The War We Are In and the One that Seems Impending

Some Strategic and Long-Range Moral Considerations

by Dr. Robert Hickson

With many of your strategic-minded colleagues I have been speaking about many important things over this last year—about many matters of moment to Man. It has been a very shocking year for many of us. I had hoped to be back in Switzerland soon after last August and early September, but I have been very busy this year for many reasons. The discovery and defence of truth today—which is often inconvenient and unwelcome truth—requires much courage and support, and I have missed your companionship, your always sustaining companionship.

I have been very, very greatly concerned about what my own country is now doing, and further threatening to do.

Moral disorders in my country

What we are now seeing is, I believe, a very long cumulative effect of many deeper and deepening moral disorders in my country, and I think that the covert-irregular warfare strikes of last 11th September were also very symbolic strikes, not only on the World Trade Center, which means the financial power of Wall Street, but also on the Pentagon, a symbol of our military power. They were very symbolic attacks on the United States and on our growing way of life: the culture of dialectic materialism.

The inner logic of several of our false premises is now bringing forth, I believe, many bitter fruits. (Some of you know me well enough to know that I also believe that ‘the West’ lost the Cold War, inasmuch as we have gradually and cumulatively and more and more come to imitate what we were once purportedly fighting against, namely the revolutionary strategic culture of historical and dialectical materialism.) And I think that we are, as a nation, in a desperate situation, just the way that organised Jewry is also increasingly in a desperate position, especially in Israel, and not only demographically; and I think that some very, very tragic things are developing. I hope we will have the maturity to discipline ourselves, to restrain ourselves and to admit our mistakes with humility—and to make a grand-strategic ‘course correction’.

Under the rubble of pervasive untruth

Last summer, Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was preparing to provoke a mass migration of the Palestinians over into Jordan. He was then warned not to do it. But, after 11th September 2001, many things have changed. But, we should ask ‘cui bono?’—‘to whose advantage?’ Ariel Sharon’s hand is now arrogantly stronger and we are ‘living under the rubble’ of pervasive untruth. Now, in my own country, this matter of organized falsehood is becoming asphyxiating. It is suffocating. And I have seen it also in my own military community, namely the unwillingness to deal with the truth. ‘Die Wahrheit der Dinge’—The truth of things. For, ‘the truth matters’, even when it is unwelcome. And ‘O! what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.’

And this growing deprivation of truth has become asphyxiating, indeed, and repellent. It is for us an intolerable situation because of the suffocation by untruth, asphyxiation by organised falsehood. For, organized falsehood is protected falsehood—and is often protected by political and financial and ‘Media’ elites.

Over the many years I have known you, we have always spoken about this matter of trust, ‘das Vertrauen.’ And the greatest social effect of the lie, the deliberately delivered falsehood, is that it breaks trust. And when intimate trust is once broken, it is very hard to repair. And, also, it is productive of cynicism and the corrosion of hopelessness.

Unbearable self-righteousness

In my own country since the 11th of September, indeed, the hysterical Mass Media have been a terrible thing to experience for someone like some of us now here! This self-righteousness of my country was unbearable, as expressed by the public language, which was so flaunted about, that ‘we are only hated because of our virtues, and because of the virtues of those people whom we protect abroad, like the Israelis, who are salients and representatives of our virtues abroad’! (These were the essential and almost exact words of one well-known, non-Jewish journalist, George Will, who is professedly an Episcopalian Christian, as well as a ‘Neo-Conservative.’)

Moreover, increasingly, in the military that I work for, you can also see the confusion of thought: the moral confusion, the strategic confusion, the inability and the unwillingness to define even our specific enemy or our specific objectives. I can assure you that in my own Special Operations Command in which we deal with a lot of the unusual units, the special-mission units, there is very great confusion, even about what we are doing in Afghanistan. There is no clarity about our war aims or our peace aims, nor about ‘who is the enemy’, nor about how long we will be there, nor even about what the operational and theater boundaries are. And, my own military that I work with, are very tired.

