From: Andrew Johnson
Date: 2007-03-08 09:28:54
http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/tik0703/frontpage/empire911 The American Empire and 9/11 David Ray Griffin AP Photo / Amy Sancetta and Cedric H. Rudisill
Editors Note: Because we at Tikkun are aware of extensive arguments that have appeared elsewhere against the perspective presented by the author of this piece, we debated long and hard about whether to present David Ray Griffin’s argument here. We decided it was still important, given that if his view is true, the position he articulates would provide adequate grounds for impeachment of the president, grounds far more substantive than those that formed the basis of the impeachment by a Republican dominated Congress of President Bill Clinton. You are invited to give your responses to this piece.
Click here to read a critique of this article by Rabbi Michael Lerner.
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The Article
Introduction After the attacks of 9/11, I accepted the blowback thesis, according to which the attacks were revenge for U.S. foreign policy. This view led me to undertake an extensive study of the American empire, the very reality of which had been an embattled issue. The American Empire In his 2002 book American Empire, Andrew Bacevich pointed out that it had long been a cherished American tradition [that] the United States is not and cannot be an empire. The words American empire were fighting words, so that uttering them was an almost sure sign that the speaker was a left-wing critic of Americas foreign policy.[1] As Bacevich also pointed out, however, this had all recently changed, so that even right-wing commentators were freely acknowledging the existence of the American empire. As columnist Charles Krauthammer put it in 2002: People are coming out of the closet on the word empire.[2] Given this consensus about the reality of the American empire, the only remaining issue concerned its nature. This empire was generally portrayed, especially by neoconservatives, as benign. Robert Kagan spoke of The Benevolent Empire.[3] Dinesh DSouza, after writing that America has become an empire, added that happily it is the most magnanimous imperial power ever.[4] Commentators from the left, however, presented a radically different view. A 2003 book by Noam Chomsky was subtitled Americas Quest for Global Dominance.[5] Richard Falk wrote of the Bush administrations global domination project, which posed the threat of global fascism.[6] Chalmers Johnson, once a conservative who believed American foreign policy aimed at promoting freedom and democracy, described the United States as a military juggernaut intent on world domination.[7] Bacevich, although still a conservative, had come to accept the lefts assessment of this empire. He ridiculed the claim that the promotion of peace, democracy, and human rights and the punishment of evil-doers–not the pursuit of self-interest–[has] defined the essence of American diplomacy.[8] Pointing out that the aim of the US military has been to achieve something approaching omnipotence, Bacevich mocked the idea that such power in Americas hands is by definition benign.[9] The historical evidence clearly supports this non-benign view of the American empire. Part of this evidence is the fact that U.S. political and military leaders have arranged false-flag operations as pretexts for war. We did this to begin the wars with Mexico and the Philippines and to begin the full-out attack on Vietnam.[10] Also important is Operation Northwoods, a plan submitted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to President Kennedy containing pretexts which would provide justification for U.S. military intervention in Cuba. Some of the ideas, such as the proposal to blow up a U.S. ship in Guantánamo Bay and blame Cuba,[11] would have required killing Americans. This history shows that U.S. military and political leaders have not been averse to using the same tricks as military and political leaders in other countries with imperial ambitions, such as Japan, which in 1931 manufactured the Mukden incident as a pretext for taking control of Manchuria,[12] and Nazi leaders, who in 1933 set the Reichstag Fire as a pretext for rounding up leftists and annulling civil rights,[13] then in 1939 had German troops dressed as Poles stage attacks on German posts at the Polish border, allowing Hitler to present his attack on Poland the next day as a defensive necessity.[14] In each case, evidence was planted to implicate the people these governments wanted to attack. 9/11: A False-Flag Operation? Given this background information, I might have immediately concluded that the 9/11 attacks were false-flag attacks orchestrated by the Bush administration to enlarge the U.S. empire under the cover of the war on terror. But when I first heard this allegation, about a year after 9/11, I replied that I did not think even the Bush administration would do such a heinous thing. I checked out some proffered websites but found the evidence unconvincing. (I tell this story because of the widespread allegation that those who call 9/11 an inside job do so because of antagonism to Bush and Cheney and/or their policies.) A few months later, however, another colleague suggested that I look at a website containing the massive 9/11 timeline created by Paul Thompson.