The Islamic World Targeted by the West?

Clash of or Dialogue Between Civilizations?

by Nadia Weiss

Is it really impossible for nations to live in peace with each other? Do these nations have to be at each others’ throats? Is there a clash of civilizations? At least this is what a theory suggests—Samuel Huntington’s thesis of the clash of civilizations—a theory, however, that was set at rest long ago. The question is why this long-refuted theory is all of a sudden rising from the ashes. Is it perhaps directed dowards breaking down the Christian world’s natural resistance to the war that is now being planned against the Islamic world? It seems very likely that this is the reason.

The attack against the world trade center was hardly over when the media were already telling us who the guilty parties were—bin Laden and the al-Qaeda fighters. With a huge effort the media have since then been whipping the shocked American public and their allies into a frenzy of vengeance. There is talk of ‘Islamistic terror’, Bush calls for a ‘crusade’—the crusades of the Middle Ages led Christians to the Holy Land to wage war on the Muslim world—and so the idea is spread that every Muslim is potentially dangerous, because he is a religious fanatic. As a result the already long-suffering people of Afghanistan are drawn even deeper into suffering by this war against al-Qaeda. International law is being trampled on, prisoners of war are tortured and mowed down. ‘Forget about human rights’, is the message from Washington.

At the same time that the sinister warlords of the Northern Alliance declare their victory and the Americans together with the UN are celebrated as ‘nation builders’, for the Afghanistan people, the war against Taliban guerillas isn’t over by a long shot. The brutal bombing has left thousands dead and hundreds of thousands have been driven from their homes and untold numbers will die in the remaining battles or will be blown apart by landmines. On top of that untold numbers do not know yet if their children will survive the harsh Afghanistan winter and the subsequent famine.

As Jean Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie have shown in their recently published book ‘Bin Laden, La Verité Interdite’ [The Forbidden Truth] (2001), all of this is taking place against a background in which the American government has portrayed the Taliban ‘as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of an oil pipeline across Central Asia’, which can bring oil from the rich oil fields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakstan through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean. The CIA World Factbook, in fact indicates in its chapter on Afghanistan that the anti-communist Mujahadeen troops—among whom the Taliban became the most powerful in time through secret Pakistani and Saudi support—were ‘supplied and trained by the US, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and others’.

In his book ‘The Great Chessboard. American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives’, leading American strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski indicates that hegemony over the Caucasus region is a major American concern. Others are of the same opinion: ‘I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian.’ When the present Vice-President Cheney of the United States said that in 1998, he was the CEO of Halliburton, the biggest supplier for the oil industry in the United States, which had just projected the trans-Afghanistan pipeline.

Cheney, by the way, is not the only oil magnate in the American government. Already George Bush’s grandfather had made his fortune in the oil business, his son George was earning millions of dollars working for Pennzoil during the oil boom of the ’50s and ’60s. Since 1978 George W. Bush has also been involved in the oil business, making contacts with business associates of the Saudi elites. Those business contacts were usually handled by the lawyer of George W. Bush’s father and his then secretary of State James Baker, and are said to have involved even the bin Laden family. Even Security Adviser Condolezza Rice has an oil industry background: She sat on the board of Chevron, which graced a tanker with her name.

In an interview in the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur (1998), Brzezinski had bragged that during the Carter Administration he had been orchestrating massive secret operations in Afghanistan. The Carter Administration had known that the CIA operations would provoke Russia even further into invading Afghanistan. When asked if he regretted any of those operations today, Brzezinski replied: ‘Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day the Russians officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: “We now have the opportunity of giving the USSR its Vietnam war.” Indeed, for almost 10 years Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.’

The so-called ‘rogues’ against whom the US now wants to lead the world into war are of their own creation. Even though more and more contradictions appear in the official justification for the war against Afghanistan, the war and propaganda machine continue to work overtime. For weeks now the Americans have had Iraq in their sights and blaimed it as the main supporter of terrorism and agent of the Anthrax attacks in the United States. Muslims are portrayed more and more frequently as potential extremists and terrorists. The intellectuals do their part as well. In an interview in the German magazine Der Spiegel on December 3, the French philosopher, Bernard-Henri Levy declared ‘war about the Enlightenment’. ‘For Muslims’, he claimed, ‘America is a scapegoat. They are suffering the eventual decline that their lands have already been experiencing for the past few centuries. That is their obsession. Their lost grandeur, their interrupted Enlightenment, the shame of having been colonized, constitute a permanent humiliation.’ Israel and America, he believes, have not really done anything to them; they serve however, ‘as an excuse for their inability to explain their own unhappiness and to take responsibility for it’.