Unjust intervention and aggressive war will be explosive

And now we have this impending lunatic expansion of the war, which so speciously seems to be (and now explicitly purports to be) a new part of ‘the global war against terrorism.’ But, there is much more here than meets the eye, and I am not just referring to the matter of oil, or ‘energy security.’ And I think we are now in the position, the United States government is now in the position, that we will destroy our country if we go into this widened war, in part because it will inflame the religious-cultural war all over the world, not just in Central Asia and the Middle East. And I believe that my own country is very weak and fragmented. We are Balkanized, too, culturally and racially Balkanized. And I think this unjust intervention and aggressive war will be explosive and altogether self-sabotaging of my country. It will be a disaster if we go, if we promiscuously go, into a wider war in the Mid-East. Our infliction of injustice will return upon our heads, and we will be further stuck to the ‘Tar Baby’1 of Israel.

But there is now in ‘counterfeit circulation’ this swollen and frenetic public language of war, this fever, this lunacy, afoot in my country, and ‘the Controlled Press’ has also become very, very strong in my country. I will now just say, even when the current war—i.e., the ‘global war on terrorism’ (or the ‘GWOT’, as it is called)—was first announced by the President, there was no definition of the enemy. There is not even a specific Feindbild—not even an ‘enemy image.’ We don’t even talk about Usama bin Ladin any more. We are now more fighting the enemies of Israel, in part, I believe, in order to support the larger grand strategy of Israel and their prospective ‘business interests’ in the Middle East. But even—even in the language of the ‘global war on terrorism’—once again you have the abuse of language and the consequent abuse of power: ‘Missbrauch der Sprache, Missbrauch der Macht.’

Abuse of language and vague definitions

Because you have this abstract and very vague definition of ‘terrorism’, which is itself only a method, you thereby have much scope and ‘maneuver room’ for misuse (especially by the Sophists!). Terrorism itself is, at least, ‘a form of psychological warfare’, do we agree? And, if you were to announce that we are going to have a ‘global war on psychological warfare’, people reasonably would think that you are a lunatic! Or, at least, a Deceiver—a Sophist! For, you are not going to defeat psychological warfare. But now, instead, we have this vague abstraction about ‘terrorism’, without considering that it is an irrationality, as well as an equivocal (if not intentional!) deception (and self-deception). As George Orwell might say: ‘We shall now have Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace.’

And even in my own country, I assure you, among the military—and I cannot talk about some things because of my professional position—there are very many senior people (or Sycophants and ‘Courtier Generals’) who do not at all know what to say when you simply ask them: ‘Who is the enemy?’ ‘Is it just al-Qaeda? And ‘who is al-Qaeda? And what are our objectives?’ Moreover, ‘we are also in the Philippines now, fighting against some other groups, but is al-Qaeda really only in the Middle East, or is it also in Latin America, as well as the Philippines?’ ‘What is the nature of the enemy? And what is the enemy’s long-range strategy against us?’ And, more importantly: ‘what is the kind of war we are in?’ You would be embarrassed to hear the answers I have invariably received. (I regret to say that I myself was very discouraged.)

Some of you know your own German military and strategic theorist, Carl von Clausewitz. He always said that, before you enter into a war, or if you are in a war, the most important thing is to understand ‘the kind of war you are in’. In my country—I assure you—there is no discussion about this matter. There is no discussion, either, about the deeper cultural-religious issues involved or about the manipulation of the public language. It is very difficult. Do you believe me?

Now, in the military—I also assure you—there are many people who are very, and increasingly, suspicious about Israel. And I speak rather openly about this myself. In most places of my society, however, they do not speak openly. They are afraid, or intimidated. (Self-censorship is a ‘Darwinian survival trait’—in the words of one of my ironical friends.) And in my country—I think—a key political-theological division is: those who really sympathise with Israel and unconditionally want to help them; and those who don’t. That determines their view about the current war against terrorism and their emphatic influence, especially, about the impending and widening war in Middle East.

