The Long War: The US and al-Qaeda

Eight Years Into The 'War On Terror', How Does The US View The Aal-Qaeda Threat?

Last Modified: 25 Jan 2010 10:44
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"

Al-Qaeda is on the ropes. Driven out of Afghanistan and hunted in Pakistan, it has no place left to hide.

Some, like General James L. Jones, the national security adviser to Barack Obama, the US president, say there are only 100 or so al-Qaeda operatives left in Afghanistan.

Others in the West claim that global jihad has been defeated by the so-called 'war on terror'.

Al-Qaeda's leaders have been targeted and killed by military raids or drone attacks, and intelligence agencies around the world are successfully thwarting planned terrorist attacks before they happen.

So, is the US about to find an end to what threatened to be its longest-running war?

The reality is that, whilst direct al-Qaeda actions have been seriously restricted, the organisation has franchised from Somalia to Indonesia and North Africa.

In Afghanistan, it directs or collaborates in Taliban attacks.

Al-Qaeda is mercurial and, like a virus, mutates and adapts.

They are now waging global jihad on the web.

With highly sophisticated websites and its own video production arm, al-Qaeda is aiming to radicalise a whole new generation of militants.

How does the US see al-Qaeda's current threat level eight years after the 'war on terror' was launched?

PART-1




PART-2

America Is Detached From The War

By Tom Engelhardt
June 24, 2010
Courtesy Of "The Nation"

Admittedly, before George W. Bush had his fever dream, the United States had already put its first unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drone surveillance planes in the skies over Kosovo in the late 1990s. By November 2001, it had armed them with missiles and was flying them over Afghanistan.

In November 2002, a Predator drone would loose a Hellfire missile on a car in Yemen, a country with which we weren't at war. Six suspected Al Qaeda members, including a suspect in the bombing of the destroyer the USS Cole would be turned into twisted metal and ash—the first "targeted killings" of the American robotic era.

Just two months earlier, in September 2002, as the Bush administration was "introducing" its campaign to sell an invasion of Iraq to Congress and the American people, CIA Director George Tenet and Vice President Dick Cheney "trooped up to Capitol Hill" to brief four top Senate and House leaders on a hair-raising threat to the country. A "smoking gun" had been uncovered.

According to "new intelligence," Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had in his possession unmanned aerial vehicles advanced enough to be armed with biological and chemical weaponry. Worse yet, these were capable—so the CIA director and vice president claimed—of spraying those weapons of mass destruction over cities on the East Coast of the United States. It was just the sort of evil plan you might have expected from a man regularly compared to Adolf Hitler in our media, and the news evidently made an impression in Congress.

Democratic Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, for example, said that he voted for the administration's resolution authorizing force in Iraq because "I was told not only that [Saddam had weapons of mass destruction] and that he had the means to deliver them through unmanned aerial vehicles but that he had the capability of transporting those UAVs outside of Iraq and threatening the homeland here in America, specifically by putting them on ships off the eastern seaboard."

In a speech in October 2002, President Bush then offered a version of this apocalyptic nightmare to the American public. Of course, like Saddam's supposed ability to produce "mushroom clouds" over American cities, the Iraqi autocrat's advanced UAVs (along with the ships needed to position them off the US coast) were a feverish fantasy of the Bush era and would soon enough be forgotten. Instead, in the years to come, it would be American pilotless drones that would repeatedly attack Iraqi urban areas with Hellfire missiles and bombs.

In those years, our drones would also strike repeatedly in Afghanistan, and especially in the tribal borderlands of Pakistan, where in an escalating "secret" or "covert" war, which has been no secret to anyone, multiple drone attacks often occur weekly. They are now considered so much the norm that, with humdrum headlines slapped on ("US missile strike kills 12 in NW Pakistan"), they barely make it out of summary articles about war developments in the American press.

And yet those robotic planes, with their young "pilots" (as well as the camera operators and intelligence analysts who make up a drone "crew") sitting in front of consoles 7,000 miles away from where their missiles and bombs are landing, have become another kind of American fever dream. The drone is our latest wonder weapon and a bragging point in a set of wars where there has been little enough to brag about.

CIA director Leon Panetta has, for instance, called the Agency's drones flying over Pakistan "the only game in town" when it comes to destroying Al Qaeda; a typically anonymous US official in a Washington Post report claims of drone missile attacks, "We're talking about precision unsurpassed in the history of warfare"; or as Gordon Johnson of the Pentagon's Joint Forces Command told author Peter Singer, speaking of the glories of drones: "They don't get hungry. They are not afraid. They don't forget their orders. They don't care if the guy next to them has been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes."

Seven thousand of them, the vast majority surveillance varieties, are reportedly already being operated by the military, and that's before swarms of "mini-drones" come on line. Our American world is being redefined accordingly.

In February, Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post caught something of this process when he spent time with Colonel Eric Mathewson, perhaps the most experienced Air Force officer in drone operations and on the verge of retirement. Mathewson, reported Jaffe, was trying to come up with an appropriately new definition of battlefield "valor"—a necessity for most combat award citations—to fit our latest corps of pilots at their video consoles. "Valor to me is not risking your life," the colonel told the reporter. "Valor is doing what is right. Valor is about your motivations and the ends that you seek. It is doing what is right for the right reasons. That to me is valor."

Smoking Drones

These days, CIA and administration officials troop up to Capitol Hill to offer briefings to Congress on the miraculous value of pilotless drones: in disrupting Al Qaeda, destroying its leadership or driving it "deeper into hiding" and taking out key figures in the Taliban. Indeed, what started as a 24/7 assassination campaign against Al Qaeda's top leadership has already widened considerably. The "target set" has by now reportedly expanded to take in ever lower-level militants in the tribal borderlands. In other words, a drone assassination campaign is morphing into the first full-scale drone war (and, as in all wars from the air, civilians are dying in unknown numbers).

If the temperature is again rising in Washington when it comes to these weapons, this time it's a fever of enthusiasm for the spectacular future of drones (which the Air Force has plotted out to the year 2047), of a time when single pilots should be able to handle multiple drones in operations in the skies over some embattled land, and of a far more distant moment when those drones should be able to handle themselves, flying, fighting and making key decisions about just who to take out without a human being having to intervene.

When we possess such weaponry, it turns out, there's nothing unnerving or disturbing, apocalyptic or dystopian about it. Today, in the American homeland, not a single smoking drone is in sight.

Now it's the United States whose UAVs are ever more powerfully weaponized. It's the United States that isdeveloping a twenty-two-ton tail-less drone twenty times larger than a Predator that can fly at Mach 7 and (theoretically) land on the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier. It's the Pentagon that is planning to increase the funding of drone development by 700 percent over the next decade.

Admittedly, there is a modest counter-narrative to all this enthusiasm for our robotic prowess, "precision" and "valor." It involves legal types like Philip Alston, the United Nations special representative on extrajudicial executions. He recently issued a twenty-nine-page report criticizing Washington's "ever-expanding entitlement for itself to target individuals across the globe." Unless limits are put on such claims, and especially on the CIA's drone war over Pakistan, he suggests, soon enough a plethora of states will follow in America's footprints, attacking people in other lands "labeled as terrorists by one group or another."

Such mechanized, long-distance warfare, he also suggests, will breach what respect remains for the laws of war. "Because operators are based thousands of miles away from the battlefield," he wrote, "and undertake operations entirely through computer screens and remote audio-feed, there is a risk of developing a 'PlayStation' mentality to killing."

Similarly, the ACLU has filed a freedom of information lawsuit against the US government, demanding that it "disclose the legal basis for its use of unmanned drones to conduct targeted killings overseas, as well as the ground rules regarding when, where, and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, and the number of civilian casualties they have caused."