[15] I found that it contained an enormous number of reports, all from mainstream sources, that contradicted the official account. This discovery started a process that led me to publish The New Pearl Harbor,[16] which summarized much of the evidence that had been discovered by previous researchers—evidence, I concluded, that provided a strong prima facie case for official complicity.[17] I will summarize some of this evidence in terms of six questions. I. How Could Hijacked Airliners Have Struck the WTC and the Pentagon? If standard operating procedures of the FAA and the U.S. military had been carried out on 9/11, AA Flight 11 and UA Flight 175 would have been intercepted before they reached Manhattan, and Flight 77 would have been intercepted long before it could have reached the Pentagon. Such interceptions are routine, being carried out about 100 times a year. A month after 9/11, the Calgary Herald reported that in the year 2000, NORAD had scrambled fighters 129 times. Just a few days after 9/11, Major Mike Snyder, a NORAD spokesperson, told the Boston Globe that [NORADs] fighters routinely intercept aircraft.[18] Why did such interceptions not occur on 9/11? We have never been given a plausible explanation. Indeed, we have received three mutually inconsistent stories. In the first few days, military officials said that no fighter jets were sent up by NORAD until after the strike on the Pentagon at 9:38, even though signs that Flight 11 was in trouble had been observed at 8:15. That would mean that although interceptions usually occur within 15 minutes, in this case over 80 minutes had elapsed before any fighters were even airborne. This story suggested that a stand-down order had been issued. Within a few days, a second story was put out, according to which NORAD had ordered fighters aloft but they did not arrive in time, because FAA notification had unaccountably come very late. Critics showed, however, that even if the FAA notifications had come as late as NORADs timeline indicated, there was sufficient time for interceptions.[19] This second story did not, therefore, remove the suspicion that a stand-down order had been given. The 9/11 Commission Report, issued in 2004, gave a third account, according to which, contrary to NORADs timeline of September 18, 2001, the FAA did not notify NORAD about Flights 175, 77, and 93 until after they had crashed. As I showed in books published in 2005 and 2006, however, this new story contains many problems.[20] In August 2006, Michael Bronner, who was an associate producer for the film United 93, published an essay, 9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes, which popularized the 9/11 Commissions new story and emphasized tapes supplied by NORAD, purportedly from 9/11, on which it is based. This new story was further publicized by the simultaneous publication of Without Precedent by Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the chair and vice chair, respectively, of the 9/11 Commission. This book and Bronners essay caused a minor sensation with their suggestion that the account given by the military between 2001 and 2004, which only partly absolved the military from responsibility for failing to prevent the attacks, had been a lie. The new story puts all the blame on the FAA, except for a little confusion on the militarys part, thereby lessening the grounds for suspicion that the military had been given a stand-down order. This new story has been widely accepted. However, in my most recent book, Debunking 9/11 Debunking,[21] I show even more fully than I had before that this new story is incredible. Besides contradicting many well-documented reports, it is inherently implausible, because it claims that military leaders lied in a way that made them look worse than does the truth (as described by the 9/11 Commission). This new story does not, accordingly, remove grounds for suspicion that a stand-down order had been issued. II. Why Did the Twin Towers and Building 7 of the WTC Collapse? The Bush-Cheney administration has also failed to provide a credible explanation for the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings. According to the official explanation, the Twin Towers (WTC 1 and 2) collapsed because of the impact of the airplanes and the heat of the ensuing fires. But this explanation faces several formidable problems. First, WTC 7 also collapsed, and in roughly the same way. This similarity implies that all three buildings collapsed from the same causes. However, unlike the Twin Towers, WTC 7 was not hit by an airplane. Second, the fires in these buildings were not as big, hot, or long-lasting as fires in steel-frame high-rises that have not induced collapses. In 1991, a fire in Philadelphia burned for 18 hours; in 2004, a fire in Caracas burned for 17 hours. But neither fire produced even a partial collapse.