Rational Fears and "Gut Feelings:" U.S. Policy, the Middle East and the Privileging of Hegemony Over Survival

"Security is an important element of human life, and free people do not give up their security. Unlike what Bush says - that we hate freedom - let him tell us why didn't we attack Sweden, for example."

- Osama bin-Laden, 2003

 

"I. guess while I was there [in Iraq], the general attitude was 'a dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi.   You know, so what?"

- Jeff Englehart, former Specialist, Third Brigade, First Infantry Division, United States Army, 2006  

 

  

 

 

Like United States Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, I've got a "gut feeling" (Associated Press 2007) that the U.S. is going to get hit by a major terrorist attack.  

 

Unlike Chertoff, I don't claim to get this feeling from any specific recent national security data or "chatter."

 

I have no idea if Chertoff is right to say that the danger is especially strong this summer. 

 

I have no official information about which groups are most likely to attack or which U.S. facilities or structures or populations are most at risk.

 

 

 

"THE POLITICS OF FEAR"

 

And I have the distinct impression that Chertoff's "feeling"and subsequent terror warnings from the executive branch   have as much to do with the politics of George W. Bush's disastrous Iraq War as with any specific intelligence about escalated dangers.  As the New York Times' editorial page observed in a piece titled "The Politics of Fear" last Wednesday:

 

"It had to happen.  President Bush's bungling of the war in Iraq has been the talk of the summer.   On Capitol Hill, some of the more reliable Republicans are writing proposals to force Mr. Bush to change course.  A showdown vote is looming in the Senate."  

 

"Enter, stage right, the fear of terrorism."

 

"...The message, as always: Be very afraid.  And don't question the president."

 

"...The White House has never hesitated to play on fear for political gain, starting with the first homeland security secretary, Tom Ridge , and his Popsicle-coded threat charts.  It is a breathtakingly cynical ploy, but in the past it has worked to cow the Democrats into silence, if not always submission, and herd Republicans back into the party line" (New York Times Editorial Board 2007).

 

 

WHY THEY DIDN'T ATTACK SWEDEN

 

My "gut feeling" is more general, basic, existential and longstanding than Chertoff's.  It's the same nagging sense I had long before 9/11.

 

I'll have it next summer even if no attack occurs between now and then - unless the U.S. drastically changes its course of action regarding the Middle East.

 

The main "intelligence" source for my dread today is the same one that made me less than surprised when the twin towers fell in the late summer of 2001: a common-sense understanding that people from (and/or with allegiances to) the Muslim world and Middle East are being massively and dangerously incited by a U.S. foreign policy that privileges American global dominance over the security of the U.S. people (Chomsky 2003). 

 

Those who claim that "Islamofascist" hatred of western "freedom" and "democracy" was the driving force behind al Qaeda's stunning jetliner attacks have little explanation for why Osama bin-Laden (OBL) et al. specifically targeted the United States for attack. If bin-Laden and his followers and supporters were motivated by loathing of "American freedom and democracy," why were they on the side of the U.S. in the late 1980s, when America enjoyed at least as much domestic freedom and democracy as in the summer of 2001, if not more?

 

And if bin-Laden and the rest were so angry at the internal freedom and democracy of '"infidel" Western nations, why were Canada, Denmark, Holland, Sweden, New Zealand, and Switzerland - to name a few non-Islamic democratic states where democratic institutions were healthier and more developed - right to be much less worried about major attacks from al Qaeda during and after the 1990s?

 

The answer, of course, is to be found in American foreign policy. Sweden, Holland and the rest lacked the United States' rich and ongoing record of imperial oppression in the Middle East. 

 

Before as after 9/11, Uncle Sam was no innocent bystander in the crisis of Middle Eastern life. The United States was (and remains) the leading sponsor and supplier of the hated regional non- (many Muslims would say anti-) Islamic superpower Israel - the officially Jewish state that has   brutally occupied Muslim Palestine since the late 1940s - and of the corrupt, arch-repressive and oil-rich Saudi Arabian regime. 

 

It permitted, equipped and defended Israel's continuing savage oppression of the Palestinians, the leading living symbol of the hated legacy of western colonialism in the Middle East. 

