to invade Kuwait. Osama a.s.sumed that after his own victories as a guerrilla against the Russians, he and his organization would be used by the Saudis to stop the Iraqis. To Osama's horror, King Fahd sent for the Americans: thus were infidels established on the sacred soil of Mohammed. ”This was,” he said, ”the most shocking moment of my life.” ”Infidel,” in his sense, does not mean anything of great moral consequence-like cheating s.e.xually on your partner; rather it means lack of faith in Allah-the one G.o.d-and in his prophet Mohammed.

Osama persuaded four thousand Saudis to go to Afghanistan for military training by his group. In 1991, Osama moved on to Sudan. In 1994, when the Saudis withdrew his citizens.h.i.+p, Osama was already a legendary figure in the Islamic world and so, like Shakespeare's Coriola.n.u.s, he could tell the royal Saudis, ”I banish you. There is a world elsewhere.” Unfortunately, that world is us.

In a twelve-page ”declaration of war,” Osama presented himself as the potential liberator of the Muslim world from the great Satan of modem corruption, the United States.

Osama's organization blew up two of our emba.s.sies in Africa, and put a hole in the side of an American wars.h.i.+p off Yemen, Clinton lobbed a missile at a Sudanese aspirin factory, and so on to the events of Black Tuesday. G. W. Bush was then transformed before our eyes into the cheerleader that he had been in prep school. First he promised us not only ”a new war” but a ”secret war” and, best of all, according to the twinkle in his eye, ”a very long war.” Meanwhile, ”this administration will not talk about any plans we may or may not have ... We're going to find these evildoers and we're going to hold them accountable,” along with the other devils who have given Osama shelter.

As of the first month of 2002, the Pentagon Junta pretends that the devastation of Afghanistan by our highflying air force has been a great victory (no one mentions that the Afghans were not an American enemy-it was tike destroying Palermo in order to eliminate the Mafia). In any case, we may never know what, if anything, was won or lost (other than much of the Bill of Rights).

A member of the Pentagon Junta, Rumsfeld, a skilled stand-up comic, daily made fun of a large group of ”journalists” on prime-time TV. At great, and often amusing, length, Rummy tells us nothing about our losses and their losses. He did seem to believe that the sentimental Osama was holed up in a cave on the Pakistan border instead of settled in a palace in Indonesia or Malaysia, two densely populated countries where he is admired and we are not. In any case, never before in our long history of undeclared unconst.i.tutional wars have we, the American people, been treated with such impish disdain-so many irrelevant spear carriers to be highly taxed (those of us who are not rich) and occasionally invited to partic.i.p.ate in the odd rigged poll.

When Osama was four years old I arrived in Cairo for a conversation with Na.s.ser, to appear in Look magazine. I was received by Mohammed Hekal, Na.s.ser's chief adviser. Na.s.ser himself was not to be seen. He was at the Barricade, his retreat on the Nile; he had just survived an a.s.sa.s.sination attempt. Hekal spoke perfect English; he was sardonic, worldly. ”We are studying the Koran for hints on birth control.” A sigh.

”Not helpful?”

”Not very. But we keep looking for a text.” We talked off and on for a week. Na.s.ser wanted to modernize Egypt. But there was a reactionary, religious element. . . Another sigh. Then a surprise.” We've found something very odd, the young village boys-the bright ones that we are educating to be engineers, chemists and so on, are turning religious on us.”

”Right wing?”

”Very.” Hekal was a spiritual son of our eighteenth-century enlightenment. I thought of Hekal on Dark Tuesday when one of his modernized Arab generation had, in the name of Islam, struck at what had been, forty years earlier, Na.s.ser's model for a modern state. Yet Osama seemed, from all accounts, no more than a practicing, as opposed to zealous, Muslim. Ironically, he was trained as an engineer. Understandably, he dislikes the United States as symbol and as fact. But when our clients, the Saudi royal family, allowed American troops to occupy the Prophet's holy land, Osama named the fundamental enemy ”the Crusader Zionist Alliance.” Thus, in a phrase, he defined himself and reminded his critics that he is a Wahabi Muslim, a Puritan activist not unlike our Falwell/ Robertson zanies, only serious. He would go to war against the United States, ”the head of the serpent.” Even more ambitiously, he would rid all the Muslim states of their western-supported regimes, starting with that of his native land. The word ”Crusader” was the giveaway. In the eyes of many Muslims, the Christian west, currently in alliance with Zionism, has for a thousand years tried to dominate the lands of the Umma-the true believers. That is why Osama is seen by so many simple folk as the true heir to Saladin, the great warrior king who defeated Richard of England and the western crusaders.

