Why Americans Must End America’s Self-Generating Wars
By Prof. Peter Dale Scott
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Global Research, August 30, 2012
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URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=32572
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The
most urgent political challenge to the world today is how to prevent
the so-called “pax Americana” from progressively degenerating, like the
19th-century so-called “pax Britannica” before it, into major
global warfare. I say “so-called,” because each “pax,” in its final
stages, became less and less peaceful, less and less orderly, more and
more a naked imposition of belligerent competitive power based on
inequality.
To define this prevention of war as an achievable
goal may sound pretentious. But the necessary steps to be taken are
above all achievable here at home in America. And what is needed is not
some radical and untested new policy, but a much-needed realistic
reassessment and progressive scaling back of two discredited policies
that are themselves new, and demonstrably counterproductive.
I am referring above all to America’s so-called War
on Terror. American politics, both foreign and domestic, are being
increasingly deformed by a war on terrorism that is counter-productive,
producing more terrorists every year than eliminates. It is also
profoundly dishonest, in that Washington’s policies actually contribute
to the funding and arming of the jihadists that it nominally opposes.
Above all the War on Terror is a self-generating war,
because, as many experts have warned, it produces more terrorists than
it eliminates. And it has become inextricably combined with America’s
earlier self-generating and hopelessly unwinnable war, the so-called War
on Drugs.
The two self-generating
wars have in effect become one. By launching a War on Drugs in Colombia
and Mexico, America has contributed to a parastate of organized terror
in Colombia (the so-called AUC, United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia)
and an even bloodier reign of terror in Mexico (with 50,000 killed in
the last six years).1 By launching a War on Terror in
Afghanistan in 2001, America has contributed to a doubling of opium
production there, making Afghanistan now the source of 90 percent of the
world’s heroin and most of the world’s hashish.2
Americans should be aware
of the overall pattern that drug production repeatedly rises where
America intervenes militarily – Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 60s,
Colombia and Afghanistan since then. (Opium cultivation also increased
in Iraq after the 2003 US invasion.)3 And the opposite
is also true: where America ceases to intervene militarily, notably in
Southeast Asia since the 1970s, drug production declines.4
Both of America’s self-generating wars are lucrative to the private interests that lobby for their continuance.5
At the same time, both of these self-generating wars contribute to
increasing insecurity and destabilization in America and in the world.
Thus, by a paradoxical dialectic, America’s New World
Order degenerates progressively into a New World Disorder. And at home
the seemingly indomitable national security state, beset by the problems
of poverty, income disparity, and drugs, becomes, progressively, a
national insecurity state and one gripped by political gridlock.
The purpose of this paper is to argue, using the analogy of British errors in the late 19th
century, for a progressive return to a more stable and just
international order, by a series of concrete steps, some of them
incremental. Using the decline of Britain as an example, I hope to
demonstrate that the solution cannot be expected from the current party
political system, but must come from people outside that system.
The Follies of the Late 19th Century Pax Britannica
The final errors of British
imperial leaders are particularly instructive for our predicament
today. In both cases power in excess of defense needs led to more and
more unjust, and frequently counter-productive, expansions of influence.
My account in the following paragraphs is one-sidedly negative,
ignoring positive achievements abroad in the areas of health and
education. But the consolidation of British power led to the
impoverishment abroad of previously wealthy countries like India, and
also of British workers at home.6
A main reason for the latter was, as Kevin Phillips
has demonstrated, the increasing outward flight of British investment
capital and productive capacity:
The dangers of increasing
income and wealth disparity in Britain were easily recognized at the
time, including by the young politician Winston Churchill.8 But only a few noticed the penetrating analysis by John A. Hobson in his book Imperialism
(1902), that an untrammeled search for profit that directed capital
abroad created a demand for an oversized defense establishment to
protect it, leading in turn to wider and wilder use abroad of Britain’s
armies. Hobson defined the imperialism of his time, which he dated from
about 1870, as “a debasement ... of genuine nationalism, by attempts to
overflow its natural banks and absorb the near or distant territory of
reluctant and inassimilable peoples.”9
The earlier British empire could be said by a British historian in 1883 to have been “acquired in a fit of absence of mind,"
but this could not be said of Cecil Rhodes’s advances in Africa.
