St. Marys, Ga.
July 14 2002

R L Norman

jmkeynes@secularstagnation.com

'The Future's Uncertain and the end is always near.'
Road House Blues 1968
Jim Morrison and The Doors.

Introduction

This article seeks to place into a 50-year historical perspective the occurrences of September 11, 2001 and to show how damaging the 50-year Cold War was to American interests with regards to the Middle East. The primary focus of the paper is how a governmental bureaucracy, acting with extreme secrecy in operations and policy formation; can ultimately subvert its very reason for existence in the first place. The case in point here is how the national security agencies used the post World War ll confusion, to create a niche for themselves 'fighting communism', without the American public having any way whatever to critique either the policies being made in their name, nor the murderous operations abroad which made millions, perhaps billions of enemies for the United States. Now in the face of the worst security disaster in American history, the Bush administration is attempting to formulate policy in that same illegitimate secrecy model which allowed the Islamic warriors to rise and attack the United States in the first place. This is utterly absurd.

None of the present writing should be seen as sympathetic towards the 911 act of war, nor to the Islamic fundamentalists behind it, nor to the old communist system under the Soviet Union. As such however, there are certain things which might now be said for the old Soviet system, especially with respect to its pacification and to some degree its modernization of Islam in the former Soviet southern provinces. Perhaps with the Cold War rhetoric fading and in the shadow of the former World Trade towers, a better perspective may be had on Soviet policy with regards to Islam. It is in these former Soviet Muslim provinces, where the United States probably has the best chance of safely fighting Osama Bin Laden and other Islamic fundamentalist movements. There are probably few Arab/Muslim states where large numbers of American soldiers are safe, especially in Saudia Arabia, our major source of energy.

The most serious argument here against the present Bush war policy is not with the actual level of threat being stated by the Bush administration, but with whether or not the existing military-intelligence apparatus which evolved in the Cold War and was heavily shaped by the war on communism; has the capacity to see the actual strategic threat on the ground in the United States and to be able to stave it off long enough for our external military exercises to decapitate the global Islamic fundamentalist movements. Quite possibly they do not and that a series of more direct public statements soon have to be made by United States leaders to the larger Islamic world, which clearly state the likely disastrous consequences to the Muslim world, if the integrity of the United States continues to be threatened by a group claiming to speak for the Muslim world.

Tactical Acts of Terror versus Strategic First Strikes

First it is important to understand what did not occur. What did not occur was an act of political terrorism. Such terrorist acts are generally known for their limited, but unpleasant results in a relatively small and defined area. The activities by the IRA in Northern Ireland and Britain during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s fit this model. The current activities of the PLO and Hamas on the West Bank and in Israel do so as well, emulating similar activities of the Jewish terrorists in Irgun, Hagannah and other groups in British-controlled Palestine in the late 1940s. The terror acts are tactical attempts by a militarily weaker group to provoke a strategic move by a larger, militarily stronger force. The 911 attack was not to a relatively defined area, but rather presented as an assault against the three most important strategic centers of the United States; the Pentagon, Wall Street and most likely, either the White House or Congress. Bin Laden came very close to a 'first-strike', strategic victory over the United States, something which has not occurred since the founding of the country in 1776.

Tactical versus Strategic Problems on 911

The larger problem was that the intelligence agencies were not able to understand the difference between tactical incidents of terrorism and the strategic political act which occurred on 911. In short, they had not been able to leave the Cold War mindset, which had given them their reason for existence since the late 1940s. Bin Laden's acts on 911 were a strategic act, meant to destroy the ability of the United States to survive as a global culture and power. Bin Laden is thinking in vast strategic terms and the fact that he and his crew are widely dispersed from their homeland in Afghanistan seemingly has not mitigated their capacities and certainly has not altered their intentions. They came very close to success on September 11, 2001 and this drawing of blood is more likely to encourage their onward fight, than the recent takeover of Afghanistan to have discouraged their will to fight. They intend to destroy modernity as a concept and to replace modern society with an old Islamic concept of the caliphate. Thus September 11 might well be seen as major victory in the Islamic Long War to annihilate all versions of Western modernity, while Afghanistan might well be seen as just a temporary setback. If the United States is not very lucky and very careful, the political situations in both Afghanistan and Pakistan may become treacherous, with an ongoing battle of attrition, similar to that faced by the French in Algeria in the late 1950s.