Who was Saladin? Dates 1138-1193. He was an Armenian Kurd. In the century before his birth, western Christians had established a kingdom at Jerusalem, to the horror of the Islamic Faithful. Much as the United States used the Gulf War as pretext for our current occupation of Saudi Arabia, Saladin raised armies to drive out the Crusaders. He conquered Egypt, annexed Syria, and finally smashed the Kingdom of Jerusalem in a religious war that pitted Mohammedan against Christian. He united and ”purified” the Muslim world and though Richard Lion-heart was the better general, in the end he gave up and went home. As one historian put it, Saladin ”typified the Mohammedan utter self-surrender to a sacred cause.” But he left no government behind him, no political system because, as he himself said, ”My troops will do nothing save when I ride at their head ...” Now his spirit has returned with a vengeance.

The Bush administration, though eerily inept in all but its princ.i.p.al task, which is to exempt the rich from taxes, has casually torn up most of the treaties to which civilized nations subscribe- like the Kyoto Accords or the nuclear missile agreement with Russia. The Bus.h.i.+tes go about their relentless plundering of the Treasury- and now, thanks to Osama, Social Security (a supposedly untouchable trust fund), which, like Lucky Strike green, has gone to a war currently costing us S3 billion a month. They have also allowed the FBI and CIA either to run amok or not budge at all, leaving us, the very first ”indispensable” and-at popular request-last global empire, rather like the Wizard of Oz doing his odd pretend-magic tricks while hoping not to be found out. Meanwhile, G.W. booms, ”Either you are with us or you are with the Terrorists.” That's known as asking for it.

To be fair, one cannot entirely blame the current Oval One for our incoherence. Though his predecessors have generally had rather higher IQs than his, they, too, a.s.siduously served the 1 percent that owns the country while allowing everyone else to drift. Particularly culpable was Bill Clinton. Although the most able chief executive since FDR, Clinton, in his frantic pursuit of election victories, set in place the trigger for a police state that his successor is now happily squeezing.

Police state? What's that all about? In April 1996, one year after the Oklahoma City bombing, President Clinton signed into law the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, a so- called conference bill in which many grubby hands played a part, including the bill's cosponsor, Senate Majority leader Dole. Although Clinton, in order to win elections, did many unwise and opportunistic things, he seldom, tike Charles II, ever said an unwise one. But faced with opposition to ant.i.terrorism legislation that not only gives the attorney general the power to use the armed services against the civilian population, neatly nullifying the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, it also, selectively, suspends habeas corpus, the heart of Anglo-American liberty. Clinton attacked his critics as ”unpatriotic.” Then, wrapped in the flag, he spoke from the throne: ”There is nothing patriotic about our pretending that you can love your country but despise your government.” This is breathtaking since it includes, at one time or another, most of us. Put another way, was a German in 1939 who said that he detested the n.a.z.i dictators.h.i.+p unpatriotic?

There have been ominous signs that our fragile liberties have been dramatically at risk since the 1970s when the white-s.h.i.+rt-blue-suit-discreet-tie FBI reinvented itself from a corps of ”generalists,” trained in law and accounting, into a confrontational ”Special Weapons and Tactics” (aka SWAT) Green Beret-style army of warriors who like to dress up in camouflage or black ninja clothing and, depending on the caper, ski masks. In the early *80s an FBI super-SWAT team, the Hostage 270 Rescue Team, was formed. As so often happens in United States-speak, this group specialized not in freeing hostages or saving lives but in murderous attacks on groups that offended them like the Branch Davidians- evangelical Christians who were living peaceably in their own compound at Waco, Texas, until an FBI SWAT team, illegally using army tanks, killed eighty-two of them, including twenty-five children. This was 1993.

Post Tuesday, SWAT teams can now be used to go after suspect Arab Americans or, indeed, anyone who might be guilty of terrorism, a word without legal definition (how can you fight terrorism by suspending habeas corpus since those who want their corpuses released from prison are already locked up?). But in the post-Oklahoma City trauma, Clinton said that those who did not support his draconian legislation were terrorist coconspirators who wanted to turn ”America into a safe house for terrorists.” If the cool Clinton could so froth, what are we to expect from the overheated post-Tuesday Bush?