Maldistribution of wealth was an initial cause of British expansion, and
also an inevitable consequence of it. Much of Hobson’s book attacked
western exploitation of the Third World, especially in Africa and Asia.10 He thus echoed Thucydides description of
Both the apogee of the British empire and the start
of its decline can be dated to the 1850s. In that decade London
instituted direct control over India, displacing the nakedly
exploitative East India Company.
But in the same decade Britain sided with France’s
nakedly expansionist Napoleon III (and the decadent Ottoman empire) in
his ambitions against Russia’s status in the Holy Land. Although Britain
was victorious in that war, historians have since judged that victory
to be a chief cause of the breakdown in the balance of power that had
prevailed in Europe since the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Thus the
legacy of the war for Britain was a more modernized and efficient army,
together with a more insecure and unstable world. (Historians may in
future come to judge that NATO’s Libyan venture of 2011 played a similar
role in ending the era of U.S.-Russian détente.)
The Crimean War also saw
the emergence of perhaps the world’s first significant antiwar movement
in Britain, even though that movement is often remembered chiefly for
its role in ending the active political roles of its main leaders, John
Cobden and John Bright.12 In the short run, Britain’s
governments and leaders moved to the right, leading (for example) to
Gladstone’s bombardment of Alexandria in 1882 to recover the debts owed
by the Egyptians to private British investors.
Reading Hobson’s economic analysis in the light of Thucydides, we can focus on the moral factor of emergent hubristic greed (pleonexia)
fostered by unrestrained British power. In 1886 the discovery of
colossal gold deposits in the nominally independent Boer Republic of the
Transvaal attracted the attention of Cecil Rhodes, already wealthy from
South African diamonds and mining concessions he had acquired by deceit
in Matabeleland. Rhodes now saw an opportunity to acquire goldfields in
the Transvaal as well, by overthrowing the Boer government with the
support of the uitlanders or foreigners who
had flocked to the Transvaal.
In 1895, after direct plotting with the uitlanders
failed, Rhodes, in his capacity as Prime Minister of the British Cape
Colony, sponsored an invasion of Transvaal with the so-called Jameson
Raid, a mixed band of Mounted Police and mercenary volunteers. The raid
was not only a failure, but a scandal: Rhodes was forced to resign as
Prime Minister and his brother went to jail. The details of the Jameson
raid and resulting Boer War are too complex to be recounted here; but
the end result was that after the Boer War the goldfields fell largely
into the hands of Rhodes.
The next step in Rhodes’ well-funded expansiveness
was his vision of a Cape-to-Cairo railway through colonies all
controlled by Britain. As we shall see in a moment, this vision provoked
a competing French vision of an east-east railway, leading to the first
of a series of crises from imperial competition that progressively
escalated towards World War I.
According to Carroll
Quigley, Rhodes also founded a secret society for the further expansion
of the British empire, an offshoot of which was the Round Table which in
turn generated the Royal Institute of International Affairs. In 1917
some members of the American Round Table also helped found the RIIA’s
sister organization, the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations
(CFR).13
Some have found Quigley’s
argument overstated. But whether one agrees with him or not, one can see
a continuity between the expansionist acquisitiveness of Rhodes in
Africa in the 1890s and the post-war acquisitiveness of UK and American
oil corporations in the CFR-backed coups in Iran (1953), Indonesia
(1965), and Cambodia (1970).14 In all these cases
private acquisitive greed (albeit of corporations rather than an
individual) led to state violence and/or war as a matter of public
policy. And the outcomes enriched and strengthened private corporations
in what I have called the American war machine, thus rendering less weak
those institutions representing the public interest.
My main point is that the progressive build-up of the
British navy and armies provoked, predictably, a responsive build-up
from other powers, particularly France and Germany; and this ultimately
made World War I (and its sequel, World War II) all but inevitable. In
retrospect it is easy to see that the arms build-up contributed,
disastrously, not to security but to more and more perilous insecurity,
dangerous not just to the imperial powers themselves but to the world.
