by
Peter Dale Scott
The
Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus

Recently
by Peter Dale Scott: Drug-Financed
Salafi Jihadism

The most urgent
political challenge to the world today is how to prevent the so-called
“pax Americana” from progressively degenerating, like
the 19^th-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 19^th 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 19^th 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:

Thus did
Britain slip into circumstances akin to those of the United States
in the 1980s and most of the 1990s – slumping nonsupervisory
wage levels and declining basic industries on one hand, and at
the other end of the scale a heyday for banks, financial services,
and securities, a sharp rise in the portion of income coming from
investment, and a stunning percentage of income and assets going
to the top 1 percent.⁷

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

how Athens
was undone by the overreaching greed (pleonexia) of its unnecessary
Sicilian expedition, a folly presaging America’s follies in Vietnam
and Iraq [and Britain’s in Afghanistan and the Transvaal]. Thucydides
attributed the rise of this folly to the rapid change in Athens
after the death of Pericles, and in particular to the rise of
a rapacious oligarchy.¹¹

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 British
empire during the Victorian Era

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.

 

 
French
caricature of Rhodes, showing him trapped in Kimberley during
the Boer War, seen emerging from tower clutching papers with
champagne bottle behind his collar.
 
 

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 undermining 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
19^th 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 19^th 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:

In 2010 …the
United States maintained its dominating position in the global
arms bazaar, signing $21.3 billion in worldwide arms sales, or
52.7 percent of all weapons deals, ….

Russia was
second with $7.8 billion in arms sales in 2010, or 19.3 percent
of the market, compared with $12.8 billion in 2009. Following
the United States and Russia in sales were France, Britain, China,
Germany and Italy.¹⁹

A year later
America’s total dominance of overseas arms sales had more than doubled,
to represent 79 percent of global arms sales:

Overseas
weapons sales by the United States totaled $66.3 billion last
year, or more than three-quarters of the global arms market, valued
at $85.3 billion in 2011. Russia was a distant second, with $4.8
billion in deals.²⁰

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,

Islamist
extremism in Yemen is the result of a long and complicated set
of developments. A large number of Yemeni nationals participated
in the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan during the 1980s. After
the Soviet occupation ended, the Yemeni government encouraged
its citizens to return and also permitted foreign veterans to
settle in Yemen. Many of these Arab Afghans were co-opted by the
regime and integrated into the state’s various security apparatuses.
Such co-optation was also used with individuals detained by the
Yemeni government after the September 11 terrorist attacks. As
early as 1993, the U.S. State Department noted in a now-declassified
intelligence report that Yemen was becoming an important stop
for many fighters leaving Afghanistan. The report also maintained
that the Yemeni government was either unwilling or unable to curb
their activities. Islamism and Islamist activists were used by
the regime throughout the 1980s and 1990s to suppress domestic
opponents, and during the 1994 civil war Islamists fought against
southern forces.²⁸

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:

Well, I think
for – our policy on Yemen has been terrorism – has been terrorism
and security and al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, to the exclusion
of almost everything else. I think, despite what – what people
in the administration say, we have been focused on terrorism.
We have not been focused on the systemic challenges that Yemen
faces: unemployment, governance abuses, corruption. I think these
are the things that will bring down the state. It’s not AQAP…..
everyone in Yemen sees that we’re supporting the regimes, at the
expense of the Yemeni people.²⁹

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

wealthy Saudis
remain the chief financiers of worldwide terror networks. ‘If
I could somehow snap my fingers and cut off the funding from one
country, it would be Saudi Arabia,’ said Stuart Levey, the US
Treasury official in charge of tracking terror financing.³⁴

Similar reports
of Saudi funding have come from authorities in Iraq, Pakistan, and
Afghanistan, according to Rachel Ehrenfeld:

Pakistani
police reported in 2009 that Saudi Arabia’s charities continue
to fund al Qaeda, the Taliban and Pakistan’s Lashkar-e-Tayyiba.
The report said the Saudis gave $15 million to jihadists, including
those responsible for suicide attacks in Pakistan and the death
of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

In May 2010,
Buratha News Agency, an independent news source in Iraq,
reported on a leaked Saudi intelligence document showing continued
Saudi governmental support for al Qaeda in Iraq in the form of
cash and weapons…. An article in the May 31, 2010, edition of
The Sunday Times in London revealed that the Afghan financial
intelligence unit, FinTRACA, reported that since 2006, at least
$1.5 billion from Saudi Arabia was smuggled into Afghanistan,
headed most probably to the Taliban.”³⁵

However the
Saudi backing of al Qaeda was not, according to the Times,
limited to funds:

In recent
months, Saudi religious scholars have caused consternation in
Iraq and Iran by issuing fatwas calling for the destruction of
the great Shi’ite shrines in Najaf and Karbala in Iraq, some of
which have already been bombed. And while prominent members of
the ruling al-Saud dynasty regularly express their abhorrence
of terrorism, leading figures within the kingdom who advocate
extremism are tolerated.