Apocalyptic theology of ‘Christian Zionists’

There are many influential people who very proudly call themselves ‘Christian Zionists’ But a lot of these growing Christian Zionists—who have a certain messianic and increasingly apocalyptic political theology about ‘the end of time’, about the indefectibly sacred land of Israel, and about the strategic, providential purpose of the State of Israel—even further desire, it is true, ‘the Re-building of the Third Temple’, which would, of course, require the prior desecration of a Mosque (The Dome of the Rock)! And a lot of these ‘Protestant Christian Zionists’—who are also, incidentally, very anti-Catholic—are thereby, for theological reasons, very influential in promoting Israeli foreign policy! I have a text that I shall later give to you, about 200 pages in length, which was written by the scholar, Yona Malachy, and published by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem back in 1978. Sponsored by the University’s ‘Institute of Contemporary Jewry’, it was a strategic, religious cultural book about how Israel could make strategic use of Christian Protestant fundamentalism in the United States. The full title of the book was: American Fundamentalism and Israel: The Relation of Fundamentalist Churches to Zionism and the State of Israel. If you read this text, some scales of illusion may fall from your eyes. (You should also read Yehoshafat Harkabi’s 1988 book, Israel’s Fateful Hour.)

Israel’s use of Christian Protestant fundamentalism

As another instrument of strategic deception and indirection, the Fabian Movement from Great Britain, as well as the so called ‘British Israel’ groups, have a lot of pro-Zionist views about foreign policy in the Middle East, many of which are not only secular, but very theological, indeed. (See Barbara Tuchman’s 1956 book, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour.) So, one of the first emphatic points I would make to you is that this analogous theological discussion about the impending war is now going on secretly—or privately—in my country, and it is decisively influential on U.S. foreign policy!

But also, despite the public appearance of ‘the West’s’ pervasive ‘secularism’ and ‘agnosticism’, there is a lot more of the religious element than you may want to believe behind our public discourse in the United States. And a lot of the Jewish strategic institutes work very closely with some of these Protestant Christian Zionists, who really believe that the land in Israel is specially given by God to the Jews forever (or at least ‘in perpetuity’) and that the Palestinians are not really human. As one Jewish member of our Intelligence Community intensely, but coldly, said to me recently: ‘the Palestinians are not a people, they are a weapon’, and ‘what is important is whether or not you have a Jewish soul.’ Could you imagine this inhuman formulation? And, how do you think this man responded when I challenged him?

But some of the Protestant Christian Zionists whom I know also say, and often even flippantly say: ‘Well, you see, the “Christians” that are there, the few Christians that are left in Israel, in Palestine, they are not really Christians. You see, they are Roman Catholics, Latins or Melchites, or even Russian and Greek Orthodox. They are not really true Biblical Christians.’ I have heard of some of these people say these things explicitly—and with undisguised contempt! They have complete contempt even for their nominally fellow Christians in the Middle East—their so called ‘fellow Christians.’ Such is their perfidy. Such is their frigidity.

More involved than oil and geopolitics

Therefore, I think that, first of all, we must carefully consider that there is a lot more religious fervor and fever in this discussion of a wider war that we may want to face! (Our self-deception in this matter can also be seductively manipulated—and has been!) There is more involved here than oil, or the geopolitics of energy and water! Moreover, you see now more and more of this illusionary development of American ‘messianic democracy’ which is now also becoming a kind of febrile Judaeo-American or Christian-Zionist ‘apocalyptic democracy’. And this frenzy to expand all these delusive things is very frightening, because you are also seeing increased manipulation of the public language and sometimes deft, sophistic deception, Täuschung, and, yet, an increased irrationality! And I am not kidding. Do you trust me? What further evidence may I give you to convince you, not just to persuade you?