Because American global dominance surpasses what Britain’s ever was, we
have not hitherto seen a similar backlash in competitiveness from other
states; but we are beginning to see a backlash build-up (or what the
media call terrorism) from increasingly oppressed peoples.
In retrospect one can see
also that the progressive impoverishment of India and other colonies
guaranteed that the empire would become progressively more unstable, and
doomed in its last days to be shut down. This was not obvious at the
time; and comparatively few Britons in the 19th century,
other than Hobson, challenged the political decisions that led from the
Long Depression of the 1870s to the European “Scramble for Africa,” and
the related arms race.15 Yet when we look back today
on these decisions, and the absurd but ominous crises they led to in
distant corners of Africa like Fashoda (1898) and Agadir (1911), we have
to marvel at the short-sighted and narrow stupidity of the so-called
statesmen of that era.16
We also note how
international crises could be initially provoked by very small,
uncontrolled, bureaucratic cabals. The Fashoda incident in South Sudan
involved a small troupe of 132 French officers and soldiers who had
trekked for 14 months, in vain hopes of establishing a west-to-east
French presence across Africa (thus breaching Rhodes’ vision of a
north-to-south British presence.17 The 1911 provocative arrival (in the so-called “Panther leap” or Panzersprung)
of the German gunboat Panzer at Agadir in Morocco was the foolish
brainchild of a Deputy Secretary of Foreign Affairs; its chief result
was the cementing of the Anglo-French Entente Cordiale, thus
contributing to Germany’s defeat in World War I.18
The Pax Americana in the Light of the Pax Britannica
The world is not condemned to repeat this tragedy
under the Pax Americana. Global interdependence and above all
communications have greatly improved. We possess the knowledge, the
abilities, and the incentives to understand historical processes more
skillfully than before. Above all it is increasingly evident to a global
minority that American hypermilitarism, in the name of security, is
becoming – much like British hypermilitarism in the 19th century -- a threat to everyone’s security, including America’s, by inducing and increasingly seeking wider and wider wars.
There is one consolation for Americans in this
increasing global disequilibrium. As the causes for global insecurity
become more and more located in our own country, so also do the
remedies. More than their British predecessors, Americans have an
opportunity that other peoples do not, to diminish global tensions and
move towards a more equitable global regimen. Of course one cannot
predict that such a restoration can be achieved. But the disastrous end
of the Pax Britannica, and the increasingly heavy burdens borne by
Americans, suggest that it is necessary. For American unilateral
expansionism, like Britain’s before it, is now contributing to a
breakdown of the understandings and international legal arrangements
(notably those of the UN Charter) that for some decades contributed to
relative stability.
It needs to be stated clearly that the American arms
build-up today is the leading cause in the world of a global arms
build-up – one that is ominously reminiscent of the arms race, fuelled
by the British armaments industry, that led to the 1911 Agadir incident
and soon after to World War I. But today’s arms build-up cannot be
called an arms race: it is so dominated by America (and its NATO allies,
required by NATO policy to have compatible armaments) that the
responsive arms sales of Russia and China are small by comparison:
A year later America’s total dominance of overseas
arms sales had more than doubled, to represent 79 percent of global arms
sales:
And what is NATO’s primary activity today requiring
arms? Not defense against Russia, but support for America in its
self-generating War on Terror, in Afghanistan as once in Iraq. The War
on Terror should be seen for what it really is: a pretext for
maintaining a dangerously oversized U.S. military, in an increasingly
unstable exercise of unjust power.
