9-11-07, 9:20 am
World War II began officially in September 1939 with the Nazi attack on Poland and ended officially six years later with the Japanese surrender on the U.S. battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. World War II was the greatest war in human history in terms of human life with well over 60 million killed by contemporary statistics and untold millions wounded, maimed, and injured, both physically and psychologically.
The World Trade Center was destroyed on September 11, 2001, with nearly 3,000 Americans and citizens of other nations murdered in the wreckage. The destruction of the World Trade Center ushered in what the Bush administration immediately called and has continued to call a global “war against terrorism.” Other countries, even Bush's closest ally Great Britain, have resisted using that term, realizing that anti-terrorism is now and has always been primarily a criminal rather than a military matter (the two, while there is overlap, are essentially separate) and that grandiose proclamations about a “war against terrorism” aids terrorist groups by giving them the attention that they seek.
Six years after the September 11 attacks, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan has been ousted and the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq has been ousted in the name of fighting the “war against terrorism.” The Bush administration has created a “Department of Homeland Security” to do work that was formerly under the Justice and Interior Departments and has spent hundreds of billions of dollars in its wars abroad as part of its “war against terrorism.” The “Patriot Act” has been passed, civil liberties protections have been undermined, and the U.S. base at Guantanamo in Cuba has become the most infamous prison camp in the world.
Hundreds of people in the developed countries have been killed in terrorist attacks and hundreds of thousands have perished in Afghanistan and Iraq as a consequence of the “war against terrorism.”
And, of course, the Al Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden, has sent out a this week crackpot video tape calling upon “America” to convert to the Muslim religion if “America” wishes to prevent new 9/11 attacks. Mass media is giving this video great attention and talking head analysis, which of course is exactly what bin Laden wants.
Feudal reactionary Saudi Arabia, from where bin Laden came as the fund-raiser and leader of “Saudi” Jihadists (“freedom fighters” they were called by the Reagan administration in the 1980s), remains rich, unstable, and a “geographical expression” based on a holy and not so holy alliance of feudal rulers and transnational oil companies. The large polygamous bin Laden family (polygamy of course legal in “Saudi” Arabia) is richer than it was in 2001 from my readings, having profited from the “war against terrorism” that their black sheep and former CIA asset, Osama, helped to create. The Afghanistan-Pakistan border areas where Al Qaeda was created in 1988 with CIA knowledge as part of the war against the Communist-led government is today the world center for both the Taliban and Al Qaeda as they fight against the U.S.-NAT0 backed government in Kabul and also train terrorists for attacks through the world (as recent arrests in Germany show).
Six years after the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration has led the nation and those allies it still has left into a disaster of mind boggling proportions. Perhaps a concept from the beginning of World War II can help us understand the disaster and act against it. From September 1939 to the spring of 1940, the American press called the war in Europe a “phony war” in which the Chamberlain government in Britain was making propaganda, holding its armies with the French at the Maginot line, doing next to nothing to assist Poland, which was conquered by the fascist war machine in a matter of weeks.
How could Chamberlain, who had orchestrated the appeasement policy toward Hitler and had aided pro-fascist forces in Spain and actually hoped Hitler would turn east and attack the USSR, suddenly change course and fight him. The answer of course is that he couldn't just like Bush and the right-wing Republicans in the U.S., however bellicose their rhetoric is for domestic political consumption, can't fight Osama bin Laden.
The “phony war” ended by June 1940, with the Nazi Blitzkrieg conquering Western Europe and the French Right signing a separate peace with Hitler and establishing the fascist collaborator government at Vichy. Chamberlain was literally in the nick of time replaced by Winston Churchill, as much an imperialist and conservative as Chamberlain, but one who had advocated opposing rather than appeasing Hitler in order to save the British Empire. The heroism of the British people and U.S. aid to Britain enabled Britain to survive rather than follow the path of France and sign a separate peace with Hitler, which many on the British right wing and in the ruling class were willing to do in 1940.
Eventually, the U.S.-Soviet-British alliance, with the Soviets making by far the greatest contribution to victory against the fascist Axis forces in Europe, defeated Hitler, his myriad of European allies and puppets, and the Japanese Empire in the Asia-Pacific region six years after the war began where the US, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, and a host of national liberation movements making huge contributions to victory in the Pacific.
Bush is still in power in the U.S. and the “phony war” against terrorism, while the dangers are not comparable to what they were in the spring of 1940, has lasted now for six years. Let us look at the disastrous course that this administration and the “coalition of the willing” who for whatever reasons have followed it have carried forward over these last six years.
Terrorists seek attention in order to distract people from the truth that they are too weak to fight either conventional or guerrilla wars. In the early aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration and its mass media collaborators gave them enhanced attention by spreading terror through the U.S. population, highlighting poisonous anthrax letters sent to government offices. It has been believed for years that these letters had nothing to do with the Al Qaeda group or similar group, but the administration used them to heighten fears in order to get Congress to give it what it wanted. (Heightening fears was and is exactly what terrorists want and what they are largely about.)
