In the Service of Empire

[Dr Qaisar]

As-salaamu-alaikum, ya muslimeen


We have all along known that the so-called US 'War on Terror' has, in reality, been a hostile campaign and a war against Muslims & Islamic countries. The ideological war campaign has existed for many years in America led by right-wing Christian groups, pro-Israel lobbies & Zionists and conservative think-thanks. We are now witnessing the unveiling & implementation of these anti-Muslim strategies and policies not just in the US Foreign Affairs but also domestically, the most recent being the new US Immigration laws requiring citizens from 20 Arab & Muslim countries to register themselves with the INS. Hundreds of Muslims are being arrested & detained indefinitely without trial & access to relatives and lawyers on flimsy grounds or minor immigration violations.

http://www.startribune.com/stories/670/3542919.html


The article below provides a revealing insight to the ideological basis of the US anti-Muslim plans and designs in the Middle-East and using the pretext of its 'War on Terror' to launch a war against Arab & Muslim countries.


In the service of empire
Lamis Andoni, in the first of a series on America's war hawks, looks at the views of the man who coined the phrase "clash of civilisations".
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"Bernard Lewis has brilliantly placed the relationships and the issues of the Middle East into their larger context, with truly objective, original -- and always independent -- thought. Bernard has taught [us] how to understand the complex and important history of the Middle East and use it to guide us where we will go next to build a better world for generations" -- Paul Wolfowitz, speaking via video phone at a special ceremony held in Tel Aviv to honour the leading Orientalist in March. American Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of the US war hawks are no doubt indebted to the Princeton historian: At the age of 86, Bernard Lewis has not only provided historical justification for Washington's "war on terror", but has also emerged as chief ideologue for the recolonisation of the Arab world through an American invasion of Iraq.

Lewis's work, especially his book What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, has been a major source in what is practically a manifesto for advocates of US military intervention towards "establishing democracy in the Middle East". By declaring that the peoples of the Middle East, meaning Arabs and Iranians, have failed to catch up with modernity and have fallen into "a downward spiral of hatred and rage", Lewis has at once exonerated American imperial policies and provided a moral imperative for President George W Bush's "preemptive strikes" and "regime change" doctrines.

But the role of the man, who 12 years ago coined the term "clash of civilisations" that was later adopted by Samuel Huntington, has gone beyond that of "an apologist for colonialism", as Edward Said, his foremost critic, describes him. In fact, Lewis, according to published reports and his own statements, has been involved in lobbying, shaping and promoting the Bush Administration's most hawkish policies in support of Israel against the Palestinians, and for the aggressive use of American military force in the region.

His influence is not merely a result of his academic stature and prolific writings on Islam, rather it is primarily a function of his membership in an alliance of neo-conservatives and hard-line Zionists who have come to assume key posts in the Bush administration. Led by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, the powerful alliance has been trying to put into practice a vision that they have been advocating throughout the nineties to ensure unrivalled American supremacy through the elimination of all potential threats. On 19 February 2000, representatives of the alliance, including Lewis, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and others, signed a letter urging President Bill Clinton to launch a military offensive, which would have included blanket bombings, to destroy the Iraqi regime. Since assuming power, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, have called on influential friends like Lewis, and a host of hard-line pundits, to press for an American war against Iraq.

In that capacity, Lewis has assumed a bigger "insider" role than some officials in the administration who were not included in the decision-making on Iraq. According to a report in USA Today, Lewis participated in a special meeting for the Defence Advisory Board, led by the leader of warmongers, Richard Perle, on 19 September 2001. The meeting that was scheduled before the 11 September attacks had occurred, was also attended by Lewis's friend Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress. By various accounts, Lewis's meetings with both President Bush, and especially a dinner with Vice-President Dick Cheney (during his days of seclusion in the immediate aftermath of 9/11), were crucial to promoting Wolfowitz's agenda of refocusing the administration's attentions on a war against Iraq. In those meetings, and many that followed, Lewis argued that 9/11 demonstrated the danger the West was facing, especially if "Muslim terrorists" were supplied weapons of mass destruction by Iraq, Syria or Iran. His message to the administration was that the US could not afford to show weakness towards Arabs and Muslims. An American official told The New Yorker magazine in April that Lewis advised them to disregard warnings against inflaming the so-called Arab street since "in that part of the world, nothing matters more than resolute will and force."