 

Reflecting the American Empire's longstanding obsession with the control of globally super-strategic Middle Eastern oil, U.S. troops and bases surrounded the sacred Saudi and Muslim grounds of Mecca and Medina.

 

The U.S. effectively occupied the Arab Peninsula states of Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.  

 

It killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis during "Operation Dessert Storm" (officially seeking to punish a brutal dictator it had long supported) and continued to attack Iraq from land and sea through the 1990s. 

 

Last but not least, the U.S. was the leading enforcer of a savage decade-long "economic sanctions" (embargo) regime that killed more than a million Iraqis and helped deepen the grip of the hated Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein on his desperate populace.   It continued to exercise regular terrorism from the skies against Iraq. 

 

For these and other reasons, there was always as much substance as bluster in al Qaeda's claim that the Muslim world was under imperial assault from the U.S. and I was unsurprised that Washington DC and New York City came under Islamo-terrorist attack in the late summer of 2001.

 

I'd had a "gut feeling" that such attack was inevitable since first learning about the United States' Middle Eastern policy during the middle 1990s.  

 

It's probably the same sort of feeling that white U.S. settlers got living on their expanding nation state's early frontier after U.S. soldiers committed mass atrocities against nearby Native American "savages."

 

 Imperial and racist violence can spark bitter retaliation.   What goes around comes around, especially in a global age when terrible methods and technologies of mass killing are more accessible and transportable than ever before.

 

 

"BECAUSE OF WHAT WE HAVE DONE"

 

You don't have to be a Left anti-imperialist to make these basic connections. Here's how the conservative Catholic Middle Eastern expert and leading CIA al Qaeda analyst Michael Scheurer described U.S. policy in the Middle East in seeking to explain 9/11 and al Qaeda's subsequent popularity in the Muslim world in late 2003: "Professor Telhami's accurate depiction of America's non-credibility in the Muslim world encapsulates the consequences of a half century of U.S. Middle Eastern policy that moved America from being the much admired champion of liberty and self-government to the hated and feared advocate of a new imperial order, one that has much the same characteristics as nineteenth-century European imperialism: military garrisons; economic penetration and control; support for leaders, no matter how brutal and undemocratic, as long as they obey the imperial power; and the exploitation and depletion of natural resources" (Anonymous [Scheurer] 2004, p. 15).

 

By Scheurer's account, "the greatest danger for Americans facing the radical Islamist threat is to believe - at the urging of U.S. leaders - that Muslims attack us for what we are and what we think rather than for what we do." Scheurer determined that "Bin Laden et al. are and will continue fighting and killing Americans, once again, because of what we have done and are doing in the Islamic world and not because of who we are and how we run our political, economic, and social systems...Bin-Laden and most militant Islamist...can be said to be motivated by their love for Allah and their hatred for a few, specific U.S. policies and actions they believe are damaging - and threatening to destroy - the things they love...While they will use whatever weapons comes to hand - including weapons of mass destruction - their goal is not to wipe out secular democracy" (Anonymous [Scheurer] 2004, pp. 16-17)

 

"A DARK AND DEPRAVED ENTERPRISE"

 

My own "gut feeling" regarding the American "homeland" (lovely imperial term) terror threat emanating from the Middle East has hardly gone away in the last six years.    U.S. actions and policies since 9/11 have only further fanned the flames of Muslim and Middle Eastern rage, creating countless new recruits for terrible actions against U.S. citizens.

 

The sanctions against Iraq have disappeared (a country "liberated" for Western corporate-neoliberal exploitation no longer requires such "economic" punishment) and few U.S. troops remain in the Saudi kingdom.  But Israel's vicious U.S.-sponsored oppression of the Palestinians lives on and the U.S. supported a massive Israeli bombing assault on Muslim (and other) civilians in southern Lebanon during the summer of 2006.  

 

Muslim Afghanistan is occupied and effectively ruled by "Christian" America and its messianic "crusader" president, thanks to an illegal invasion than both ruling U.S. political parties strongly support.  Thousands of Afghan civilians have lost their lives in this brutal occupation. 

