Mr. Pacepa, it’s your turn.
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Pacepa: Thanks Jamie. I believe that the most important thing in a war is to know your enemy. Today’s terrorism is a 21st century variation of the old anti-Semitism, that weapon of the emotions wielded by so many tyrants over the centuries.
History always repeats itself, and if you can live two lives, you have an even greater chance of seeing that repetition with your own eyes. During the last six years of my other life, as a Romanian intelligence general, the main task of the Soviet bloc espionage community was to transform Yasser Arafat’s war against Israel and its main supporter, the United States, into an armed doctrine of the whole Islamic world. America was our main enemy, and a billion adversaries could inflict far greater damage on it than could a mere one million. Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep. Our task was to convert its historical hatred of the Jews into a new hatred of the United States, by portraying this land of freedom as an “imperial Zionist country” financed by Jewish money and run by a rapacious “Council of the Elders of Zion,” the Kremlin’s epithet for the US Congress.
According to KGB theorists, the Islamic world was a petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hate. Islamic cultures had a taste for nationalism, jingoism and victimology. Their illiterate, oppressed mobs could be whipped up to a fever pitch. Terrorism and violence against America would flow naturally from their religious fervor. We had only to keep repeating, over and over, that the United States was a “Zionist country” bankrolled by rich Jews. Islam was obsessed with preventing the infidel’s occupation of its territory, and it would be highly receptive to our dogma that American imperialism wanted to transform the rest of the world into a Jewish fiefdom.
Before I left Romania for good, in 1978, the Soviet bloc intelligence community flooded the Islamic world with Arabic translations of an old Russian, forged, anti-Semitic tract entitled Protocols of the Elders of Zion, along with “documentary” materials, also in Arabic, “proving” that the United States was a Zionist country governed by Jewish money, whose aim was to extend its domination over the rest of the world. We also infiltrated the Islamic world with thousands of Soviet bloc Islamic citizens recruited as intelligence agents and tasked to implant there a rabid, demented hatred for American Zionism. They were to portray everybody and everything in America as being subordinated to Jewish interests: the leaders, the government, the political parties, the most prominent personalities—and even American history. Most of these agents were religious servants, engineers, medical doctors or teachers, and they had excellent credibility.
Although we now live in an age of technology, we still do not have an instrument that can scientifically measure the results of a sustained influence operation. Nevertheless, it is safe to presume that over the course of the further twenty-plus years—until the Soviet Union buckled—the combination between spreading hundreds of thousands of Protocols within the Islamic world and portraying the United States there as a criminal Zionist instrument should have left some trace. The hijacked airplane was launched into the world of contemporary terrorism by the KGB and its puppet Yasser Arafat, and it is significant that this became the weapon of choice for September 11, 2001.
The United States won the Cold War on the 9th of November in 1989, when the Berlin Wall collapsed and the downtrodden people kept hostage inside the Soviet bloc woke up to claim freedom as their own God-given right. We in the West succeeded, because we united the free world against evil, and because we ensured that our side was armed with overwhelming military potential.
We can conquer terrorism if we can make the people of the Islamic world realize that democracy, not anti-Semitism, will give them a better life. Re-civilizing Iraq will be crucial toward that.
FP: Thank you Mr. Pacepa. So democratizing Iraq is one of our most effective weapons in the terror war. . .
Mr. Leiken, back to you now.
Fell free to respond to the previous comments of the panel. But kindly include a comment on the strategies we must implement to fight this war. Mr. Pacepa affirms that civilizing Iraq is crucial. Mr. Laqueur makes three preliminary suggestions: (1) intelligence should be greatly improved, (2) Western counter-propaganda should at least begin to exist, (3) and political use should be made of the terrorists’ mistakes. Kindly build on these themes.
