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June 19, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
The
Incredible Shrinking President
June 18, 2002
David Vest
Raise the
White Flag in Terror War?
Ben White
Is It Possible
to "Understand" the Rise in "Anti-Semitism"?
Edward Said
Palestinian
Elections Now
June 17, 2002
Jack McCarthy
Watergate
and All That
Philip Farruggio
A Maximum
Wage Law
Ron Sullivan
Law
and Orders:
The Assault on Trial by Jury
Rev. Charles Booker-Hirsch
Taking
on the School
of the Americas
Joan Smith
G.W. Bush:
The Man is Stupid
Dave Marsh
Corporate
Buy Outs and the Decline of Teen Jive
Robert Jensen
Rhetoric
Distorts Realities
June 15 / 16, 2002
Tanweer Akram
A Review
of Noam Chomsky's 9-11
Daniel Wolff
The Day
They Shot a Wolf in the Ghetto and What It Meant
Ralph Nader
A Corporate
Crime State
David Vest
Have You
Been Serviced?
Karl Kraus
A Minor
Detail
Alexander Cockburn
The
Terrorism of Everyday Life
June 14, 2002
Mark Weisbrot
US Trade
Policy:
"Do as We Say, Not as We Did"
Starhawk
The Boy Who Kissed the Soldier
David Krieger
Farewell
to the ABM Treaty
Tom Turnipseed
The Fear Factor to Promote
War and Trample Truth
Steve Perry
How the
Bush Adminstration Buried Coleen Rowley
June 13, 2002
Linda Belanger
Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict:
The Story Behind the Headlines
Amira Hass
Indefinite
Siege
Mokhiber / Weissman
Time to Put Lives Over Patents
Robert Fisk
Bush's Weird
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Stanton / Madsen
Democracy
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What is to be Done?
Roldan Tomasz Suárez
Venezuela:
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June 12, 2002
Fran Shor
Dirty Bombs, Blowback
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Dave Marsh
Shelley
Stewart, Radio and the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement
Chris Floyd
Murder, Inc.
June 11, 2002
Omar Barghouti
On Dance, Identity and War
Robert Fisk
The Bush
Afghan Gang:
Murderers, Gangsters, Stooges
Minerva Wright
The Donkeys of the Holy Land
David Krieger
Stopping
a Nuclear War
in South Asia
June 10, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
Executioner's Last Songs
June 8/9, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Mademoiselle
M.
Or Getting Screwed in Paris
Susan Davis
Sleepless
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George Sunderland
"Send
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June 19,
2002
Red Targets in the
"War on Terrorism"
by Gary Leupp
The insufferably pompous and benighted Lou Dobbs,
who captains CNN's Moneyline, has recently taken on a
glorious cause far removed from his erstwhile function of business
news analysis. He wishes to reshape the discourse on the current
world situation by redefining the "War on Terrorism,"
which he finds both vague and "politically correct"
(since it fails to target any group in particular) with what
he deems the more accurate, descriptive designation: "War
on Islamism."
Let's call a spade a spade, he tells
us. Those who have killed us and who will for generations terrorize
us are Muslims. Now, not all Muslims are bad, mind you. But there
are political Muslims bent on imposing the Shari'a on
the whole world through force, and of course, they hate Americans.
One recent evening Dobbs claimed that, surprisingly, most Muslims
commenting by email on his redefinition campaign (he does, oh
so open-mindedly, solicit feedback) endorsed his initiative,
distinguishing, as it so pointedly does, between good Muslims
and bad "Islamists." But another night he acknowledged
that the feedback from Muslims has been overwhelmingly negative.
No matter. To one (non-Muslim) who protested that the average
American will readily conflate "Muslim" and "Islamist,"
he smugly declared that the American people "deserve more
credit than that." (Americans imbibing CNN's spin on the
news? Yeah, sure, Lou.)
