World War III Began In May 2006

Building The New Map Of The Middle East In Real Time

By Chycho

I. Beginnings Of Conflicts

Usually there are disagreements as to the exact dates of beginnings of conflicts, especially when those conflicts are global. 

“The beginnings of wars are often hard to identify. Which act lit the spark on the tinderbox? Which straw was the final one? Like peak oilitself, the beginnings of war are often visible only in retrospect.” 

For example, some would argue that World War II began in 1939 withthe German invasion of Poland. Others would pick the 1931Japanese invasion of Manchuria, or maybe even the 1933 Reichstag Fire. The only consensus regarding World War II is that it was devastating. 

As for World War III, some believe that it was the Cold War and that we are in the beginning stages of World War IV. They believe that it started with the invasion of Iraq, and will be completely realized when the United States and Israel begin their attack on Iran and Syria (1, 2). 

Some reference the confrontation between Israel and Palestine at the turn of the century as the start. Others state that the First Gulf War was the “opening guns of World War III”, while some declare that “the most significant feature of this New World Order/World War III is that the target of war is no longer so much a state institution as it is the citizenry of states. Since this majority is working class, World War III is really a war upon the working class, designed to increase the rate of its economic exploitation.” 

There is even a belief that the root cause is the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) which is “creating worldwide tensions similar to the standoff before the Second World War.” 

Others, specifically, Miles Copeland, Jr. who was one of the founding members of the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), predicted in 1989 that World War III would begin when the United States and Israel get duped by Russia into starting a self-destructive war - referred to as a crusade by some - with the Muslim world:

“But even with the help of the Israelis - especially with the help of the Israelis! - we couldn't defeat the Iranians, the 'Arabs', the world of Islam or the whole Third World if it should turn against us. We [the CIA] have reason to believe that Soviet strategists well understand this, and that the Third World War that they envision will be one of ourselves against shapeless forces of the Third World, with Soviet Russia ostensibly aloof from it...The U.S Government was sinking into exactly the dilemma that best suited the purposes of Moscow's Leninists as they've begun to blossom under Gorbachev. In materials easily available to the U.S government without recourse to espionage, they had made it clear enough that in their version of the Third World War the United States would be forced into a variety of situations in which it would feel compelled to play the role of a powerful nation but, for all the world to see on it television sets, it would in fact, be powerless." The Game Player: Confessions of the CIA's Original Political Operative, London: Aurum Press, 1989

II. Start of World War III

Whichever truth you choose to believe, since they are all relevant and valid in their own right, the fact is that according to the mainstream media, World War III (or IV) has already begun. 

Considering that the players involved in starting this war are so conveniently, on our behalf, declaring that World War III (or IV) has already started, I thought it would be a good idea to narrow the timeline and pick a date which will be marked as the commencement of the demise of our civilization. 

So when exactly did World War III start? 

In early May of 2006, the president of the United States, George W Bush, the commander in chief of the United States Military, stated that 2001 was the beginning of World War III. His remarks were confirmed by Dan Gillerman, at the time Israel's UN Ambassador, when he also acknowledged during a routine UN Security Council meeting on 30 May 2006 that World War III had already begun. Many consider these two statements from two of the main nuclear powers in the world to be the declaration of War, indicating that World War III has already started. 

So even though 11 September 2001 is the key to understanding why this conflict has begun, and considered by the United States to be the event that triggered World War III, I believe that May 2006 is really the beginning of this global conflict. This is when the two major parties, who each individually is capable of starting World War III, declared war. 

III. Map Of The New Middle East

As to what the objective of this war is for some of its conspirators? The most likely purpose is twofold: to create the New Map of the Middle East, and to maintain the status quo of Western economic dominance over global financial markets. A lot more on theeconomics of war later, for now, let’s focus on the new map of the Middle East. 

The boundaries of countries were redrawn after World War I and World War II (1, 2), and that is exactly what the end resulted will be once the dust settles after this world war. 

What is happening right now is very likely related to US plans to create aNew Middle East, the plans for which were revealed in 2006 by retired Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters. The map, presented below, with the redrawn borders of the Middle East, indicates that Turkey would lose a large portion of its territory while Iraq would be split into three autonomous regions. This map also shows plans to partition Pakistan and reduce Iran’s territory, along with numerous other imperial agendas. 

Present Middle East

IV. The Human Toll

As to the human toll of this global war, a conservative estimate of how many people would die can be obtained by assuming that the same percentage of people that died in World War II would also die in World War III. 

In the 1940’s the world population was approximately 2.3 billion. World War II resulted in 60 to 80 million deaths (38 to 55 million of which were civilian casualties). This means that approximately 4% of the world’s population was killed. 

At present, the world population is approximately 7 billion. If we assume that the same percentage of people will die during this world war than the last, it would mean that over 280 million people will be dead in the next few years. This is a conservative estimate since nuclear weapons were introduced at the end of World War II, while they are being proposed at the beginning of World War III. The number of wounded will be approximately 1.5 billion if we assume a kill to wounded ratio of 1 to 5.