In other words America is
by far the chief country flooding the world with armaments today. It is
imperative that Americans force a reassessment of this incentive to
global poverty and insecurity. We need to recall Eisenhower’s famous
warning in 1953 that “Every gun that is made, every warship launched,
every rocket fired signifies, is in the final sense, a theft from those
who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”21
It is worth recalling that
President Kennedy, in his American University speech of June 10, 1963,
called for a vision of peace that would explicitly not be “a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.”22
His vision was wise, if short-lived. After sixty years of the American
security system – the so-called “Pax Americana” – America itself is ever
more caught up in an increasingly paranoid condition of psychological
insecurity. Traditional features of American culture – such as respect
for habeas corpus and international law – are being jettisoned at home
and abroad because of a so-called terrorist threat that is largely of
America’s own making.
The Covert US-Saudi Alliance and the War on Terror
Of the $66.3 billion in
U.S. overseas arms sales in 2011, over half, or $33.4 billion, consisted
of sales to Saudi Arabia. This included dozens of Apache and Black Hawk
helicopters, weapons described by the New York Times, as needed
for defense against Iran, but more suitable for Saudi Arabia’s
increasing involvement in aggressive asymmetric wars (e.g. in Syria).23
These Saudi arms sales are
not incidental; they reflect an agreement between the two countries to
offset the flow of US dollars to pay for Saudi oil. During the oil price
hikes of 1971 and 1973 Nixon and Kissinger negotiated a deal with both
Saudi Arabia and Iran to pay significantly higher prices for crude, on
the understanding that the two countries would then recycle the
petrodollars by various means, prominently arms deals.24
The wealth of the two
nations, America and Saudi Arabia, has become ever more interdependent.
This is ironic. In the words of a leaked US cable, “Saudi donors remain
the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda.”25
The Rabita or Muslim World League, launched and largely funded by the
Saudi royal family, has provided an international meeting place for
international Salafists including some al Qaeda leaders.26
In short, the wealth generated by the Saudi-American
relationship is funding both the al Qaeda-type jihadists of the world
today and America’s self-generating war against them. The result is an
incremental militarization of the world abroad and America at home, as
new warfronts in the so-called War on Terror emerge, predictably, in
previously peaceful areas like Mali.
The media tend to present the “War on Terror” as a
conflict between lawful governments and fanatical peace-hating Islamist
fundamentalists. In fact in most countries, America and Britain not
excepted, there is a long history of occasional collaboration with the
very forces which at other times they oppose.
Today America’s foreign
policies and above all covert operations are increasingly chaotic. In
some countries, notably Afghanistan, the US is fighting jihadists that
the CIA supported in the 1980s, and that are still supported today by
our nominal allies Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. In some countries, notably
Libya, we have provided protection and indirect support to the same
kind of jihadis. In some countries, notably Kosovo, we have helped bring
these jihadis to power.27
One country where American authorities conceded its
clients were supporting jihadis is Yemen. As Christopher Boucek reported
some years ago to the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace,
In March 2011 the same scholar, Christopher Boucek,
observed that America’s war on terror had resulted in the propping up of
an unpopular government, thus helping it avoid needed reforms:
Stated more bluntly: One major reason why Yemen (like
other countries) remains backward and a fertile ground for jihadi
terrorism is America’s war on terror itself.
