Part 4
Fully Facing the Truth about the American Empire
To be sure, as Chomsky, Falk, and Chalmers Johnson illustrate, strong portrayals of American imperialism as far from benign can be drawn without any suggestion that the Bush administration arranged 9/11. These portrayals can be drawn from publicly available documents.
One such document is the “National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” published by the Bush administration in September of 2002. David North says, not unfairly, that this document “asserts as the guiding policy of the United States the right to use military force . . . against any country it believes to be, or it believes may at some point become, a threat to American interests.” “No other country in modern history,” adds North, “has asserted such a sweeping claim to . . . world domination.”40
Another such document, called “Vision for 2020,” was published in February of 1997 by the US Space Command. The mission statement at the head of this document reads: “U.S. Space Command--dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect US interests and investment.”41 There is no mention of democracy and human rights. In the body of the document, in fact, we find this amazingly candid statement: “The globalization of the world economy . . . will continue with a widening between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots.’” The point of this statement is that as the domination of the world economy by the United States and its allies increases, the world’s poor will get still poorer, making the “have-nots” hate America all the more. We will need, therefore, the power to keep them in line.
The United States can do this---and this is the document’s main message--through “Full Spectrum Dominance,” which will involve merging “space superiority with land, sea, and air superiority.” Dominance in space will include, the document frankly says, the power “to deny others the use of space.”
By speaking only of the Space Command’s effort to develop a “missile defense system,” the Pentagon and the White House like to suggest that its purpose is purely defensive. But the goal includes weaponizing space so as to give US forces, in the words of a more recent document, a “prompt global strike capability, whether nuclear or non-nuclear, [that] will allow the US to rapidly and accurately strike distant . . . targets.”42 The fact that the U.S. Space Command’s program is an aggressive one is announced in the logo of one of its divisions: “In Your Face from Outer space.”43
Simply from these and other documents, taken in conjunction with the actions of the Bush administration and the US military, we can see through the claim that the US project of creating the first truly global empire is a benevolent or at least benign enterprise. However, we can fully grasp the extent to which this project is propelled by fanaticism based on a deeply perverted value system only when we realize that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were orchestrated by our own leaders--and that they did this to provide the justification, the fear, and the funding for the so-called war on terror, which would be used as a pretext for enlarging the empire.
I will illustrate this point with one of the most brazen examples of the use of 9/11 to get funding. Shortly before the current Bush administration took office, a document entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses was published by an organization called the Project for the New American Century,44 founding members of which included Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld. This document focused primarily on getting more tax money allocated for the technological transformation of the US military, with the centerpiece of this technological transformation being the US Space Command’s project to weaponize and thereby control space. Because this transformation of the US military will be very expensive, the document said, it will probably proceed very slowly--unless America suffers “some catastrophic and catalyzing event--like a new Pearl Harbor."45 It is interesting that on the night of 9/11, President Bush reportedly wrote in his diary, “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today.”46
In any case, earlier that evening, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was on message. We might assume that he would have been disoriented by the fact that the Pentagon had just, on his watch, suffered an unprecedented attack. Instead, he was ready to use the attacks to obtain more money for the US Space Command. In front of television cameras, Rumsfeld berated Senator Carl Levin, then chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, saying:
Senator Levin, you and other Democrats in Congress have voiced fear that you simply don’t have enough money for the large increase in defense that the Pentagon is seeking, especially for missile defense. . . . Does this sort of thing convince you that an emergency exists in this country to increase defense spending . . . ?47
This strategy worked. Congress immediately appropriated an additional $40 billion for the Pentagon. Since then, furthermore, the president has gotten every additional appropriation he has sought for the so-called war on terror.
Besides being a rousing success in obtaining increased spending for military purposes, 9/11 also provided the pretext for putting many military bases in Central Asia. Zbigniew Brzezinski, in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, had said that doing so would be crucial for maintaining “American primacy,” partly because of the huge oil reserves around the Caspian Sea. Indeed, it may have been from this book that the Project for the New American Century got its idea that a new Pearl Harbor would be helpful. Brzezinski, explaining that the American public had “supported America’s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,”48 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.”49 And indeed, thanks to the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration was able to carry out its plan to attack Afghanistan—-a plan that, we now know, had been formulated several months before 9/11.50 The White House now has a friendly government in Afghanistan and the Pentagon has military bases there and in several other countries of Central Asia.