At the sight of all of the crimes committed in the name of colonialism and imperialism, crimes that continue to be committed up to the present day, the statements of Levy alone are outrageous. His is an especially ugly attempt to goad all the Western ‘good guys’ into war. ‘Islam in its fundamentalist form is to a certain extent the third fascism; it’s green fascism following on the heels of red and brown fascism. […] The expansion of the Enlightenment is at stake. This battle is going to last a long time and its outcome is terribly uncertain.’

On December 10, V. S. Naipaul, newly crowned Nobel Prize winner, followed suit. In response to the question from the Spiegel interviewer on whether Islam couldn’t coexist with other religions, Naipaul answered: ‘Not when its in power because one of the crucial elements of Islam is the idea of the holy war. Good Muslims have to wage it always, good Muslims have to identify their enemies and hate them.’

The American Zeitgeist-philosopher Richard Rorty, who received the Meister Eckhart Prize on December 3 along with a speech by Juergen Habermas praising him, the same Richard Rorty, it should be added, who according to a critic propagates ‘the militarily escorted exportation of Western Values as panacea for a better world’, had similar things to say. ‘I would probably consider it necessary as well to bomb Afghanistan if I were President of the United States,’ Rorty told the ‘Frankfurter Rundschau’ on November 30.

Scholl-Latour got right to the point in his characterization of this campaign in 1999: ‘Here we are confronted with the typical American penchant for demonization, an uninhibited propaganda which tries to pillory the children of strict Islamic faith as violent criminals or potential terrorists’ (Welt am Sonntag, 19 December 1999). The American media in particular are bombarding their citizens with this sort of propaganda round the clock.

Huntington’s ‘horror scenario’

A significant part of this campaign is traceable to the resurrection of Samuel Huntington’s book ‘Clash of Civilizations’, this ‘horror scenario’, as Scholl-Latour says. Tim Hames, one of the leading politicians in the Republican Party and someone very close to the Bush administration, was claiming only one day after the attacks that Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ was now dominating the American political scene (The Times, 12 September 2001).

Mind you, we’re not just talking about propaganda here, but rather about clear-headed, cold-blooded planning, which is already creating facts of its own: Influential people surrounding deputy defense minister Paul Wolfowitz want to expand the war against Afghanistan to include war against Iraq and 30 other Muslim countries. Getting down to specifics, they are naming Somalia, Sudan, Malaysia, and Indonesia, all of them countries with a large Muslim population. These countries differ greatly from each other in as far as political attitude, practice of religion and social structure are concerned. What they have in common, however, is the fact that their natural resources and their geographic position have lent them strategic significance in the eyes of the American government. Woolsey, head of the CIA under the Clinton administration, had this to say: ‘The first thing we have to do is develop some confidence that Iraq is involved in terrorist incidents against us, not meaning September 11.’ (‘The New York Times’, 12 October 2001)

After reading statements of this sort, one has to wonder which acts of terrorism the CIA plans to blame on Iraq. Perhaps an anthrax attack on German subways? Or against London? An attack on the Vatican would suit the bill, especially during the Christmas season, a fierce scenario recently described in Der Spiegel. Still fresh in memory are the CIA-sponsored counterfeit pictures of Iraqi soldiers laying hands on helpless infants during the Gulf War.

Refuted by science

Huntington’s scenario of a ‘clash of civilizations’ has fabricated a ‘self-defense’ myth for the world’s only superpower and its vassals which makes them see war as logic, inevitable and therefore acceptable. He maintains that most of the wars in the world take place because the cultures find themselves in a permanent, if at the same time, latent state of ‘cold war’ against each other. Huntington is of the opinion that without true enemies, there are no true friends. If we don’t hate what we are not, we can’t love what we are (‘Clash of Civilizations’, p. 18). That means that both nations and individuals can only develop a positive identity in so far as they hate other individuals or other nations. Of course that means that terms like Enlightenment, democracy and human rights are meaningless, that the ideas of a peaceful cooperation and exchange of cultures have been thrown overboard. Huntington ignores the results of anthropology, developmental psychology and social psychology every bit as much as he ignores the findings of natural law, a crucial belief for our culture. Harald Müller, professor of international relations, has shown the inadequacy of Huntington’s thesis from a scientific point of view, documented in a comprehensive refutation of Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’.