Meddling In Other People's Business

Mehdi Hasan Goes Head To Head With Bernard-Henri Levy On The Rights and Wrongs Of Foreign Intervention.

Courtesy Of Al-Jazeera

From Bosnia in 1994 to Syria today, via Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Mali, is western military intervention ever justified?

In this episode of Head to Head at the Oxford Union, Mehdi Hasan challenges one of the world’s most renowned public intellectuals, Bernard-Henri Levy, on the rights and wrongs of liberal intervention, and the difference between humanitarian concerns and the pursuit of special interests.

Levy is France’s most famous philosopher, a journalist and bestselling author of more than 30 books, with Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism being his most recent book. He is the founder of the New Philosophers' movement and a leading thinker on humanitarian intervention.

Levy has undertaken important missions for the French government in the world's most troubled areas and was famously instrumental in getting NATO to act quickly and decisively in Libya. He now wants the same to be done in Syria: “Bashar al-Assad is a paper tiger because he’s weak, therefore it is doable,” argues Levy, “We cannot let the blood bath go on like this!”

“When I hear liberal interventionists make this case it always seem to be either we bomb or we do nothing,” replies Al Jazeera's Mehdi Hasan. “Is there no middle ground? Is there no coercive diplomacy?”

Joining this discussion are: Dr Rama Mani, an expert on peace, justice and human security and a senior research associate of the University of Oxford’s Centre for International Studies, she has also co-authored a book onResponsibility to Protect: Cultural Perspectives from the global South  and has formed part of peace-building missions across Africa, Iraq and Afghanistan; Peter Oborne, a broadcaster who has made documentaries on Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as a political commentator for The Spectatorand The Daily Telegraph , the author of The Rise of Political Lying, And A moral Duty to Act amongst others; and Salma Yaqoob, a former leader of the Respect Party, a socialist political party in the UK, and one of the founders of the Stop the War Coalition , she is also a critic of indiscriminate liberal interventionism.

The Eternal War

By Andrew Bacevich

Twelve and a half years after Congress didn’t declare war on an organization of hundreds or, at most, thousands of jihadis scattered mainly across the backlands of the planet, and instead let President George W. Bush and his cohort loose to do whatever they wanted; twelve and a half years after the president, his top officials, his neocon supporters, assembled pundits, and others swore we were nonetheless “at war” and the country in “wartime,” after our media beat the drums for “war” and assured us that “war” was our fate, after followers of the president insisted we were entering a monumental, multigenerational struggle, or even World War IV; twelve and a half years after the war that hadn’t been declared was launched and the bombing of Afghanistan began, after the CIA and Washington targeted up to 80 countries in a “worldwide attack matrix” -- later given the leave-no-location-out name the Global War on Terror -- and after top Washington officials swore we would soon “drain the [global] swamp,” another president has now assured us that someday, in a distant future, in a way that we might not even notice (“Our victory against terrorism won’t be measured in a surrender ceremony at a battleship...”), we might possibly find ourselves approaching the sort-of-end of what will have been a 20- or 30-year conflict.

At the National Defense University (NDU) last Thursday, President Obama, so media reports and editorials assured us, gave a speech in which he promised to dial back the war on terror as a “global” operation, curtail U.S. drone operations abroad, and launch another effort to whittle down, if not close, Guantanamo.  But a careful look at the text of his speech indicates that he still accepts the most basic premises of the previous administration: that we are “at war”; that the country, despite visible evidence to the contrary, is in “wartime”; and that, when a president decides it’s necessary, this planet will remain a global free-fire zone for drones, special operations forces, or whatever else he choses to throw at it.  He may even, reports Jonathan Landay of McClatchy News, have quietly expanded the categories of human beings that U.S. drones can attack. 

In those twelve and a half years between 9/11 and the recent speech, it’s been a bumpy ride through a minefield of unexpected IEDs.  Two invasions of the Eurasian mainland have led to two defeats that passed for better here and are bringing U.S. combat troops home with, as this president said, their “heads held high,” but also with massive numbers of PTSD cases, suicides, and other debilitating issues.  In the meantime, America’s global warring has resulted in a significant destabilization of the Greater Middle East.  (The present Syrian disaster would have been unimaginable without the U.S. invasion of Iraq.)  It’s also resulted in the growth of an ever larger secret military cocooned inside the U.S. military, the special operations forces -- 10,000 of whom are now in Afghanistan alone -- and the launching of a series of drone wars and assassination campaigns across a significant swath of the planet.  These, from a White House that has taken on ever more power to do as it pleases in foreign and military policy, the president now claims to be curtailing and bringing under his version of the rule of law, largely because they haven't been working out so terribly well.  Finally, there’s the spread of the al-Qaeda franchise into areas Washington has helped unsettle, which, as the president indicated, ensures that our “war” cannot end any time soon.  Think of it as a Mobius strip of self-justifying conflict.