Radical Islam as a Charismatic Movement

What is most problematic, is that the United States is likely facing a charismatic movement, not simply a charismatic leader in the form of Osama Bin Laden. Moreover, this charismatic movement is deeply embedded within a worldwide, religious community of close to one billion people. And a substantial number of these people are inclined to accept the basic view of bin Laden with regards to the United States and modernity in general. We are in fact facing the level of threat which our military-intelligence forces claimed that we were facing in the late 1940s from Soviet 'expansionism'. If anything, the actual level of threat is potentially far worse, because the enemy this time has already attempted to annihilate the United States polity and economy; something which the former Soviet Union never did.

Islamic War on Modernization: From Afghanistan to the World Trade Towers

The first major target of modernity by Islamic 'mujahadinism' was the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan in the late 1970s. This government was a poor government, even among the poorly-governed Soviet satrapies. While American intelligence in the early 1980s seemed to play up the old Russo-Soviet desire to have warm water port in the Mediterranean or the Indian Ocean, it is just possible that what the Soviet government had been doing was to continue the 1000 year-old Russian policy of trying to protect its southern border by containing the northern expansion of Islam. Alexandre Bennigsen and Marie Broxup (Bennigsen, Alexandre, and Marie Broxup. The Islamic Threat to the Soviet State. London: Croom Helm, 1983.), did a book during the 1980s which detailed this 1000 year-old war. Maybe the Soviet government saw Iranian radicalism in the late 1970s, as threatening the Muslim areas in then Soviet-Central Asia- the places where America troops are probably safer in 2002 than anywhere except the American homeland.

But in the larger 'strategic' interests as defined by the American military-industrial complex of the 1980s, the Soviet war in Afghanistan was denounced as 'Communist aggression' and substantial amounts of tax money were funneled into the Islamic 'freedom fighters'. American creation of and support for the Islamic 'mujahadin' was successful in undermining the Soviet presence in Afghanistan by the middle 1980s. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers died in that war to contain Islamic expansion, while the American intelligence agencies laughed. It must do the former Soviet military a bit of good, to see the United States in their former role of protecting the southern flank of Russia from Islamic expansion, in our attempt to prevent the complete annihilation of the United States. It is an absurd situation, but one which has very deep roots in post World War ll. foreign policy. And has as often been the case; domestic American politics was largely behind that foreign policy.

Roots of 911 in Post World War ll. U.S. Military-Intelligence Complex

The roots of the 911 disaster do not lie in simply what President George W. Bush did or did not do since entering office, nor in what Bill Clinton did or did not do during his tenure. Rather the source of the problem may be found in the late 1940s, after World War ll. had ended and just before the Cold War had begun. Three major interests in the West had reason to be unhappy over the Soviet's newfound power in 1945 over continental Europe:

1. American business class
2. Demobilizing American military and intelligence officers
3. Great Britain

First and foremost was the American business class, of which a large number had seen Adolph Hitler as the best bet for staving off Russian Communism in the 1930s. The American capitalist elite had done its best to avoid war with Germany until December 1941 hiding behind the umbrella of 'isolationism'. And even after the declaration of war by Franklin Roosevelt and the Congress in December 1941, some very important businessmen had stalled during the early phases of war, preferring to go by their contractual 'obligations' and patent agreements with German companies, rather than go whole-heartedly into war. A substantial portion of the European capitalist elite in occupied Europe had collaborated directly with the German war machine during the war. A rising senator from Missouri, Harry S. Truman, held hearings on these ties and a book was published in 1943, Patents For Hitler, by Guenter Reimann.

Yet, by the middle of war, most American companies had gotten on board and were enjoying huge profits from cost-plus contracts. More importantly the war had revived the economy in a major way. However, economists were concerned by 1943, that as the war spending would begin to wind down, after the defeat of the Axis powers; that jobless and Depression might return to the economy. The 1943 book, Post War Economics, by Seymour Harris described in detail what might be expected. One article by a soon-to-be official of the CIA, Richard Bissell, made clear how far even more conservative thinkers were willing to go in terms of continuing federal direction of the economy after the war, should that Depression seem to be returning.

Fears of Post War Demobilization and Military-Intelligence Joblessness

For most of European history, the end of war has meant the demobilization of most of the standing military and the loss of many jobs in the military officer corps. Since however the end of World War ll. was being seen well before the end of war as leading into joblessness again, it behooved thinking men in various parts of the military-intelligence apparatus to seek ways of prolonging their jobs beyond the armistice, just in case the end of war returned the nation to 25% unemployment. I believe that this was the single largest factor in the foundation for what became the Cold War intelligence bureaucracies.