I spent a lot of time this last year trying to raise fundamental rational strategic moral questions with various influential people, because I am responsibly involved in some of the longer-range planning and rather strategic, military operations, as most of you know. Often I have asked, very quietly and patiently: ‘What are our war aims; what are the peace aims; who is the enemy; what are the deeper causes of this war; and what are your underlying assumptions?’ In response to such simple and straightforward questions, you see, increasingly, the lack of rationality, not just the lack of candor! Now, do you understand why I am so gravely concerned about my delusively powerful nation?

And, then, you also have ‘the Controlled Press.’ And I assure you, that there is also the fear and self-censorship that exists whenever one is talking about Israel, whenever one is talking about any of the specific Israeli (hence Jewish) issues of public importance to us all.

There is also now a fear in my country of talking about certain Islamic issues, even about the essence of Islam and its unequivocal requirement of a rather fatalistic ‘submission.’ You cannot teach Christianity in our public schools in the United States, but you can now permissibly, though tendentiously, teach Islam. It is, for sure, a very special interpretation of Islam, you know, as seen through the eyes of the Secular Enlightenment, the secular Aufklärung, but this attenuated, ‘Unitarian’ version of Islam is now being openly taught in our State schools! President Bush himself (purportedly a Protestant Christian himself) is, in effect, trying to tell everybody, ‘Well, you know, that real Islam is only a religion of peace and tolerance, and everything is very kind.’ (‘They are only Unitarians with camels’, as one of my droll friends ironizes this matter and subversive travesty!) But, there is so much confusion of thought, in any event, and no truly deliberate public discourse has been conducted about any of these vital matters of faith, or their implications for war and peace.

    Do you think I am making this all up? Do you think I am manipulating you with a witty hyperbole? Do you think that I am pandering to your anti-American prejudices—or even to your vices? Not at all, I regret to say.

Multi-media psycho-techniques prevent thinking

I don’t know how many of you in this room have seen the visual and ‘multi-media’ formats on American television now, for example. When you look at a screen, you have usually one woman and one man in the center of the screen all grinning and set to give ‘the news’—‘the Real News of the Day’—and at the bottom of the screen there are new ‘bursting’ messages going ‘back and forth.’ It is lunatic! What does this do with human mind to watch these little associative ‘stroboscopic’ and ‘incongruous’ concurrent impressions, again and again? And you do not have the opportunity to consider fundamental facts and arguments, though you often have a deliberate concealment of fundamental truth. You are thoroughly diverted by the ‘multi-media psycho-techniques’, and distracted! And you have at work here a kind of immoral irresponsibility of arbitrary power, as well as organised falsehood.

And we must remember that we are now talking about matters of peace and of war, with the involvement of very grave weapons. And some of you know about chemical and biological weapons, and I have often spoken to you before about some of the advanced biological and chemical and ‘neurological’ weapons that I have some sorrowful knowledge about. And I assure you that there are such psycho-tropic and neuro-tropic weapons—or the potential for them in Iraq. The capabilities are there, but what about their explicit (and impending) intention to use them? That is another issue. The Israelis have such weapons, too.

If my fellow soldiers are put at risk in Iraq, and they are not adequately protected against certain advanced agents, what is going to be ‘the blow-back’ in my own country? Have we even considered this? Just from the narrow concern about our own people, what has been our public discourse? Isn’t it a joyful thing to be in a ‘Modern Democracy’? And, especially when you are also ‘the World’s Sole Superpower’?

No just reason to make war on Iraq

But I think, in any event, that there is no just reason to make war on Iraq. By the laws of warfare and by the long, articulate tradition of ‘Just War’ criteria and standards of judgment (both ad bellum and in bello), there will be very grave consequences if the United States takes a pre-emptive strike against Iraq, even with the help of Turkey, who may reluctantly (because of their own grave financial problems) permit us to use its bases. I think it will be very, very grave, indeed, if we press on to war and thereby ‘strut to our confusion.’