And yet, the ability of the U.S. to “project force” everywhere from the Mali-Niger border to the Philippines remains impressive.  Even its capacity to engage in a series of disasters over such an expanse of the planet for twelve and a half years and still be talking about “pivoting” militarily to Asia, while maintaining a massive build-up of U.S. forces around Iran, should give anyone pause.  It's a reminder that the now-seldom-heard term "sole superpower” continues to mean something.

But what? Somehow, like our empire of bases (and the private contractors that go with it), it’s been hard to absorb the continual use of such power projection and the vast web of military-to-military relationships and weapons sales that go with it, or the increasing ability of the White House alone to determine what makes sense and what doesn’t abroad, even as both the Greater Middle East and what’s left of American democracy and liberties are further destabilized.

Much of this has not yet been taken in here in a meaningful way, though you can feel it lurking, half-expressed, half-grasped, in the president’s NDU speech.  To begin to understand what’s actually been going on, it would help to define the “war” that we’ve been fighting all these years from North Africa to China's Central Asian border.  TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, whose latest book Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country will be published in September, suggests that a good place to begin is by naming that now nameless “war.” (In fact, if, having checked out his piece, TomDispatch readers want to send in their own naming suggestions, along with their explanations for them, we might highlight a few of them above a future post.) Tom 

Naming Our Nameless War 

By Andrew J. Bacevich

For well over a decade now the United States has been “a nation at war.” Does that war have a name?

It did at the outset.  After 9/11, George W. Bush's administration wasted no time in announcing that the U.S. was engaged in a Global War on Terrorism, or GWOT.  With few dissenters, the media quickly embraced the term. The GWOT promised to be a gargantuan, transformative enterprise. The conflict begun on 9/11 would define the age. In neoconservative circles, it was known as World War IV.

Upon succeeding to the presidency in 2009, however, Barack Obama without fanfare junked Bush’s formulation (as he did again in a speech at the National Defense University last week).  Yet if the appellation went away, the conflict itself, shorn of identifying marks, continued.

Does it matter that ours has become and remains a nameless war? Very much so.

Names bestow meaning.  When it comes to war, a name attached to a date can shape our understanding of what the conflict was all about.  To specify when a war began and when it ended is to privilege certain explanations of its significance while discrediting others. Let me provide a few illustrations.

With rare exceptions, Americans today characterize the horrendous fraternal bloodletting of 1861-1865 as the Civil War.  Yet not many decades ago, diehard supporters of the Lost Cause insisted on referring to that conflict as the War Between the States or the War for Southern Independence (or even the War of Northern Aggression).  The South may have gone down in defeat, but the purposes for which Southerners had fought -- preserving a distinctive way of life and the principle of states’ rights -- had been worthy, even noble.  So at least they professed to believe, with their preferred names for the war reflecting that belief.

Schoolbooks tell us that the Spanish-American War began in April 1898 and ended in August of that same year.  The name and dates fit nicely with a widespread inclination from President William McKinley’s day to our own to frame U.S. intervention in Cuba as an altruistic effort to liberate that island from Spanish oppression.

Yet the Cubans were not exactly bystanders in that drama.  By 1898, they had been fighting for years to oust their colonial overlords.  And although hostilities in Cuba itself ended on August 12th, they dragged on in the Philippines, another Spanish colony that the United States had seized for reasons only remotely related to liberating Cubans.  Notably, U.S. troops occupying the Philippines waged a brutal war not against Spaniards but against Filipino nationalists no more inclined to accept colonial rule by Washington than by Madrid.  So widen the aperture to include this Cuban prelude and the Filipino postlude and you end up with something like this:  The Spanish-American-Cuban-Philippines War of 1895-1902.  Too clunky?  How about the War for the American Empire?  This much is for sure: rather than illuminating, the commonplace textbook descriptor serves chiefly to conceal.

Strange as it may seem, Europeans once referred to the calamitous events of 1914-1918 as the Great War.  When Woodrow Wilson decided in 1917 to send an army of doughboys to fight alongside the Allies, he went beyond Great.  According to the president, the Great War was going to be the War To End All Wars.  Alas, things did not pan out as he expected.  Perhaps anticipating the demise of his vision of permanent peace, War Department General Order 115, issued on October 7, 1919, formally declared that, at least as far as the United States was concerned, the recently concluded hostilities would be known simply as the World War.

In September 1939 -- presto chango! -- the World War suddenly became theFirst World War, the Nazi invasion of Poland having inaugurated a Second World War, also known as World War II or more cryptically WWII.  To be sure, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin preferred the Great Patriotic War.  Although this found instant -- almost unanimous -- favor among Soviet citizens, it did not catch on elsewhere.

Does World War II accurately capture the events it purports to encompass?  With the crusade against the Axis now ranking alongside the crusade against slavery as a myth-enshrouded chapter in U.S. history to which all must pay homage, Americans are no more inclined to consider that question than to consider why a playoff to determine the professional baseball championship of North America constitutes a “World Series.”