America’s is not the only
foreign security policy contributing to the crisis in Yemen. Saudi
Arabia has had a stake in reinforcing the jihadi influence in republican
Yemen, ever since the Saudi royal family in the 1960s used conservative
hill tribes in northern Yemen to repel an attack on southern Saudi
Arabia by the Nasser-backed republican Yemeni government.30
These machinations of
governments and their intelligence agencies can create conditions of
impenetrable obscurity. For example, as Sen. John Kerry has reported,
one of the top leaders of Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP) “is a
Saudi citizen who was repatriated to Saudi Arabia from Guantanamo in
November 2007 and returned to militancy [in Yemen] after completing a
rehabilitation course in Saudi Arabia.”31
Like other nations, America
is no stranger to the habit of making deals with al Qaeda jihadis, to
aid them to fight abroad in areas of mutual interest -- such as Bosnia –
in exchange for not acting as terrorists at home. This practice clearly
contributed to the World Trade Center bombing of 1993, when at least
two of the bombers had been protected from arrest because of their
participation in a Brooklyn-based program preparing Islamists for
Bosnia. In 1994 the FBI secured the release in Canada of a U.S.-Al Qaeda
double agent at the Brooklyn center, Ali Mohamed, who promptly went on
to Kenya where (according to the 9/11 Commission Report) he “led” the
organizers of the 1998 attack on the U.S. Embassy.32
Saudi Arabian Support for Terrorists
Perhaps the foremost
practitioner of this game is Saudi Arabia, which has not only exported
jihadis to all parts of the globe but (as previously noted) has financed
them, sometimes in alliance with the United States. A New York Times
article in 2010 about leaked diplomatic cables quoted from one of the
diplomatic dispatches: “Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of
Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda.”33
Back in 2007 the London Sunday Times also reported that
Similar reports of Saudi funding have come from authorities in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, according to Rachel Ehrenfeld:
However the Saudi backing of al Qaeda was not, according to the Times, limited to funds:
The Example of Mali
Something similar is
happening today in Africa, where Saudi Wahhabist fundamentalism “has
grown in recent years in Mali with young imams returning from studying
on the Arab peninsula.”37 The world
press, including Al Jazeera, has reported on the destruction of historic tombs by local jihadis:
But most of these stories (including al Jazeera’s)
have failed to point out that the destruction of tombs has long been a
Wahhabi practice not only endorsed but carried out by the Saudi
government:
The Chance of Peace and Insecurity, the Chief Impediment to It
Today one must distinguish between the Saudi Arabian
Kingdom and the Wahhabism promoted by senior Saudi clerics and some
members of the Saudi Royal Family. King Abdullah in particular has
reached out to other religions, visiting the Vatican in 2007 and
encouraging an interfaith conference with Christian and Jewish leaders,
which took place in 2008.
In 2002 Abdullah, as Crown Prince, also submitted a
proposal for Arab-Israeli peace to a summit of Arab League nations. The
plan, which has been endorsed by Arab League governments on many
occasions, called for normalizing relations between the entire Arab
region and Israel, in exchange for a complete withdrawal from the
occupied territories (including East Jerusalem) and a "just settlement"
of the Palestinian refugee crisis based on UN Resolution 194. It was
spurned in 2002 by Israel’s Sharon and also by Bush and Cheney, who at
the time were determined to go to war in Iraq. But as David Ottaway of
the Woodrow Wilson Center has noted,
The plan has no traction in
2012, with Israel hinting at action against Iran and America paralyzed
by an election year. However Israeli President Shimon Peres welcomed the
initiative in 2009; and George Mitchell, President Obama’s special
envoy to the Middle East, announced in the same year that the Obama
administration intended to "incorporate" the initiative into its Middle
East policy.41
These voices of support
indicate that a peace agreement in the Middle East is theoretically
possible, but by no means do they make it likely. Any peace settlement
would require trust, and trust is difficult when all parties are beset
by a sense of insecurity about their nations’ futures. Pro-Zionist
commentators like Charles Krauthammer recall that for thirty years
before Camp David, the destruction of Israel was “the unanimous goal of
the Arab League.”42 Many Palestinians, and most of
Hamas, fear that a peace settlement would leave unsatisfied, and indeed
extinguish, their demands for a just settlement of grievances.
Insecurity is particularly widespread in the Middle
East because of the widespread resentment there against injustice, which
insecurity both grows from and propagates. Much of the global status
quo has its origins in injustice; but the injustice in the Middle East,
on all sides, is extreme, recent, and ongoing. I say this only to offer
this advice to Americans: to keep in mind that the issues of security
and justice cannot be separated.
Above all, one thing called for is compassion. We as
Americans must understand that both Israelis and Palestinians live in
conditions not remote from a state of war; yet both have reason to fear
that a peace settlement might leave them even worse off than in their
present uncomfortable situation. Too many innocent civilians have been
killed in the Middle East. American actions should not increase that
number.
This sense of insecurity, the major impediment to
peace, is not confined to the Middle East. Since 9/11 Americans have
experienced the anguish of insecurity, and this is the major reason why
there is so little American resistance to the manifest follies of the
Bush-Cheney-Obama War on Terror.