And what I am also afraid of is that our military is considerably weaker than some of you might think, especially if we had a longer conflict, a protracted conflict, to endure. And, so, therefore the temptation to use our ‘special weapons’ will likely be very great. And then what? Certainly, there will be more of a resort to anonymous, more impersonal, more frigid devices and ‘platforms’ and ‘fusion sensors.’ You must know about such ‘abstract coldness’, even in our using what we call UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), not just for reconnaissance, as is the case with the German Spähtruppen (but ‘Spähtruppen without the Truppen’), but also as impersonal instruments and new weapon systems. And all of this is often manically inhuman and, in my own judgment, I do not believe that we are really thinking through where this might all lead, also with respect to our long-range strategic alliances and in light of our European allies.

Some of you now know that, at the recent Wehrkunde-Conference, General Brent Scowcroft, who was an advisor to the older President Bush, unexpectedly stood up at the strategic Congress and publicly defied two of the primary Jewish Neo-Conservative people present, who are important and influential strategists in the Pentagon (people such as Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle), saying that these two men had gravely misrepresented President Bush’s real views! Yes, General Scowcroft, who is an older West Pointer and a former Air Force general officer, stood up and said in front of all the Europeans present: You are misrepresenting President Bush’s true ideas! There is a deeper struggle going on in my own country, too.

Enormous influence of the Neo-Conservatives

But, more and more, this so-called ‘Neo-Conservative’ lobby (which includes Wolfowitz and Perle) has sustained an enormous influence in Washington. There is a large network of them in the Pentagon and elsewhere, and a lot of them also seem to have barely-veiled contempt for the military, these ‘nützliche Idioten’—these mere ‘useful idiots’ in uniform! These ‘Neo-Conservatives’ are certainly intelligent and they do have a strategic political plan, although none of them, it seems, has ever himself been in military uniform or in actual war and at risk! Nevertheless, they also have subtly connected array of well-funded ‘Think Tanks’ in Washington, which are strategic Think Tanks, and they not only have a lot of money but are pervasive in the Media.

And, then, there is the matter of those questions that are not asked, the issue of not just what is said, but what is not said! These tendentious omissions often are so important, and the omissions are often so distorting of the truth, as well, especially of the fuller truth in proper proportion. ‘Suppressio veri, suggestio falsi.’

Breaking of trust and growing cynicism

And, so, in my own country, you see not only the breaking of trust, but also the growing cynicism. And I think it is very frightening, especially the corrosive consequences of cumulative cynicism. For, we have very many vulnerabilities in our country, to start with, and over this last year I have seen the growing intrusiveness of the State, in a new regime of restrictions, so that more and more people myopically want the illusion of security, and are rashly willing, therefore, to sacrifice many of their rights and liberties. But, so many things are gradually being taken away, as if by ‘titration.’ The deprivation is thus less detectable, as when oxygen is only gradually removed from the air.

New technologies are also coming in, such as the biomedical technologies, to include the ‘sensors’ of biometrics. They will take away even more privacy, and it is all presented under the specious pretext of ‘more security from terrorism.’ And I regret to say that my country has had—and has ignored—many deeper long-standing problems, which are also now accumulating by way of a kind of ‘titration’, and for a long time, or even if we just go back through the whole 20th century in my Country! The growing ‘tumescent’ State and its punitive apparatus are becoming more unmistakably intrusive, and deceptively ‘therapeutic.’ And, we now are faced with even graver moral and spiritual challenges, not just among the youth in our ‘narco-democracy’, or in our ‘steroid-infested cult of athletics.’

Becoming increasingly irrational

Moreover, psychologically, I think that we have a growing fever in my country—and we really do! We are becoming increasingly irrational and we manifest an inability to deal with all the growing resentment and confusion and deception. There’s a lot of tension. And what I’m afraid of is—and a lot of you who are professional psychologists will certainly know this—that when people are all tense and tangled up, they want to have a terrible simplification, and they often submit to demagogues and panderers: what the French call ‘the terrible simplificateurs’—‘the terrible simplifiers.’ That is to say, somebody who will give emotional focus to something, especially when people’s lives are in a jangle and full of ‘cognitive dissonance’! And I see, therefore, that, in this tense situation of impending war, the United States military has even a higher moral obligation to the common good (bonum commune): namely, a moral obligation to stand up to a lot of these corrupt political leaders and to give strategic-moral arguments that will resist their deceptive sophistic manipulations and will thus demand further clarity and morally just reasons, before they continue to follow their irrational vagueness and unmistakable aimlessness. (A fanatic is ‘he who, losing sight of his aim, redoubles his effort.’)