In fact, however convenient and familiar, World War II is misleading and not especially useful.  The period in question saw at least two wars, each only tenuously connected to the other, each having distinctive origins, each yielding a different outcome.  To separate them is to transform the historical landscape.

On the one hand, there was the Pacific War, pitting the United States against Japan.  Formally initiated by the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, it had in fact begun a decade earlier when Japan embarked upon a policy of armed conquest in Manchuria.  At stake was the question of who would dominate East Asia.  Japan’s crushing defeat at the hands of the United States, sealed by two atomic bombs in 1945, answered that question (at least for a time).

Then there was the European War, pitting Nazi Germany first against Great Britain and France, but ultimately against a grand alliance led by the United States, the Soviet Union, and a fast fading British Empire.  At stake was the question of who would dominate Europe.  Germany’s defeat resolved that issue (at least for a time): no one would.  To prevent any single power from controlling Europe, two outside powers divided it.

This division served as the basis for the ensuing Cold War, which wasn’t actually cold, but also (thankfully) wasn’t World War III, the retrospective insistence of bellicose neoconservatives notwithstanding.  But when did the Cold War begin?  Was it in early 1947, when President Harry Truman decided that Stalin’s Russia posed a looming threat and committed the United States to a strategy of containment?  Or was it in 1919, when Vladimir Lenin decided that Winston Churchill’s vow to “strangle Bolshevism in its cradle” posed a looming threat to the Russian Revolution, with an ongoing Anglo-American military intervention evincing a determination to make good on that vow?

Separating the war against Nazi Germany from the war against Imperial Japan opens up another interpretive possibility.  If you incorporate the European conflict of 1914-1918 and the European conflict of 1939-1945 into a single narrative, you get a Second Thirty Years War (the first having occurred from 1618-1648) -- not so much a contest of good against evil, as a mindless exercise in self-destruction that represented the ultimate expression of European folly.

So, yes, it matters what we choose to call the military enterprise we’ve been waging not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in any number of other countries scattered hither and yon across the Islamic world.  Although the Obama administration appears no more interested than the Bush administration in saying when that enterprise will actually end, the date we choose as its starting point also matters.

Although Washington seems in no hurry to name its nameless war -- and will no doubt settle on something self-serving or anodyne if it ever finally addresses the issue -- perhaps we should jump-start the process.  Let’s consider some possible options, names that might actually explain what’s going on.

The Long War: Coined not long after 9/11 by senior officers in the Pentagon, this formulation never gained traction with either civilian officials or the general public.  Yet the Long War deserves consideration, even though -- or perhaps because -- it has lost its luster with the passage of time.

At the outset, it connoted grand ambitions buoyed by extreme confidence in the efficacy of American military might.  This was going to be one for the ages, a multi-generational conflict yielding sweeping results.

The Long War did begin on a hopeful note.  The initial entry into Afghanistan and then into Iraq seemed to herald “home by Christmas” triumphal parades.  Yet this soon proved an illusion as victory slipped from Washington’s grasp.  By 2005 at the latest, events in the field had dashed the neo-Wilsonian expectations nurtured back home.

With the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan dragging on, “long” lost its original connotation.  Instead of “really important," it became a synonym for “interminable.”  Today, the Long War does succinctly capture the experience of American soldiers who have endured multiple combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

For Long War combatants, the object of the exercise has become to persist.  As for winning, it’s not in the cards. The Long War just might conclude by the end of 2014 if President Obama keeps his pledge to end the U.S. combat role in Afghanistan and if he avoids getting sucked into Syria’s civil war.  So the troops may hope.

The War Against Al-Qaeda: It began in August 1996 when Osama bin Laden issued a "Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places,” i.e., Saudi Arabia.  In February 1998, a second bin Laden manifesto announced that killing Americans, military and civilian alike, had become “an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”

Although President Bill Clinton took notice, the U.S. response to bin Laden’s provocations was limited and ineffectual.  Only after 9/11 did Washington take this threat seriously.  Since then, apart from a pointless excursion into Iraq (where, in Saddam Hussein’s day, al-Qaeda did not exist), U.S. attention has been focused on Afghanistan, where U.S. troops have waged the longest war in American history, and on Pakistan’s tribal borderlands, where a CIA drone campaign is ongoing.  By the end of President Obama’s first term, U.S. intelligence agencies were reporting that a combined CIA/military campaign had largely destroyed bin Laden’s organization.  Bin Laden himself, of course, was dead. 

Could the United States have declared victory in its unnamed war at this point?  Perhaps, but it gave little thought to doing so.  Instead, the national security apparatus had already trained its sights on various al-Qaeda “franchises” and wannabes, militant groups claiming the bin Laden brand and waging their own version of jihad.  These offshoots emerged in the Maghreb, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, and -- wouldn’t you know it -- post-Saddam Iraq, among other places.  The question as to whether they actually posed a danger to the United States got, at best, passing attention -- the label “al-Qaeda” eliciting the same sort of Pavlovian response that the word “communist” once did.