[22] The World Trade Centers north and south towers burned only 102 and 56 minutes, respectively, before they collapsed. WTC 7, moreover, had fires on only a few floors, according to several witnesses[23] and all the photographic evidence.[24] Third, total collapses of steel-frame high-rise buildings have never been brought about by fire and externally caused structural damage. All such collapses have been caused by explosives in the procedure known as controlled demolition. Fourth, the collapses of these three buildings all manifested many standard features of the kind of controlled demolition known as implosion, such as: sudden onset (whereas steel, if weakened by fire, would gradually begin to sag); straight-down collapse (as opposed to falling over); collapse at virtually free-fall speed (indicating that the lower floors, with all their steel and concrete, were offering no resistance); total collapse (indicating that the massive steel columns in the core of each building had been broken into many pieces—which is what explosives do in controlled demolitions); the production of molten metal; and the occurrence of multiple explosions. Although none of these six features can be explained by the official theory, let us focus on only the last two. To begin with the molten metal: Many people have been led to believe, by misleading TV documentaries, that the Twin Towers collapsed because their steel melted. But steel does not begin to melt until it reaches 2800°F, whereas open fires based on hydrocarbons such as kerosene—which is what jet fuel is—cannot get much above 1700°F (even with an ideal mixture of fuel and oxygen, which seldom occurs in building fires). Nevertheless, molten metal was produced, according to many witnesses. For example, Peter Tully, president of Tully Construction, which was involved in the clean-up operation, said that he saw pools of literally molten steel at the site.[25] That would be no surprise only if the buildings steel columns had been sliced by the use of high-temperature explosives, such as thermite, thermate, or RDX, which are regularly used to cut steel. That this is what happened is supported by reports that sometimes when steel beams were lifted from the rubble, they were dripping molten metal.[26] With regard to explosions, literally dozens of people—including journalists, police officers, WTC employees, emergency medical workers, and firefighters—reported hearing explosions in the Twin Towers, with some of them explicitly saying that the collapses appeared to be instances of controlled demolition.[27] One fire captain said: “I hear an explosion and I look up. It is as if the building is being imploded, from the top floor down, one after another, boom, boom, boom.”[28] One paramedic said: [I]t was [like a] professional demolition where they set the charges on certain floors and then you hear ‘Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. One firefighter said: It seemed like on television [when] they blow up these buildings. It seemed like it was going all the way around like a belt, all these explosions.[29] Steven Jones, a physicist who long taught at Brigham Young University, has pointed out that to believe the official account is to believe that some very basic laws of physics were violated.[30] Given all the features that indicate controlled demolition, it is not surprising that when a controlled demolition expert in Holland was shown videos of the collapse of WTC 7,[31] without being told what the building was (he had previously thought that only the Twin Towers had collapsed on 9/11), he said: They have simply blown away columns. . . . A team of experts did this. . . . This is controlled demolition.[32] It is also not surprising that two emeritus professors of structural analysis and construction at Zurichs prestigious ETH Institute of Technology say that WTC 7 was with the highest probability brought down by explosives.[33] All evidence suggesting controlled demolition is ignored in The 9/11 Commission Report, which simply assumed the truth of the official story. Indeed, after FEMA, the first agency given the task of explaining the collapse of the WTC, said that its best explanation for the collapse of WTC 7 had only a low probability of occurrence,[34] the 9/11 Commission avoided the problem by simply not finding room to mention this collapse in its 571-page report.[35] This behavior is no surprise given the fact that the Commission was run by its executive director, Philip Zelikow, who was virtually a member of the Bush-Cheney administration: He had worked with Condoleezza Rice on the National Security Council in the administration of the first President Bush; when the Republicans were out of office during the Clinton administration, Zelikow and Rice co-authored a book; Rice then, as National Security Advisor for the second President Bush, asked Zelikow to help make the transition to the new National Security Council, after which he was appointed to the Presidents Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board;[36] Rice later brought in Zelikow to be the primary author of the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States of America, which used 9/11 to justify a new doctrine of preemptive warfare, according to which the United States can attack other nations even if they pose no imminent threat.