But pay no mind to all this. The arguments may be legally compelling, but not in Washington, which has mounted a half-hearted claim of legitimate "self-defense," but senses that it's already well past the point where legalities matter. The die is cast, the money committed. The momentum for drone war and yet more drone war is overwhelming.

It's a done deal. Drone war is, and will be, us.

A Pilotless Military
 
If there are zeitgeist moments for products, movie stars and even politicians, then such moments can exist for weaponry as well. The robotic drone is the Lady Gaga of this Pentagon moment.

It's a moment that could, of course, be presented as an apocalyptic nightmare in the style of the Terminator movies (with the United States as the soul-crushing Skynet), or as a remarkable tale of how "networking technology is expanding a homefront that is increasingly relevant to day-to-day warfare" (as Christopher Drew recently put it in the New York Times). It could be described as the arrival of a dystopian fantasy world of one-way slaughter verging on entertainment, or as the coming of a generation of homegrown video warriors who work "in camouflage uniforms, complete with combat boots, on open floors, with four computer monitors on each desk...and coffee and Red Bull help[ing] them get through the 12-hour shifts." It could be presented as the ultimate in cowardice—the killing of people in a world you know nothing about from thousands of miles away—or(as Col. Mathewson would prefer) a new form of valor.

The drones—their use expanding exponentially, with ever newer generations on the drawing boards and the planes even heading for "the homeland"—could certainly be considered a demon spawn of modern warfare, or (as is generally the case in the United States) a remarkable example of American technological ingenuity, a problem-solver of the first order at a time when few American problems seem capable of solution. Thanks to our technological prowess, it's claimed that we can now kill them, wherever they may be lurking, at absolutely no cost to ourselves, other than the odd malfunctioning drone. Not that even all CIA operatives involved in the drone wars agree with that one. Some of them understand perfectly well that there's a price to be paid.

As it happens, the enthusiasm for drones is as much a fever dream as the one President Bush and his associates offered back in 2002, but it's also distinctly us. In fact, drone warfare fits the America of 2010 tighter than a glove. With its consoles, chat rooms and "single shooter" death machines, it certainly fits the skills of a generation raised on the computer, Facebook and video games. That our valorous warriors, their day of battle done, can increasingly leave war behind and head home to the barbecue (or, given American life, the foreclosure) also fits an American mood of the moment.

The Air Force "detachments" that "manage" the drone war from places like Creech Air Force Base in Nevada are "detached" from war in a way that even an artillery unit significantly behind the battle lines or an American pilot in an F-16 over Afghanistan (who could, at least, experience engine failure) isn't. If the drone presents the most extreme version thus far of the detachment of human beings from the battlefield (on only one side, of course) and so launches a basic redefinition of what war is all about, it also catches something important about the American way of war.

After all, while this country garrisons the world, invests its wealth in its military, and fights unending, unwinnable frontier wars and skirmishes, most Americans are remarkably detached from all this. If anything, since Vietnam when an increasingly rebellious citizens' army proved disastrous for Washington's global aims, such detachment has been the goal of American war-making.

As a start, with no draft and so no citizen's army, war and the toll it takes is now the professional business of a tiny percentage of Americans (and their families). It occurs thousands of miles away and, in the Bush years, also became a heavily privatized, for-profit activity. As Pratap Chatterjee reported recently, "Every US soldier deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq is matched by at least one civilian working for a private company. All told, about 239,451 contractors work for the Pentagon in battle zones around the world." And a majority of those contractors aren't even US citizens.

If drones have entered our world as media celebrities, they have done so largely without debate among that detached populace. In a sense, our wars abroad could be thought of as the equivalent of so many drones. We send our troops off and then go home for dinner and put them out of mind. The question is: Have we redefined our detachment as a new version of citizenly valor (and covered it over by a constant drumbeat of "support for our troops")?

Under these circumstances, it's hardly surprising that a "pilotless" force should, in turn, develop the sort of contempt for civilians that can be seen in the recent flap over the derogatory comments of Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal and his aides about Obama administration officials.

The Globalization of Death

Maybe what we need is the return of George W. Bush's fever dream from the American oblivion in which it's now interred. He was beyond wrong, of course, when it came to Saddam Hussein and Iraqi drones, but he wasn't completely wrong about the dystopian Drone World to come. There are now reportedly more than forty countriesdeveloping versions of those pilotless planes. Earlier this year, the Iranians announced that they were starting up production lines for both armed and unarmed drones. Hezbollah used them against Israel in the 2006 summer war, years after Israel began pioneering their use in targeted killings of Palestinians.

Right now, in what still remains largely a post–cold war arms race of one, the United States is racing to produce ever more advanced drones to fight our wars, with few competitors in sight. In the process, we're also obliterating classic ideas of national sovereignty, and of who can be killed by whom under what circumstances. In the process, we may not just be obliterating enemies, but creating them wherever our drones buzz overhead and our missiles strike.

We are also creating the (il)legal framework for future war on a frontier where we won't long be flying solo. And when the first Iranian, or Russian or Chinese missile-armed drones start knocking off their chosen sets of "terrorists," we won't like it one bit. When the first "suicide drones" appear, we'll like it even less. And if drones with the ability to spray chemical or biological weapons finally do make the scene, we'll be truly unnerved.

In the 1990s, we were said to be in an era of "globalization," which was widely hailed as good news. Now, the United States and its detached populace are pioneering a new era of killing that respects no boundaries, relies on the self-definitions of whoever owns the nearest drone and establishes planetary free-fire zones. It's a nasty combination, this globalization of death.

Wars Without End

By Michael T. Klare
December 6, 2001
Courtesy Of "The Nation"

With the war against the Taliban nearing conclusion, many in Washington are urging Bush to expand the current conflict into a vast, open-ended campaign against assorted terrorist groups and "rogue" states like Iraq. The President has encouraged such thinking. The current struggle in Afghanistan is "just the beginning on the war against terror," he told US soldiers the day before Thanksgiving. "There are other terrorists who threaten America and our friends, and there are other nations willing to sponsor them. We will not be secure as a nation until all of these threats are defeated."

Originally, in his address to Congress on September 20, he said the war would extend to every terrorist group that has "a global reach" and to states that knowingly aided or harbored such groups. But on November 26 he expanded the target list to include states that "terrorize" other nations by secretly pursuing the manufacture of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, a category that conceivably could include Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria and North Korea.

With the door open to so many options, hawks and hard-liners of many stripes have been arguing for a wide range of punitive military strikes. At the top of the list is a campaign to kill or oust Saddam Hussein of Iraq. Other oft-mentioned targets include Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, Hamas and Hezbollah in the West Bank and Lebanon and assorted rebel groups in Somalia.

With fighting still under way in Afghanistan, the White House is reluctant to provide any specifics about the next stage of the war. But various officials have suggested that the Pentagon is already gearing up for a wider range of attacks, including a stepped-up campaign against Saddam Hussein. From all that can be discerned these plans envision far more extended and risky operations than those now under way in Afghanistan.

Many signs point to preparations for an expanded war. Most conspicuous, of course, are the threatening comments by senior Administration officials. "The objective is to dismantle the global terrorist networks and state support for terrorism," said Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz on November 18. "There are a number of states that support terrorists. Saddam Hussein [leads] one of them." Equally suggestive is the Defense Department's continuing mobilization of forces for deployment to the Persian Gulf area even as the Taliban regime appears to be disintegrating. Several aircraft carrier battle groups have already been stationed in the area, and at least one other group is on the way. "We want to continue planning, so that we can...provide the President of the United States with credible military options," Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of the US Central Command, said on November 8.

A war with Iraq would conceivably jeopardize the flow of oil from the Gulf, so it is particularly significant that George W. Bush has ordered the Energy Department to completely fill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for the first time ever. The reserve is designed to provide the United States with a secure supply of oil in the event of war or a major national emergency.

