The Perle and Frum H

I admit not buying or reading the screed written by Richard Perle and David Frum, “An End to Evil: How to Win the War On Terror.” I don’t want to encourage the neocon duo, although I am certain thousands of people are snapping up the book like hotcakes fresh off the griddle, and a considerable number are buying into the crackpot ideas of the Neocon Duo.

I found a bunch of quotes from the book published on the InfoShop website. Most of the quotes deal with domestic repression, neocon suggestions for putting the thumbscrews to Muslims, and the US relationship with other countries.
The quotes on domestic issues are interesting because Perle usually talks about blowing up small third world countries — or on really bad hair days, France — and usually says little about the neocon plan for America.

Let’s begin with the neocon vision for America. As to be expected, F & P — as I’ll call them from hereupon, for the sake of brevity — envision an authoritarian America, a nation of “zero tolerance” toward foreigners, outsiders, and those who do not embrace the predominant culture.

For instance, victimless crime begets larger, more serious crime. “We ought to learn a lesson from the most effective anticrime program the United States has ever seen: Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s crack down in New York,” the pair write.

Giuliani’s core insight was this: People who break one law will break other laws. You want to catch a guy who’s skipped out on a manslaughter arrest warrant? Stop every turnstile jumper and inspect his ID. You want to find the killer who left his fingerprints on a knife that stabbed a kid to death yesterday? Scan the fingerprints of everybody you catch smoking marijuana in the park today.

Notice how effortlessly F & P associate marijuana use with murder — not simply garden-variety murder but rather heinous child murder. The assumption here is that people who smoke pot are more than likely guilty of other, far more serious crimes.

I wonder if F & P believe Al Gore’s son, who was busted for smoking pot recently, is a potential murderer. Or Bill Clinton.

Following the logic presented here, smoking pot but not inhaling, as Clinton admitted, leads to mass murder. After all, under Clinton, Yugoslavia was bombed non-stop for 78 days, resulting in the death of around 500 innocent civilians, according to Human Rights Watch.

Of course, F & P are not really interested in pot smokers, that is unless they are from Iran or Somalia. It’s mostly Arabs, Afghans, Iranians, and Northern Africans the Bushites want to kick around.

The Giuliani approach to crime resulted in an increase in the distrust of the police by African-Americans and other minorities in New York, especially after the police killed an unarmed Guinean man, Amadou Bailo Diallo. Of course, since Diallo was from a third world country, his death is meaningless, especially for F & P who mistrust the “dark side” (see below) of humanity.

In addition to Arabs, Muslims, and Africans with visas, the neocon duo believe antiwar demonstrators are dangerous. In fact, if I read these guys correctly, the First Amendment itself is dangerous.

We may be so eager to protect the right to dissent that we lose sight of the difference between dissent and subversion.

Eager to protect, in other words eager to follow the Constitution.

Once upon a time, the First Amendment ensured Americans the right to peacefully assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances. But according to F & P, this is an excuse for subversion.

This is nothing new. Early on the Adams administration had a bone to pick with subversives — more accurately, people who disagreed with the government — and so they created the Sedition Act, also called the Alien and Sedition Laws. Ever since, in fits and starts, the government has had it out for aliens, outsiders, minorities (African-Americans, Irish, Italians, Native Americans, etc.), labor organizers, socialists, anarchists, civil rights marchers, and antiwar demonstrators, to name but a few. For Adams, the Constitution was an impediment. Same for our neocon authors.

F & P want to continue this legacy. Instead of going after “reds” like one of Ashcroft’s predecessors, A. Mitchell Palmer (AG under Woodrow Wilson), they want the government to go after “terrorists,” that is anybody who disagrees with them on US foreign policy.

Nor should we exclude the possibility that Islamic terrorism may begin to make common cause with Western political extremists of the far Left and far Right. Especially those on the Left, since F & P occupy the extreme Right.

Interesting they believe progressives will make “common cause” with Osama bin Laden. I have yet to speak with a progressive who agrees with the wacky political and religious ideas of Osama and Omar.

In fact, the political allies of F & P — the Christian Coalition and Christian Zionist types — are far closer philosophically to Osama than Noam Chomsky will ever be. Osama is a social reactionary, just like Pat Robertson. Osama hears the voice of God, as does the current resident of the White House.
As F & P see it, anybody who disagrees with the neocon plan to invade the Arab Middle East, and impose the political will of the Zionists and Wall Street neoliberals on 350 million people, is a “subversive.”

But even a nation of laws must understand the limits of legalism. Between 1861 and 1865, the government of the United States took tens of thousands of American citizens prisoner and detained them for years without letting any one of them see a lawyer.