[37] The idea that the 9/11 Commission was independent and impartial is, therefore, ludicrous. If the first two reports on the WTC collapses (FEMAs and the 9/11 Commissions) were carried out by investigative bodies that were closely tied to the Bush-Cheney White House, the same is true of the supposedly definitive report produced by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST).[38] It is an agency of the U.S. Commerce Department, headed by Bushs secretary of commerce. It could hardly publish a report that contradicted the official story. In any case, NISTs explanation of the collapses of the Twin Towers—at this writing it still has not published a report on WTC 7—itself collapses when scrutinized from a scientific point of view.[39] As I show in Debunking 9/11 Debunking, for example, the NIST scientists, who knew molten metal could not have been produced by the fires, handled the problem by casting doubt on its existence, in spite of the abundant evidence for it.[40] III. Could the Official Account of the Pentagon Possibly Be True? According to the official account, the Pentagon was struck by AA Flight 77 under the control of al-Qaeda hijacker Hani Hanjour. This account is challenged by many facts. First, Flight 77 allegedly, after making a U-turn in the mid-west, flew back to Washington undetected for 40 minutes, even though it was then known that hijacked airliners were being used as weapons and even though the U.S. military has the best radar systems in the world. Second, in order to get into position to hit Wedge 1 of the Pentagon, the aircraft had to execute an amazing downward spiral and come in at ground level, which according to some pilots would have been impossible for a Boeing 757, even under the control of an expert. Hanjour, moreover, was known as a terrible pilot, who could barely fly a single-engine airplane.[41] Russ Wittenberg, who flew large commercial airliners for 35 years after serving in Vietnam as a fighter pilot, has said that it would have been impossible for Flight 77 to have descended 7,000 feet in two minutes, all the while performing a steep 270 degree banked turn before crashing into the Pentagons first floor wall without touching the lawn. It would, he added, have been totally impossible for an amateur who couldnt even fly a Cessna to maneuver the jetliner in such a highly professional manner.[42] Ralph Omholt, a captain-qualified 757 pilot, agrees: The idea that an unskilled pilot could have flown this trajectory, says Omholt, is simply too ridiculous to consider.[43] Third, terrorists brilliant enough to outfox the U.S. militarys defense system would not have struck Wedge 1, for many reasons: It had been reinforced, so the damage was less severe than a strike anywhere else would have been; it was still being renovated, so relatively few people were there; the secretary of defense and all the top brass, whom terrorists would presumably have wanted to kill, were on the opposite side of the building; and hitting Wedge 1 required a difficult maneuver, whereas crashing into the roof-of, say, the area with the offices of Rumsfeld and the top brass—would have been much easier and deadlier. Fourth, there is considerable evidence that the aircraft that struck the Pentagon was not even a Boeing 757. Unlike the strikes on the Twin Towers, the Pentagon strike did not create a detectable seismic signal.[44] Also, according to photographs and eyewitnesses, the kind of damage and debris that would have been produced by the impact of a Boeing 757 was not produced by the strike on the Pentagon. With regard to the debris, the eyewitnesses include Karen Kwiatkowski, who was then an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel employed at the Pentagon. She writes of a strange lack of visible debris on the Pentagon lawn, where I stood only moments after the impact. . . . I saw nothing of any significance at the point of impact—no airplane metal or cargo debris.[45] Another eyewitness was CNNs Jamie McIntyre, who said during a live report from the Pentagon on 9/11: The only pieces left that you can see are small enough that you pick up in your hand.[46] The lack of the expected debris inside the Pentagon has been reported by April Gallop, who, along with her two-month-old son, was seriously injured. She says: I was located at the E ring. . . . [W]e had to escape the building before the floors . . . collapsed on us. And I don’t recall at any time seeing any plane debris. . . . If I wasn’t informed [at the hospital that it was a plane] I would have never believed it. I walked through that place to try to get out before everything collapsed on us . . . . [S]urely we should have seen something.[47] With regard to damage, Omholt, discussing the photographic evidence,[48] writes: There is no hole big enough to swallow a 757. . . . There is no viable evidence of burning jet fuel. . . . The expected crash damage doesnt exist. . . . Even the Pentagon lawn was undamaged! The geometry of the day certifies the official account as a blatant lie.