Lewis often cites the Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon, which he criticised as "too early", as an example of such signs of weakness that inspired the Palestinians to emulate Hizbullah's "perceived victory" by launching the Intifada. But it is his broad definition of the relationship between Islam and the West that makes Lewis invaluable to the war lobby. Arab and Muslim grievances against the West, in Lewis's view, are by in large baseless and no more than desperate attempts by failed societies to blame external powers, especially the US and Israel for their self-inflicted misery. Lewis provides "a scholarly" cover for a lobby that has been openly advocating the reshaping of the regional map to eliminate "the Arab threat to Israel". Furthermore, Lewis considers Israel and Turkey the only real nation states in the region and has been forecasting the demise and the disintegration of Arab states since the Gulf War. "Most of the states of the Middle East... are of recent and artificial construction and are vulnerable to such a process. If the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, [and] no real sense of common national identity or overriding allegiance to the nation-state. The state then disintegrates -- as happened in Lebanon -- into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and parties," Lewis wrote in Foreign Affairs in 1992.

Lewis has repeatedly cited the rise of Islamism, following the decline of Pan Arabism and socialism, as evidence that all Arab and Muslim responses to Western hegemony -- ranging from the Palestinian resistance to intellectual anti-imperialist discourse -- result from irrational religious fanaticism. Lewis seemed to relish the rise of Osama Bin Laden, who he portrayed in a 1998 article as the eloquent and poetic voice of Muslim rage, taking the Islamist's ascendancy as a vindication of his own inattention to secular and democratic forces in the region who oppose Western domination. In Lewis's world view, which has been adopted by countless media pundits, only tyrants, oppressors and fanatics would stand up to US plans for radical change in the region, while "true democrats", like certain figures in the Iraqi opposition, are awaiting military liberation at Washington's hands.

At the opening of a conference entitled "The Day After: Planning For A Post Saddam Iraq", organised by the right- wing American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Lewis put forward his views with respect to the current context. As Lewis sees things, the military campaign is actually a "vision of democratisation" that elicits two types of responses. "The first could be summed up like this: The Arabs are incapable of democratic government. Arabs are different from us, and we must be more, shall we say, reasonable both in what we expect from them and in what they may expect from us. Whatever we do, these countries will be ruled by corrupt tyrants. The aim of foreign policy, therefore, should be to make sure that they are friendly tyrants rather than hostile," Lewis told the opening session of the conference on 3 October.

"The other point of view is somewhat different. It begins more or less from the same position -- that Arab countries are not democracies and that establishing democracies within Arab societies will be difficult. Yet, Arabs are teachable and democratic governance ought to be possible for them, provided we proctor and gradually launch them on our way, or I should say on their way. "That point of view is known as imperialism. It was the method adopted in the British and French empires, in their mandated territories and in some of their colonies, creating governments in their own image. In Iraq, in Syria, and elsewhere, the British created constitutional monarchies and the French created unstable republics. None of them worked very well. But hope still remains", Lewis said as he argued for the virtue of American military intervention as an opportunity for the West to modernise the Arab world.

Lewis, who worked for British intelligence during World War II, not only has considerable nostalgia for bygone days, but has put himself solidly in the service of the new American empire, hoping it will pick up where the British and the French left off.


Al-Ahram Weekly.

[Dr Qaisar]

As-salaamu-alaikum.



The Viceroy.
Continuing her series on US war hawks, Lamis Andoni traces the history of Zalmay Khalilzad
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Zalmay Khalilzad, the American special envoy "to free Iraqis", is perhaps the highest ranking Muslim official in the history of the US. But the Afghan-born official, may be the first Muslim "viceroy" appointed by a western imperial power to shape the governance of conquered, or would-be conquered, lands. Since his appointment as ambassador at large to Afghanistan last year, Khalilzad has emerged as the point- man for President George Bush's policy for "regime change" in countries deemed a threat to American interests. His role in installing Hamid Karzai and the Afghan government demonstrated the heavy-handed American handling of the political process in post-Taliban Afghanistan. He applied the same skills last week in London by trying to appoint the Iraqi National Congress, led by his friend Ahmed Chalabi, as de facto leader for the Iraqi opposition. The American emissary's efforts may flounder, but the appointment of Khalilzad as the main interlocutor with Iraqi opposition has advanced the agenda of "the war hawks".

The former Columbia university professor is by no means a mere foot soldier following his commander's orders. Once a pro-Palestinian radical student activist, he became right-wing when he went back to the University of Chicago for his PhD, reportedly influenced by a conservative professor, where he found friends in peers like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. After working for the State Department and the Pentagon in the mid-1980s, he found a niche among the "cold warriors" who were reinstated after the election of George Bush. In the 19090s Khalilzad became one of the main thinkers and orchestrators of the strategy which had been incorporated into what is known as "the Bush doctrine" -- long before George W Bush announced his plans for Afghanistan and Iraq.