Americans should not expect this war to end anytime soon.  Indeed, the Pentagon’s impresario of special operations recently speculated -- by no means unhappily -- that it would continue globally for “at least 10 to 20 years.”   Freely translated, his statement undoubtedly means: “No one really knows, but we’re planning to keep at it for one helluva long time.”

The War For/Against/About Israel: It began in 1948.  For many Jews, the founding of the state of Israel signified an ancient hope fulfilled.  For many Christians, conscious of the sin of anti-Semitism that had culminated in the Holocaust, it offered a way to ease guilty consciences, albeit mostly at others’ expense.  For many Muslims, especially Arabs, and most acutely Arabs who had been living in Palestine, the founding of the Jewish state represented a grave injustice.  It was yet another unwelcome intrusion engineered by the West -- colonialism by another name.

Recounting the ensuing struggle without appearing to take sides is almost impossible.  Yet one thing seems clear: in terms of military involvement, the United States attempted in the late 1940s and 1950s to keep its distance.  Over the course of the 1960s, this changed.  The U.S. became Israel’s principal patron, committed to maintaining (and indeed increasing) its military superiority over its neighbors.

In the decades that followed, the two countries forged a multifaceted “strategic relationship.”  A compliant Congress provided Israel with weapons and other assistance worth many billions of dollars, testifying to what has become an unambiguous and irrevocable U.S. commitment to the safety and well-being of the Jewish state.  The two countries share technology and intelligence.  Meanwhile, just as Israel had disregarded U.S. concerns when it came to developing nuclear weapons, it ignored persistent U.S. requests that it refrain from colonizing territory that it has conquered.

When it comes to identifying the minimal essential requirements of Israeli security and the terms that will define any Palestinian-Israeli peace deal, the United States defers to Israel.  That may qualify as an overstatement, but only slightly.  Given the Israeli perspective on those requirements and those terms -- permanent military supremacy and a permanently demilitarized Palestine allowed limited sovereignty -- the War For/Against/About Israel is unlikely to end anytime soon either.  Whether the United States benefits from the perpetuation of this war is difficult to say, but we are in it for the long haul.

The War for the Greater Middle East: I confess that this is the name I would choose for Washington’s unnamed war and is, in fact, the title of a course I teach.  (A tempting alternative is the Second Hundred Years War, the "first" having begun in 1337 and ended in 1453.)

This war is about to hit the century mark, its opening chapter coinciding with the onset of World War I.  Not long after the fighting on the Western Front in Europe had settled into a stalemate, the British government, looking for ways to gain the upper hand, set out to dismantle the Ottoman Empire whose rulers had foolishly thrown in their lot with the German Reich against the Allies.

By the time the war ended with Germany and the Turks on the losing side, Great Britain had already begun to draw up new boundaries, invent states, and install rulers to suit its predilections, while also issuing mutually contradictory promises to groups inhabiting these new precincts of its empire.  Toward what end?  Simply put, the British were intent on calling the shots from Egypt to India, whether by governing through intermediaries or ruling directly.  The result was a new Middle East and a total mess.

London presided over this mess, albeit with considerable difficulty, until the end of World War II.  At this point, by abandoning efforts to keep Arabs and Zionists from one another's throats in Palestine and by accepting the partition of India, they signaled their intention to throw in the towel. Alas, Washington proved more than willing to assume Britain’s role.  The lure of oil was strong.  So too were the fears, however overwrought, of the Soviets extending their influence into the region. 

Unfortunately, the Americans enjoyed no more success in promoting long-term, pro-Western stability than had the British.  In some respects, they only made things worse, with the joint CIA-MI6 overthrow of a democratically elected government in Iran in 1953 offering a prime example of a “success” that, to this day, has never stopped breeding disaster.

Only after 1980 did things get really interesting, however.  The Carter Doctrine promulgated that year designated the Persian Gulf a vital national security interest and opened the door to greatly increased U.S. military activity not just in the Gulf, but also throughout the Greater Middle East (GME).  Between 1945 and 1980, considerable numbers of American soldiers lost their lives fighting in Asia and elsewhere.  During that period, virtually none were killed fighting in the GME.  Since 1990, in contrast, virtually none have been killed fighting anywhere except in the GME.

What does the United States hope to achieve in its inherited and unending War for the Greater Middle East?  To pacify the region?  To remake it in our image?  To drain its stocks of petroleum?  Or just keeping the lid on?  However you define the war’s aims, things have not gone well, which once again suggests that, in some form, it will continue for some time to come.  If there’s any good news here, it’s the prospect of having ever more material for my seminar, which may soon expand into a two-semester course.

The War Against Islam: This war began nearly 1,000 years ago and continued for centuries, a storied collision between Christendom and the Muslim ummah.  For a couple of hundred years, periodic eruptions of large-scale violence occurred until the conflict finally petered out with the last crusade sometime in the fourteenth century.