The administration with bipartisan support than used the attacks and its proclaimed “war against international terrorism” to launch spectacular increases in military spending. Here one should remember that the development of the cold war after World War II had led in the U.S. to the institutionalizing of what sociologist C. Wright Mills called a “permanent war economy” and what President Dwight Eisenhower in his Farewell Address called a “military industrial complex.”
Rather than engage in an extensive critique of these policies for our readers, let me say that the rationale for them was to oppose the Soviet Union, the socialist state which emerged from World War II even with its enormous devastation as the only military power on earth capable of challenging or resisting U.S. power, and revolutionary Communist and other anti-colonialist and anti-capitalist forces who were advancing rapidly in China and other parts of the world from abolishing capitalism in the regions which provided it with raw materials, captive markets, and cheap labor. In the aftermath of the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, the U.S. military budget “stabilized” although it was two to three times what any reasonable “post cold war” budget should have been and the percentage of global military spending it represented actually increased.
Six years after the 9/11 attacks the military has increased by 200 billion and represents according to my readings 50% of the official military spending of the world as Al Qaeda launches terrorist attacks in Iraq, Iran's influence through Shia Muslim clerical elements in Iran has grown substantially, the Taliban attacks Afghanistan from bases in Pakistan as it did 20 years ago and finances its activities by coercing Afghani peasants into growing opium for processing into heroin, and new attacks are certainly a possibility as the administration continues its propaganda war in the U.S. to buttress its occupation of Iraq, selling the U.S. military “surge” against guerrillas, refusing to listen to reports from establishment sources that contradict what its propaganda, using its disasters and defeats to call upon the people to support it more fully, since not supporting it would lead to greater disasters. Given the wealth and power of the U.S. and the world community that was allied to it in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks as against the wealth and real power of Al Qaeda and other groups, these are truly monumental defeats that can be attributed wholly to the destructive policies of the Bush administration.
Six years after the 9/11 attacks, protecting the U.S. and the world from international terrorism by and through the Bush administration and the Republican Party is like the British keeping Neville Chamberlain in power in 1940.
But what would an alternative policy be. First, it must be acknowledged that terrorism is a police rather than a military problem and requires international police cooperation. Second, the U.S. and transnational oil company policies that have enriched and aided the forces in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan among other countries which have served as the economic real financial and recruiting centers for Al Qaeda and similar groups must end and a policy that addresses the misery and poverty of the masses of people in South Asia and the Middle East rather than allying with local exploiters and tyrants to profit from that misery must be enacted. At the beginning of World War II, Franklin Roosevelt came forward with the Four Freedoms, including Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear as war aims to rally people through the world. The Soviets called for a war of liberation from fascism, not only for the Soviet people, but for all of Europe.
The Bush administration, in its turning over of the Iraq occupation to private corporations and contractors, its inept playing of traditional colonial politics in shifting between Shia and Sunni groups in Iraq, has shown what its aims are in its “war against terrorism.” Who would or should be surprised that such policies have aided and abetted the very forces that they were supposed to fight.
As real victory was achieved in 1945, the issues were global reconstruction of a devastated world and, for the U.S., a reconversion to a peacetime economy which the cold war largely prevented. It was understood that for reconstruction to be successful politically, it would have to be successful economically and socially.
Today, six years after the September 11 attacks, the “phony war” against terrorism should be scrapped for policies to withdraw militarily from Iraq and work to bring Shia and Sunni groups together in that country with the Kurdish minority on reconstruction and development programs. The clerical reactionary government in Iran should be opposed by supporting progressive secular forces in that country with the aid of progressive people in the Iranian diaspora in the U.S. and the world. Threats of military attack offer its people nothing but what the Iraqis have gotten. In South Asia progressive groups can advance regional development policies which would bring together India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and of course Pakistan, instead of manipulating and being manipulated by military and adventurist regimes in Pakistan who portray themselves as the only alternative to the Taliban style groups that they have in effect long fostered. Finally the U.S. must through the United Nations work with developed and developing nations to put the oil resources of the Persian Gulf under international regulation and control. The present corrupt and crackpot alliance between feudal rulers and societies and transnational oil companies is, even without the issue of terrorism, a huge negative force in the world economy that works against any rational global energy policy, undermines global ecology, intensifies waste in the rich countries “underdevelopment” and poverty in the poor ones.
Such policies would enable the people of South Asia and the Middle East to both eliminate groups like Al Qaeda and enable the people of the U.S. and the rest of the developed world to move out of perpetual security checks and multi-colored terrorism alerts. They would help make real for the people of the world the last two of Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear (which all Marxists know are both dialectically inter-related and the basis of real freedom anywhere).
--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.
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