[49] Significant testimony is also provided by Army Reservist Isabelle Slifer, whose fourth-floor office was directly above the strike zone between the first and second floors. Even though a 757 has a very large tail fin, her office was not damaged by the impact.[50] Fifth, the Pentagon is surely the best defended building on the planet. It is within an ultra-restricted zone. It is only a few miles from Andrews Air Force Base, which, assigned to protect this zone, has at least three squadrons with fighter jets on alert at all times. (The claim by The 9/11 Commission Report that no fighters were on alert the morning of 9/11 is wholly implausible and contradicted by the militarys own website.[51]) Also, the Pentagon is reportedly protected by batteries of surface-to-air missiles,[52] so if any aircraft without a U.S. military transponder—a military transponder radiates a friendly signal—had entered the Pentagons airspace, it would have been automatically shot down—unless officials in the Pentagon had deactivated its anti-aircraft defenses. Accordingly, whether the Pentagon was struck by a military or a nonmilitary aircraft, the strike had to be an inside job. A sixth reason to be dubious of the official story is that, as at the World Trade Center, evidence was quickly destroyed. Shortly after the strike, officials picked up debris in front of the impact site and carried it off.[53] Shortly thereafter the entire lawn was covered with dirt and gravel, so that any remaining forensic evidence was literally covered up.[54] FBI agents, moreover, quickly confiscated videos from security cameras on nearby buildings.[55] The Justice Department, after long refusing to release any of them, finally in May 2006 released one purporting to showing a Boeing 757 striking the Pentagon. But it did not. Even Bill OReilly of Fox News had to say: I cant see a plane there.[56] If there were any videos giving clear support to the official story, would we not have seen them as often as we have seen the strikes on the World Trade Center? These six problems, besides conflicting with the official account, collectively indicate that the strike on the Pentagon was orchestrated by forces within our own government. In the light of these first three challenges to the official account, we can reflect on President Bushs advice not to tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories about the attacks of 11 September.[57] This is excellent advice. But it deflects attention from the fact that the truly outrageous conspiracy theory is the official theory, according to which a band of Arab Muslims conspired to defeat not only the most sophisticated defense system in history but also, in the attacks in both New York and Washington, some basic laws of physics. The problems in the official account, moreover, do not end there. A fourth question is: IV. Why Did the President and His Secret Service Agents Remain at the School? Upon hearing that a plane had struck one of the Twin Towers, President Bush reportedly believed that it was an accident. It was not terribly strange, therefore, that he decided to go ahead with the photo-op at the school in Sarasota. Word of the second strike, however, should have indicated to his Secret Service agents—assuming that these strikes were unexpected—that the country was undergoing an unprecedented terrorist attack. And yet he was allowed to remain at the school for another half hour. This behavior was very strange. The presidents location had been highly publicized. If the attacks were indeed unexpected, the Secret Service, having no idea how many planes had been hijacked, would have suspected that the president himself was one of the targets: What could be more satisfying to foreign terrorists attacking high-value targets than to kill the president? For all the Secret Service would have known, a hijacked airliner might have been bearing down on the school at that very minute, ready to crash into it, killing the president and everyone else there—including the Secret Service agents themselves. It is, in any case, standard procedure for the Secret Service to rush the president to a safe location whenever there is any sign that he may be in danger. And yet these agents, after allowing the president to remain in the classroom another 10 minutes, permitted him to deliver his regularly scheduled TV address, thereby announcing to the world that he was still at the school. Would not this behavior be explainable only if the head of the Secret Service detail knew that the targets did not include the president? And how could this have been known unless the attacks were being carried out by people within our own government? The 9/11 Commission, far from asking these questions, said only: The Secret Service told us they . . . did not think it imperative for [the president] to run out the door.[58] A serious inquiry into this matter, therefore, remains to be made. V. Why Did the 9/11 Commission Lie about Vice President Cheneys Activities? One sign of the complicity of Vice President Cheney is the fact that the 9/11 Commission evidently felt a need to lie about the time of two of his activities: his entry into the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) under the White House and authorization to shoot down any hijacked airliners. It had been widely reported that the vice president had gone down to the PEOC shortly after the second strike on the WTC, hence about 9:15.