Mr. Dobbs has revised his formulation
somewhat, having been instructed by academics and others that
"Islamists" (in the sense of militant Shari'a proponents)
include a wide range of groups, most of whom are not "terrorists"
or even foes of the U.S. (Is not Saudia Arabia-mother of
fundamentalist Islamic societies-a good friend of the
U.S.?) Having magnanimously conceded that all "Islamists"
aren't killers, he now chooses to identify "radical
Islamists" as the evil-doers. But even this category, of
course, includes groups with no notable relationship with al-Qaeda,
nor history of attacking American civilians outside their own
invaded or occupied homelands (like Hezbollah in Lebanon, or
Hamas in Palestine); Dobbs in any case wants us to see them all
as our enemies. He also assigns states to the "radical
Islamist" camp-including Iraq, ruled by its secular
Baath Party that in fact keeps a tight leash on the Muslim clergy.
(The man is just not very well informed, or if he is, accurate
description is not, in fact, his forté or priority.)
The power structure seems divided on
the question of the vilification of Islam; John Ashcroft and
Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland
Security, Georgia Republican Saxby Chambliss, being leading proponents;
Colin Powell apparently standing in diplomatic opposition; and
George Bush just not making much sense in his signals on the
issue. It's not clear how well Dobbs' initiative will resonate
in the media and in political discussion, but while he'll be
able to generate bigotry and racism, I doubt that his campaign
will produce the pointed focus of the terror war he seems to
desire. Rather, I'm afraid the "War on Terrorism" is
likely to broaden beyond "Islamist" foci, targeting
movements with no connection whatsoever to Islam (of any variety),
nor indeed to Sept. 11.
To be sure, Muslim Iraq has been posited
as the inevitable next front, but conflicts within the military
and political elite seem to have placed Desert Storm II on hold
for a while. Yet the war has to spread somewhere, lest
the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz cabal be accused of going wimpish. And
let's face it, "Islamists" may challenge U.S. bases
around the Gulf, or oppose U.S. Middle East policy, or condemn
U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq; they may even demonize the "American
way of life." But they're not the big threat to the U.S.
Empire in the long run. They're not, for God's sake, even against
capitalism. (Bin Laden's a millionaire businessman, right?)
They're not in principle opposed to imperialism. (30,000
Islamists from around the world joined hands with the CIA to
fight the godless Soviets in Afghanistan in the '80s, right?)
But there remain forces around the world whose challenge to the
U.S. is precisely their defiance of imperialism. And these
could be targeted by the terror war at any time.
I'm talking about the revolutionary left-you
know, the communists. "Communist," of course, is another
vague category; in the Cold War, the U.S. government always subsumed
under this term a wide variety of movements and figures without
much real linkage to Marxism-Leninism at all. (Any left-leaning
nationalist-Juan Bosch, Patrice Lumumba, Mossadegh, Sukarno-was
a "Communist" in league with an international anti-American
conspiracy.) And despite all the crowing since 1991 about the
"death of communism" and ultimate triumph of western
"democracy" and free market principles, U.S. imperialism
at its zenith continues to glare at, and castigate as "communist,"
a broad spectrum of posited antagonists. My point here is not
to determine whether any of these particular targets really merit
the designation, but merely to note that many of those defining
themselves as such (as well as those on the left who don't) continue
to live under the threat of U.S. attack. Not all of them, of
course: the "Communist Party of China," having presided
over the full-scale restoration of capitalism, and even graciously
accepted capitalists as members, seems in no immanent danger.
Nor are Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Cuba and North Korea, however,
are feeling the heat. So are the Maoists (the serious
communists of the twenty-first century), wherever Maoism flourishes.
Maoist Target
#1: the NPA of the Philippines
It seems to flourish in the Philippines.