Although none of this evidence can be considered definitive, it makes it increasingly apparent that the Administration plans to start a new round of attacks once the fighting in Afghanistan is over. This could entail an intensified air campaign against Iraq or commando raids on suspected terrorist camps in Somalia, the Bekaa valley of Lebanon or other sites in the greater Middle East or Asia. Stepped-up US involvement in the Philippines' counterinsurgency campaign against Muslim rebels in southwestern Mindanao is also likely. (US military advisers have already been assigned to the government forces involved in this effort.)

Whatever the immediate outcome of these engagements, the United States is likely to find itself embroiled in one bloody and uncontrollable conflagration after another. Except possibly in the Philippines, where support for the rebels is limited, US intervention will provoke a hostile reaction from at least some segments of the local population, leading to a larger conflict and/or new outbreaks of terrorism. It will also divert resources from the effort to track down surviving offshoots of Al Qaeda--groups that most directly threaten the United States. In addition, an expanded US war effort will alienate our partners in the global antiterror coalition, most of whom insist that the current campaign be confined to attacks on Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

A US attack on Iraq presumably would be justified on the grounds that Iraq is manufacturing weapons of mass destruction that threaten the world community. But there is no clear evidence of such activities. The only way to find such evidence is by sending UN arms inspectors to Iraq--a step Saddam has opposed since 1998. The best way to compel him to let inspectors in is to impose "smart" sanctions of the sort proposed by Secretary of State Colin Powell and by others who oppose the current regime of sanctions, which inflicts great suffering on ordinary Iraqis. Any US military action that pre-empted such an effort would invite worldwide condemnation.

The Bush Administration enjoys strong support from Americans and the international community for the campaign against Osama bin Laden. As Richard Falk suggests in this issue ["In Defense of 'Just War' Thinking"], a war limited to the destruction of Al Qaeda can be considered a just and proportionate response to the September 11 terror attacks. But a larger effort, aimed at any number of states and individuals with no apparent connection to September 11, must not be viewed in that light. Such a campaign should be denounced as a dangerous example of "mission creep," intended to further the ambitions of certain strategists and politicians in Washington while exposing US soldiers and the American people to additional bouts of deadly violence.

Lessons From The Long War and A Blowback World

By Tom Engelhardt
October 19, 2009
Courtesy Of "The Nation"

Is it too early--or already too late--to begin drawing lessons from "the Long War"? That phrase, coined in 2002 and, by 2005, being championed by Centcom Commander General John Abizaid, was meant to be a catchier name for George W. Bush's "Global War on Terror." That was back in the days when inside-the-Beltway types were still dreaming about a global Pax Americana and its domestic partner, a Pax Republicana, and imagining that both, once firmly established, might last forever.

"The Long War" merely exchanged the shock-'n'-awe geographical breadth of the President Bush's chosen moniker ("global") for a shock-'n'-awe time span. Our all-out, no-holds-barred struggle against evildoers would be nothing short of generational as well as planetary. From Abizaid's point of view, perhaps a little in-office surgical operation on the nomenclature of Bush's war was, in any case, in order at a time when the Iraq War was going disastrously badly and the Afghan one was starting to look more than a little peaked as well. It was like saying: Forget that "mission accomplished" sprint to victory in 2003 and keep your eyes on the prize. We're in it for the long slog.

When Bush officials and Pentagon brass used "the long war"--a phrase that never gained much traction outside administration circles and admiring think tanks--they were (being Americans) predicting the future, not commenting on the past. In their view, the fight against the Islamist terrorists and assorted bad guys who wanted to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction and truly bloody the American nose would be decades long.

And of that past? In the American tradition, they were Fordian (as in Henry) in their contempt for most history. If it didn't involve Winston Churchill, or the US occupying Germany or Japan successfully after World War II, or thrashing the Soviet Union in the cold war, it was largely discardable bunk. And who cared, since we had arrived at a moment of destiny when the greatest country in the world had at its beck and call the greatest, most technologically advanced military of all time. That was what mattered, and the future--momentary pratfalls aside--would surely be ours, as long as we Americans were willing to buckle down and fund an eternal fight for it.

Arm and Regret

With the arrival of the Obama administration, "the Long War," like "the Global War on Terror," has largely fallen into disuse (even as the wars that went with it continue). Like all administrations, Obama's, too, prefers to think of itself as beginning at Year Zero and, as the new president emphasized more than once, looking forward, not backwards, at least when it came to the CIA, the Bush Justice Department, and torture practices.

Perhaps, however, the Long War shouldn't be consigned to the dust bin of history just yet. It might still have its uses, if we were to do the un-American thing and look backward, not forward.

As we call a contentious era in European history the Hundred Years' War, so our war in "the Greater Middle East" has already gone on for thirty years, give or take a few. If you wanted to date its exact beginning, you might consider choosing President Ronald Reagan's brief, disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1983, the occasion for the first suicide truck bombings of the modern American era. (As Mike Davis has written, "Indeed, the suicide truck bombs that devastated the US embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 prevailed--at least in a geopolitical sense--over the combined firepower of the fighter-bombers and battleships of the US Sixth Fleet and forced the Reagan administration to retreat from Lebanon.")

An even more reasonable date, however, might be July 3, 1979, when, at the behest of national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter signed "the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul." In other words, six months before the actual Soviet invasion of Afghanistan began, the US threw its support to the mujahedeen, the Afghan anti-Soviet fundamentalist jihadists.

As Brzezinski later described it, "On the same day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained that in my opinion this aid would lead to a Soviet military intervention." Asked whether he regretted his actions, given the results so many years after, he replied: "Regret what? The secret operation was an excellent idea. It drew the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? On the day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, saying, in essence: 'We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.' "

Another inviting date for the start of our thirty-years' war might be January 23, 1980, when Carter, in a speech officially billed as a response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, outlined what came to be known as  the Carter Doctrine, which would put an armed American presence in the middle of the globe's oil heartlands. Having described the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf as a "vital interest" of the United States, Carter went on to state in the speech's key passage: "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force."

What followed was the creation of a Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, meant in a crisis to get thousands of US troops to the Gulf region quickly. In the Reagan years, that force was transformed into the Central Command (Centcom, of which General David Petraeus is now commander), while its area of responsibility grew as the US built up a massive military infrastructure of bases, weaponry, ships and airfields in the region.

Since then, war, however labeled, has been the name of the game: in Afghanistan, our war began in 1979 and, in start-and-stop fashion, still continues; in Iran, it's gone on largely in a proxy fashion, from 1979 to the present moment; in Iraq, from the First Gulf War in 1990 to now; briefly and disastrously in Somalia in  1993 andintermittently in this new century; and more recently in Pakistan.

The future is, of course, unknown, but as our president and his foreign policy team prepare to make crucial decisions in the coming months about Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Iraq, shouldn't our thirty-years' war across the oil heartlands of the planet, essentially one disaster-hailed-as-a-victory after another, offer some cautionary lessons for us? Shouldn't it raise the odd red flag of warning?

American Jihad

Let me suggest just one lesson that seems to be on no one else's mind at a moment when a key "option" being offered in Washington--especially by Democrats not eager to see tens of thousands more US troops heading Afghanistan-wards--is to arm and "train" ever more thousands of Afghans into a vast army and police security force for a government that hardly exists. Based on the last three decades in the region, don't you think that we should pause and consider who exactly we may be arming and who exactly we may be supporting, and whether, given those thirty years of history, we have the slightest idea what we're doing?

With those questions in mind, here's a little potted history of our own thirty-years' war:

In the Afghan branch of it, our fervent American jihad of the 1980s involved the CIA slipping happily into a crowded bed with the Saudis, the Pakistanis and the most extreme Islamist fundamentalists among the anti-Soviet Afghan fighters. In those years, the agency didn't hesitate to organize car-bomb and even camel-bomb terror attacks on the Russian military ( techniques endorsed by CIA Director William Casey). The partnership of these groups wasn't surprising at the time, given that Casey, himself a cold war fundamentalist and supporter of Opus Dei, believed that the anti-communism of the most extreme Islamist fundamentalists made them our natural allies in the region.