The War on Terror promises to make America more
secure, yet in fact continues to guarantee the proliferation of
America’s terrorist enemies. It also continues to disseminate the War
into new battlefields, notably Pakistan and Yemen. By thus creating its
own enemies, the War on Terror, now solidly entrenched in bureaucratic
inertia, seems likely to continue unabated. In this it is much like the
equally ill-considered War on Drugs, dedicated to maintaining the high
costs and profits that attract new traffickers.
Above all this contributes to Islamic insecurity as
well, causing more and more Muslims to deal with the fear that
civilians, not just jihadi terrorists, will be the victims of drone
attacks. Insecurity in the Middle East is the major obstacle to peace
there. Palestinians live in daily fear of oppression by West Bank
settlers and retaliation by the Israeli state. The Israelis live in
constant fear of hostile neighbors. So does the Saudi royal family.
Insecurity and instability have increased together since 9/11 and the
War on Terror.
Middle Eastern insecurity
replicates itself on a wider and wider scale. Israeli fear of Iran and
Hizbollah is matched by Iranian fear of Israeli threats of massive
attacks on its nuclear installations. And recently former U.S. hawks
like Zbigniew Brzezinski have warned that an Israeli attack on Iran
could lead to a longer war that spreads elsewhere.43
Above all, in my opinion, Americans should fear the insecurity spread by
drone attacks. If not soon stopped, America’s drone
attacks threaten to do what America’s atomic attacks did in 1945: lead
to a world in which many powers, not just one, possess this weapon and
may possibly use it. In this case the most likely new target by far
would be the United States.
How long will it be, I wonder, before a prevailable
force of Americans will recognize the predictable course of this
self-generating war, and mobilize against it?
What Is to Be Done?
This paper has argued, using the analogy of British errors in the late 19th
century, for a progressive return to a more stable and just
international order, by a series of concrete steps, some of them
incremental:
Forty years ago I would have appealed to Congress to
take these steps to defuse the state of paranoia we are living under.
Today I have come to see that Congress itself is dominated by the powers
that profit from what I have called America’s global war machine. The
so-called “statesmen” of America are as dedicated to the preservation of
American dominance as were their British predecessors.
But to say this is not to despair of America’s
ability to change direction. We should keep in mind that four decades
ago domestic political protest played a critical role in helping to end
an unjustified war in Vietnam. It is true that in 2003 similar protests –
involving one million Americans – failed to impede America’s entry into
an unjustified war in Iraq. Nevertheless, the large number of
protesters, assembled under relatively short notice, was impressive. The
question is whether protesters can adapt their tactics to new realities
and mount a sustained and effective campaign.
Under the guise of COG planning, the American war
machine has been preparing for forty years to neutralize street antiwar
protests. Taking cognizance of this, and using the folly of British
hypermilitarism as an example, today’s antiwar movement must learn how
to apply coordinated pressure within American institutions – not just by
“occupying” the streets with the aid of the homeless. It is not enough
simply to denounce, as did Churchill in 1908, the increasing disparity
of wealth between rich and poor. One must go beyond this to see the
origins of this disparity in dysfunctional institutional arrangements
that are corrigible. And one of the chief of these is the so-called War
on Terror.
No one can predict the success of such a movement.
But I believe that global developments will persuade more and more
Americans that it is necessary. It should appeal to a broad spectrum of
the American electorate, from the viewers of Democracy Now on the left
to the libertarian followers of Murray Rothbard, Ron Paul, and Lew
Rockwell on the right.
And I believe also that a well-coordinated nonviolent
antiwar minority – of from two to five million, acting with the
resources of truth and common sense on their side – can win. America’s
core political institutions at present are both dysfunctional and
unpopular: Congress in particular has an approval rating of about ten
percent. A more serious problem is the determined resistance of
corporate and personal wealth to reasonable reforms; but the more
nakedly wealth shows its undemocratic influence, the more evident will
become the need to curb its abuses. Currently wealth has targeted for
removal Congress members who have been guilty of compromise to solve
government problems. Surely there is an American majority out there to
be mobilized for a return to common sense.
