In article <bje43h$1ofl$1@pencil.math.missouri.edu>, Dave Muller says...

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Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three 
months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British 
politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the 
Gulf and the world.

Mr Meacher, in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism 
is a smokescreen and that  the US goal is "world hegemony, built around 
securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax 
Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened 
before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".

*This war on terrorism is bogus*

The 9/11 attacks gave the US an ideal pretext to use force to secure its 
global domination

*Michael Meacher*
*Saturday September 6, 2003*
*The Guardian*

Massive attention has now been given - and rightly so - to the reasons 
why Britain went to war against Iraq. But far too little attention has 
focused on why the US went to war, and that throws light on British 
motives too. The conventional explanation is that after the Twin Towers 
were hit, retaliation against al-Qaida bases in Afghanistan was a 
natural first step in launching a global war against terrorism. Then, 
because Saddam Hussein was alleged by the US and UK governments to 
retain weapons of mass destruction, the war could be extended to Iraq as 
well. However this theory does not fit all the facts. The truth may be a 
great deal murkier.

We now know that a blueprint for the creation of a global Pax Americana 
was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld 
(defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), Jeb Bush 
(George Bush's younger brother) and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of 
staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences, was 
written in September 2000 by the neoconservative think tank, Project for 
the New American Century (PNAC).

The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the 
Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says "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."

The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document attributed to Wolfowitz 
and Libby which said the US must "discourage advanced industrial nations 

>from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or 

global role". It refers to key allies such as the UK as "the most 
effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership". 
It describes peacekeeping missions as "demanding American political 
leadership rather than that of the UN". It says "even should Saddam pass 

>from the scene", US bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain 

permanently... as "Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests 
as Iraq has". It spotlights China for "regime change", saying "it is 
time to increase the presence of American forces in SE Asia".

The document also calls for the creation of "US space forces" to 
dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent "enemies" 
using the internet against the US. It also hints that the US may 
consider developing biological weapons "that can target specific 
genotypes [and] may transform biological warfare from the realm of 
terror to a politically useful tool".

Finally - written a year before 9/11 - it pinpoints North Korea, Syria 
and Iran as dangerous regimes, and says their existence justifies the 
creation of a "worldwide command and control system". This is a 
blueprint for US world domination. But before it is dismissed as an 
agenda for rightwing fantasists, it is clear it provides a much better 
explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than 
the global war on terrorism thesis. This can be seen in several ways.

First, it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt 
the events of 9/11. It is known that at least 11 countries provided 
advance warning to the US of the 9/11 attacks. Two senior Mossad experts 
were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the CIA and FBI to a 
cell of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation (Daily 
Telegraph, September 16 2001). The list they provided included the names 
of four of the 9/11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested.

It had been known as early as 1996 that there were plans to hit 
Washington targets with aeroplanes. Then in 1999 a US national 
intelligence council report noted that "al-Qaida suicide bombers could 
crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, 
the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House".

Fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers obtained their visas in Saudi Arabia. 
Michael Springman, the former head of the American visa bureau in 
Jeddah, has stated that since 1987 the CIA had been illicitly issuing 
visas to unqualified applicants from the Middle East and bringing them 
to the US for training in terrorism for the Afghan war in collaboration 
with Bin Laden (BBC, November 6 2001). It seems this operation continued 
after the Afghan war for other purposes. It is also reported that five 
of the hijackers received training at secure US military installations 
in the 1990s (Newsweek, September 15 2001).

Instructive leads prior to 9/11 were not followed up. French Moroccan 
flight student Zacarias Moussaoui (now thought to be the 20th hijacker) 
was arrested in August 2001 after an instructor reported he showed a 
suspicious interest in learning how to steer large airliners. When US 
agents learned from French intelligence he had radical Islamist ties, 
they sought a warrant to search his computer, which contained clues to 
the September 11 mission (Times, November 3 2001). But they were turned 
down by the FBI. One agent wrote, a month before 9/11, that Moussaoui 
might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers (Newsweek, May 20 2002).

All of this makes it all the more astonishing - on the war on terrorism 
perspective - that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself. 
The first hijacking was suspected at not later than 8.20am, and the last 
hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06am. Not a single 
fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from the US Andrews airforce 
base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had 
hit the Pentagon at 9.38 am. Why not? There were standard FAA intercept 
procedures for hijacked aircraft before 9/11. Between September 2000 and 
June 2001 the US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to 
chase suspicious aircraft (AP, August 13 2002). It is a US legal 
requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight 
plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate.

Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being 
ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been 
deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose 
authority? The former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, has 
said: "The information provided by European intelligence services prior 
to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the 
CIA or FBI to assert a defence of incompetence."

Nor is the US response after 9/11 any better. No serious attempt has 
ever been made to catch Bin Laden. In late September and early October 
2001, leaders of Pakistan's two Islamist parties negotiated Bin Laden's 
extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for 9/11. However, a US official 
said, significantly, that "casting our objectives too narrowly" risked 
"a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky 
chance Mr Bin Laden was captured". The US chairman of the joint chiefs 
of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that "the goal has never 
been to get Bin Laden" (AP, April 5 2002). The whistleblowing FBI agent 
Robert Wright told ABC News (December 19 2002) that FBI headquarters 
wanted no arrests. And in November 2001 the US airforce complained it 
had had al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in its sights as many as 10 times 
over the previous six weeks, but had been unable to attack because they 
did not receive permission quickly enough (Time Magazine, May 13 2002). 
None of this assembled evidence, all of which comes from sources already 
in the public domain, is compatible with the idea of a real, determined 
war on terrorism.