With that in mind, in tandem with Saudi funders, the CIA provided money, arms, training and support (as well as thousands of American-printed Korans). The funds and arms were all funneled through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence organization (ISI). At the time, our generosity even included offering Stinger missiles, the most advanced hand-held ground-to-air weapon of the era, to our favored Afghans. The CIA also came to favor the most extreme of the jihadists, particularly two figures: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani.

In the early 1990s, after the Soviets left in defeat, the jihadists descended into a wretched civil war, and Washington essentially jumped ship, a new movement, the Taliban, initially a creation of the ISI (with at least implicit American backing at least some of the time), almost swept the boards in Afghanistan, creating a fundamentalist Islamic state in most of the country.

Now, leap forward a couple decades. In that same country, who exactly is the US military fighting? As it happens, the answer is: the forces of the old Taliban, rejuvenated by an American occupation, as well as its two key allies, the warlords Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, who are now our sworn enemies. And we are, of course, pouring more billions of dollars, weaponry and significant blood into defeating them. In the process, with hardly a second thought, the Obama administration is attempting to massively bulk up a weak Afghan army and thoroughly corrupt police force. The staggering ultimate figure for the future combined Afghan security forces now regularly cited in Washington: 400,000.

In other words, thirty years after we launched our jihad against the Soviets by arming the Afghans, we are now fighting almost all the people we once armed and arming a whole new crew. All sides in the debate in Washington find this perfectly sensible.

Then, of course, no one should forget Al Qaeda itself, which emerged from the same anti-Soviet struggle in Afghanistan in the late 1980s--Osama bin Laden first arrived there to fight and fund in 1982--part of the nexus of Islamist forces on which the US bet at the time.

Our Man (and Mortal Enemy) Saddam

Above all, let's not forget Iraq. Indeed--not that anyone mentions it these days --back in the early 1980s, the Reagan administration threw its support behind the Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein against the hated Iranian Shiite regime of Ayatollah Khomeini in the brutal eight-year Iran-Iraq War that began when Saddam launched an invasion in 1980. According to Patrick Tyler of the New York Times, Washington went far indeed in its support of Saddam's military on the battlefield:

A covert American program during the Reagan administration provided Iraq with critical battle planning assistance at a time when American intelligence agencies knew that Iraqi commanders would employ chemical weapons in waging the decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war, according to senior military officers with direct knowledge of the program.

In other words, when it came to Iraq, we were for weapons of mass destruction before we were against them. Of course, you know the story from there. Next thing, Saddam Hussein had transmogrified into a new Adolf Hitler, and after his next invasion (of Kuwait), Gulf War I commenced--another smashing American "victory" in the region that only led to ever more war and greater disaster. A decade of regular US air attacks on Saddam's various military facilities and defenses ensued before, in March 2003, the Bush administration launched an invasion to "liberate" his country and its oppressed Shiite and Kurdish populations.

Soon after, Washington's viceroy in occupied Baghdad would demobilize what was left of Saddam's largely Sunni-officered 400,000-man army. (According to Bush administration plans, liberated Iraq was to have only a lightly armed, 40,000-man border-patrolling military and no air force to speak of.) Soon, however, the United States found itself in yet another war, a bitter, bloody Sunni Party insurgency amid a developing sectarian civil war. Once again, we chose a side and, after some hesitation, began rebuilding the Iraqi military and its intelligence services, as well as the country's paramilitary police force. The result: a largely Shiite-officered army for the new government we set up in Baghdad, which we proceeded to arm to the teeth.

Now, Iraq has a US-created army of approximately 262,000 men, and the interior ministry, which oversees the police, employs another 480,000 people. This is, of course, a gigantic security infrastructure, and not even counted are an estimated 94,000 members of the Sunni Awakening, mostly former insurgents and erstwhile opponents of the army and police that the US paid and armed to make the "surge" of 2007 a relative success. The Iraqi government has recently purchased 140 Abrams tanks from the US through the Foreign Military Sales Program and, as soon as the price of oil rises and it feels less financially strapped, it's eager to buy F-16s for its still barely existent air force.

Let me point out the obvious: No one yet knows whom all this fire power may someday be turned upon, but given that there is now a significantly Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad and little short of a shuttle of key Shiite leaders heading Tehran-wards, there's no reason to assume that the Iraqi military will be our "friend" forever. The same would obviously be true of a gigantic Afghan army, if we were capable of creating one.

In a region where the law of unintended consequences seems to go into overdrive, you choose and arm your allies at your peril. In the past, whatever the United States did had an uncanny propensity for blowing back in our direction--something the Israelis also experienced when, in the 1980s, they chose to support an embryonic fundamentalist Islamist organization we now know as Hamas as a way of containing their then-dreaded enemy Fatah. (This "law" may turn out to apply no less to the Palestinian army that US Lieutenant General Keith Dayton has been creating on the West Bank for Fatah. As Robert Dreyfuss recently reported, the general, speaking in Washington, warned that the Palestinian troops he's training "can only be strung along for just so long. 'With big expectations, come big risks.... There is perhaps a two-year shelf life on being told that you're creating a state, when you're not.' ")

We now tend to think of blowback as something in our past, something that ended with the attacks of 9/11. But in the Greater Middle East, one lesson seems clear enough: for thirty years we've been deeply involved in creating, financing, and sometimes arming a blowback world. There's no reason to believe that, with the arrival of Barack Obama, history has somehow been suspended, that now, finally, it's all going to work out.

There is a record here. It's not a pretty one. It's not a smart one. Someone should take it into account before we plunge in and arm our future enemies one more time.

UPDATED ON: MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2008
15:45 MECCA TIME, 12:45 GMT
Courtesy Of Al-Jazeera

Part-1



Part-2



Part-3



Part-4



As the US-led "War on Terror" has moved towards an attritional conflict with groups perceived as extremist, Al Jazeera investigates the full implications of this war as it affects the politics and people of the world.

In 2007, America's military spending was higher than at any time since the Second World War but terrorist attacks around the world have increased every year since 2001.

We visit Iraq and Afghanistan, sites of the most prolific terrorist incidents to investigate the human cost of the "War on Terror" as it is played out across ordinary peoples' lives.

With Iraq and Afghanistan enduring as the war's primary focus, we go to Somalia to uncover what some regard as the unofficial third front of the so-called war on terror.

As US-backed Ethiopian forces engage in gun battles with divergent bands of militia intent on resistance, we analyse how this violence and unrest has become a microcosm of the wider war and try to glean what lessons can be learned from the fighting in East Africa.

Al Jazeera's senior political analyst Marwan Bishara is joined by leading analysts as well as the former US commander of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Watch the show online and send us your feedback.

The Long War: The US & Al-Qaeda

UPDATED ON: MONDAY, JANUARY 25, 2010
13:44 MECCA TIME, 10:44 GMT
Courtesy Of Al-Jazeera

Part-1



Part-2



So, is the US about to find an end to what threatened to be its longest-running war?

The reality is that, whilst direct al-Qaeda actions have been seriously restricted, the organisation has franchised from Somalia to Indonesia and North Africa.

In Afghanistan, it directs or collaborates in Taliban attacks.

Al-Qaeda is mercurial and, like a virus, mutates and adapts.
They are now waging global jihad on the web.

With highly sophisticated websites and its own video production arm, al-Qaeda is aiming to radicalise a whole new generation of militants.

How does the US see al-Qaeda's current threat level eight years after the 'war on terror' was launched? Empire finds out.

This episode of Empire originally aired from Wednesday, October 28, 2009.