Many other items figured into the Cold War, not least of which was Stalin himself and his willingness to take off as much of the gloves as necessary to remain in Eastern Europe. And Britain had maintained a policy for many years of opposing the biggest European power, through supporting the second strongest power. This had led to the Triple Entente before World War l, with Britain, France and Czarist Russia as the primary fighters in the Allies during the early part of the war. It had led Churchill to support Communist Russia after Nazi Germany had attained such primary strength and position in 1941. And after the war, it had led Churchill to his `Iron Curtain' speech, where he had sought to portray Russia in the harshest possible light. But Britain's views of and interests in Europe were not necessarily those of America, something which new president Harry S. Truman seemingly could not understand.

The 'States Secrets' Approach in the Formulation of NSA and CIA:
The Cold War

The reason that the Cold War began and continued in the late 1940s was that most Americans were basically cut out of the formulation of the policy after World War ll, at a point where a little democracy might have resumed. Although America had never had the type of `states secrets' act which British citizens have suffered with for generations, the formulation of the CIA and NSA in the late 1940s and early 1950s, essentially gave these new organizations levels of internal secrecy capacity which emulated such a `state secrets' law. And both the policy and later operational activities starting in the late 1940s with the civil war in Greece occurred behind a `stealth' wall, which emulated the 1990s radar-evading planes in the U.S. Air Force.

Thus there was no `vote' on whether or not for the United States to allow thousands of Nazi killers to escape even rudimentary justice after about 1948. By 1950, the United States had largely incorporated the Nazi intelligence machine in Eastern Europe under Reinhard Gehlen into the CIA. How many of our most important analyses of both the intentions as well as the actual threat capacity of the Soviet Union were hopelessly biased by the presence of such thugs in our intelligence machine? It is not likely that Stalin's view of the United States was improved by our inclusion of so many Nazis at that time. Quite possibly, Stalin came to believe that America was simply continuing the war against Russia started in 1941 by Nazi Germany.

Early Cold War Policy and the Muslim World

In the case of the Middle East and Islam, Cold War policy often dictated that the United States use Islamic insurgents against existing nationalist leaders, which had arose during and after World War ll. From Mohammed Mosadegh in Iran in 1953-54 to Sukarno in Indonesia in the mid-1960s, the United States pushed out of office people who perhaps were not the best of allies; while permitting and abetting the rise of Islamic fundamentalist leaders. The most obvious case of this policy was in Afghanistan itself, when in 1978, the Soviet Union moved in to `stabilize' the collapsing government. The actual problem had been caused by one of their own supporters, who had apparently read too much communist propaganda and who had begun the type of social experimentation which so often ends in disaster, as with the Kymer Rouge in Cambodia. As Russia moved in to try to save the situation from deteriorating further, American right wing, anti-Communists saw this as a golden opportunity to `pay back' the Russians for their assistance to the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War.

Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire:
American Anti-Communism in the 1980s

Every damn dollar which we gave to the Afghan resistance after 1978 essentially hastened the day that the Russians would leave Afghanistan and hence the day that the Taliban would assume power and give bin Laden the basis for attacking the continental United States. There is no other accurate way of describing what the entire Cold War debacle was all about, as regards the Middle East. There is no set of intelligence lies so dark as to be able to cover this fact. The entire Cold War era was based upon lies, or at the least, upon a set of extremely biased interpretations around Soviet and later Chinese communism.

Although Jimmy Carter may have begun the policy against Russian Afghani intervention in 1978, it took the Reagan Revolution in 1980 to get things really kicked off. The Cold War resumed with a vengeance and soon the Soviet Union was no more. Only now Islamic fundamentalism had no strong power to the north to constrain them and the thousands of nuclear tipped missiles from the old Soviet arsenal began deteriorating and many stockpiles of bomb grade plutonium, lesser grades of nuclear material and biological agents became open to plunder and resale. With the decline of one major modern power, Bin Laden and his thugs could dream of destroying the other major modern power and restoring the thousand year old Muslim caliphate to its glory.

Support for Muslim Fundamentalism by United States Cold Warriors

What is so troubling, is that many in the intelligence community continue to see the destruction of Soviet Russia in the Cold War as a good thing, as the best of events; utterly ignoring the 1000-year history of problems between Russia and its Islamic border. Instead of trying to completely destroy Soviet Russia, we might have at least been seeing Russia as a potential barrier to the spread of Islamic fundamentalist terror. And the reason that this did not occur, is that dissidents in the intelligence system during the 1950s either learned to keep their views to themselves, or were purged out. Historian David MacMichals was one such person, who has paid a heavy price for his opposition to CIA policy in Eastern Europe. The Cold War as applied in the Middle East and specifically to Afghanistan has been a complete failure.