Clearly new strategies and techniques of protest will
be needed. It is not the purpose here to define them, but future
protests – or cyberprotests – will predictably make more skillful use of
the Internet.
I repeat that one cannot be confident of victory in
the struggle for sanity against special interests and ignorant
ideologues. But with the increasing danger of a calamitous international
conflict, the need to mobilize for sanity is increasingly clear. The
study of history is one of the most effective ways to avoid repeating
it.
Are these hopes for protest mere wishful thinking? Very possibly. But, wishful or not, I consider them to be necessary.
Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His most recent book is American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan. His website, which contains a wealth of his writings, is here.
Recommended citation: Peter Dale Scott, "Why Americans Must End America’s Self-Generating Wars," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 10, Issue 36, No. 2, September 3, 2012.
Notes
1 Oliver Villar and Drew Cottle, Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror: U.S. Imperialism and Class Struggle in Colombia (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011); Peter Watt and Roberto Zepeda, Drug War Mexico: Politics, Neoliberalism and Violence in the New Narcoeconomy (London: Zed Books, 2012); Mark Karlin, “How the Militarized War on Drugs in Latin America Benefits Transnational Corporations and Undermines Democracy,” Truthout, August 5, 2012.
2 Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 217-37.
3 Patrick Cockburn, “Opium: Iraq's deadly new export,” Independent (London), May 23, 2007.
4 Scott, American War Machine, 134-40.
5 See Mark Karlin, “How the Militarized War on Drugs in Latin America Benefits Transnational Corporations and Undermines Democracy,” Truthout, August 5, 2012.
6 Sekhara Bandyopadhyaya, From Plassey to Partition: A History of Modern India (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2004), 231.
7 Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), 185.
8 “The
seed of imperial ruin and national decay – the unnatural gap between the
rich and the poor.... the swift increase of vulgar, jobless luxury –
are the enemies of Britain” (Winston Churchill, quoted in Phillips, Wealth and Democracy, 171).
9 John A. Hobson, Imperialism
(London: Allen and Unwin, 1902; reprint, 1948), 6. The book’s chief
impact in Britain at the time was to permanently stunt Hobson’s career
as an economist.
10 Hobson, Imperialism, 12. Cf. Arthur M. Eckstein, "Is There a 'Hobson–Lenin Thesis' on Late Nineteenth-Century Colonial Expansion?" Economic History Review, May 1991, 297–318, especially 298-300.
11 Peter
Dale Scott, "The Doomsday Project, Deep Events, and the Shrinking of
American Democracy," Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, January 21,
2011, http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3476.
12 See Ralph Raico, “Introduction,” Great Wars and Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2010), http://mises.org/daily/5088/Neither-the-Wars-Nor-the-Leaders-Were-Great.
13 Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time
(G,S,G, & Associates, 1975); Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American
Establishment (GSG Associates publishers, 1981),
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/New_World_Order/Anglo_American_Estab.html.
Discussion in Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, The Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations & United States Foreign Policy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), 12-14; Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader , 332.
14 For the little-noticed interest of oil companies in Cambodian offshore oilfields, see Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation, 2008), 216-37.
15 Thomas Pakenham, Scramble for Africa: The White Man's Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876-1912 (New York: Random House, 1991).
16 See the various books by Barbara Tuchman, notably The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (New York: Knopf, 1984).
17 Pakenham, Scramble for Africa.
18 E. Oncken, Panzersprung nach Agadir. Die deutsche Politik wtihrend der zweiten Marokkokrise 1911 (Dilsseldorf, 1981). Panzersprung in German has come to be a metaphor for any gratuitous exhibition of gunboat diplomacy.
19 Thom Shanker, “Global Arms Sales Dropped Sharply in 2010, Study Finds,” New York Times, September 23, 2011.
20 Thom Shanker, "U.S. Arms Sales Make Up Most of Global Market,” New York Times, August 27, 2012.
21 Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier and President (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 325,
22 Robert Dallek, An unfinished life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 2003.). 50.
23 Shanker, "U.S. Arms Sales Make Up Most of Global Market,” New York Times, August 27, 2012.
24 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 33-37.