In those days, many people had deemed religion something worth fighting for, a proposition to which the more sophisticated present-day inhabitants of Christendom no longer subscribe.  Yet could that religious war have resumed in our own day?  Professor Samuel Huntington thought so, although he styled the conflict a “clash of civilizations.”  Some militant radical Islamists agree with Professor Huntington, citing as evidence the unwelcome meddling of “infidels,” mostly wearing American uniforms, in various parts of the Muslim world.  Some militant evangelical Christians endorse this proposition, even if they take a more favorable view of U.S. troops occupying and drones targeting Muslim countries.

In explaining the position of the United States government, religious scholars like George W. Bush and Barack (Hussein!) Obama have consistently expressed a contrary view.  Islam is a religion of peace, they declare, part of the great Abrahamic triad.  That the other elements of that triad are likewise committed to peace is a proposition that Bush, Obama, and most Americans take for granted, evidence not required.  There should be no reason why Christians, Jews, and Muslims can’t live together in harmony.

Still, remember back in 2001 when, in an unscripted moment, President Bush described the war barely begun as a “crusade”?  That was just a slip of the tongue, right?  If not, we just might end up calling this one the Eternal War.

Preventive Warriors

Courtesy Of JourneyMan Pictures

If in doubt -- attack! 

The American neo-conservative policy of attacking rivals before they're a real danger represents a dangerous political shift within the most powerful nation on earth. 

But what will the long term consequences of pre-emptive war be? 

This week's documentary is a polished and critical investigation into the foreign affairs sledgehammer now being wielded out of Washington. 

Featuring interviews with leading intellectuals this documentary offers a frightening insight into what could become a harsh new world order.

Was The London killing Of A British Soldier 'Terrorism'?

What Definition Of The Term Includes This Horrific Act Of Violence But Excludes The Acts Of The US, The UK and Its Allies?

Glenn Greenwald pens the following article:

Two men yesterday engaged in a horrific act of violence on the streets of London by using what appeared to be a meat cleaver to hack to death a British soldier. In the wake of claims that the assailants shouted "Allahu Akbar" during the killing, and a video showing one of the assailants citing Islam as well as a desire to avenge and stop continuous UK violence against Muslims, media outlets (including the Guardian) and British politicians instantly characterized the attack as "terrorism".

That this was a barbaric and horrendous act goes without saying, but given the legal, military, cultural and political significance of the term "terrorism", it is vital to ask: is that term really applicable to this act of violence? To begin with, in order for an act of violence to be "terrorism", many argue that it must deliberately target civilians. That's the most common means used by those who try to distinguish the violence engaged in by western nations from that used by the "terrorists": sure, we kill civilians sometimes, but we don't deliberately target them the way the "terrorists" do.

But here, just as was true for Nidal Hasan's attack on a Fort Hood military base, the victim of the violence was a soldier of a nation at war, not a civilian. He was stationed at an army barracks quite close to the attack. The killer made clear that he knew he had attacked a soldier when he said afterward: "this British soldier is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."

The US, the UK and its allies have repeatedly killed Muslim civilians over the past decade (and before that), but defenders of those governments insist that this cannot be "terrorism" because it is combatants, not civilians, who are the targets. Can it really be the case that when western nations continuously kill Muslim civilians, that's not "terrorism", but when Muslims kill western soldiers, that is terrorism? Amazingly, the US has even imprisoned people at Guantanamo and elsewhere on accusations of "terrorism" who are accused of nothing more than engaging in violence against US soldiers who invaded their country.

It's true that the soldier who was killed yesterday was out of uniform and not engaged in combat at the time he was attacked. But the same is true for the vast bulk of killings carried out by the US and its allies over the last decade, where people are killed in their homes, in their cars, at work, while asleep (in fact, the US has re-defined "militant" to mean "any military-aged male in a strike zone"). Indeed, at a recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on drone killings, Gen. James Cartwright and Sen. Lindsey Graham both agreed that the US has the right to kill its enemies even while they are "asleep", that you don't "have to wake them up before you shoot them" and "make it a fair fight". Once you declare that the "entire globe is a battlefield" (which includes London) and that any "combatant" (defined as broadly as possible) is fair game to be killed - as the US has done - then how can the killing of a solider of a nation engaged in that war, horrific though it is, possibly be "terrorism"?

When I asked on Twitter this morning what specific attributes of this attack make it "terrorism" given that it was a soldier who was killed, the most frequent answer I received was that "terrorism" means any act of violence designed to achieve political change, or more specifically, to induce a civilian population to change their government or its policies of out fear of violence. Because, this line of reasoning went, one of the attackers here said that "the only reasons we killed this man is because Muslims are dying daily" and warned that "you people will never be safe. Remove your government", the intent of the violence was to induce political change, thus making it "terrorism".