Thank you, Cold Warriors.

Bush's New War and Operational versus Policy Secrecy

With the Bush administration's extreme emphasis on both operational and policy secrecy, the vast majority of Congress has little idea of what is happening and an even smaller percentage of America people have any idea of the logic behind the war. It is one thing to try to extend as much cover as possible to the ground forces fighting day-to-day for their very lives and survival; it is quite another for the Bush administration to attempt to formulate and put into motion the policy behind the war, without serious debate in the rest of the country. The idea that the same intelligence organizations which basically left open not the back door, but the very front door to the United States; the idea that we the American people will defer war policy to them again- is utterly absurd.

And it is to those same intelligence organizations which helped lay the framework for the Cold War and the Middle East policy in the late 1940s, which we as a nation have had to turn, in our hope to survive. We have to hope the nation's intelligence bureaus can fight this entrenched Cold War attitude and maybe see the world as it is. But the idea that the policy debates can be held in the same level of secrecy which resulted in the initial Cold War policies of the late 1940s- this idea is a totally absurd.

Operational secrecy is mandatory; the nation can not reasonably expect our soldiers to fight out in the open. No soldier or agent is required to be a martyr as a matter of American policy. But the policy itself must be debated in the open- in the media, in the Congress and on the Internet. Never again will a federal bureaucracy be allowed to so channel our nation's foreign policy, in such deep secrecy as that which occurred during that late 1940s. Never, never again. If we are to be destroyed by these Islamic thugs, at least we may be allowed to see the problem as it is. And such a policy must guarantee these Islamic thugs that their vision of a `Greater Islam' will die just as damn hard and fast as we in America do.

Closing: From Cold War Secrecy to Democracy in Foreign Policy

It is ludicrous that Americans should be facing the problems which we are facing with Qeada. It is even more ludicrous that we should consider allowing the secretive bureaucracies which brought the problem to our doorstep in the first place, to decide how we will fight and with whom. In a free society, that is the job of the electorate. In one of communist Bertol Brecht's plays, in a backhanded stab at Stalin, he noted that if the People should disappoint the Leader, that the Leader should dismiss the People and appoint another.

If the American People are disappointed in the direction of the military-intelligence machine, then the People may appoint new political leaders to redirect our security forces. Those in the military-intelligence system who oppose such a redirection should join the political system openly and make their case, even as some dissatisfied former Soviet military officials have recently done. That is democracy.

It has been almost 55 years since the Nazi and Imperial Japanese forces were crushed, with a lot of help from the Russians. Maybe its time that the United States citizens had some democratic voice in the development of foreign policy. We could hardly do worse than our military-intelligence bureaucracies have done since 1945. How much closer to annihilation could a democratic foreign policy bring the United States than the Cold Warriors brought us on September 11, 2001?

Future Articles: The Blind Being led by the One-Eyed?

Future articles will cover the idiocy of the Bush policy of trying to overthrow Saddam and upon the problems created by the multicultural left's obsession with not 'profiling' potential terrorists. In many ways, it has to be admitted that even if the intelligence system had been able to discern the September 11 attack, that it might have been impossible for them to have prevented the attack, for fear of offending the more jihadist members of the U. S. civil liberties world. The Bush policy of lumping the Qeada with Saddam's Iraq, seems to be compounding the errors created by the Cold War bureaucracies, to the point where even the military-intelligence positions on an invasion of Iraq are beginning to almost make sense.

Americans who oppose the war should not necessarily assume that the military leadership sees an immediate invasion of Iraq as sound policy. One military leader was quoted as saying that he understood a hard political position backed up by military force, but that raw force with no apparent political position, made no sense. This man had apparently read Von Clauswitz, and understood correctly that war was an extension of politics, not a substitute for politics.( On War ,paperback, by Carl
von Clauswitz, Princeton University Press.) It might be good reading for Mr. Bush to obtain the Von Clauswitz book and a short book on Gallipoli. Winston Churchill's account might even do.

Our soldiers may have to fight and die in several theatres before this decade is over and the Qeada thugs are finally defeated, as they will be at some considerable cost both to us and to whatever country(s) permit them a fire base. Getting a bunch of American soldiers killed prematurely in Iraq now in 2003, as the British did at Gallipoli in 1915; is not the way to keep the war on terror 'on mission'. In this light, any American protests should be as much concerned with the welfare of the citizen-soldiers of America as with the welfare of the citizens of Iraq. Charity should begin at home, sometimes.