Military have obligation to resist deception and confusion

I recently told several senior officers that we should soberly look to ‘the principle of the Nüremberg trials’, which, as a whole, I myself have had very many moral problems with ( in part because of the Soviet judges present, like A. Vychynsky.) But, essentially, at Nüremberg, German military officers were held morally accountable for what their political leaders did! And I think it follows from that established principle, that the American military, too, especially our senior officers, also have to answer to a higher standard and to deal with a moral and strategic long-range view in their own decisions to go into a wider war! For, they, too, have a higher obligation to resist the current political sophistry: the deception, the confusion, the ‘un-clarity.’

Because I am in the Special Operations Command, which has a very special range of grand-strategic, political-military missions, not just ‘conventional military missions’, you should know that our people, therefore, should have even more accountability, in view of our politically sensitive, higher military responsibility. And I have often emphasized this special obligation during my teaching, and not just over the last year. And, during this last year, I often raised this sensitive theme, but it’s very difficult today because many military officers in my own country, as in other countries, have an abiding sense of their fittingly unquestioning obedience to a ‘legal order’, and they say: ‘Well, this is my duty, and the political leaders give us these missions.’

But, more and more, I’m seeing the military officers themselves (and certain sergeants major!) asking these deeper moral and strategic questions, because they vividly feel and see the asphyxiation of untruth and the sophistic manipulation in the Media. These men also know what we idiomatically call ‘the ground truth’, and have seen the fruits of political mendacity abroad!

Big power brokers in ‘the oil realm’

I will add a couple of other things now concerning the geopolitics of oil and other energy resources, including the issues of water and of ‘hydro-politics.’ However, I think there is a deeper analysis, especially about the global energy reserves and about the equivocal grand-strategic concept of ‘energy security.’ I think that, increasingly in my country, a lot of the big power brokers in ‘the oil realm’ now believe that there will be many problems about the Caspian Sea oil and natural-gas reserves, and that these political and strategic problems will further be involving the whole Caspian Sea region itself in conflict. For, there now seems to be much less oil there than they had thought, and it is also more difficult to get! There is a lot of political and cultural strife in the area as well, and the pipelines are very expensive, and they can be easily interrupted. And, so, more and more I think that, at a strategic and grand-strategic level, the sobering realization is that the Persian Gulf Oil will still be the most important source of oil for many, many years to come, and we must therefore be more ‘pre-emptive’ to make new strategic-political ‘arrangements’ there, as was also rashly done after World War I in the Gulf region.

Analogously, just as after the Turkish Ottoman Empire was formally dissolved in the aftermath of World War I and after the Sykes-Picot ‘arrangements’ came into effect to engineer the Middle East by means of the French and the British ‘protectorates’, so, too, the new argument goes, something is needed anew today. Just as some of the Imperial British interests wanted us to make strategic use of the Hashimites then, we are now seeing a lot of same deeper history and strategic themes coming back—now even unto the ‘purging’ of ‘Saud’ from ‘Saudi Arabia’ and the ‘replacement’ of its ‘Wahhabite’ Islamic religious ideology.