Global War and Dying Democracy

The Revolution Of The Elites

Global Power and Global Government: Part 5

By Andrew Gavin Marshall
August 19, 2009
Courtesy Of Global Research

Transnational Totalitarianism Global trends in political economy suggest that “democracy” as we know it, is a fading concept, where even Western industrialized nations are retreating from the system. Arguably, through party politics and financial-corporate interests, democracy is something of a façade as it is. However, we are entering into an era in which even the institutions and image of democracy are in retreat, and the slide into totalitarianism seems inevitable. The National Intelligence Council report, Global Trends 2025, stated that many governments will be “expanding domestic security forces, surveillance capabilities, and the employment of special operations-type forces.” Counterterrorism measures will increasingly “involve urban operations as a result of greater urbanization,” and governments “may increasingly erect barricades and fences around their territories to inhibit access. Gated communities will continue to spring up within many societies as elites seek to insulate themselves from domestic threats.”[1] Essentially, expect a continued move towards and internationalization of domestic police state measures to control populations. The nature of totalitarianism is such that it is, “by nature (or rather by definition), a global project that cannot be fully accomplished in just one community or one country. Being fuelled by the need to suppress any alternative orders and ideas, it has no natural limits and is bound to aim at totally dominating everything and everyone.” David Lyon explained in Theorizing Surveillance, that, “The ultimate feature of the totalitarian domination is the absence of exit, which can be achieved temporarily by closing borders, but permanently only by a truly global reach that would render the very notion of exit meaningless. This in itself justifies questions about the totalitarian potential of globalization.” The author raises the important question, “Is abolition of borders intrinsically (morally) good, because they symbolize barriers that needlessly separate and exclude people, or are they potential lines of resistance, refuge and difference that may save us from the totalitarian abyss?” Further, “if globalization undermines the tested, state-based models of democracy, the world may be vulnerable to a global totalitarian etatization.”[2] Russia Today, a major Russian media source, published an article by the Strategic Cultural Fund, in which it stated that, “the current crisis is being used as a mechanism for provoking some deepening social upheavals that would make mankind – plunged as it is already into chaos and frightened by the ghost of an all-out violence – urge of its own free will that a ‘supranational’ arbitrator with dictatorial powers intervene into the world affairs.” The author pointed out that, “The events are following the same path as the Great Depression in 1929-1933: a financial crisis, an economic recession, social conflicts, establishing totalitarian dictatorships, inciting a war to concentrate power, and capital in the hands of a narrow circle.” However, as the author noted, this time around, it’s different, as this “is the final stage in the ‘global control’ strategy, where a decisive blow should be dealt to the national state sovereignty institution, followed by a transition to a system of private power of transnational elites.” The author explained that a global police state is forming, as “Intelligence activities, trade of war, penitentiary system, and information control are passing into private hands. This is done through so-called outsourcing, a relatively new business phenomenon that consists of trusting certain functions to private firms that act as contractors and relying on individuals outside an organization to solve its internal tasks.” Further, “he biggest achievements have been made over the last few years in the area of establishing electronic control over people’s identities, carried out under the pretext of counterterrorism. Currently, the FBI is creating the world’s biggest database of biometric indexes (fingerprints, retina scans, face shapes, scar shapes and allocation, speech and gesture patterns, etc.) that now contains 55 million fingerprints.”[3] Global War Further, the prospects of war are increasing with the deepening of the economic crisis. It must be noted that historically, as empires are in decline, international violence increases. The scope of a global depression and the undertaking of restructuring the entire global political economy may also require and produce a global war to serve as a catalyst for formation of the New World Order. The National Intelligence Council document, Global Trends 2025, stated that there is a likely increase in the risk of a nuclear war, or in the very least, the use of a nuclear weapon by 2025, as, “Ongoing low-intensity clashes between India and Pakistan continue to raise the specter that such events could escalate to a broader conflict between those nuclear powers.”[4] The report also predicts a resurgence of mercantilist foreign policies of the great powers in competition for resources, which “could lead to interstate conflicts if government leaders deem assured access to energy resources to be essential to maintaining domestic stability and the survival of their regime.” In particular, “Central Asia has become an area of intense international competition for access to energy.”[5] Further, “Sub-Saharan Africa will remain the most vulnerable region on Earth in terms of economic challenges, population stresses, civil conflict, and political instability. The weakness of states and troubled relations between states and societies probably will slow major improvements in the region’s prospects over the next 20 years unless there is sustained international engagement and, at times, intervention. Southern Africa will continue to be the most stable and promising sub-region politically and economically.” This seems to suggest that there will be many more cases of “humanitarian intervention,” likely under the auspices of a Western dominated international organization, such as the UN. There will also be a democratic “backslide” in the most populous African countries, and that, “the region will be vulnerable to civil conflict and complex forms of interstate conflict—with militaries fragmented along ethnic or other divides, limited control of border areas, and insurgents and criminal groups preying on unarmed civilians in neighboring countries. Central Africa contains the most troubling of these cases, including Congo-Kinshasa, Congo-Brazzaville, Central African Republic, and Chad.”[6] In 2007, the British Defense Ministry released a report in which they analyzed future trends in the world. Among many of the things predicted within 30 years are: “Information chips implanted in the brain. Electromagnetic pulse weapons. The middle classes becoming revolutionary, taking on the role of Marx's proletariat. The population of countries in the Middle East increasing by 132%, while Europe's drops as fertility falls. ‘Flashmobs’ - groups rapidly mobilised by criminal gangs or terrorists groups.” It further reported that, “The development of neutron weapons which destroy living organisms but not buildings ‘might make a weapon of choice for extreme ethnic cleansing in an increasingly populated world’. The use of unmanned weapons platforms would enable the ‘application of lethal force without human intervention, raising consequential legal and ethical issues’. The ‘explicit use’ of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons and devices delivered by unmanned vehicles or missiles.” Further, “an implantable ‘information chip’ could be wired directly to the brain. A growing pervasiveness of information communications technology will enable states, terrorists or criminals, to mobilise ‘flashmobs’, challenging security forces to match this potential agility coupled with an ability to concentrate forces quickly in a small area.” In regards to social problems, “The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx.” Interestingly, “The thesis is based on a growing gap between the middle classes and the super-rich on one hand and an urban under-class threatening social order: ‘The world's middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest’. Marxism could also be revived, it says, because of global inequality. An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the ‘sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism’.” The report also forecasts that, “Globalisation may lead to levels of international integration that effectively bring inter-state warfare to an end. But it may lead to "inter-communal conflict" - communities with shared interests transcending national boundaries and resorting to the use of violence.”[7] RAND corporation, a Pentagon-linked powerhouse think tank, connected to the Blderberg Group, Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations, came up with a solution to the financial crisis in October of 2008: for the United States to start a major war. Chinese media reported that RAND “presented a shocking proposal to the Pentagon in which it lobbied for a war to be started with a major foreign power in an attempt to stimulate the American economy and prevent a recession.” Further, “the target country would have to be a major influential power,” and Chinese media “speculated that the target of the new war would probably be China or Russia, but that it could also be Iran or another middle eastern country.”[8] Gerald Celente, the CEO of Trends Research Institute, the most highly respected trend forecaster in the United States, has been sounding the alarm over the trends to come in the next few years. Having previously predicted the 1987 stock market crash, the fall of the Soviet Union, the dot-com bubble burst, and the 2008 housing bubble burst, these forecasts should not be taken lightly. Celente told Fox News that, “by 2012 America will become an undeveloped nation, that there will be a revolution marked by food riots, squatter rebellions, tax revolts and job marches, and that holidays will be more about obtaining food, not gifts.” He stated that this will be “worse than the great depression.” In another interview, Celente stated that, “There will be a revolution in this country,” and, “It’s not going to come yet, but it’s going to come down the line and we’re going to see a third party and this was the catalyst for it: the takeover of Washington, D. C., in broad daylight by Wall Street in this bloodless coup. And it will happen as conditions continue to worsen.” He further explained, “The first thing to do is organize with tax revolts. That’s going to be the big one because people can’t afford to pay more school tax, property tax, any kind of tax. You’re going to start seeing those kinds of protests start to develop.”