That is at least a coherent definition. But doesn't that then encompass the vast majority of violent acts undertaken by the US and its allies over the last decade? What was the US/UK "shock and awe" attack on Baghdad if not a campaign to intimidate the population with a massive show of violence into submitting to the invading armies and ceasing their support for Saddam's regime? That was clearly its functional intent and even its stated intent. That definition would also immediately include the massive air bombings of German cities during World War II. It would include the Central American civilian-slaughtering militias supported, funded and armed by the Reagan administration throughout the 1980s, the Bangledeshi death squads trained and funded by the UK, and countless other groups supported by the west that used violence against civilians to achieve political ends.

The ongoing US drone attacks unquestionably have the effect, and one could reasonably argue the intent, of terrorizing the local populations so that they cease harboring or supporting those the west deems to be enemies. The brutal sanctions regime imposed by the west on Iraq and Iran, which kills large numbers of people, clearly has the intent of terrorizing the population into changing its governments' policies and even the government itself. How can one create a definition of "terrorism" that includes Wednesday's London attack on this British soldier without including many acts of violence undertaken by the US, the UK and its allies and partners? Can that be done?

I know this vital caveat will fall on deaf ears for some, but nothing about this discussion has anything to do with justifiability. An act can be vile, evil, and devoid of justification without being "terrorism": indeed, most of the worst atrocities of the 20th Century, from the Holocaust to the wanton slaughter of Stalin and Pol Pot and the massive destruction of human life in Vietnam, are not typically described as "terrorism". To question whether something qualifies as "terrorism" is not remotely to justify or even mitigate it. That should go without saying, though I know it doesn't.

The reason it's so crucial to ask this question is that there are few terms - if there are any - that pack the political, cultural and emotional punch that "terrorism" provides. When it comes to the actions of western governments, it is a conversation-stopper, justifying virtually anything those governments want to do. It's a term that is used to start wars, engage in sustained military action, send people to prison for decades or life, to target suspects for due-process-free execution, shield government actions behind a wall of secrecy, and instantly shape public perceptions around the world. It matters what the definition of the term is, or whether there is a consistent and coherent definition. It matters a great deal.

There is ample scholarship proving that the term has no such clear or consistently applied meaning (see the penultimate section here, and my interview with Remi Brulin here). It is very hard to escape the conclusion that, operationally, the term has no real definition at this point beyond "violence engaged in by Muslims in retaliation against western violence toward Muslims". When media reports yesterday began saying that "there are indications that this may be act of terror", it seems clear that what was really meant was: "there are indications that the perpetrators were Muslims driven by political grievances against the west" (earlier this month, an elderly British Muslim was stabbed to death in an apparent anti-Muslim hate crime and nobody called that "terrorism"). Put another way, the term at this point seems to have no function other than propagandistically and legally legitimizing the violence of western states against Muslims while delegitimizing any and all violence done in return to those states.

One last point: in the wake of the Boston Marathon attacks, Idocumented that the perpetrators of virtually every recent attempted and successful "terrorist" attack against the west cited as their motive the continuous violence by western states against Muslim civilians. It's certainly true that Islam plays an important role in making these individuals willing to fight and die for this perceived just cause (just asChristianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and nationalism lead some people to be willing to fight and die for their cause). But the proximate cause of these attacks are plainly political grievances: namely, the belief that engaging in violence against aggressive western nations is the only way to deter and/or avenge western violence that kills Muslim civilians.

Add the London knife attack on this soldier to that growing list. One of the perpetrators said on camera that "the only reason we killed this man is because Muslims are dying daily" and "we apologize that women had to see this today, but in our lands our women have to see the same." As I've endlessly pointed out, highlighting this causation doesn't remotely justify the acts. But it should make it anything other than surprising. On Twitter last night, Michael Moore sardonically summarized western reaction to the London killing this way:

I am outraged that we can't kill people in other counties without them trying to kill us!"

Basic human nature simply does not allow you to cheer on your government as it carries out massive violence in multiple countries around the world and then have you be completely immune from having that violence returned.

Drone Admissions

In not unrelated news, the US government yesterday admitted for the first time what everyone has long known: that it killed four Muslim American citizens with drones during the Obama presidency, including a US-born teenager whom everyone acknowledges was guilty of nothing. As Jeremy Scahill - whose soon-to-be-released film "Dirty Wars" examines US covert killings aimed at Muslims - noted yesterday about this admission, it "leaves totally unexplained why the United States has killed so many innocent non-American citizens in its strikes in Pakistan and Yemen". Related to all of these issues, please watch this two-minute trailer for "Dirty Wars", which I reviewed a few weeks ago here:

Note

The headline briefly referred to the attack as a "machete killing", which is how initial reports described it, but the word "machete" was deleted to reflect uncertainty over the exact type of knife use. As the first paragraph now indicates, the weapon appeared to be some sort of meat cleaver.