The fact that history is full of wars does not indicate that differences in religions or cultures caused the wars but rather that the causes were power politics and aspirations for hegemony, a fact that Huntington plays down deliberately. In contrast to a widely propagated opinion, the Islamic world is no more inclined to war or terrorism than the rest of the world. Scholl-Latour ascertained in 1999 that terror attacks by Muslim extremists were rare in both Europe and the United States. ‘When they do take place, they take place in the context of the fatal Israeli-Palestinian rivalry over control of the Holy Land […], or they are aimed at what they see as American complicity with the system of hegemony in their own countries, with those military dictatorships, dynastic cliques or despots at the mercy of whom the peoples of the ‘Dar-ul-Islam’ continue to live in a more or less repressive form.’ (Welt am Sonn-tag, 19 December 1999)

‘The West against the rest’

Huntington portrays a world view according to which ‘the rest of the world’ is against the West: ‘On the macrolevel, the major fault lines run between “the West and everybody else”, which means that the most intensive conflicts will take place between the Moslem and Asiatic societies on the one hand and the West on the other.’

Huntington obviously attempts to suggest that we—‘the West’—have to defend ourselves against the hegemonic aspirations of foreign cultures. Harald Müller did a good job of characterizing Huntington’s propaganda. It’s marked by a constant ‘we against them’, by fanning anxieties in the reader with the help of simplifying and misleading concepts of the sort that are well known to anyone familiar with the history of propaganda. Such concepts are: ‘the yellow peril’, ‘the Turks at the gates of Vienna’, ‘the primacy of the West is being threatened’, ‘the population bomb’, ‘the dangers of Islam’, ‘the rest of the world is full of resentment against the West, and the manifestation of those resentments is fundamentalism’. Müller warns us about the danger to base thought and policy on Huntington’s theory: ‘The world has lots of “we-against-them-theories”—like Huntington’s “West against the Rest”—which are: Fundamentalism, Social Darwinism, Marxism-Leninism, Realism, etc. All of them cultivate the virtue of parsimony at the expense of the truth. They are simple and wrong. Their application begins with what seem convincing and reasonable slogans to everybody and ends up in the arms race, war and massacre. We do not need this kind of theory.’

Huntington ignores the fact that wars are always instigated by only a handful of people in positions of power, who pit one nation against another in order to achieve their own geostrategic and hegemonic goals. His book is written with this end in mind. Like many demagogues before him, Huntington plays up certain differences in religion and world view to use them for his own purposes.

Comrades in arms: Huntington and Brzezinski

As soon as one delves into Huntington’s background, the first thing one notices is that one of his chief political allies is none other than Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s chief geostrategist and author of ‘The Grand Chessboard’. Zbigniew Brzezinski is well known as the creator of the American strategy to achieve hegemony, which lies at the heart of American foreign policy. That battle for global hegemony is going to be fought in Eurasia. Therefore America needs access to geopolitically important countries like Ukraine, Turkey, Iran and the countries in the Caucasus. Both the expansion of the EU to the East and the expansion of NATO in the same direction are part of this strategy.

In reading Huntington, one often has the impression of reading Brzezinski. Huntington, for example, writes that the maintenance of American hegemony is just as important for the entire world as it is for the United States. The world needs a superpower, and America is the only one left that can assume this role, and that is also necessary for American interests. In this context the American dominance in the world economy is crucial: ‘America is now being challenged by Japan, and in the future she will probably be challenged by Europe as well.’

Brzezinski and Huntington are pursuing the same political plan: They want the world to be ruled by one power and they want to be part ot that power ruling the world. It is no coincidence that Brzezinski sings the praise of Huntington’s book calling it ‘a monumental work which will revolutionize our view of foreign affairs.’ At another point he characterizes Huntington as the ‘democratic Machiavelli’.

Both these men are not just pursuing the same plan, they are doing it together.

They met in 1959. Between 1960 and 1962 they collaborated in writing the book ‘Political Power: USA/USSR: A Comparison’. During the academic year 1961-1962, they conducted seminars together comparing American and Soviet politics at Columbia University, which they later repeated in various countries. They both worked together on the National Security Council under Jimmy Carter. They both worked together on various councils and committees, and had leading positions on many of them. Both men, for example, are members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission (TC). These organizations are not just some harmless, altruistic clubs, but rather private circles that determine the course of world events without any claim to democratic legitimacy.