 

The biggest ongoing incitement to renewed "anti-American" terror, however, is the continuing mass-murderous U.S. invasion of oil-rich Iraq. The United States made a bipartisan decision to commit the supreme crime (under Nuremburg principles) against Iraq and international law: the launching of an unprovoked war of aggression and occupation.   Widely understood around the world to have been a brazenly imperialist effort to increase U.S. control over strategic Persian Gulf energy resources, Operation Iraqi Freedom has  resulted in the death of more than 700,000 Iraqis, the exodus of millions more, and in a general crisis and collapse of Iraqi society and infrastructure.

 

It has been conducted with shocking racist and imperial violence before, during and since the terrible Abu Ghraib revelations of 2004. As Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian report in the July 30th edition of The Nation, the occupation is a "a dark and depraved enterprise, one that bears a powerful resemblance to other misguided and brutal colonial wars and occupations, from the French occupation of Algeria to the American war in Vietnam and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory."

 

In a fact sheet handed out to antiwar activists in his Cedar Rapids office earlier this month, U.S. Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), praises "our brave men and women" for "having brilliantly completed the task for which they were sent to Iraq." But many of fifty U.S. occupation veterans interviewed by Hedges and Al-Arian have "returned home deeply disturbed by the disparity between the reality of the war and the way it is portrayed by the U.S. government and media."   By returning GIs' account, the war on the ground includes the gratuitous killing and torture of Iraqi civilians, including children.  The invasion involves the routine "indiscriminate" application of U.S. force and numerous "disturbing patterns of behavior by American troops." 

 

"I guess while I was there [in Iraq]," one returning occupation soldier (Jeff Englehart, former Specialist, Third Brigade, First U.S. Army Infantry Division) told Hedges and Al-Arian, " the general attitude was ' a dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi. You know, so what?"

 

Numerous veterans "described reckless firing once they left their compounds.  Some shot holes into cans of gasoline being sold along the roadside and then tossed grenades into the pools of gas to set them ablaze.   Others opened fire on children.  These shootings often enraged Iraqi witnesses."

 

"We heard a few reports, in one case corroborated by photographs," Hedges and Al-Arian report, "that some soldiers had so lost their moral compasses that they mocked or desecrated Iraqi civilian corpses."  

 

Twenty four veterans "said they had witnessed or heard stories from those in their unit of unarmed civilians being shot or run over by convoys.  These incidents were so numerous that many were never reported." 

 

The killing of "unarmed Iraqis" is "so common many of the troops said it became an accepted part of the daily landscape."  

 

Several interviewees told Hedges and Al-Arian of cases where U.S. soldiers would "plant AK-47s" next to the bodies of unarmed Iraqis they had butchered "to make it seems as if the civilian dead were combatants" (Hedges and Al-Arian 2007)

 

"Mom, we killed women on the street today," one U.S. soldier recently reported from Iraq.  "We killed kids on bikes.  We had no choice."  According to the New York Times, the soldier's mother (Penry Preszler of Phoenix, Arizona) "no longer wears red on Fridays in support of the Iraq war" (Urbina 2007). 

 

 

"THE BEST OF INTENTIONS"

 

Throughout this arch-criminal enterprise, both leading imperial U.S. political parties cling to the preposterous claim that the United States invaded Iraq to bring popular governance and national independence (ala 1776) to Iraq and the Middle East (Goldberg 2007; Street 2007a, 2007b, and 2007c). "We want to continue to export democracy," Hillary Clinton told the New Yorker at the end of 2006, "but we want to deliver it in digestible steps" (Goldberg 2007).

 

The mendacious "mush-mouthed" militarist Barack Obama (Ford 2005; Street 2007d;  and Street 2007e) defends the occupation as having been carried out with "the best of [democratic] intentions" (Obama 2006, pp. 290-309) - a mistaken effort "to impose democracy with the barrel of a gun" (Obama 2006, p.317).

 

Never mind that the occupation is a monumentally illegal war crime committed in defiance of Iraqi and world opinion and international law and directed at deepening U.S. control over Middle Eastern energy resources - a goal (encoded in the recent U.S.-drafted and U.S.-imposed Iraqi Petroleum Law) that stands in direct conflict with the alleged motive of promoting democracy within and beyond Iraq.    

