Chalmers Johnson - The Sorrows of Empire - Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic

In July 1996, these four wrote a position paper for Israel’s incoming prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu of the Likud Party, entitled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” It called on Israel to repudiate the Oslo Accords and the underlying concept of “land for peace” and to permanently annex the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip. It also recommended that Israel advocate the elimination of Saddam Hussein as a first step toward regime changes in Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. In November 2002, Prime Minister Sharon echoed these ideas when he urged the United States to turn to Iran as soon as it finished with Saddam. Many other officials and hangers-on of the second Bush administration hold these or similar views. Given their well-known sympathies, it is not implausible to think that they have been attempting to implement them under cover of the “war on terror.” 25

Still another reasonable theory was that America’s war fever was stoked by shrewd political operators in the White House and that the campaign against Saddam Hussein was mainly meant to influence domestic politics—both the 2002 midterm election and the 2004 presidential one. Several commentators called this the use of “weapons of mass distraction.” 26Among its goals were to bolster George W. Bush’s dubious legitimacy as president and to divert voters’ attention from his less than sterling domestic achievements in his first two years in office. Faced with 2002 midterm elections, the leaders of the Republican Party were desperate to keep discussion away from issues such as the president’s and vice president’s close ties to the corrupt Enron Corporation, the huge and growing federal budget deficit, the looting of workers’ pension funds by highly paid CEOs, vast tax cuts that favored the rich, a severe loss of civil liberties under Bush’s attorney general, and, in the foreign sphere, the embarrassing fact that, despite the war in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden evidently remained at large and potent.

In this view, key political advisers in the White House such as Karl Rove and Chief of Staff Andrew Card had far more influence with the president than either Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld or Secretary of State Powell. Just as, during the Vietnam War, Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon had to a surprising degree based key foreign policy decisions on domestic political considerations rather than on grand strategy or intelligence estimates, the evidence suggests that it was Rove who overruled the unilateralist hawks in the Pentagon and sent the president to the United Nations for his September 12,2002, speech in which he called for renewed inspections in Iraq. Rove had discovered that domestic opinion was lukewarm on waging a war in the Middle East without allies. 27For George W. Bush, the strategy worked. After two years in office, the party holding the White House increased its strength in Congress, gaining control of both houses, a genuine rarity in modern political history.

It would be hard to deny that oil, Israel, and domestic politics all played crucial roles in the Bush administration’s war against Iraq, but I believe the more encompassing explanation for our second war with Iraq is no different from that for our wars in the Balkans in 1999 or in Afghanistan in 2001-02: the inexorable pressures of imperialism and militarism. Jay Bookman, a columnist at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, asked the relevant question months before the war began: “Why does the administration seem unconcerned about an exit strategy from Iraq once Saddam is toppled? Because we won’t be leaving. Having conquered Iraq, the United States will create permanent military bases in that country from which to dominate the Middle East, including neighboring Iran.” 28

Already, between the defeat of Iraq in 1991 and the renewal of hostilities in March 2003, the United States began to acquire and build bases in the area, first by consolidating and enlarging the facilities it had used, especially in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, during the war. The decision to stay on in Saudi Arabia turned out to have serious unintended consequences, particularly for New York City. A number of influential young Saudis resented what they saw as the highlighting of the U.S.-led coalition and its commander, General Norman Schwarzkopf, to the detriment of his Saudi counterpart, Lieutenant General Khalid Al Saud, who commanded units from twenty-four non-Western countries and yet was generally ignored by the Western allies. These Saudis felt that it would have been better if Arab and Persian Gulf countries had been entrusted with the leading role in disciplining Saddam Hussein instead of having to rely on Americans and Europeans, even though the capability of Saudi Arabia and its allies to assume that role was probably a fantasy. Far more important, some of them also came to believe that the Saudi monarchy wanted the American military forces to remain in Saudi Arabia primarily to safeguard it in the face of growing demands for a more modern, less repressive regime. Since the Saudi monarchy is entrusted with the defense of Mecca and Medina, the most sacred sites in the Muslim world, other Saudi dissidents (but hardly democrats) argued that the presence of so many infidels in the country was an affront not just to Saudi nationalism but to Islam itself.

At first, there were only a few anti-American incidents. In February and March 1991, shots were fired at U.S. military vehicles and an attempt was made to burn a bus. Matters became more serious in 1994, with increasing reports of terrorist threats. On November 13,1995, dissidents exploded a 220-pound car bomb in the capital city of Riyadh, killing five Americans and two Indians. Its target was the U.S. Military Training Mission to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which was under the direct control of the Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida, but was actually subcontracted to the Vinnell Corporation, a firm of military mercenaries. In May 1996, the Saudi government convicted and beheaded four Muslim militants for the crime.

During the first Gulf War, the Saudis installed several hundred American, British, and French military commanders and their staffs in the Khobar Towers, a group of eight-story apartment buildings at Dhahran on the periphery of King Abdul Aziz Air Base. The Americans instantly placed Patriot air defense missile batteries around the compound and neighboring Dhahran airfield. In July 1992, after the war was over and the Saudis agreed to allow American military forces to remain, the Army Forces Central Command-Saudi Arabia (ARCENT-SA) established its headquarters in the Khobar Towers. On June 25, 1996, just outside a chain-link fence surrounding the apartment buildings, anti-American terrorists detonated a powerful truck bomb that killed nineteen American airmen and injured hundreds more. Despite the carnage, rather than pull back from Saudi Arabia, now seen as key to our whole Persian Gulf strategy, the White House and the Pentagon decided to dig in deeper but isolate themselves as much as possible from Saudi society.

In the wake of the Khobar Towers attack, the Pentagon relocated some 6,000 military personnel to distant and more easily protected locations. All the senior command units—ARCENT-SA, the Military Training Mission, and other operations—were ordered to move their offices and living quarters from Dhahran and downtown Riyadh to Eskan Village, a compound about fifteen miles outside the capital, surrounded by Patriot missile batteries. The air force transferred its personnel and equipment to Prince Sultan Air Base, located at al Kharj on an unmarked road seventy miles southeast of Riyadh in the open desert. It is a sprawling 230-squaremile compound the size of metropolitan Chicago but not marked on any map. Under Saudi-imposed rules, no photos can depict anything that reveals the presence of American troops at Prince Sultan—no landmarks, no signs, no Saudis walking in the background to show that what’s depicted is even in Saudi Arabia, no vehicles with Saudi license plates. All snapshots are reviewed and those that contain anything more than a bland background are confiscated. 29