In 1992, the then Defence Minister Dick Cheney formed a team to draw up a post-cold war "national defence strategy" for the 1990s. But the victory of Bill Clinton placed that plan on hold. In 1995 Khalilzad, working for the right- wing Rand Corp, summed up the proposed strategy in a book entitled "From Containment to Global Leadership: America and the World after the Cold War". In his book, Khalilzad strongly recommended that the US preclude the rise of another global rival for the indefinite future, prevent "hostile" hegemony "over critical regions" and preserve American military preeminence. "It is a vital US interest to preclude such a development, i.e. to be willing to use force if necessary for the purpose," he wrote.

Later on Khalilzad extended his recommendations to include disproportionate military response against any country that sponsors terrorism by "targeting its economic infrastructure, its communications ...until it renounces terrorism". "In short, we punish to deter," he wrote in the Weekly Standard in 1996. The 11 September attacks gave Khalilzad, as well as the hawks in Washington, a golden opportunity to define the enemy as "terror and countries with weapons of mass destruction" -- and carry out their mission. Shortly before the 9/11 attacks, in an article published in the Washington Quarterly he urged the US to collaborate discreetly with Russia and Iran to destabilise the Taliban. After the destruction of the Twin Towers, he became a key member of the team that planned war action against Afghanistan, and was soon appointed ambassador at large to his country of origin.

His success in putting together an Afghan government led by Karzai -- reportedly by coercing representatives of the Loya Jirga and appeasing the war lords -- rocketed Khalilzad from being a behind-the-scenes strategist to a visible world player. He was the ideal choice: an ethnic Pashtun, born in Mazar Al-Sherif, Khalilzad had connections with the Afghan war lords since the days when he had been a go-between for the Ronald Regan Administration and the mujahidin. But Khalilzad was not always hawkish against the Taliban. In fact, up until 1999 he had lobbied for the US to "engage the Taliban ...[which] does not practice the anti- US style of fundamentalism practiced in Iran". At that time Khalilzad was a paid consultant for the American UNOCAL company which was involved in negotiations to secure the Taliban's approval to build a $2.5 billion pipeline to transport oil from Central Asia through Afghanistan to the Pakistani coast. The talks collapsed in 1998, shortly after which Khalilzad called the Taliban a "rogue" regime. His position, however, did not only emanate from his private interests, but partly reflected his published views that American influence in Afghanistan was crucial to prevent Russia's regional "expansion" and to curb Iranian influence in oil--rich central Asia.

Khalilzad, however, has been consistent in his hawkish stands on both Iran and Iraq throughout the 1990s. In December 1997, Khalilzad and Wolfowitz has called publicly for a "regime change" in Iraq and even outlined again "a six point plan to topple Saddam Hussein". A number of other neo-conservatives -- many of whom are now in key government positions -- and Likudnik Zionists, endorsed the main outlines of the plan that was included in a letter sent to President Bill Clinton on 19 February 1998. A month later Khalilzad joined Chalabi and former Central Intelligence Agency Chief James Woolsey in successfully persuading Congress, with the help of hardline senators, to revive political and financial support for the INC. In his congressional testimony, Khalilzad suggested embarking on a course of sustained air raids to dismantle Saddam's defences, to destroy the Iraqi National Guards and to create "safe havens" for the Kurds, with an American- armed and financed Iraqi opposition force to control the rest of the country. Ironically, Khalilzad warned that "military invasion of Iraq could involve significant casualties and might risk involvement in a protracted war".

By the time he was appointed as special advisor to the president for Near Eastern, Southwest Asian and North African Affairs, he had abandoned his words of caution. At a briefing at the pro-Israeli Washington Institute for Near East Affairs, Khalilzad declared that Washington could install a US-led military government in Iraq to assure transition to an elected civilian government. He said that under such plans, a US-led special assistant coalition "will assume ... responsibility for the territorial defence and security of Iraq after liberation".

Khalilzad has been a true spokesman for the hawks on all issues with the exception of the US role in the Israeli- Palestinian "peace process". He has argued that Palestinian-Israeli peace would allow the US to set up a security pact which includes Israel and Arabs, to undercut "hostile states" and consolidate its interests in securing oil supplies and protecting Israel. His position, including his reference to "the legitimacy of Palestinian rights", and his ethnic and religious background ran counter to the agenda of his Likudnik and neo- conservative backers. Most recently Khalilzad was replaced by Elliot Abrams, a vehement opponent of the Palestinians and the "peace process". Abrams is infamous for his role in the Iran--Contra affair and notorious for his cover up on crimes committed by US-backed military in Central America. The Weekly Standard, the de facto platform of the hawks, has openly celebrated the event as a setback for Secretary of State Colin Powell's efforts to revive Palestinian-Israeli negotiations. But Khalilzad, who has already been making threatening statements to Tehran, remains the point man "of choice" to dictate American power over Afghans, Iraqis and the rest of the countries awaiting US wrath. The "Ugly American" has been replaced by a dark-skinned native.


Al-Ahram Weekly.