The first indication that the terror war might expand beyond
"Islamist" foes to embrace the traditional red ones
came in November, as Washington announced plans for U.S. troop
deployment in the southern part of the country ("Operation
Balikatan") to combat the Abu Sayyaf Group. Anyone familiar
with the situation in the Philippines would realize that Abu
Sayyaf was and is a tiny bandit group (100-200 combatants) that
the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) could easily defeat
on its own. (Its failure to do so seems to have something to
do with the penchant of military officers to share in the ransom
money the group rakes in through kidnappings.) The two truly
significant, armed "Islamist" organizations in the
country, the Moro National Liberation Front and the Moro Islamic
Liberation Front, are both holding talks with the government
of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Confined to the south,
and based solely among the Muslim (Moro) population (about 5%
of the total), they have not historically constituted the greatest
threat to U.S.-backed Filipino governments. That, rather, stems
from the New People's Army (NPA), established by the Communist
Party of the Philippines (CPP) in the late 1960s.
At present thought to number some 12,000
guerrillas, active throughout the archipelago, controlling some
8000 villages and perhaps 20% of the countryside, the NPA is
fighting a Maoist People's War, supported by a broad array of
organizations that constitute the National Democratic Front.
Small wonder that the NPA is listed on the State Department's
list of "terrorist organizations," and would, in the
current environment, constitute on that basis alone a "valid
target" for U.S. attack.
But the prospect of transforming the
Philippines into another Vietnam appeals to some more than others
in the pro-U.S. Filipino establishment itself. Arroyo cut the
deal behind Balikatan, boasting that cooperation with the U.S.
would bring the Philippines more aid than received by Pakistan;
but Vice-President (and Foreign Minister) Teofisto Guingona was
so opposed that he threatened to resign in January. After grudgingly
accepting the mission as a training program (and insisting that
U.S. troops would be barred from combat, and patrol only under
Filipino command), he demanded (and received) assurances from
Colin Powell on February 10 that the operation would be limited
to Basilan Island and not involve operations against the main
guerrilla groups. ("We do not want to initiate activities
against the NPA or the MILF," he told Powell, "because
our policy is to forge peace with them.")
Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes, meanwhile,
seemed eager to pit the U.S. troops against the Maoists. As the
operation got underway January 31, a U.S. MC-130 special operations
cargo plane was damaged by small-arms fire. Reyes immediately
blamed "New People's Army or criminal elements." CPP
spokesman Gregorio "Ka Roger" Rosal denied NPA involvement,
suggesting the incident was a ploy to justify U.S. involvement
in combat operations against his guerrillas. On the same day,
an American tourist was killed by a gunman at the base of Mt.
Pinatubo. Army spokesman Lt. Col. Jose Mabanta declared, "We
have reason to believe [the attackers] were NPAs." (Again,
the Maoists denied any responsibility; later, police suggested
the tourist's German companion may have shot him, or that the
attacker may have been a bandit of the indigenous Aeta people.)
Meanwhile, Arroyo has done her best to
conflate Abu Sayyaf and the NPA, echoing Bush's Manichean rhetoric.
Responding to NDF-led protests in February, she declared that
those opposing the Balikatan exercises were "protectors
of terrorists, allies of murderers and Abu Sayyaf lovers"
"You are not a Filipino," she railed, "if you
are against peace. You love the terrorists more than your own
soldiers." On February 25, AFP spokesman Lt. Col Josen Mbanta,
called the NPA "worse than the Abu SayyafWe dare say they
are no different from the Abu Sayyaf We have to open our eyes
because, in the long run, they will be the more protracted enemy
that we will be confronting." Operation Balikatan, of course,
is designed to help them confront that "protracted enemy"!
Underscoring the primacy of the NPA threat,
Arroyo distinguished the Maoists from MILF on March 18, when
she signed a Lenten truce with the latter but declined to do
so with the former. She explained that "if we look at the
situation right now all over the world, isn't it true that the
NPA has been declared as a terrorist group [by the U.S.]?"
The MILF, however, in her judgment, is not terrorist;
"They seem," she opined, "to have good faith in
looking for peace." Aware that the U.S. continues to consider
MILF terrorist, and linked to al-Qaeda, she said that she would
ask the U.S. to reclassify the group. (Later, at Reyes' recommendation,
she did in fact sign a Lenten truce with the Maoists.)