The catalogue of evidence does, however, fall into place when set 
against the PNAC blueprint. From this it seems that the so-called "war 
on terrorism" is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider 
US strategic geopolitical objectives. Indeed Tony Blair himself hinted 
at this when he said to the Commons liaison committee: "To be truthful 
about it, there was no way we could have got the public consent to have 
suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan but for what happened on 
September 11" (Times, July 17 2002). Similarly Rumsfeld was so 
determined to obtain a rationale for an attack on Iraq that on 10 
separate occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to 
9/11; the CIA repeatedly came back empty-handed (Time Magazine, May 13 
2002).

In fact, 9/11 offered an extremely convenient pretext to put the PNAC 
plan into action. The evidence again is quite clear that plans for 
military action against Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well before 
9/11. A report prepared for the US government from the Baker Institute 
of Public Policy stated in April 2001 that "the US remains a prisoner of 
its energy dilemma. Iraq remains a destabilising influence to... the 
flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East". Submitted to 
Vice-President Cheney's energy task group, the report recommended that 
because this was an unacceptable risk to the US, "military intervention" 
was necessary (Sunday Herald, October 6 2002).

Similar evidence exists in regard to Afghanistan. The BBC reported 
(September 18 2001) that Niaz Niak, a former Pakistan foreign secretary, 
was told by senior American officials at a meeting in Berlin in mid-July 
2001 that "military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the 
middle of October". Until July 2001 the US government saw the Taliban 
regime as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the 
construction of hydrocarbon pipelines from the oil and gas fields in 
Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, 
to the Indian Ocean. But, confronted with the Taliban's refusal to 
accept US conditions, the US representatives told them "either you 
accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of 
bombs" (Inter Press Service, November 15 2001).

Given this background, it is not surprising that some have seen the US 
failure to avert the 9/11 attacks as creating an invaluable pretext for 
attacking Afghanistan in a war that had clearly already been well 
planned in advance. There is a possible precedent for this. The US 
national archives reveal that President Roosevelt used exactly this 
approach in relation to Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. Some advance 
warning of the attacks was received, but the information never reached 
the US fleet. The ensuing national outrage persuaded a reluctant US 
public to join the second world war. Similarly the PNAC blueprint of 
September 2000 states that the process of transforming the US into 
"tomorrow's dominant force" is likely to be a long one in the absence of 
"some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor". The 
9/11 attacks allowed the US to press the "go" button for a strategy in 
accordance with the PNAC agenda which it would otherwise have been 
politically impossible to implement.

The overriding motivation for this political smokescreen is that the US 
and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy 
supplies. By 2010 the Muslim world will control as much as 60% of the 
world's oil production and, even more importantly, 95% of remaining 
global oil export capacity. As demand is increasing, so supply is 
decreasing, continually since the 1960s.

This is leading to increasing dependence on foreign oil supplies for 
both the US and the UK. The US, which in 1990 produced domestically 57% 
of its total energy demand, is predicted to produce only 39% of its 
needs by 2010. A DTI minister has admitted that the UK could be facing 
"severe" gas shortages by 2005. The UK government has confirmed that 70% 
of our electricity will come from gas by 2020, and 90% of that will be 
imported. In that context it should be noted that Iraq has 110 trillion 
cubic feet of gas reserves in addition to its oil.

A report from the commission on America's national interests in July 
2000 noted that the most promising new source of world supplies was the 
Caspian region, and this would relieve US dependence on Saudi Arabia. To 
diversify supply routes from the Caspian, one pipeline would run 
westward via Azerbaijan and Georgia to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. 
Another would extend eastwards through Afghanistan and Pakistan and 
terminate near the Indian border. This would rescue Enron's beleaguered 
power plant at Dabhol on India's west coast, in which Enron had sunk 
$3bn investment and whose economic survival was dependent on access to 
cheap gas.

Nor has the UK been disinterested in this scramble for the remaining 
world supplies of hydrocarbons, and this may partly explain British 
participation in US military actions. Lord Browne, chief executive of 
BP, warned Washington not to carve up Iraq for its own oil companies in 
the aftermath of war (Guardian, October 30 2002). And when a British 
foreign minister met Gadaffi in his desert tent in August 2002, it was 
said that "the UK does not want to lose out to other European nations 
already jostling for advantage when it comes to potentially lucrative 
oil contracts" with Libya (BBC Online, August 10 2002).

The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the "global war 
on terrorism" has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave 
the way for a wholly different agenda - the US goal of world hegemony, 
built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to 
drive the whole project. Is collusion in this myth and junior 
participation in this project really a proper aspiration for British 
foreign policy? If there was ever need to justify a more objective 
British stance, driven by our own independent goals, this whole 
depressing saga surely provides all the evidence needed for a radical 
change of course.

*7* Michael Meacher MP was environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003

meacherm@parliament.uk <maito:meacherm@parliament.uk>

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- - - 
Let me add that the so-called War on Terrorism is totally bogus,
but the War against Debunkers is very real and should be
continued until every debunker is neutralized!!