 

 

"BLAME AND HOLD"

 

Now that the war faces widespread opposition inside the U.S., leaders of both parties are "repackaging it to dampen domestic opposition, cut some of the worst laws and regroup." As Anthony Arnove explains in the Socialist Worker, the "new approach" of many congressional Republicans and Democrats is "troop reduction, not withdrawal; a greater reliance on air power and 'over the horizon' forces rather than boots on the grounds; a retreat to bases and the Green Zone in Baghdad; and a shifting of the blame from the United States and its allies to the Iraqis.   In effect, it's a 'blame and hold' strategy.  Blame the Iraqis for all the problems we created.  Hold onto whatever the U.S. military can salvage in terms of military bases in Iraq - to have some influence over the future of Iraq's massive oil reserves and some ability to continue military operations in Iraq, and to project power against other countries in the region, particularly Iran" (Arnove 2007).

 

The task is to mask continued petro-imperialist occupation and control as "withdrawal" while deflecting and undermining legitimate calls for the payment of reparations for the monumental damage the American Empire has inflicted on Mesopotamia.

 

 

WHY THEY STILL HATE US

 

Meanwhile, the United States' dominant corporate War & Entertainment media - a critical component of the supposed "freedom" culture overseas Islamists are accused of blindly hating - renders Arab and Muslim victims of U.S. assault invisible to the citizens of the world's most powerful nation.

 

"Our" media was obsessed with the tragic murder of 32 innocent students at Virginia Tech but cannot bring itself to focus in any meaningful, honest or respectful way on routinely larger and daily civilian body counts in U.S.-mangled Iraq.

 

In a similar vein, "our" military offers hundreds of thousands of dollars for information about three U.S. soldiers ambushed south of Baghdad last May but gives paltry "blood money" payments of $500-$2500 to the family members of innocent civilians we butcher in the name of "democracy" in Iraq and Afghanistan. "We" valued the life of each U.S. civilian murdered by al-Qaeda terrorists on September 11, 2001 at $1.8 million (Mitchell 2007; Engelhardt 2007).

 

Gee, but is this all perhaps part of the answer to the great supposed mystery of "Why They Hate Us?"

 

Is it part of the response to the related question of why we will soon - early in 2009, according to Bill and Hillary Clinton - face another "terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11?" The Clintons make the likelihood of another 9/11 part of their 2008 campaign pitch for Hillary.  They take it to mean that the American people need an "experienced" foreign policymaker (Hillary, not Obama) in the White House after Bush II.  

 

Too bad Hillary Clinton is a highly experienced inciter of the Islamic world and the Middle East and thus a threat to the safety of ordinary Americans at home and abroad (Street 2007f).

 

 

HEGEMONY OVER SURVIVAL

 

But then U.S. policy has long privileged global dominance over "homeland security." As Noam Chomsky observed in July of 2005, when the strong military interventionist Hillary Clinton was still eagerly embracing the occupation of Iraq in the name of "democracy" (Gerth and Van Natta 2007):

 

"For U.S.-U.K. planners, invading Iraq was a far higher priority that the 'war on terror.' That much is revealed by the reports of their own intelligence agencies.   On the eve of the allied invasion, a classified report by National intelligence Council (NIC), the intelligence community's center for strategic thinking, 'predicted that an America-led invasion of Iraq would increase support for political Islam and would result in a deeply divided Iraqi society prone to violent internal conflict' ..the NIC warned that 'Iraq and other possible conflicts in the future could provide recruitment, training grounds, technical skills and language proficiency for a new class of terrorists who are 'professionalized' and for whom political violence becomes an end in itself.'"

 

"The willingness of top planners to risk increase of terrorism does not of course indicate that they welcome such outcomes.   Rather, they are simply not a high priority in comparison with other objectives, such as controlling the world's major energy resources" (Chomsky 2007, p.135).

 

 

RATIONAL FEAR AND PROJECTION

 

As Chomsky noted during a lecture in Iowa City in April of 2006, some of the remarkable fear Americans are encouraged by state and media authorities to feel about angry others wishing them harm is rational.   There was a significantly logical basis for 19th century white U.S frontier settlers' fear of Indian retaliation to imperial atrocities committed against First Nations peoples - slated for ethnic cleansing by the expanding white republic's "manifest destiny" of conquest.   Southern whites in colonial and antebellum America had reasons to fear occasional bloody slave rebellions.