The day after Arroyo's statement, the
Manila Times quoted analyst Daniel Crawford as warning
that given the "alliance between communist and Moro rebels,"
and putative ties dating back to the 1980s between the NPA, North
Korea, and the People's Republic of China, the United States
would ultimately "actually engage [the NPA] in combat in
southern and central Mindanao, and even in eastern Mindanao,
under the guise of fighting terrorism." (The very same day,
four U.S. Green Berets participating in Operation Balikatan on
Basilan entered a combat zone, ostensibly to retrieve wounded
Filipino troops. They were driven back, while Filipino forces
retrieve the injured; but many felt they had violated the rules
governing their presence in the country.)
The mainstream press has expressed some
concern about gung-ho GIs becoming involved in combat, specifically
with the NPA. In April, hundred more U.S. troops arrived to participate
in "Exercise Balikatan" (as opposed to Operation
Balikatan) on the northern island of Luzon (where there are
no Muslim rebels to speak of, but lots of NPA). Ostensible reasons
for this activity are to train Filipino troops to take part in
UN peacekeeping operations, and to combat "terrorism"
elsewhere in Southeast Asia. AP reported that the exercise "carries
risks because communist rebels in the north have warned they
will attack any Americans who venture into territory they claim."
Some reports, echoing Arroyo, have facilely
conflated the Maoists and Muslim rebels. An AP article by William
Foreman that appeared June 10 described recent actions in the
campaign against Abu Sayyaf, but shifted topic in the final paragraphs:
"Yesterday, air force helicopters rocketed a southern Philippine
village inhabited by a communist rebel group, killing at least
nine rebels, an official said. President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo
told reporters that U.S. advisers who are training Philippine
troops and planning missions might be upgraded to the company
level, putting them closer to the fighting. 'We will have to
finish this war because terrorism is the scourge of the earth,'
Arroyo said." Plainly, for both her and her foreign friends,
Maoism is a big part of the scourge that must be finished off.
Maoist Target
#2: Nepal's PLA
Another People's War rages in Nepal,
lead by another Maoist organization on the State Department's
"terrorist" list. Since 1996, the Communist Party of
Nepal (Maoist) has effectively challenged government control
over much of the Nepali countryside, and by some estimates controls
one-third of the national territory. Spectacular military victories
last year by the party-led People's Liberation Army (PLA) brought
the government to the negotiating table. But in November (while
the U.S. was preparing its "train and equip" missions
to the Philippines, Yemen and Georgia), peace talks broke down
and intense fighting has occurred since.
On November 26, the highly unpopular
king, Gyanendra, declared a state of emergency, branded the Maoists
"terrorists," and issued a Terrorism Control Ordinance.
The U.S. ambassador, Michael Malinowski, remarked at the time
that the CPN(M) would have to reckon hereafter with the consequences
of bearing that label. Among those consequences was the first-ever
visit to Nepal by a U.S. secretary of state. Arriving in Kathmandu
January 18, Colin Powell made the connections clear: "You
have a Maoist insurgency that's trying to overthrow the government
and this really is the kind of thing that we are fighting
against throughout the world [emphasis added]." He thanked
Gyanendra and Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba for "fighting
international terrorism," and offered military aid. Malinowski
followed up with an address at a "South Asia Peace Operations
Seminar" in Kabul in February. As a mass strike closed down
Nepal, he announced that, "Nepal is currently plagued with
a terrorism that is shaking its very foundation as a nation.
These terrorists, under the guise of Maoism or the so called
'people's war,' are fundamentally the same as terrorists elsewhere
- be they members of the Shining Path, Abu Sayaf, the Khmer Rouge,
or Al Qaeda."
The aid promised by Powell was discussed
in April, when Foreign Minister Madhu Raman Acharya visited Washington.