Sheikh Saleh
al-Luhaidan, the chief justice, who oversees terrorist trials,
was recorded on tape in a mosque in 2004, encouraging young men
to fight in Iraq. “Entering Iraq has become risky now,”
he cautioned. “It requires avoiding those evil satellites
and those drone aircraft, which own every corner of the skies
over Iraq. If someone knows that he is capable of entering Iraq
in order to join the fight, and if his intention is to raise up
the word of God, then he is free to do so.”³⁶

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:

Fighters
from the al-Qaeda-linked group Ansar Dine, controlling northern
Mali, have destroyed two tombs at the ancient Djingareyber mud
mosque in Timbuktu, an endangered World Heritage site, witnesses
say…. The new destruction comes after attacks last week on other
historic and religious landmarks in Timbuktu that UNESCO called
“wanton destruction”. Ansar Dine has declared the ancient Muslim
shrines “haram”, or forbidden in Islam. The Djingareyber mosque
is one of the most important in Timbuktu and was one of the fabled
city’s main attractions before the region became a no-go area
for tourists. Ansar Dine has vowed to continue destroying all
the shrines “without exception” amid an outpouring of grief and
outrage both at home and abroad.³⁸

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:

In 1801 and
1802, the Saudi Wahhabis under Abdul Aziz ibn Muhammad ibn Saud
attacked and captured the holy Muslim cities of Karbala and Najaf
in Iraq, massacred parts of the Muslim population and destroyed
the tombs of Husayn ibn Ali who is the grandson of Muhammad, and
son of Ali (Ali bin Abu Talib), the son-in-law of Muhammad). In
1803 and 1804 the Saudis captured Makkah and Medina and destroyed
historical monuments and various holy Muslim sites and shrines,
such as the shrine built over the tomb of Fatimah, the daughter
of Muhammad, and even intended to destroy the grave of Muhammad
himself as idolatrous. In 1998 the Saudis bulldozed and poured
gasoline over the grave of Aminah bint Wahb, the mother of Muhammad,
causing resentment throughout the Muslim World.³⁹

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,

Abdullah’s
2002 peace plan remains an intriguing possible basis for U.S.-Saudi
cooperation on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Abdullah’s proposal
was endorsed by the entire Arab League at its 2002 summit; Israeli
President Shimon Peres and Olmert both referred to it favorably;
and Barack Obama, who chose the Saudi-owned al Arabiya television
station for his first interview after taking office, praised Abdullah
for his “great courage” in making the peace proposal. However,
the presumed new Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has
strongly opposed the Saudi plan, particularly the idea that East
Jerusalem should be the capital of a Palestinian state.⁴⁰

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 19^th
century, for a progressive return to a more stable and just international
order, by a series of concrete steps, some of them incremental:

1) a progressive
reduction of America’s bloated military and intelligence budgets,
over and above that already contemplated for financial reasons.

2) a progressive
phase-out of the violent aspects of the so-called war on terror,
while retaining traditional law enforcement means for dealing
with terrorists

3) Much of
the recent intensification of American militarism can be traced
to the “state of emergency” proclaimed on September
14, 2001, and renewed annually by American presidents ever since.
We need an immediate termination of this state of emergency, and
a reassessment of all the so-called “continuity of government”
(COG) measures associated with it – warrantless surveillance,
warrantless detention, and the militarization of domestic American
security.⁴⁴

4) a return
to strategies for dealing with the problem of terrorists that
rely primarily on civilian policing and intelligence.

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.

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.

¹²
See Ralph Raico, “Introduction,”
Great
Wars and Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal (Auburn,
AL: Mises Institute, 2010).

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).
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.

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.

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.

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.

³⁶
Sunday Times (London), November 4, 2007.

³⁷
BBC, July
17, 2012.

³⁸
Al Jazeera, July
19, 2012.

³⁹
The Weekly Standard, May
30, 2005. 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.

Reprinted
from The
Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus.

August
31, 2012

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 book, Fueling America’s War Machine: Deep Politics and the
CIAÂ’s Global Drug Connection is in press, due Fall 2010
from Rowman Littlefield.

Copyright
© 2012 Peter
Dale Scott