[59] The most compelling witness was Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta, who testified to the 9/11 Commission that when he entered the PEOC at 9:20, Cheney was already there. The 9/11 Commission Report, however, claimed that Cheney did not enter the PEOC until shortly before 10:00, perhaps at 9:58.[60] Minetas testimony was simply omitted from the final report of the Zelikow-led 9/11 Commission. Why would the Commission go to such lengths—telling an obvious lie and omitting publicly available evidence—to conceal the true time of Cheneys entry into the PEOC? One possible reason would involve the testimony of Mineta, who said:During the time that the airplane was coming in to the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President, The plane is 50 miles out. The plane is 30 miles out. And when it got down to the plane is 10 miles out, the young man also said to the Vice President, Do the orders still stand? And the Vice President . . . said, Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?[61] Mineta reported that this conversation occurred at about 9:25 or 9:26. This testimony creates a problem for the official story. Secretary of Defense Rumsfelds spokesman, in explaining why the Pentagon was not evacuated before it was struck, claimed that [t]he Pentagon was simply not aware that this aircraft was coming our way.[62] The 9/11 Commission supported this claim, alleging that there was no warning about an unidentified aircraft heading towards Washington until 9:36 and hence only one or two minutes before the Pentagon was struck at 9:38.[63] Minetas account, however, says that Cheney knew about an approaching aircraft more than 10 minutes earlier. There would have been over 12 minutes for the Pentagon to be evacuated; 125 lives could have been saved. Minetas account also implies that Cheney had issued stand-down orders. Mineta himself did not make this allegation, saying instead that he assumed that the orders were to have the plane shot down. But that interpretation does not fit what actually happened–the aircraft was not shot down. It would also make the story unintelligible: The young mans question whether the orders still stood would not make sense unless they were orders to do something unexpected—not to shoot the aircraft down. By omitting Minetas testimony and stating that Cheney did not enter the PEOC until almost 10:00, the 9/11 Commission implied that Cheney could not have given a stand-down order to allow an aircraft to strike the Pentagon. The full brazenness of the Commissions lie is illustrated by the fact that it contradicts Cheneys own account, which can still be read on the White House website. Speaking on NBCs Meet the Press five days after 9/11, Cheney said: [A]fter I talked to the president, . . . I went down into . . . the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. . . . [W]hen I arrived there within a short order, we had word the Pentagon’s been hit.[64] So he got there, as Mineta said, some time before the Pentagon was struck, not 20 minutes afterwards. The lie about Cheneys entry into the PEOC was also important to the controversy over whether the US military shot down Flight 93. The 9/11 Commission, simply ignoring a vast amount of evidence that the plane had been shot down,[65] supported the official claim that it was not shot down by claiming that Cheney, having not arrived at the PEOC until almost 10:00, did not issue the shoot-down order until after 10:10—which would have been seven or more minutes after Flight 93 had crashed (at 10:03, according to the official account). But in addition to the evidence that Cheney had been in the PEOC since about 9:15, we also have evidence—including statements from Richard Clarke, who was the national coordinator for security and counterterrorism, and Colonel Robert Marr, the head of NORADs northeast sector (NEADS)[66]—that Cheneys shoot-down order was issued well before 10:00.[67] The 9/11 Commissions obvious lies about Cheneys activities give reason to suspect that it, under the leadership of Philip Zelikow, was trying to conceal Cheneys responsibility for the Pentagon strike and the downing of Flight 93.[68] Incidentally, although Michael Bronners aforementioned article and the movie United 93, on which he worked, were obviously intended to bolster the official account about this flight, they do not refute the conclusion that this account is false. For one thing, the cell phone calls, which play a central role in the drama, were technologically impossible in 2001.[69] Moreover, Major General Larry Arnold, who was the commanding general of NORADs Continental Region at the time, said after seeing United 93: The movie trailer said the military was not notified of UAL 93 until 4 minutes after it had crashed. That is not true as we were notified a short time before it crashed. . . . I advised Col. Marr to intercept UAL 93.