Meanwhile Deuba declared, "The coalition against terrorism
should not be in Afghanistan only, it should be all over the
world." Without "international aid," he suggested,
it might take Nepal ten years to defeat the Maoists. While Acharya
was still in Washington, Reuters reported April 22 that there
were "about a dozen senior U.S. military officers"
in Nepal "assessing its progress against the rebels to determine
what military aid it might need as part of Washington's pledge
to help the government."
Deuba himself visited Washington following
Acharya, becoming the first Nepali prime minister to meet an
American president at the Oval Office May 6. He told reporters
afterwards that "President Bush is very much supportive
to our campaign against terrorism and he has assured us he will
help in many ways." (It was later revealed that the U.S.
will provide $ 20 million in military equipment, including transport
helicopters, automatic weapons, rocket launchers, flak jackets
and night-vision goggles to fight surprise attacks in the dark.)
On June 16, BBC reported that the U.S. government had just completed
training 20 Nepali officials, including the Inspector General
of Armed National Investigation and army generals working at
the Royal Palace, in "resistance against Maoist terrorism."
One would expect that the Bush administration
would seek to justify military aid to Nepal by associating the
Maoists with other groups it has labeled "terrorist."
I expect that we'll hear reference to a statement by Sri Lanka's
President Chandrika Kumaratunga to the Nepali ambassador to Colombo
June 14, to the effect that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam
(LTTE), an 8000-10,000 strong guerrilla force, are training Nepali
Maoists in the northern part of his country. This seems questionable,
given the considerable ideological differences between the groups.
LTTE leader Vellupillai Pirabhakaran has pretty much discarded
any Marxist-Leninist principles in favor of a race war (Hindu
Tamils vs. Buddhist Sinhalese) doctrine, while the CPN(M) is
politically aligned with another group in Sri Lanka, the Ceylon
Communist Party (Maoist) that shares its ideology. More ominously,
on May 11, The Independent cited "Western intelligence
agencies" as suspecting that al-Qaeda has been supplying
"sophisticated weaponry" to Maoists in Nepal! (This
smacks of sheer disinformation. Recall that bin Laden built his
career on "anticommunist" action in Afghanistan.)
Maoist Target
#3: the "Shining Path" of Peru
Within hours of the September 11 attacks,
some in the U.S. media suggested that the Shining Path of Peru
(the term often used to refer to the Communist Party of Peru
or PCP) was behind the attacks. The association was absurd, but
in character with the campaign of vilification of the Peruvian
Maoists dating back to the late '80s and early '90s, when according
to a RAND report it had acquired control over at least a quarter
of Peruvian territory, enjoyed widespread support, and stood
a good chance of seizing state power. Weakened by the capture
of its leader, Dr. Abimael Guzman (aka President Gonzalo) in
1992, the organization has survived the dictatorship of Alberto
Fujimori and his CIA-created Frankenstein, Vladimiro Montesinos,
and continues to organize armed resistance to the regime of Fujimori's
successor Alberto Toledo. According to the Washington Post
(June 13), the PCP has been re-forming in the remote eastern
Huallaga and Apurimac valleys, and stepping up recruitment on
college campuses. The Peruvian government has just declared a
state of emergency in the southern department of Arequipa, after
several days of antigovernment rioting quite probably involving
Maoists.
On March 21, just prior to the arrival
of President Bush on a state visit, a car bomb detonated outside
the U.S. embassy in Lima, killing nine people. Toledo blamed
the Communist Party of Peru, and the international press placed
that spin on the story. Two women and one man were recently arrested
and charged with the bombing. But no one has claimed responsibility
for the blast, and some have suggested that agents of Montesinos
(now under detention but, with many years of service to U.S.
intelligence and much embarrassing information to share, spared
trial for his many crimes) may be responsible. The message, in
any case, has been made clear: the PCP, which has been on the
State Department's terrorism list for years, is another al-Qaeda-like
enemy. Should its military position improve, don't be surprised
at U.S. intervention under the rubric of "War on Terror."
