6-27-05, 9:50 am
Karl Rove, who serves as Bush’s key political strategist and unofficial minister of propaganda, hit a particularly low note, even by his standards, last week. At Conservative party meeting in New York, Rove said 'conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.'
Democratic Senators were screaming foul and calling for Rove’s resignation, which they won’t get of course, proclaiming that the attacks were not a 'partisan issue.' In reality, they are a partisan issue, not primarily between Democrats and Republicans but between Communists and those small groupings of the broad American left who opposed the Reagan administration’s contra war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, which produced the Al Qaeda group, and all of those who supported that contra war and created the conditions for the unprecedented terrorist attacks. The Communist Party, USA’s national contention in Chicago next weekend will be the convention of the only U.S. political party who supported internationally the forces in Afghanistan that, had they triumphed, would have made the 9/11 attacks and all that has followed from them impossible.
A little erased history might help to put this in perspective. In 1979, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor and an extreme anti-Soviet policy planner convinced Carter to use the CIA to provide support to rightwing Muslim guerrillas fighting against the Afghanistan’s Communist party government, which had taken power in 1978 and was attempting to advance far-reaching land and social reforms in the countryside. Brzezinski hoped, as he later boasted, to get the Soviets to fall into the 'Afghan trap,' to intervene in the conflict and get bogged down in a Vietnam style counter-insurgent war. The Soviets did intervene at the end of 1979. Later, the Reagan administration greatly expanded aid to the Afghan contras, who were hailed as 'freedom fighters' while the Kabul government had very little support in the US, unlike the Nicaraguan Sandinista government, which faced a similar contra war. Since the Soviets were involved and the war was going on in a Muslim country, only the CPUSA, consistently supported the Afghan government and challenged the CIA inspired propaganda that portrayed the Soviets as fighting a genocidal war in Afghanistan and ignored totally both the atrocities of the guerrillas and their political ends.
By the late 1980s, there were over 50,000 foreign 'freedom fighters' fighting a 'holy war' in Afghanistan from CIA supported bases and training camps in Pakistan. Among them were five thousand Saudis led by Osama bin Laden, a scion of the richest capitalist family in the region, a family who had assets in excess of $6 billion and whose wealth came from their construction business through connections with the Saudi royal family and contracts from the Arab-American Oil Company (ARAMCO) and other firms. Bin Laden had been working with the CIA for years—some sources say as earlier as 1979—in both fund-raising among the Saudi rich and, given his engineering background, logistics work for the guerillas, whose stock in trade against Soviet forces and the Kabul government was the kind of terrorist attacks for which they are now globally known.
The United States was now declared to be the main enemy, its people and its culture fair game, as the Soviet Union and the Afghan government had been in the 1980s. When bin Laden sought to expand his 'holy war' back home in Saudi Arabia, his family largely disowned him and the Saudi feudal regime forced him out. But he retained large sources of wealth and was able to relocate eventually to Afghanistan, where the clerical fascist Taliban regime, the product of imperialism’s 'victory' in Afghanistan, gave him sanctuary.
My own suspicion is that Bin Laden’s former CIA friends, not to mention his family’s business associates in high U.S. corporate circles, including those with direct Bush family connections, saw him as a minor nuisance, even after U.S. installations and citizens were attacked and lives lost.
This was the situation that the Bush administration and 'conservatives' faced on September 11, 2001, a situation that their appeasement and active support of 'jihad' in Afghanistan had created as clearly as the Chamberlain government’s appeasement to Nazi Germany in order to use it to destroy the Soviet Union and failure even after WWII began in 1939 to take the German war machine seriously had led the British to Dunkirk in 1940.
At least Chamberlain, before he was removed and replaced by Winston Churchill, didn’t have the 'chutzpah'(overweening arrogance) to say that his Conservative Party had courageously stood up to Hitler while the Labor party was mired in cowardly pacifism.
Actually, what the Bush administration did on September 11 was to run around, as my late mother used to say, like a chicken without a head. It was more interested in saving its face and protecting the president from any possible attack than in coming forward and providing leadership for the people in the first hours of the attack. Then it was interested in exploiting the attack for political reasons—accusing critics of being disloyal, massively increasing military spending in response to what was essentially a domestic police matter, and creating a Department of Homeland Security, another big spending bureaucratic agency, as conservatives like to say about HUD and HEW, instead of working with the already extensive domestic security apparatus. Bush also immediately sought evidence to blame the Iraqis, who had nothing to do with the attack and encouraged rather than reduced a panic atmosphere in the country in which Anthrax letters, rhetoric about Weapons of Mass Destruction, and mass a media frenzy that might have even embarrassed the old Hearst press, ran wild.
One day, and I doubt it will take that long, writers in the United States will began to deal seriously with this terrible set of episodes: The protection given the wealthy Bin Ladens in the United States on the day of the attack while completely innocent people of the Muslim faith were picked up and held in preventive detention. The flying schools in Florida that gave lessons to the suicide hijackers and thought nothing of the fact that they didn’t even come back to learn how to land airplanes, a comment on the deregulated anything for sale capitalism that 'conservatives' glorify. The invasion and occupation of Iraq in the name of fighting both 'international terrorism' and removing weapons of mass destruction, when there were no weapons of mass destruction and there were not then, but are now, Al Qaeda terrorists killing both Iraqis and U.S. military personnel in the country. The 'investigation' of the attacks which cut out entirely the CIA bin Laden connection and used a tunnel vision approach in its examination of evidence, never even contemplating serious political questions related to the attack.
Conservatives, cold war liberals, and anti-Communist anti-Soviet 'leftists' who supported the contra war in Afghanistan all deserve blame for the Al Qaeda attacks, but it was the Reagan administration which greatly expanded the support begun by Carter to the rightwing guerillas.
It was the Bush I administration which rejected any compromise solution to the war in Afghanistan after Soviet troops were withdrawn in 1988 and gave full support to Muslim guerillas and its Pakistani allies, who then backed the Taliban regime until the September 11 attacks. And it was the Bush II administration which used the attacks to do virtually everything except fight real terrorists—proclaiming an open-ended 'war against terrorism' to replace the cold war, enacting legislation that threatens the civil liberties of all Americans without impeding Al Qaeda or similar groups, and invading strengthening Al Qaeda through the diversionary Iraq invasion and occupation. Rove and his rightist minions hate words like 'therapy,' because they believe in punishment society where understanding and forgiveness exists either in an afterlife or in the institutions reserved for the upper classes, the 'elect.' In that case, they resemble the Al Qaeda fanatics that they claim to be fighting.
'Conservatives saw what happened to us on 9/11, Rove contended,' and said ‘we will defeat our enemies.’ Liberals saw what happened to us and said ‘we must understand our enemies.’'
First, no one wins any war without understanding the enemy. Second, Rove’s kind of conservative country club Republican still has far better relations with the Saudi elite than they do with the people of New York City, who like the people of San Francisco, and the Hollywood movie industry they have long portrayed as internal enemies. What was it Walt Kelly’s cartoon character, Pogo, once said in what some saw as an aside at cold warriors and McCarthyites 'we have met the enemy and he is us.'
--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs. Reach him with your thoughts at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.