In other words, it is acceptable to lock up your critics because Lincoln did it during the Civil War. “Lincoln defined a ‘saboteur’ as virtually anyone who disagreed with his politics and policies and subsequently ordered the military to arrest literally tens of thousands of Northern political opponents, including dozens of opposition newspaper editors,” writes historian Thomas J. DiLorenzo. “[D]on’t be surprised to see articles in the near future from the Claremont Institute, AEI, National Review, The Weekly Standard, and other neocon organs urging President Bush to be more ‘Lincolnesque’ in his treatment of the war opponents in Congress.”

Even the slightest deviation from the neocon line is viewed by F & P as subversion. As for throwing people in prison or camps like Gitmo without access to legal representation, no problem. Lincoln did it, so why not the neocons? It’s a Republican thing, after all.

People who live next door to a storefront mosque in Brooklyn, New York, will almost certainly observe more things of interest to counterterrorism officials than will people who live next door to a Christian Science church in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Nonsense. I live about fifty yards from a mosque. I never observe “things of interest,” that is unless you consider Muslims going to worship on Friday afternoon interesting. I’d say it is about as interesting as the Baptists or Hindus going to their places of worship.

Maybe the Muslims should begin observing “things of interest” at Protestant fundamentalist churches where Christian Zionists support Bush’s war against Muslims and fork over millions in donations to Zionist organizations determined to erase Palestinian Arabs, or at least move them en masse from the land the Judeo-Christian God supposedly gave to the Jews, according to a book written by Jews.

F & P obviously consider all Muslims terrorists, as do their ideological taskmasters, the Zionists. F & P easily mix political dogmatism with racism, an explosive blend that resulted, in the not too distant past, in genocide and a war claiming nearly 50 million lives.

The CIA is blinded, too, by the squeamishness that many liberal-minded people feel about noticing the dark side of third world cultures.

I guess the CIA was “blinded” when it engineered coups in Iran, Chile, Indonesia, Iraq (ultimately resulting in the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein) and elsewhere; trained and financed death squads in Haiti, El Salvador, Angola, Bolivia, Brazil, Cambodia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia, Iran, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Syria, Turkey, and Vietnam.

It is curious F & P use the term “dark side” when referring to the third world. Most of the world is “dark” — that is, most people in the world have darker melanin than F & P. It is only “squeamishness” standing in the way of invading their “dark” countries, stealing their natural resources, and imposing “white” Judeo-Christian culture on them.

In fact, the xenophobia of F & P is quite remarkable in its outspokenness. If a nation or people do not share the presuppositions of Judeo-Christian culture — most notably predatory capitalism and the “right” of “free markets” to exploit humanity and natural resources — they are corrupted by the “dark side,” that is to say their own cultures. Thus reduced to a vile abstraction, it is easier to bomb them and spread around DU to make sure they suffer cancer for the next few generations.

Not mentioned by F & P is the fact many of the problems in the third world are directly related to the legacy of colonialism. If F & P sincerely wanted to correct many of the social problems in the third world — incessant poverty, illiteracy, disease, violent fundamentalism — they would instead advocate debt cancellation and address the unregulated plunder of shareholder capital in the third world.

As Bush has demonstrated, the only response to the “dark side” is to bomb their cities, destroy their civilian infrastructure, and occupy their countries. Only “squeamish” “liberal-minded people” find this criminal and insane.

As AG Ashcroft noted shortly after 9/11, “liberal-mind people” and others who are critical of the wholesale dismantling of the Constitution “scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty” and “only aid terrorists.”

Iran is itself a terrorist state, the world’s worst. North Korea has committed terrorist atrocities, too […] Both regimes are nightmarishly repressive; both regimes present intolerable threats to American security. We must move boldly against them both and against all other sponsors of terrorism as well: Syria, Libya, and Saudi Arabia. And we don’t have much time.

For F & P, Iran is a “terrorist state” for two reasons, both unmentioned. First, it supports Hezbollah, a Lebanese “terrorist” organization — national groups resisting invasion and occupation are invariably considered “terrorist” organizations — formed when Israel invaded southern Lebanon. Not only did Hezbollah manage to expel Israel, but it continues to successfully resist Israeli aggression in southern Lebanon. Second, Iran is considered “terrorist” by F & P and the neocons because it is a large Muslim nation with an Islamic government opposed to Israeli domination in the region. Iran also has a lot of oil.

F & P say “we don’t have much time” to kill a whole lot of Muslims and Koreans, the latter who sell sophisticated weapons to untrustworthy Muslims, a fact that disturbs the neocons because well-armed adversaries make it more difficult to invade and occupy their countries. The neocons prefer defenseless countries like Iraq, weakened by more than a decade of sanctions.

Bush has but one term left in office — unless he completely trashes the Constitution and becomes dictator-for-life, a distinct possibility. The neocons are painfully aware that after Bush’s second term they will be sent back to their think tanks and foundations to spin their devious wheels for naught. So they are pushing their agenda hard and fast as possible and want to get things done — invade Syria, Iran, blockade North Korea, militarily intimidate all nations not going along (or maligning them like France), sort of like a global mafia. All of this has to be accomplished in the next five years.