North Korea and the
"Axis of Evil"
Thus as of late January, Maoist organizations
had been quietly placed in the crosshairs of the U.S.'s terror
war. But the administration continued to focus on bin Laden,
al-Qaeda, and "Islamic extremists." Thus millions were
puzzled and shocked by Bush's January 29 State of the Union address
in which, just four months after the attacks, he completely ignored
bin Laden, mentioned al-Qaeda only once in passing, and abruptly
shifted attention to an imagined "Axis of Evil": Iraq,
Iran, and North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea;
DPRK). The nice thing about the speech was that it was so transparently
doltish (to anyone who had not already surrendered judgment and
succumbed to the very real psychological comfort and appeal of
fascistic obedience) that it caused many to have second thoughts
about the whole "War on Terrorism." European foreign
ministers were appalled; so was former U.S. President Jimmy Carter,
and a growing chorus of mainstream commentators. It just didn't
make any sense to link those particular three: secular Iraq;
Iran, with its mix of Shi'a fundamentalism and civil society;
and hermetic North Korea, an ostensibly Marxist-Leninist state
where in fact "Kim Il-Sungism" and the vague concept
Juche (self-reliance) constitute the state religion. Iraq
and Iran tore each other to bits during the U.S.-encouraged war
of 1980-88, and neither have much in common with the DPRK. The
commonsense concept of an axis as an alliance just didn't
work here.
It was for the spin-doctors and commentators
to explain the logic of the formulation apparently penned in
by the President at the last minute. North Korea had sold ballistic
weapons technology to Iraq and Iran, and was, like the other
two, itself (perhaps, at some point) capable of producing weapons
of mass destruction that might target the U.S. But of course,
pro-U.S. Pakistan was the primary recipient of DPRK assistance,
and as for weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. had already
negotiated, in the 1994 Agreed Framework nuclear deal, an arrangement
whereby North Korea had suspended its nuclear program in exchange
for the Western-financed construction of reactors producing little
weapons-grade material. (The "experts" have viewed
this as a very successful program.) In 2000, Kim Jong-Il and
South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung met, reducing tensions on
the peninsula, and after Bush's inauguration, Kim Dae-Jung urged
the new U.S. president to pursue the negotiations with Pyongyang
begun during the Clinton administration. But to his great chagrin,
Bush abandoned the rapprochement policy. Now, one year into his
presidency, Bush shocked Koreans, north and south, by his "Axis
of Evil" pronouncement, clearly tagging the DPRK as a terrorist,
evil-doing enemy-but one, like the Maoists mentioned above, that
obviously had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, "Islamism,"
or September 11.
Fortunately, the obtuse rhetoric has
not been followed by action; indeed, U.S. envoy on policy towards
North Korea, Jack Pritchard, met recently with a North Korean
diplomat at the UN, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage
has stated that Washington plans to send an envoy to Pyongyang
soon to discuss terrorism and nuclear proliferation, among other
matters. Kim Jong-Il seems little concerned about Bush's "axis""
remark, even joking about it to a South Korean envoy. But should
the U.S. decide to undertake a strike against the DPRK (such
as Bill Clinton contemplated in 1994), the action would be justified
not only in "anti-terrorist," but also anti-communist
terms. Recall that the DPRK once stood in the vanguard of resistance
to U.S. imperialism, fighting (with massive Chinese assistance)
U.S. forces to a stalemate in 1953. The obliteration of North
Korea would be a settling of scores, providing closure (on imperialist
terms) to one of the most brutal Cold War crusades. ("Islamism,"
of course, would have nothing to do with it.)