The Council on Foreign Relations: the US inner circle

Carroll Quigley, also a member of the CFR, explains in his book Tragedy and Hope that the CFR is an organization which feels that ‘national boundaries should be erased and in their place a world order should be established’. As we have already indicated, both Huntington and Brzezinski are pursuing the same goal.

The founder of the CFR was Edward Mandell House, chief advisor to Woodrow Wilson. House was a Marxist who wanted to reforge both American political parties into a communist America. Since its founding in 1921, the CFR has exerted enormous influence on American politics, especially on foreign policy and defense. The CFR makes sure that at least the four key positions in each administration are occupied by CFR people: Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of the Treasury, and National Security Advisor. By the end of the Reagan administration almost half of the membership of the CFR had served at one point or another either in the government itself or as consultants to it. The official foreign policy of the United States as well as its defense policy has corresponded regularly to the positions of the CFR. CFR members are also represented in all of the major media outlets: NBC, ABC, CBS, ‘The New York Times’ and the ‘Washington Post’.

In many instances the CFR, the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderbergers are characterized in one breath as the essential covert political circles in which the real decisions are taken. Among the best known members of the CFR are Robert and Edward Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, Nelson Rockefeller, David Rockefeller, and Madeleine Albright. Some presidents of the United States were also members of the CFR: Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Nixon, Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George Bush. The biggest Ame-rican banks and industrial concerns also have their representatives at the CFR.

Trilateral Commission: for a one-world government

The Trilateral Commission was founded in 1972 by eight members of the CFR, including David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski. It came into existence to bond together the ruling classes of the United States, Europe and Japan. Brzezinski made sure—as he himself declared—that members of the WTO, (World Trade Organization) NAFTA (North American Free Trade Association) and MAI (Multilateral Agreement for Investment) were included in the Trilateral Commission. This group of people makes far-reaching decisions far away from the democratic political process, and quite often in secret session. The TC was founded at the initiative of David Rockefeller, who was inspired by Brzezinski’s book ‘Between Two Ages’. Brzezinski was director of the Trilateral Commission until his appointment as National Security Advisor for the Carter Administration. As a Director of National Security, he brought his friend and colleague Samuel Huntington on board his advisory staff.

Huntington was not only close to Brzezinski as co-author and colleague, he had also written a report for the Trilateral Commission on ‘democracy in crisis’, in which he virtually proposes the elimination of democracy. According to the testimony of some members of the Trilateral Commission, Rockefeller’s ‘idea was that if the three industrial superpowers—Japan, the United States and Western Europe—could form some sort of industrial cartel they could sit down quietly and carve up the globe into economic areas of influence, nipping price competition in the bud’.

The commission’s purpose is to engineer an enduring partnership among the ruling classes of North America, Western Europe and Japan, in an attempt to influence public opinion, policy and decision making in government in such a way that the nations, governments and economies of the entire world will serve the interests of multinational banks and corporations. In order to achieve this end, they have to reduce the masses to dependency and suppress democracy through control and surveillance as well as any voice of protest. The final goal is the establishment of a one-world economy, a one-world government, a one-world monetary system and a one-world religion.

‘What the Trilateralists truly intend’, wrote Barry Goldwater, who was himself a member of the Trilateral Commission, ‘is the creation of a worldwide economic power superior to the political government of the nation-states involved. As managers and creators of this system they will rule the world […]. In my view the Trilateral Commission represents a skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centres of power: the political, monetary, the intellectual and the ecclesiastical.’ ‘It [the TC]’, Goldwater continues, ‘is intended to be the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the United States.’ Just as Brzezinski suggests in his book ‘Between Two Ages’, the TC also demanded that the more progressive communist states were to become partners in the alliance which would lead to world government.

The ruling out of any possibility of democratic participation

The Trilateral Commission made their plans clear in the book they published in collaboration with Samuel Huntington in 1975: ‘The Crisis of Democracy’. They were alarmed at ‘the challenging of the authority of established political, social and economic institutions, increased popular participation in and control over those institutions, [and] a reaction against the concentration of power of Congress, and of state and local government’. This means that this commission was complaining about what Noam Chomsky called an ‘excess of democracy’, and that it was longing ‘to restore the population to passivity and acquiescence, perhaps even renewing the good old days when Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers’, circumstances which Huntington fondly recalls in his book. The book complains about increasing civil participation in public matters, because the government, ‘short of a cataclysmic crisis (!)’ has only ‘little ability to impose on its people the sacrifices which may be necessary to deal with foreign-policy problems and defense’.