[70] VI. Did the Bush-Cheney Administration Have Motives for Orchestrating the 9/11 Attacks? When prosecuting attorneys seek to prove the defendant to be guilty as charged, they have to show means, motive, and opportunity. It is clear that the Bush-Cheney administration, including its Pentagon under the leadership of Donald Rumsfeld, had—unlike al-Qaeda—the means and the opportunity to orchestrate the events of 9/11. Of the several motives that high officials in the administration would have had, I will mention three: Afghanistan: Zbigniew Brzezinskis 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, said that establishing military bases in Central Asia would be crucial for maintaining American primacy, partly because of the huge oil reserves around the Caspian Sea. But American democracy, he added, is inimical to imperial mobilization, which requires economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and . . . human sacrifice (casualties even among professional soldiers). Explaining that the public had supported Americas engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Brzezinski suggested that Americans today would support the needed military operations in Central Asia only in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.[71] Support for these operations was generated by the 9/11 attacks plus the claim by the Bush-Cheney administration that these attacks had been planned in Afghanistan by Osama bin Laden-a claim for which the administration refused to provide any proof[72] and for which even the FBI admits that it has no hard evidence.[73] A more specific motivation was provided by the pipeline war.[74] The Bush-Cheney administration supported UNOCALs plan to build an oil-and-gas pipeline through Afghanistan, but the Taliban, being unable to provide sufficient security, had become regarded as an obstacle. In a July 2001 meeting in Berlin, representatives of the administration, trying to get the Taliban to share power with other factions, reportedly said, Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.[75] When the Taliban refused, the Americans reportedly said that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead . . . before the snows started falling in Afghanistan, by the middle of October at the latest.[76] Given the fact that the attacks on New York and Washington occurred on September 11, the U.S. military had time to get logistically ready to begin the attack on Afghanistan on October 7. Iraq: Some key members of the Bush-Cheney administration—including Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Scooter Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney himself—had in the late 1990s been active members of an organization, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), that advocated attacking Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein, establish a strong military presence, and control the oil.[77] PNACs Rebuilding Americas Defenses, released late in 2000, reiterated the idea of a permanent military presence in the Gulf region, saying that the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, but the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.[78] Immediately upon taking office, both Paul 0Neill and Richard Clarke have revealed, the Bush administration was intent on taking over Iraq. The only question was finding a way to do it, as ONeill put it. The terrorist attacks of September 11, said Bob Woodward, gave the U.S. a new window to go after Hussein. Although no Iraqis were among the alleged hijackers, the Bush administration was able to use 9/11 as a pretext to attack Iraq. Given the state of fear created of fear created in the American psyche by 9/11, the administration needed only to fabricate evidence that Saddam was acquiring nuclear weapons while also suggesting that he had been involved in 9/11.[79] Increased Military Spending: A second possible motive was provided by PNACs more general goal of increasing Americas military superiority sufficiently to establish a global Pax Americana. This goal had already been asserted in the 1992 draft of the Defense Planning Guidance, written by Wolfowitz and Libby under the guidance of Cheney, who was completing his tenure as secretary of defense. In 2000, Wolfowitz and Libby were participants in PNACs project to produce Rebuilding Americas Defenses, in which this goal showed up again. This document also contained an idea perhaps derived from Brzezinskis book: After saying that the desired Pax Americana must have a secure foundation on unquestioned U.S. military preeminence and that such preeminence will require a technological transformation of the US military, it added that this process of transformation will likely be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event–like a new Pearl Harbor.”[80] When 9/11 came, it was immediately treated as the Pearl Harbor of the 21st century, as Bush reportedly called it that very night.[81] It was also characterized as, in Bushs words, a great opportunity,[82] with Rumsfeld adding that 9/11 created the kind of opportunities that World War II offered, to refashion the world.[83]
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