Colombia
and FARC
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
(FARC) are thought, with some 17,000 armed combatants, to be
the largest "leftist" guerrilla movement in the Western
Hemisphere. Rooted in Colombia's Liberal Party of the 1950s and
in a Communist Party that gravitated towards Castroism in the
'60s, it has an eclectic ideology, but its leadership considers
itself Marxist-Leninist and the U.S. government surely regards
it as such. From Washington's point of view, it is an irritant,
supposedly because it sponsors marijuana and coca producers and
engages in narco-trafficking, but really because it has militarily
challenged a succession of U.S.-backed regimes, acquiring control
of perhaps one-fourth of the national territory; and threatens
the huge U.S. investments in the country. Specifically, FARC
has sabotaged oil pipelines owned by U.S. companies. (The Caño
Limón pipeline, which services oil fields operated by
California-based Occidental Petroleum One, was out of service
266 days in 2001 due to 170 FARC attacks.) Small wonder Colombia
is the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid.
On February 6 (just after Bush's "Axis
of Evil" speech), CIA director George J. Tenet reported
to Congress about various "terrorist groups" that had
no al-Qaeda ties, but could be future U.S targets. These included
FARC, which, Tenet indicated, "poses a serious threat to
U.S. interests in Latin America because it associates us with
the government it is fighting against." (How could it not?)
The following week, the White House announced a plan to spend
$98 million to train and equip a Colombian army brigade specifically
to protect the (private) Caño Limón oil
pipeline. Senator Patrick Leahy, Vermont Democrat and chair
of the Senate's Foreign Operations Subcommittee, noted matter-of-factly
at the time: "For the first time, the administration is
proposing to cross the line from counternarcotics to counterinsurgency"
in the Latin American country.
The bridge from the one to the other,
of course, was the "War on Terrorism." On March 8,
House Resolution 358 called for the United States "to assist
the Government of Colombia protect its democracy from United
States-designated foreign terrorist organizations..." Rep.
Ron Paul, member of the House International Relations Committee
and the Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, protested that
the legislation, introduced without notice, placed the U.S. on
a "slippery slope toward unwise military intervention in
a foreign civil war that has nothing to do with the United States."
(Nor with "radical Islamism," nor September 11.)
Ten days later, Attorney General Ashcroft
announced that a federal grand jury in District of Columbia had
indicted three alleged FARC members and four other South Americans
on charges of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States;
their actions, he declared, demonstrated "more clearly than
ever the evil interdependence between the terrorists that threaten
American lives" and drug trafficking. On April 18, Armitage
told House Appropriations Committee that al-Qaeda supporters
have been active in tri-border area of Colombia, Peru and Ecuador.
Then on April 21, former Clinton White House chief of staff Thomas
F. McLarty III wrote in the Boston Globe that "the
list of targets" in the "war on terrorism" should
"look beyond" Afghanistan, the Philippines, Iraq, Yemen
and Somalia to Colombia, where FARC and ELN (National Liberation
Army, a smaller armed organization rooted in Liberation Theology)
"are little different from the Al Qaeda network." He
supported the removal of all Congressional restrictions on military
aid to Colombia (earlier imposed out of ostensible concern for
the abysmal human rights record of Bagota's military), as requested
by the Bush administration.
Later in the month, Ashcroft announced
the indictment of three alleged FARC members for killing of U.S.
citizens in 1999, and described FARC as a "fiercely anti-American
terrorist organization." John Walters, White House Office
of National Drug Control Policy director, meanwhile announced
that Columbian rebels were closely tied to "global terror
groups." (It is unlikely these include al-Qaeda; a recent
Council on Foreign Relations report says, "there is no evidence
linking the Islamists of Al Qaeda to the FARC." But no matter.
Add FARC to the organizations listed above as a "left,"
non-"Islamist" target of the terror war.)
Evil Cuba
Unremitting U.S. resentment of an independent
Cuba has been a staple of US foreign policy for over 40 years,
but the terror war has altered U.S.-Cuban relations in surprising
ways. President Fidel Castro has pledged full support for the
war, as he understands it, and has made no protest about the
detention of al-Qaeda and Taliban captives on the U.S. base in
Guantanamo. Indeed, the Cuban government has pledged complete
cooperation in apprehending any detainees on its soil should
they escape from U.S. custody on the base.