We also know that the intention to invade Iraq existed long before 9/11 and that this intention was based on imperial designs, not disgust with Saddam’s wickedness.51 In the Project for the New American Century’s 2000 document, we read: “While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”52 The US military is now intending to build several permanent bases in Iraq, which has the world’s second largest known oil reserves. The attacks of 9/11 again provided the pretext, as the Bush administration deceived a majority of the American people into believing that Saddam was connected with Osama bin Laden and even directly responsible for the attacks of 9/11.
I suggested earlier that seeing the true connections between 9/11 and the global domination project helps us understand how fully this project reflects “fanaticism based on a deeply perverted value system.” This is a value system that is diametrically opposed to the value systems on which all the great religious and moral traditions of the world have been based. These traditional value systems say that we should not covet, steal, and murder, and that we should make sure that everyone has the necessary means for a decent life. But our government’s project for global domination is carried out in the name of the greed of the “haves” of the world to have still more, even if it means killing hundreds of thousands of people and letting millions more die every year of starvation and poverty-related diseases. We can now see, furthermore, that some political and military leaders are so fanatically infected with these perverted values that they are willing to kill thousands of their own citizens, then endlessly use a deceptive account of these terrorist attacks to justify “a war on terror,” in the name of which they claim the right to do virtually anything they wish, ignoring all principles of morality and international law.
How Should Religious People Respond?
I now turn, finally, to the question of how religious people should respond to 9/11 and the American empire. My discussion of this question must be very brief, consisting merely of four suggestions.
First, discover and then speak the truth: I would suggest that religious people should--if they have not done so already--study about both 9/11 and the American empire to see if they find the claims I have made about them true. If they do, then they should do everything in their power to make others aware of these facts.
Second, create new means to spread the truth: It is clear that the mainstream press in America is complicit in the cover-up of the truth about the American empire in general and 9/11 in particular. For example, my second book, which exposes many outrageous lies in The 9/11 Commission Report, has not been reviewed by any mainstream publication; the same was true of my earlier book, The New Pearl Harbor. There are, of course, alternative publications, both in print and on the internet, that seek to expose the truth about the American empire. Most of these, however, fail to deal with 9/11. And most of them are indifferent or even hostile to religion, so they do not provide effective organs to communicate with religious communities. Perhaps the most important thing that could be done by religious groups concerned with getting out the truth about 9/11 and the American empire would be the creation of new means of communication, means through which the total contrast between the values of the religious traditions and the values of the global domination project can be made clear. On this basis, an ecumenical religious movement to oppose the global domination project, partly by exposing the truth about 9/11, might be formed.
Third, formulate proposals for subverting the global domination project: As such a movement begins to form, it will need to decide rather concretely how to go about trying to subvert the global domination project. We need, therefore, proposals for how to do this from religious thinkers of the various tradition. I will soon, I hope, be publishing my own proposal, which is centered around the idea of global democracy.53 Other people will favor different proposals. But I stress the importance of having such proposals from religious thinkers. It is probably only such proposals, drawing explicitly on the moral principles of the religious traditions, that will have the power to move large numbers of people.
Fourth, form alliances with other moral nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). I have emphasized that it is important for representatives from the various religious traditions who take their common moral principles seriously to join forces. Indeed, my motto is: “Religions of the world unite! You have nothing to lose by your impotence.” But it is essential, at the same time, for these religious groups to forge alliances with what we can call the other moral NGOs of the world. Whether they are working for human rights, for peace, for ecological sustainability, or some related cause, the moral principles that motivate these NGOs are diametrically opposed to the values of the global domination project. By emphasizing the moral principles that we have in common, NGOs that are and are not explicitly religious can join forces in opposing that radically immoral project. |