The reason our policy towards Saudi Arabia has been so abject for so long is not mere error. No, of course not. Our policy toward Saudi Arabia has everything to do with the largest reserve of readily accessible oil on the planet.

But it’s a new dawn for F & P and their fellow travellers — according to the neocons, Saudi Arabia is no better than Iran or Syria — in fact, worse: they have a lot of money and support fundamentalist Muslims, an unpardonable sin, that is unless those enraged Muslims support US foreign policy objectives (as they did in Afghanistan).

<blockquote>In the last chapter, we argued that we should apply every possible pressure to halt Saudi Arabia’s campaign to spread its murderous version of Islam — including, if necessary, encouraging the secession of the kingdom’s oil-producing Eastern Province.</blockquote>

Strange how Saudi Arabia’s “murderous version of Islam” was not considered a problem when the US exported it to Afghanistan, beginning with Jimmy Carter. Between 1980-85 the CIA funded the recruitment and training of thousands of volunteers from three dozen Muslim countries. Saudi Arabia gave the Mujahideen millions of dollars and eagerly imported Wahabbi fundamentalism. In fact, the CIA considers the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan its most successful operation. F & P, of course, have convenient amnesia when it comes to this sort of things.

We can train Iraqi soldiers to combat insurgencies while respecting human rights, as we have trained armies in the Philippines and Latin America.

This quote is a prime example of neocon historical revisionism in action. The US and the CIA did not train armies in Latin America and the Philippines to respect human rights. In fact, they did just the opposite.

“The CIA created, structured and trained secret police in South Korea, Iran, Chile and Uruguay, and elsewhere — organizations responsible for untold thousands of tortures, disappearances, and deaths,” writes Ralph McGehee, an ex-CIA operative. “It is important to point out that the use of death squads has been a strategy of US counterinsurgency doctrine,” notes David Kirsh. “For example, the CIA’s ‘Phoenix Program’ was responsible for the ‘neutralization’ of over 40,000 Vietnamese suspected of working with the National Liberation Front.”

“The CIA has gone beyond its original mission of gathering intelligence and was conducting Mafia-type operations not only in its own territory but against foreign governments and their leaders,” writes Roland G. Simbulan of the Manila Studies Program at the University of the Philippines. “The CIA in the Philippines has engaged in countless covert operations for intervention and dirty tricks particularly in Philippine domestic politics.”

In Latin America, the US government and the CIA engineered the murder of a democratically elected leader, Chile’s Salvador Allende, supported the brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet, trained sadistic tortures in El Salvador and Honduras, financed and armed the contras in Nicaragua, and engaged in other interventions and covert operations too numerous to mention here.

“All of this in the name of fighting a supposed moral crusade against what cold warriors convinced themselves and the American people, was the existence of an evil International Communist Conspiracy, which in fact never existed, evil or not,” explains William Blum, a former State Department employee, in the Guardian.

We had come to Iraq to liberate it from Baathism.

No, they came to steal their oil and rearrange the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East, as envisioned by Likudite fanatics in Israel.

Once again, the neocons ignore historical fact. The CIA installed the Ba’athist regime in Iraq. “We came to power on a CIA train,” bragged Ali Saleh, minister of interior of the Ba’athist regime that replaced president Abdul Karim Kassim on February 8, 1963. “Many meetings were held between the Ba’ath party and American intelligence,” King Hussain of Jordan later admitted. The CIA “relayed to those carrying out the coup the names and addresses of communists there, so they could be seized and executed.”

I’m certain that if I read the entire book, I’d discover even more chilling quotes. Reading the quotes on the InfoShop website, not all included here, is frankly more than enough for one sitting.

Suffice it to say “An End to Evil: How to Win the War On Terror” is a primer for what’s to come if Bush is awarded with a second term. As it now stands, unless something happens to upset the GOP apple cart, Bush is more or less a shoo-in. Kerry is not going to make it to the White House, that is if the neocons and their Republican allies have anything to say about it, even if it takes another “terrorist incident” or Supreme Court fiat. Not with computerized voting machines that do not produce a paper trail, have proprietary software, and are owned by Republicans.

The Frum and Perle worldview and its likely course of action should not be surprising. The neocons have broadcast their intentions for years, in fact for more than a decade. If you need more details, surf over to the PNAC website and read the documents there, beginning with “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” written the year before Bush stole the White House.

I promise it is scarier than the latest Stephen King novel.

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KURT NIMMO is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Visit his excellent no holds barred blog at www.kurtnimmo.com/ . Nimmo is a contributor to Cockburn and St. Clair’s, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. A collection of his essays for CounterPunch, Another Day in the Empire, is now available from Dandelion Books. He can be reached at: nimmo@zianet.com