Incidentally, those who were shocked by Bush the Younger's shout that we are now ”at war” with Osama should have quickly put on their collective thinking caps. Since a nation can only be at war with another nation-state, why did our smoldering if not yet burning bush come up with such a war cry? Think hard. This will count against your final grade. Give up? Well, most insurance companies have a rider that they need not pay for damage done by ”an act of war.” Although the men and women around Bush know nothing of war and less of our Const.i.tution, they understand fund-raising. For this wartime exclusion, Hartford Life would soon be breaking open its piggy bank to finance Republicans for years to come. But the mean-spirited Was.h.i.+ngton Post pointed out that under U.S. case law, only a sovereign nation, not a bunch of radicals, can commit an ”act of war.” Good try, G.W. This now means that we the people, with our tax money, will be allowed to bail out the insurance companies, a rare privilege not afforded to just any old generation.

Although the American people have no direct means of influencing their government, their ”opinions” are occasionally sampled through polls. According to a November 1995 CNN-Time poll, 55 percent of the people believe ”the federal government has become so powerful that it poses a threat to the rights of ordinary citizens.” Three days after Dark Tuesday, 74 percent said they thought, ”It would be necessary for Americans to give up some of their personal freedoms.” Eighty-six percent favored guards and metal detectors at public buildings and events. Thus, as the police state settles comfortably in place, one can imagine Cheney and Rumsfeld studying these figures, transfixed with joy. ”It's what they always wanted, d.i.c.k.”

”And to think we never knew, Don.”

”Thanks to those liberals, d.i.c.k.”

”We'll get those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds now, Don.”

It seems forgotten by our amnesiac media that we once energetically supported Saddam Hussein in Iraq's war against Iran and so Saddam thought, not unnaturally, that we wouldn't mind his taking over Kuwait's filling stations. Overnight our employee became Satan-and so remains, as we torment his people in the hope that they will rise up and overthrow him-as the Cubans were supposed, in their U.S.-imposed poverty, to have dismissed Castro for his ongoing refusal to allow the Kennedy brothers to murder him in their so-called Operation Mongoose. Our imperial disdain for the lesser breeds did not go unnoticed by the latest educated generation of Saudi Arabians, and by their evolving leader, Osama bin Laden, whose moment came in 2001 when a weak American president took office in questionable circ.u.mstances.

The New York Times is the princ.i.p.al dispenser of opinion received from corporate America. It generally stands tall, or tries to. Even so, as of September 13 the NYT's editorial columns were all slightly off-key.

Under the heading ”Demands of Leaders.h.i.+p” the NYT was upbeat, sort of. It's going to be okay if you work hard and keep your eye on the ball, Mr. President. Apparently Bush is ”facing multiple challenges, but his most important job is a simple matter of leaders.h.i.+p.” Thank G.o.d. Not only is that all it takes, but it's simple, too! For a moment... The NYT then slips into the way things look as opposed to the way they ought to look. ”The Administration spent much of yesterday trying to overcome the impression that Mr. Bush showed weakness when he did not return to Was.h.i.+ngton after the terrorists struck.” But from what I could tell no one cared, while some of us felt marginally safer, that the national silly-billy was trapped in his Nebraska bunker. Patiently, the NYT spells it out for Bush and for us, too. ”In the days ahead, Mr. Bush may be asking the nation to support military actions that many citizens, particularly those with relations in the service, will find alarming. He must show that he knows what he is doing.” Well, that's a bull's-eye. If only FDR had got letters like that from Arthur Krock at the old NYT.

Finally, Anthony Lewis thinks it wise to eschew Bus.h.i.+te unilateralism in favor of cooperation with other nations in order to contain Tuesday's darkness by understanding its origin {my emphasis) while ceasing our provocations of cultures opposed to us and our arrangements. Lewis, unusually for a New York Times writer, favors peace now. So do I. But then we are old and have been to the wars and value our fast-diminis.h.i.+ng freedoms unlike those jingoes now beating their tom-toms in Times Square in favor of all-out war for other Americans to fight.

As usual, the political columnist who has made the most sense of all this is William Pfaff in the international Herald Tribune (September 17, 2001). Unlike the provincial war lovers at the New York Times, he is appalled by the spectacle of an American president who declined to serve his country in Vietnam, howling for war against not a nation or even a religion but one man and his accomplices, a category that will ever widen.

Pfaff: The riposte of a civilized nation: one that believes in good, in human society and does oppose evil, has to be narrowly focused and, above all, intelligent.

Missiles are blunt weapons. Those terrorists are smart enough to make others bear the price for what they have done, and to exploit the results.