 

In a similar vein, many of us Americans (many but not enough, thanks to biased media coverage) know in our bones that "our" imperial policymakers have been deeply inciting the people of the Middle East and the Muslim world. 

 

The Times editorial board is right to observe the Bush administration's cynical creation and manipulation of national security fears to quell domestic dissent.   But some of this fear is grounded in an accurate sense - a "gut feeling," one might say - that people wronged by "our" government and society might seek to fight back in desperate and destructive ways.  

 

Our "gut feeling" that something bad is coming around the corner is based partly on projection - on a sense of WHAT WE WOULD DO if we were under the sort of foreign attack that "our" government is launching on, say, the people of Iraq and the Middle East.   

 

What's new today - more rational basis for fear - is the relative ease with which victims (real and/or self-perceived) of imperial oppression can resort to mass violence to exploit Washington's choice of hegemony over survival.

 

The White House may be "playing on fear for political gain." But we shouldn't underestimate the significant extent to which mass fear of foreign terrorism is rationally rooted in a sense that foreign actors possess motive and capacity to inflict enormous damage on U.S. soil in response to brazen and audacious imperial provocation.

 

 

Veteran radical historian, journalist, and activist Paul Street ( paulstreet99@yahoo.com) is a Left commentator in Iowa City, IA. Street's latest book is Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).   Street is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004), Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005), and the semi-weekly Empire and Inequality Report.

 

 

SOURCES

 

Anthony Arnove 2007.  "Why Bush Won't Admit Fail;ure in Iraq," Socialist Worker (July 20, 2007), available online at http://socialistworker.org/2007-2/638/638_04_Arnove.shtml.

 

Associated Press 2007. "Chertoff Remark on Terror Elicits Little Alarm," July 11, 2007, available online at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19700127/.

 

Noam Chomsky 2003.  Hegemony Over Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance (New York: Metropolitan 2003).

 

Noam Chomsky 2007.  Interventions (San Francisco: City Lights, 2007).

 

Tom Engelhardt 2007. "What Price Slaughter?" Tom Dispatch, reproduced on ZNet (May 14, 2007) and available on at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle. cfm?ItemID=12829.

 

Glen Ford 2005.  "Obama Mouths Mush on War," Black Commentator (December 1, 2005), now available online at http://www.blackagendareport.com/archives/gf/gf_20051201_obama_mushmouf.php.

 

Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. 2007.  Hillary's War," New York Times Sunday Magazine (June 3 2007), p. 41.

 

Jeffrey Goldberg 2007.  "The Starting Gate: Foreign Policy Divides the Democrats," The New Yorker, January 15, 2007.

 

Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian 2007.  "The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness," The Nation (July 30, 2007).

New York Times Editorial Board 2007.  "The Politics of Fear," New York Times, 18 July 2007, p. A18.

 

Barack Obama 2006. The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York, NY: Crown, 2006).   

 

Michael Scheurer ("Anonymous") 2004.  Imperial Hubris: Why the West is losing the War on Terror ( Washington D.C.: Brasseys, Inc., 2004).

 

Paul Street 2007a.  "We've Done a Lot More Than Talk," Empire and Inequality Report No. 7 (January 19 2007), available online at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=11895.

 

Paul Street 2007b.  "'We've Done Our Part:' The Democratic Party Line on the United States' Commitment to Peace and Democracy Within and Beyond Iraq," Empire and Inequality Report No. 14 (March 27, 2007), available online at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12432.

 

Paul Street 2007c.  "Imperial Temptations: John Edwards, Barack Obama and the Myth of Post-WWII U.S. Benevolence," Empire and Inequality Report No. 19 (May 28 2007), available online at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12928 .

 

Paul Street 2007d. "Obama's Audacious Deference to Power," Black Agenda Report (January 31, 2007) available online at http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=61.

 

Paul Street 2007e.  "Sitting Out the Obama Dance Iowa City," ZNet (April 28 2007), available online at http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=12687§ionID=1.

 

Paul Street 2007f.  "Hillary's War and the Next 9/11," Empire and Inequality Report, No, 21 (July 5 2007), available online at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=13215.

 

Ian Urbina 2007.  "Even as Loved Ones Fight On, War Doubts Arise," New York Times, 15 July 2007, p. A1.