[9] In June of 2009, Gerald Celente reported that, “The measures taken by successive governments to save the politically corrupt, morally bankrupt, physically decrepit [American] giant from collapse have served to only hasten its demise. While the decline has been decades in the making, the acceleration of ruinous policies under the current Administration is leading the United States — and much of the world — to the point of no return.” This coming catastrophe, which Celente refers to as “Obamageddon,” will become the “Greatest Depression.”[10] In May of 2009, Celente forecasted that a major issue is the “bailout bubble” which is bigger than the dot-com bubble or the real estate bubble that preceded it, and is made up of 12.8 trillion dollars. He states that with the bursting of this bubble, the next trend would be what he calls “fascism light” and that it will be followed by war.[11] He stated that, “this bubble will be the last one. After the final blowout of the bailout bubble, we are concerned that the government will take the nation into war. This is a historical precedent that’s been done over and over again.” He elaborated, “So, it’s not the dollar that will survive. We may not even survive. Look at the German mess after WWI. It gave rise to Fascism and WWII. The next war will be fought with weapons of mass destruction.”[12] The Imperial Project War should not be understood as a recent phenomenon in regards to accelerating capitalism through expansion and transition, as this has been a continual theme throughout the history of capitalism. The notion of “surplus imperialism” is what describes the function and role of war and militarism within capitalism. The concept is built around the function of “constant war.” Ellen Wood explains the notion of ‘surplus imperialism,’ in that, “Boundless domination of a global economy, and of the multiple states that administer it, requires military action without end, in purpose or time.”[13] Further, “Imperial dominance in a global capitalist economy requires a delicate and contradictory balance between suppressing competition and maintaining conditions in competing economies that generate markets and profit. This is one of the most fundamental contradictions of the new world order.”[14] Shortly after George Bush Sr. declared a “new world order coming into view,” in 1991, the US strategic community began setting forth a new strategy for the United States in the world. This first emerged in 1992, with the Defense Planning Guidance. The New York Times broke the story, reporting that, “In a broad new policy statement that is in its final drafting phase, the Defense Department asserts that America’s political and military mission in the post-cold-war era will be to ensure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territories of the former Soviet Union,” and that, “The classified document makes the case for a world dominated by one superpower whose position can be perpetuated by constructive behavior and sufficient military might to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy.” The main figure that drafted this policy was the Pentagon’s Under Secretary for Policy Paul Wolfowitz, who would later become Deputy Secretary of Defense in the George W. Bush administration, as well as President of the World Bank. Wolfowitz is also a member of the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, and is currently a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a neo-conservative think tank. The document places emphasis “on using military force, if necessary, to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction in such countries as North Korea, Iraq, some of the successor republics to the Soviet Union and in Europe,” and that, “What is most important, it says, is ‘the sense that the world order is ultimately backed by the U.S.’ and ‘the United States should be postured to act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated’ or in a crisis that demands quick response.” Further, “the new draft sketches a world in which there is one dominant military power whose leaders ‘must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role’.” Among the necessary challenges to American supremacy, the document “postulated regional wars against Iraq and North Korea,” and identified China and Russia as its major threats. It further “suggests that the United States could also consider extending to Eastern and Central European nations security commitments similar to those extended to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Arab states along the Persian Gulf.”[15] The Secretary of Defense at the time of this document’s writing was none other than Dick Cheney. When George Bush Sr. was replaced by Bill Clinton in 1993, the neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration formed a think tank called the Project for the New American Century, or PNAC. In 2000, they published a report called, Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century. Building upon the Defense Policy Guidance document, they state that, “the United States must retain sufficient forces able to rapidly deploy and win multiple simultaneous large-scale wars,”[16] that there is “need to retain sufficient combat forces to fight and win, multiple, nearly simultaneous major theatre wars,”[17] and that “the Pentagon needs to begin to calculate the force necessary to protect, independently, US interests in Europe, East Asia and the Gulf at all times.”[18] Further, “the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”[19] In describing the need for massive increases in military spending, rapidly expanding the armed forces and “dealing” with threats such as Iraq, North Korea and Iran, they state, “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”[20] Zbigniew Brzezinski, co-founder of the Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller, former National Security Adviser and key foreign policy architect in Jimmy Carter’s administration, also wrote a book on American geostrategy. Brzezinski is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderberg Group, and has also been a board member of Amnesty International, the Atlantic Council and the National Endowment for Democracy. Currently, he is a trustee and counselor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a major US policy think tank. In his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski outlined a strategy for America in the world. He wrote, “For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia. For half a millennium, world affairs were dominated by Eurasian powers and peoples who fought with one another for regional domination and reached out for global power.” Further, “how America ‘manages’ Eurasia is critical. Eurasia is the globe’s largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail African subordination.”[21] Brzezinski explained that, “the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.”[22] Brzezinski also outlines Russia and China, in cooperation with Iran and possibly Pakistan, as the most significant coalition that could challenge US hegemony. With the George W. Bush administration, the neo-conservative war hawks put into action the plans set out in their American imperial strategic documents. This made up the Bush doctrine, which called for “a unilateral and exclusive right to preemptive attack, any time, anywhere, unfettered by any international agreements, to ensure that ‘[o]ur forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hope of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States’.”[23] In 2000, the Pentagon released a document called Joint Vision 2020, which outlined a project to achieve what they termed, “Full Spectrum Dominance,” as the blueprint for the Department of Defense in the future. “Full-spectrum dominance means the ability of U.S. forces, operating alone or with allies, to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the range of military operations.” The report “addresses full-spectrum dominance across the range of conflicts from nuclear war to major theater wars to smaller-scale contingencies. It also addresses amorphous situations like peacekeeping and noncombat humanitarian relief.” Further, “The development of a global information grid will provide the environment for decision superiority.”[24] The War on Terrorism, as a war with invisible enemies and borderless boundaries, a truly global war, marks a major stage in the evolution of the constant war “surplus imperialism” of the American empire. The US military, while being used as a vehicle for surplus imperialism; is also creating and maintaining and expanding NATO. NATO is expanding its role in the world. The wars in Yugoslavia following the collapse of the Soviet Union were used to legitimize NATO’s continued existence, which was created to have an alliance against the USSR. When the USSR vanished, so too did NATO’s purpose, until it found a new calling: becoming a global policeman. NATO has undergone its first major war in Afghanistan and its expansion into Eastern Europe is enclosing Russia and China. Ivo Daalder, the US representative to NATO, also a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote an article for Foreign Affairs in which he advocated for a “global NATO” to “address the global challenges of the day.”[25] In April of 2009, NATO began to review its Strategic Concept “in order to stay relevant in a changing security environment,” and that, “The leaders envisage cyber-attacks, energy security and climate change as new threats to NATO, which would mean big changes in NATO's future operations.”[26] Since 2008, NATO has been re-imagining its strategy and moving to a doctrine of advocating for pre-emptive nuclear warfare.