Thus it must have been an eyebrow-raiser
for the Cubans when, in a speech on May 6 in advance of former
president Jimmy Carter's private visit to Cuba, U.S. undersecretary
of state John Bolton gave a speech entitled "Beyond the
Axis of Evil," accusing Cuba of developing biological weapons
and sharing its expertise with "rogue states" (like
Syria, Iran, and Libya). This was the first time a U.S. official
had publicly linked Cuba to attempts to produce weapons of mass
destruction. Carter himself pooh-poohed the charges, noting that
in his own detailed State Department briefings nobody had raised
this charge; he implied that Bolton's remarks were motivated
by a desire to prevent any positive repercussions from his own
trip and to sabotage any moves towards improvement in U.S. relations
with Havana. But Bolton, with Bush's full support, has added
Cuba to a second circle around the Iraq-Iran-DPRK fantasy axis,
joining the evil-doing Maoists and other leftwing guerrillas
who identify with the Marxist-Leninist tradition.
Evil Americans
Finally, the terror war is already targeting
U.S. citizens and residents who identify with the political left.
There is of course a long history of this, from the Palmer Raids
of the 1920s, to the McCarthyite purges, to the COINTEL Program
of the '60s and early '70s. The 1974 Church Committee hearings
in the Senate revealed that "Operation Chaos," a CIA
domestic spying program in the '60s, had gathered "personality
profiles" on 7000 people in the U.S. and tracked over 1000
political groups. Since the enactment of the "Patriot Act"
last Halloween, the government has acquired nearly unlimited
authority to conduct "online research" on activists,
even if their efforts are not linked to an established criminal
investigation. ("Pure surfing," they call it.)
They are not just monitoring Islamic
and "Islamist" groups. Testifying before the Senate
in February, Dale Watson, Executive Assistant Director for Counterterrorism
and Counterintelligence, stated that "the terrorist threat
confronting the United States" stemmed in part from those
who "generally profess a revolutionary socialist doctrine
and view themselves as protectors of the people against the 'dehumanizing
effects' of capitalism and imperialism," and groups that
"aim to bring about change in the United States and believe
that this change can be realized through revolution rather than
the established political process." Among those who should
be watched, he listed activists in the Puerto Rican independence
movement, anarchists, "extreme socialist groups," and
anti-globalization movement forces like Reclaim the Streets and
Carnival Against Capitalism. It's still legal to be on the radical
left in the USA, but it's also now okay for the government to
be watching your ass, all the time, in egregious violation of
its own Constitution, that it touts as a model for the world.
No, Mr. Dobbs
If all the above are to be defined as
"terrorists," the peril they pose looms large indeed,
and relatively speaking, the "Islamist" menace to Mr.
Dobbs' cherished status quo fades in significance. According
to Newsweek (June 10): "Even as Bush continues to
publicly identify Al Qaeda as the chief threat, in private U.S.
officials are increasingly siding with intelligence officials
who have long insisted that the number of sworn members of Al
Qaeda worldwide has been grossly exaggerated, and may be fewer
than 200." Think about that. Hundreds of al-Qaeda,
demanding principally that the U.S. get its troops out of Saudi
Arabia. Tens of thousands of communist-led guerrillas---and
many millions who identify with the legacy of the historical
left---demanding an end to exploitation and inequality on the
planet. Imagine whom the Bush administration finds more threatening.
So in conclusion: this war Mr. Dobbs
so vigorously endorses; this war he wears on his lapel every
night in the form of that little flag pin; this war he demands
all decent Americans embrace as their own---it's not, in the
final analysis, a war on "radical Islamism" at all.
It's a war on anybody the U.S. administration chooses to target
as its foes-and for what it's worth, most of them, in fact, aren't
even Muslims.
Gary Leupp
is an an associate professor, Department of History, Tufts University
and coordinator, Asian Studies Program
He can be reached at: gleupp@tufts.edu
Today's
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