25 Scott
Shane and Andrew W. Lehren, “Leaked Cables Offer Raw Look at U.S.
Diplomacy,” New York Times, Hovember 29, 2010. Cf. Nick Fielding and
Sarah Baxter, “Saudi Arabia is hub of world terror: The desert kingdom
supplies the cash and the killers,” Times (London), 2007,
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2007/11/saudi-arabia-is-hub-of-world-terror-the-desert-kingdom-supplies-the-cash-and-the-killers.html.
26 The
United Nations has listed the branch offices in Indonesia and the
Philippines of the Rabita’s affiliate, the International Islamic Relief
Organization, as belonging to or associated with al-Qaeda.
27 See Peter Dale Scott, "Bosnia, Kosovo, and Now Libya: The Human Costs of Washington's On-Going Collusion with Terrorists,"
Asian-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, July 29, 2011; also William Blum,
“The United States and Its Comrade-in-Arms, Al Qaeda,” Counterpunch,
August 13, 2012,
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/08/13/tales-of-an-empire-gone-mad/.
28 Christopher Boucek, “Yemen: Avoiding a Downward Spiral,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 12.
29 “In
Yemen, 'Too Many Guns and Too Many Grievances' as President Clings to
Power,” PBS Newshour, March 21, 2011,
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/world/jan-june11/yemen_03-21.html.
30 Robert Lacey, The Kingdom: Arabia and the House of Sa’ud (New York: Avon, 1981), 346-47, 361.
31 John Kerry, Al Qaeda in Yemen and Somalia: A Ticking Time Bomb: a Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations (Washington: U.S. G.P.O., 2010), 10.
32 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 152-56.
33 Scott Shane and Andrew W. Lehren, “Leaked Cables Offer Raw Look at U.S. Diplomacy,” New York Times, November 29, 2010.
34 Nick Fielding and Sarah Baxter, “Saudi Arabia is hub of world terror,” Sunday Times
(London), November 4, 2007: “Extremist clerics provide a stream of
recruits to some of the world's nastiest trouble spots. An analysis by
NBC News suggested that the Saudis make up 55% of foreign fighters in
Iraq. They are also among the most uncompromising and militant.”
35 Rachel
Ehrenfeld, “Al-Qaeda's Source of Funding from Drugs and Extortion
Little Affected by bin Laden's Death,” Cutting Edge, May 9, 2011,
http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=51969&pageid=20&pagename=Security.
36 Sunday Times (London), November 4, 2007.
37 BBC, July 17, 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-18870130.
38 Al Jazeera, July 19, 2012, http://m.aljazeera.com/SE/201271012301347496.
39 The Weekly Standard, May 30, 2005, http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/642eforh.asp. Cf. Newsweek, May 30, 2005. Adapted from Hilmi Isik Advice for the Muslim, (Istanbul: Hakikat Kitabevi).
40 David Ottaway, “The King and Us: U.S.-Saudi Relations in the Wake of 9/11, Foreign Affairs, May-June 2009.
41 Barak
Ravid, “U.S. Envoy: Arab Peace Initiative Will Be Part of Obama Policy,”
Haaretz, April 5, 2009. David Ottaway, “The King and Us Subtitle:
U.S.-Saudi Relations in the Wake of 9/11, Foreign Affairs, May-June 2009.
42 Charles Krauthammer, “At Last, Zion: Israel and the Fate of the Jews,” Weekly Standard, May 11, 1998.
43 “We
have no idea how such a wald r wouend,” [Brzezinski] said. “Iran has
military capabilities, it could retaliate by destabilizing Iraq” (Salon, March 14, 2012).
44 See Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2007), 183-242; Peter Dale Scott, "Is
the State of Emergency Superseding our Constitution? Continuity of
Government Planning, War and American Society,” Asia-Pacific Journal:
Japan Focus, November 28, 2010,
http:/1/japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3448.
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