[27] As George Orwell wrote in 1984, “The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.” The Revolution of the New World Order The new system being formed is not one based upon any notion of competition or “free markets” or “socialist morality”, but is, instead a system based upon consolidation of power and wealth; thus, the fewer, the better; one government, one central bank, one army, one currency, one authority, one ruler. This is a much more “efficient” and “controllable” system, and thus requires a much smaller population or class to run it, as well as a much smaller population to serve it. Also, with such a system, a smaller global population would be ideal for the rulers, for it limits their risk, in terms of revolt, uprising, and revolution, and created a more malleable and manageable population. In this new capitalist system, the end goal is not profit, but power. In a sense, this is how the whole capitalist system has functioned, as profit has always acted as a means and lever to achieve power. Power itself, was the goal, profit was merely the means of achieving such a goal. Shortly following the origins of the capitalist system, central banking emerged. It was through the central banking system that the most powerful figures and individuals in the world were able to consolidate power, controlling both industry and governments. Through central banks, these figures would collapse economies, destroying industry and thus, profits; bankrupt countries and collapse their political structures, destroying a base for the exercise of power; but in doing so, they would consolidate their authority over these governments and industry, wiping out competition and eliminating dissent. It is these individuals who have played the greatest roles in shaping and reshaping the capitalist system, and are the main figures in the current reorganization of world order. However, such is the nature of individuals whose lives revolve around the acquisition and exercise of power. Like the saying goes, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts, absolutely.” Those who are driven by the lust for power often eliminate and remove all of those who helped them reach such a position. Hitler undertook the Night of Long Knives, in which a series of political executions were carried out, targeting prominent figures of the SA, who helped Hitler rise to power. Stalin similarly, also purged the Soviet Union of those who helped him rise to power. Power alters the psychology of the individual that holds it. It is an extremely lonely condition, in which, once power is achieved, and with no more power to gain, the obsession turns to the preservation of power, and with that, paranoia of losing it. This is why those that assist the powerful in gaining more power are doomed to a fate that is similar or worse than those who fight against such a power. This, ultimately, is why it is futile to join forces with such systems of power, or ally oneself with such powerful figures. Power is a cancer; it eats away at its host. The greater the power held, the more cancerous it is, the more malignant it becomes. The less power held by individuals, the less chance there is for growth of this cancer, or for it to become malignant. Power must be shared among all people, for the risk carried thus becomes a risk to all, and there is a greater degree of cooperation, support, and there is a more efficient and effective means through which everyone can act as a check against the abuse of power. Theoretical Foundations of Global Revolution Currently, we are witnessing, in the wake of the massive economic crisis, a revolution in the global political economy. This revolution, like all revolutions, is not simply a top-down or a bottom-up revolution. Historically, revolutions are driven by a combination of both the grassroots and the elite. Often, this materializes in clashes between social groups, such as with the American Revolution. Although, the American Revolution itself was primarily waged by the American landed elite against the foreign imperial elite of Great Britain. The French Revolution was the combination of the banking and aristocratic elite co-opting, manipulating and controlling the grassroots opposition to the established order. The Russian Revolution, also being able to see rising social tensions among the lower classes, was co-opted by an international banking elite. Currently, the transnational elite are very aware of the increasing social tensions among the worlds majority. As the crisis deepens, tensions will rise, and the chances of revolt and revolution from below greatly increase. Governments everywhere, particularly in the Western industrialized nations are building massive police states to monitor and control populations, and are actively preparing for martial law and military rule in the event of such a situation unfolding. However, the transnational elite are undertaking their own revolution from above. This revolution is encompassing the restructuring of the global political economy through their orchestrated economic crisis. Neo-Gramscian political economic theory can help us understand how this revolution has been and is currently being undertaken. Neo-Gramscian IPE (International Political Economy) emerged in the 1980s within the critical camp of theory. Largely based off of the Italian Marxist writer, Antonio Gramsci, it places a great focus on analysis of global power, order and structure. There has been much analysis within Neo-Gramscian theory on the nature and structure of the transnational capitalist class. Among the analysis of transnational classes, Neo-Gramscian theory also places emphasis on the notions of hegemony and resistance, or counter-hegemony. The Gramscian notion of hegemony differs from other perspectives in, particularly mainstream, Global Political Economy. With the Gramscian concept of hegemony, it does not focus simply on the use of state power at exerting power, but rather defines hegemony as a system of power that is dual; it requires both coercion and consent. Consent is key, as it implies the active consent of “subaltern” or “subordinate” groups (in other words, the great majority of the world’s people), to being submissive to the system itself. This hegemony is built around the notion of conformity; thus, conformity is an active consent to hegemony. By conforming, one is submitting to the system and their place within it. This is also an internationalizing concept, in that this hegemony is not nation-based, but transnational, and backed by the threat of coercive force. In discussing resistance to hegemony, or counter-hegemony, Gramsci identified two forms of resistance; the war of position and the war of movement. Robert Cox, the most well known Neo-Gramscian theorist, analyzed how Gramsci defined these notions by comparing the experiences of Russia with the Bolshevik Revolution as compared with experiences in Western Europe. As Cox explained, “The basic difference between Russia and Western Europe was in the relative strengths of state and civil society. In Russia, the administrative and coercive apparatus of the state was formidable but proved to be vulnerable, while civil society was undeveloped. A relatively small working class led by a disciplined avant-garde was able to overwhelm the state in a war of movement and met no effective resistance from the rest of civil society.”[28] So a war of movement was characterized by a small vanguard seizing power and overthrowing the state. “In Western Europe, by contrast, civil society, under bourgeois hegemony, was much more fully developed and took manifold forms. A war of movement might conceivably, in conditions of exceptional upheaval, enable a revolutionary vanguard to seize control of the state apparatus; but because of the resiliency of civil society such an exploit would in the long run be doomed to failure.” As Gramsci himself noted, “In Russia, the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between State and civil society, and when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed.”[29] In this instance, a war of movement was impossible to achieve in Western Europe, and thus, “The alternative strategy is the war of position which slowly builds up the strength of the social foundations of a new state. In Western Europe, the struggle had to be won in civil society before an assault on the state could achieve success.” This undertaking is massive to say the least, as it implies as a necessity, “creating alternative institutions and alternative intellectual resources within existing society and building bridges between workers and other subordinate classes. It means actively building counter-hegemony within an established hegemony while resisting the pressures and temptations to relapse into pursuit of incremental gains for subaltern groups within the framework of bourgeois hegemony.” In other words, it is a “long-range revolutionary strategy,” as compared to social democracy, which is “a policy of making gains within the established order.”[30] However, I wish to take the concept and notion of the “war of position” and re-imagine it, not as a means of counter-hegemony, but as a means of supra-hegemony. This is not a war of position on the part of a counter-hegemonic group (grassroots opposition, etc), but is rather a war of position on the part of an embedded international elite, or supra-hegemonic group. Supra is Latin for “above,” which implies that this group is above hegemony, just as supra-national institutions (such as the European Union) are above nations. This is the elite of the elite, beyond national elites, and composing the top tier of the hierarchy within the transnational superclass. In terms of composition, this group is the highly concentrated international bankers, the dynastic banking families such as the Rothschilds and Rockefellers, who control the major banking institutions of the world, which in turn, control the international central banking system. Their centralized power is exemplified in the Bank for International Settlements. I will refer to this group as the Global Cartel. This Cartel has usurped global authority and power through an incremental, multi-century spanning war of position. The Peace of Westphalia, signed in 1648, constituting two separate treaties, created the notion of the nation state and state sovereignty within Western Europe. Feudalism dominated Europe from the medieval period through the 16th century, and was slowly replaced by the emergence of Capitalism. Major European empires had, since the 15th century, been pursuing empire building, such as with the trans-Atlantic slave trade and expansion into the Americas. This formed the first truly global economy. The empires worked under and in service to the monarchies that oversaw them. It was with the founding of the Bank of England in 1694 that a European group of bankers overtook one of the major European empires. Great Britain then became the dominant empire, experiencing the Industrial Revolution prior to any other nation, and became a global