Islam and migrations

I think, also, that there’s a realization in the West—and this is not often spoken about openly, but we are supposed to be honest with each other here—about the strategic danger of the demography of Islam—both migrations and new births. The Muslims are having babies and large families. But, the West is dying, or at least traditional (even Christian) Europeans are not having children, and this is true not just in Spain and Italy. There are, you know, people from Senegal and Morocco all over Italy, throughout the ‘hinterland’ of Italy, and certainly in Spain, and I think certain strategic-minded people realize that not only the Islamic births but their migrations are very serious, and that something has got to be done! And this, too, is part of the ‘underground discussion’ that is going on, I think. A lot of this discussion also fits in with the unstated, underground arguments for war, but not very much of it deals with the justice of war, in general, nor does it make a specific moral defence of this particular war in the Middle East and Central Asia. Do you not see the tendentious omissions and the accumulating Sophistry?

And I would say one last thing, because I happen to have Vice President Richard Cheney’s recent speech to military veterans here in front of me, and I know a little something about Mr. Cheney and his character. And he is a thoughtful and decent man, he really is. He is a very thoughtful man. But he also has a lot of personal involvement in the oil business and its strategic interests. And, in his speech, which he gave the other day down in our southern state of Tennessee, to American Veterans of Foreign Wars, he strategically falsified or seriously distorted his larger report on Foreign Policy by omitting all kinds of facts and key parts of important history.

For example, as a lot of you know, between 1980 and 1988—September 1980 to August 1988—there was the Iraqi-Iranian war, and we supported Iraq, covertly at first and then overtly. Just to review a little bit of this important history that might be helpful to us for an understanding of the current political and strategic context, in 1979 there was the Iranian Shiite revolution. We may remember that, when the Soviets also then shockingly came into Afghanistan on Christmas of 1979 with their Spetsnaz units, there was a lot of reaction to both the Iranian and the Soviet Actions, and ‘special weapons’ were then brought in from China, weapons that are probably still in Saudi Arabia and the Israelis themselves also know that, very well. For, they certainly knew it back in 1990 -1991, because President Bush the Elder himself had originally brought some of them in from China, potentially to be used against the advancing, revolutionary Iranians.

Role of United States in Iraqi-Iranian war

Moreover, there was a concern that the Iranian Shiites were going to move in, more and more, even into Saudi Arabia, and, so, the United States then supported the Iraqis in this Iraqi-Iranian war! And we knew that they both used chemical weapons and that they (especially the Iraqis) used biological weapons, as well (e.g. camel pox), which are not talked about very much still. They used camel pox, designedly, which kills, not human beings themselves, but their camels, because camels are not only a means of transportation, but also a key source of protein, and other things were also done, but still not discussed. (The Soviets also used endemic glanders in Afghanistan, which is a zoönotic bio-agent, infecting horses and the human riders of those gravely infected horses.)

And, near the end of that eight-year Iraq-Iran war, which was started by Iraq, there was an incident in the North-Western part of Iran, or North-Eastern part of Iraq, near the Iranian border, which involved the use of chemical-warfare agents. And, at the time, the common analysis in the Intelligence Community was that it was probably the Iranians who did it. But, now, the propaganda is suspiciously otherwise—‘oh, it was the Iraqis, after all!’ This opportunistic and convenient modification is part of the dubious rewriting of history and another infliction of cynicism. (As Stalin once cynically said about his own philosophy of history: ‘Paper will put up with anything written upon it!’)

Rumsfeld brought aid to Saddam Hussein

And, it is also very important, I think, for you to know that, during that time, especially after 1984, Donald Rumsfeld, the current U.S. Secretary of Defence, was the special emissary sent to bring aid to Saddam Hussein himself. And the thing is that lot of people in the Middle East know about these flagrant things and about our hypocrisy and lack of ‘full disclosure.’

But, the American people are not given this important context, and others are likewise often unaware of these distortions of history. And so we have this new fever, trying to find a connection now between al-Qaeda and a newly diabolised Iraq, in order to justify a pre-emptive strike, which I think will set a disastrous international precedent and have an enormous ‘blow-back’ upon the imperious United States, as well. And, in my judgment, that will intensify certain terrorist attacks on my own country with ‘special weapons’ and it will lead to a further fragmentation of my own country, which I know many people also fervently want, at least in order to hold back the seemingly overweening, new American ‘Empire.’