Leiken: “Anti-imperialism” constitutes no badge of honor. Nazism, Arabism Fidelismo, Sandinismo all began life as anti-imperialist movements. Khomeni was anti-imperialist, likewise the Afghan jihad. Some anti-imperialist movements are positive (George Washington, Ghandi, Resistance in WW2), many are or become “evil.” Some are or become imperialist as with fascism and Islamism.
Did David Horowitz yearn to “extinguish human life” when he was a communist and backed the terrorist Panthers? He like others of us in the “second thoughts” group cherished good intentions which paved the road Stalinism, Leninism, Maoism and anti-Americanism.
Czech dissident Milan Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting notes that those who cheered the Communist takeover were “the more dynamic, the more intelligent, the better half.” A nuance of our world is that evil may spring from virtues like compassion or piety. Kundera also wrote that
Totalitarianism is not only hell but the dream of paradise – the age old dream where everyone would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith… If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people.”
In Paradise Lost Satan, the brightest angel, led an anti-imperialist rebellion against God’s "empire," authority and sundry “abuses”(V: 771-802). Milton’s fallen angels joined the “glorious enterprise” from a “sense of injured merit”(I: 89, 98). The Islamist terrorists believe they are striding through holy war to holiness. Merely evil, they would not win adherents, would tire without a “higher” vision.
This not to apologize for September 11 pace Chomsky, or seek exculpatory “root causes” for terrorism. That leads straight to the gas chambers, to sacrificing Israel to appease Arab “humiliation.” No: we need knowledge to fight.
Not “war” but “terrorism” molests me about the phrase. We have been the object of war since Bin Laden declared it in 1996. The Clinton administration and the FBI saw counter-terrorism as police work. They segregated intelligence to “build cases.” In Afghanistan we did employ uniformed armed forces and do so today in Fallujah.
But Cheney's “war on terrorism” has presumed a union of terrorists, as if terrorism itself was an ideology or politics. That led us to suppose a collaborative relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda which two independent panels, chaired by Republicans (the 9-11 Commission and the Senate Select Committee) denied; cf. my The Truth about the Saddam - al Qaeda Connection” www.inthenationalinterest.com. Individuals become terrorists via ideologies and politics. That is why we’ve had anarchist, fascist, Bolshevik, Christian, narco, Palestinian and even a few Zionist terrorists. We are not equally at “war” against all these.
As for strategy: first we must define our enemy: “Islamist terrorism” as the 9-11 report concluded and “not generic terrorism.” Then define our allies: Israel, the West and all countries and individuals who oppose terrorism.
Democracy is not a panacea for several reasons:
· You needn’t be a democracy to oppose terrorism – e.g. Morocco, Jordan, China, Russia.
· In most Arab countries democracy will produce an Islamist state as it nearly did in Algeria.
· In the Islamist Middle East, absent a background of civil liberties and religious freedom, democracy is not in the cards. Religious freedom is what we should be championing in alliance with traditional quietists Muslims like Sistani. We should consider reviving USIA and giving it the mission of carrying out ideological war on behalf of religious toleration.
· But here prudence cautions that if there’s a deficiency of religious freedom in countries like Saudi Arabia, before 9-11, there was an excess of it in, say, German surveillance of the Hamburg cell. On similiar grounds the FBI was barred from surveilling mosques.
· We cannot wait for years while the CIA trains agents with language mastery to gather significant intelligence within Islamist movements. That means liaison with foreign intelligence (“outsourcing”), starting with Israel but including Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, both of which have deep -- all too deep -- ties with Islamists.
At home we need an agency whose forte is counter-terrorism. I doubt that the FBI will morph into it. And we need smart borders (cf. nixoncenter.org
Attacks may or may not activate anti-terrorism – e.g. the Madrid bombings. Thanks to 9-11 U.S. public opinion is far ahead of the politicians in anti-terrorist engagement, which is why the grass root reaction to the Report of the 9-11 Commission forced Congress to return. One object of public education should be to strengthen and not weaken the Patriot Act. |