What is one to do if the crisis needed to club the nation’s citizens into submission is not at hand? Is it possible to bring about that sort of event oneself? Whether it is or isn’t the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, it came at just the right time, especially since it is now possible to introduce in its wake and in the name of fighting terrorism certain laws in various nations across the world that would suit a totalitarian state.

Huntington and his co-authors maintain in their report that democracy ‘is only one way of constituting authority, and it is not necessarily a universally acceptable one. In many situations, the claims of expertise, seniority, experience and special talentsmay override the claims of democracy as a way of constituting authority. […] The arenas where democratic procedures are appropriate are, in short, limited’.

In order to achieve their ends, the Trilateralists, according to Gary Allen, have to find a way ‘to get us to surrender our liberties in the name of some common threat or crisis. The foundations, educational institutions, and research thinktanks supported by the members of the Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations oblige by financing so-called “studies” which are then used to justify their excess. Their excuses vary but the target is always individual liberty. Our liberty.’ The question which remains is whether Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ was one of these bought and paid for studies. In any case, it is ideally suited for promoting the goals of the Trilateral Commission, which are Huntington’s own.

In their report ‘Crisis of Democracy’ Huntington and Co. make some interesting suggestions: centralized economic planning, limitations of the freedom of the press such as ‘prior restraint’ of what newspapers may publish in unspecified ‘unusual circumstances’. Huntington also suggests that governments should ‘withhold information at its source’, as well as the reintroduction of libel laws, press councils, which enforce ‘standards of professionalism’, or as an alternative letting the government determine these issues.

War is not a continuation of politics. War determines politics

Huntington is not only a member of the Trilateral Commission and the CFR, he is also head of the Olin Foundation for Strategic Studies at Harvard University, which is financed by the Olin Foundation, which was based on the fortune John M. Olin made in the armaments industry. Olin made his fortune in armaments during the First and Second World Wars. The Olin Corporation is still active in manufacturing armaments, today. Huntington has also published under the auspices of the Olin Institute. It was there as part of the ‘Project on US Cold War Military Relations’, that an article appeared in 1996 which beqeathed to the military a new revolutionary role. The traditional understanding of the role of the military was based on ‘… the American tradition of civil supremacy over the military; to that code that civilians make United States policy and the military execute’. The new revolutionary change consists in the abolition of the primacy of politics. That means from now on the military makes the political decisions and not the other way around.

The war of the ‘West against the rest’—without us!

All of this is reminiscent of Trotsky’s strategy of world revolution—one could also say world domination—by military means, which is to say, by war. And that is precisely what we are experiencing now, even if we think we are living in relative peace. We are being called to support war, and our resistance to war is to be broken by people like Huntington who try to make us believe that everyone else is out to rule and terrorize us. Let us not be caught up in this sort of cheap propaganda ploy! It is Huntington, along with a few other people, who want to rule the world. It’s up to us to not let that happen. Let us not get involved in another crusade against the Islamic or Confucian world. •

Bibliography

Allen, Garry in: Rees, John: An Interview with Garry Allan. The Review of the News, 27.2.1980

Brzezinski, Zbigniew: The Grand Chessboard. American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. New York 1997

Brzezinski, Zbigniew and Huntington, Samuel P.: Political Power: USA/USSR.1962

Caceli, Damien: The United States of Oil. Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) 21. November 2001

Chomsky, Noam: Elections Results. Voting Patterns and Abstentions. Z-Magazine, January 2001

Crozier, Huntington, Watanuki: The Crisis of Democracy. Report on the Government of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission. New York 1975

Gregor, William J.: Toward a Revolution in Civil-Military Affairs. Understanding the United States Military in the Post Cold War World. Harvard University, John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, 1996

Huntington, Samuel P.: The Clash of Civilizations. New York 1996

Huntington, Samuel P.: The Lonely Superpower. Foreign Affairs (vol. 78, number 2). März/April 1999

Huntington, Samuel P.: The Third Wave. Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. Oklahoma 1993

Huntington, Samuel P. and Harrison, Lawrence: Culture Matters. How Values Shape Human Progress. New York 2000

Müller, Harald: Das Zusammenleben der Kulturen. Ein Gegenentwurf zu Huntington. Frankfurt am Main 1998

Sciolino, Elaine and Tyler, Patrick E.: A Nation Challenged: Saddam; Some Pentagon Officials and Advisers Seek to Oust Iraq’s Leader in War’s Next Phase. The New York Times 12. October 2001

For additional bibliography turn to Current Concerns