hegemon. With the French Revolution, these European bankers took over another major empire through the establishment of the Bank of France, and then financed and profited off of all sides of every major war, and expanded imperial reach. Through the expansion of the central banking system, a highly concentrated group of European bankers were able to overtake the major nations of the world. The entire history of the United States is the story of a Republic’s struggle and battle against a central bank. Finally, the bankers usurped monetary authority with the establishment of the Federal Reserve, and built up and created the American empire. It was in the 20th century that the war of position of the cartel is most apparent. As the world globalized, so too did the war of position. The major banking dynasties founded powerful philanthropies, such as the Carnegie Endowment and the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. These organizations shaped civil society in the United States and set their sights internationally in scope. Through the establishment of think tanks like the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) in Britain and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in the United States, this cartel was able to bring in and centralize the intellectual, academic, strategic, military, economic and political establishments under the cartel’s influence. This was expanded by the cartel through organizations such as the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission. Centralizing and controlling debate and discussion within these vital socio-political-economic realms was a vital component of institutionalizing hegemony, as Gramsci understands it, in that the cartel used their monetary and financial hegemony (controlling the printing and value of currencies) to stimulate an active consent among the socio-political-economic elite. National elites consented to the hegemony of the cartel, whose coercive hegemony was in their ability to destroy a national economy through monetary policy. This hegemony, both coercive and consenting, based within the elite class themselves, facilitated the war of position of the cartel to advance their interests and proceed with their incremental revolution. The aim of this cartel, like many tyrants and power-hungry people before it, was world domination. Bankers command no army, lead no nation, and motivate no people. Their influence lies in co-opting the commanders, controlling the leaders, and manipulating motivation. Thus, it was of absolute necessity for the cartel to undertake their ultimate aim of world domination and world government through a war of position, as no person would fight for, surrender a nation to, or be motivated to help any banker achieve their own selfish goals. Rather, they had to slowly usurp power incrementally; control money, buy politicians, own economies, build empires, engineer wars, mold civil society, control their opposition, overtake educational institutions and ultimately, control thought. Conclusion As George Orwell wrote, “Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.” The more people that think for themselves; the worse it is for the cartel. People, free thinking individuals, are the greatest threat to this cartel and their war of position. That is why the answer and solution to exposing the supra-hegemonic war of position, challenging and triumphing over the New World Order, lies in the free-thinking individual. The challenge is global and globalized; the solution is local and localized. The problem is conformity and controlled thought; the answer is individuality and free thought. While humanity is faced with such monumental crises the likes of which in scope and size, we have never before faced, so too, are we faced with the greatest opportunities for an ultimate change in the right direction. While people are controlled and manipulated through crisis and disorder, so too can people be awoken to seeing the necessity of knowledge and critical thought. When one’s life is thrown into disorder and chaos, suddenly observation, information and knowledge become important in understanding how one got into that situation, and how one can escape it. With this in mind, while facing the potential for the greatest struggle humanity has ever faced, so too are we facing the greatest potential for a new Enlightenment or a new Renaissance; an age of new thought, new life, new potential, and peace. No matter how much elites think they control all things, life has a way of making one realize that there are things outside the control of people. With every action, comes an equal and opposite reaction. We may not reach a new age of thinking and peace before we enter into a new age of oppression and war. In fact, the former may not be possible without the latter. People must awake from their slumber; their immersion in consumerist society and pop culture distractions, and awake to both the malevolence of world systems and the wonder of life and its potential. Through crisis, comes control; through control, comes power; through power, comes resistance; through resistance, comes thinking; through thinking, comes potential; through potential, comes peace. We may very well be entering into the most oppressive and destructive order the world has yet seen, but from its ruins and ashes, which are as inevitable as the tides and as sure as the sun rises, we may see the rise of a truly peaceful world order; in which we see the triumphs of individualism merge with the interests of the majority; a people’s world order of peace for all. We must maintain, as Antonio Gramsci once wrote, “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” Notes [1] NIC, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World. The National Intelligence Council’s 2025 Project: November, 2008: pages 70-72: http://www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_2025_project.html [2] David Lyon, Theorizing surveillance: the panopticon and beyond. Willan Publishing, 2006: page 71 [3] Olga Chetverikova, Crisis as a way to build a global totalitarian state. Russia Today: April 20, 2009: http://www.russiatoday.com/Politics/2009-04-20/Crisis_as_a_way_to_build_a_global_totalitarian_state.html [4] NIC, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World. The National Intelligence Council’s 2025 Project: November, 2008: pages 67: http://www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_2025_project.html [5] NIC, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World. The National Intelligence Council’s 2025 Project: November, 2008: pages 63: http://www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_2025_project.html [6] NIC, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World. The National Intelligence Council’s 2025 Project: November, 2008: pages 56: http://www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_2025_project.html [7] Richard Norton-Taylor, Revolution, flashmobs, and brain chips. A grim vision of the future. The Guardian: April 9, 2007: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/apr/09/frontpagenews.news [8] Paul Joseph Watson & Yihan Dai, RAND Lobbies Pentagon: Start War To Save U.S. Economy. Prison Planet: October 30, 2008: http://www.prisonplanet.com/rand-lobbies-pentagon-start-war-to-save-us-economy.html [9] Paul Joseph Watson, Celente Predicts Revolution, Food Riots, Tax Rebellions By 2012. Prison Planet: November 13, 2008: http://www.prisonplanet.com/celente-predicts-revolution-food-riots-tax-rebellions-by-2012.html [10] Gerald Celente, Obamageddon — 2012. Prison Planet: June 30: 2009: http://www.infowars.com/obamageddon-2012/ [11] CNBC, Gerald Celente. May 21, 2009: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akH5C3f4aTI [12] Terry Easton, Exclusive Interview with Future Prediction Expert Gerald Celente. Human Events: June 5, 2009: http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=32152 [13] Ellen Wood, Empire of Capital. Verso, 2003: page 144 [14] Ellen Wood, Empire of Capital. Verso, 2003: page 157 [15] Tyler, Patrick E. U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop: A One Superpower World. The New York Times: March 8, 1992. http://work.colum.edu/~amiller/wolfowitz1992.htm [16] PNAC, Rebuilding America’s Defenses. Project for the New American Century: September 2000, page 6: http://www.newamericancentury.org/publicationsreports.htm [17] Ibid. Page 8 [18] Ibid. Page 9 [19] Ibid. Page 14 [20] Ibid. Page 51 [21] Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives. Basic Books, 1997: Pages 30-31 [22] Ibid. Page 36 [23] Ellen Wood, Empire of Capital. Verso, 2003: page 160 [24] Jim Garamone, Joint Vision 2020 Emphasizes Full-spectrum Dominance. American Forces Press Service: June 2, 2000: http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=45289 [25] Ivo Daalder and James Goldgeier, Global NATO. Foreign Affairs: Sep/Oct2006, Vol. 85, Issue 5 [26] Xinhua, NATO changes to stay relevant. Xinhua News Agency: April 5, 2009: http://www.china.org.cn/international/2009-04/05/content_17554731.htm [27] Ian Traynor, Pre-emptive nuclear strike a key option, Nato told. The Guardian: January 22, 2008: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jan/22/nato.nuclear Michel Chossudovsky, The US-NATO Preemptive Nuclear Doctrine: Trigger a Middle East Nuclear Holocaust to Defend "The Western Way of Life". Global Research: February 11, 2008: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8048 [28] Robert W. Cox, Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An Essay in Method. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2: pages 164-165 [29] Robert W. Cox, Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An Essay in Method. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2: page 165 [30] Robert W. Cox, Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An Essay in Method. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2: page 165 Andrew Gavin Marshall is a Research Associate with the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is currently studying Political Economy and History at Simon Fraser University.

Andrew Gavin Marshall is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Andrew Gavin Marshall

Part 1: Global Power and Global Government: Evolution and Revolution of the Central Banking System

Part 2: Origins of the American Empire: Revolution, World Wars and World Order

Part 3: Controlling the Global Economy: Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commission and the Federal Reserve

Part 4: Forging a “New World Order” Under a One World Government