UPDATE

In the Guardian today, former British soldier Joe Glenton, who served in the war in Afghanistan, writes under the headline "Woolwich attack: of course British foreign policy had a role". He explains:

"While nothing can justify the savage killing in Woolwich yesterday of a man since confirmed to have been a serving British soldier, it should not be hard to explain why the murder happened. . . . It should by now be self-evident that by attacking Muslims overseas, you will occasionally spawn twisted and, as we saw yesterday, even murderous hatred at home. We need to recognise that, given the continued role our government has chosen to play in the US imperial project in the Middle East, we are lucky that these attacks are so few and far between."

This is one of those points so glaringly obvious that it is difficult to believe that it has to be repeated.

‘Was The Machete Supplied By William Hague?’

Woolwich: This Is Just The Beginning If We Don't Pull The Troops Out Of Afghanistan

Harry Paterson writes:

Yesterday's events were horrific, but don't be part of the problem with EDL and the right-wing loons, be part of the solution and convince the Government they have to step in...

Predictably, the troglodyte tendency was quick to bombard Twitter with their irrational, entirely theory-free, propaganda. This particular gem caught my eye, “EDL leader Tommy Robinson on way to Woolwich now, Take to the streets peeps ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.” This would, presumably, be the same Tommy Robinson (or Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, if you prefer his real name) who, earlier this year, pleaded guilty to “possession of a false identity document with improper intention.” Basically, he entered the USA on a mate’s passport. Illegally, then. England’s glorious patriot was, in fact, an illegal immigrant. Brilliant.

However, I digress; this isn’t really about Robinson or his rag-tag assortment of violent offenders, convicted criminals, football hooligans and assorted detritus. What this is about is the, sadly, all-too predictable fall-out following this appalling murder. Of which the ridiculous Robinson’s in-fighting, feuding misfits comprise only a part.

As you might expect, the dullards of the far-right and their hard-of-learning followers were quick to castigate (for EDL readers, that’s a synonym for ‘condemn’) immigrants, foreigners, Muslims and all the usual targets; business as usual, then. Of course, not knowing if the attackers were immigrants or British citizens didn’t stop the wing-nuts from inciting a bout of hysterical bigotry among the good people of Woolwich.

As for the Muslim community, well, the Muslim Council of Britain, “condemned the attacks unreservedly.” I see. Oddly enough, when a Pakistani Muslim pensioner was slaughtered in Birmingham a few weeks back, by a suspected white attacker, you might have missed the General Synod rushing to prostrate themselves and grovel apologetically for something which was neither their fault nor their responsibility (It’s about time, actually, that the spineless Uncle Toms comprising the Muslim Council of Britain told the establishment and the right-wing sewer-press to go fuck themselves, but that’s another story). Even more strangely, there didn’t appear to be an EDL press release condemning Christianity as the source of this murderous evil swamping our land. Odd, that…

Similarly, right-wing neo-Nazi nut-job, Anders Behring Breivik, so blonde and Aryan-looking he must make Tommy hard, hasn’t been held up as a salutary warning regarding the dangers of creeping Christianity. I could go on but you get the point; one, two, three or even a dozen or a hundred religious fanatics are not even remotely representative of the followers of Islam. Just as Anders Behring Breivik isn’t typical of those terminally-irritating, painfully-earnest pests that knock on your door, intent on sharing the joys of Jesus with you. And while I’d be first in the queue to condemn the evils of the Vatican leadership, even I’d baulk at smearing all rank-and-file Catholics as child-raping perverts.

England’s glorious patriots were also surprisingly muted when it came to Daniel Crook. Crook was a Grenadier Guardsman, one of ‘our boys’ (or ‘are boys’ in EDL-speak) who got tanked up on a bottle of vodka before stabbing a 10-year old Muslim boy in the kidney with a bayonet. Because the kid had asked him for chocolate. You read that right. Maybe Robinson’s mob were too busy breaking out the torches and pitch-forks, before marching on the nearest army barracks in protest. Yeah, that must’ve been it…

So let’s sum up with a couple of indisputable truths: firstly, the poor sod butchered like a block of meat on a slab, exited this world in a manner almost beyond comprehension; the murderer’s certainly deserve all that can be legally thrown at them. But (you knew there would be a ‘but’ right?) can anyone point to any ‘terrorist’ atrocity on British streets by Muslim extremists prior to our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan? Thought not. It’s way overdue people in the UK realised actions have consequences and until we stop assuming we can invade, bomb and pillage other nations with impunity, at the behest of Uncle Sam, we’d best be prepared for two things: more of the same and worse from the impoverished, oppressed and marginalised who are ripe for grooming by the religious extremists. And also the racist, the bigoted and the ignorant, as typified by Robinson’s, thankfully-dwindling, band of cranks to keep on adding to the hate, fear and paranoia.

Hard news to swallow, folks, but the way things stand, currently, there could easily be one, two, many more Woolwichs. Don’t listen to the EDL. Don’t be part of the problem, be part of the solution; let’s get our own house in order. Put the pressure on the government and let’s get the troops out of Afghanistan now.