Much deception is suffocating the truth

For many years, as some of you know, I have been in ‘the Anti-Empire Party’, and I am now also in ‘the Anti-War Party’, in part because I think that much deception is suffocating the truth and preventing the honest examination of so many important long-range cultural and religious considerations; and also the self-sabotaging irrationality is malodorously growing and I think the evil will be very grave if we do not have greater self-discipline; and I hope that our Allies will now have even much stronger strategic and moral reasons to oppose our arrogant irrationality and sophistry, and to help us resist this terrible hubris and temptation to war now! Before it is too late. The tragedy is impending.

I believe that some of you know that Benjamin Netanyahu, the former Prime Minister of Israel, shortly after the 11th of September 2001 had the insulting chutzpah to come to my country in order to speak before the U.S. Congress, and to say to us that the attacks on the United States had nothing to do with Israel or with the U.S. policy towards Israel! Can you believe that? Do you believe that he can so insult the intelligence even of a ‘very dumb goy’ or a dog? And, then, he said, in effect, ‘but now you understand what we Israelis go through every day, and now you have to help us more in our own war on terrorism, or you will also have it in your own Marketplaces and Malls.’

Cui bono?

I also am convinced, by the cumulative evidence and especially by what I have recently seen, that the Israelis and their intelligence agents (or ‘art students’) at least had foreknowledge of the 11 September attacks, and they have certainly profited by them (cui bono?). I can’t go into the details now, but the Drug Enforcement Agency’s evidence is now public, and, from this source alone, I am convinced that the Israeli operatives probably had, at least, foreknowledge, as well as the dark satisfaction of Schadenfreude. And, if you ask the question cui bono? (to whose advantage are a lot of these things?), I think it becomes rather more clear. So, increasingly, the American Empire, which I think is growing like a self-sabotaging tumor, is also in a very grave situation, especially because another power knows very well how to manipulate ‘the World’s Sole Superpower.’ I mean that we are more bloated and disordered in our ‘National and Trans-National Governance’ than you know, and that our military is more confused than you know. And I just pray that we will be rescued by the moral strength of some of our military officers, especially the senior officers, who will come forth and stand up with honour and with strong strategic and moral arguments, and thereby proceed to demand of their political masters certain morally obligatory clarifications before they go on any further in the irrational drift to self-sabotaging war in the Muslim world as agents of a Foreign Power, blinded by our fawning cowardice and flattered in our pride. This hope for a grand-strategic ‘course-correction’ might be an illusion on my part, but this hope fortifies and encourages my own long-range mission and sense of purposiveness and strategic intention, and, in my own small way, I shall try to resist an unjust war and an un-Constitutional Empire, until I must go or be asked to leave.

Endnotes

(2) Unpublished manusript for the Xth ‘Mut zur Ethik’ Conference ‘Humanity at a Crossroads’, 30th August to 1st September 2002. The manuscript can be obtained from the editorial office of Current Concerns.

(3) A pre-emptive strike is a military attack, as an anticipatory reaction to the enemy’s military preparations. A preventive strike is used when—although you cannot see the enemy’s preparations for war—you reckon that the enemy is going to start an attack in the near future. (cf. Jürgen Rose: ‘Denuklearisierung – mögliche Konsequenzen auf der strategischen, operativen und taktischen Ebene für die Flexible Response’, 1988)

(4) The Sykes-Picot Agreement was a secret understanding concluded in May 1916 between Great Britain and France, with the assent of Russia. On May 16, 1916, the conditions for the division of the Ottoman Empire were laid down among the Allies. Italy gave its consent to the agreement later. According to the conditions, France was to exert direct control over the major part of Galilee, while Great Britain was to have great control over the small area around the bay of Haifa and Akko. The rest of Palestine except for Be’er Sheva and the Negev was to be put under international administration. As this internationalisation of Central Palestine was prevented, it was followed by the Balfour Declaration.