The War on Terror is a Fraud

By: Prof. Akhbar Navees

The US is today, albeit temporarily, the world’s foremost power. It is a country whose people are blessed with wonderful qualities of the head and heart. They are honest, hardworking problem solvers, large-hearted, decent and deeply innocent. The emergence of the US as a power with the greatest ever reaches in human history is the result of a conscious and sustained effort on the part of Washington to make America a great power.

Central to this nation-building process was the key emphasis on cultivating and creating knowledge of nature, and of the high-level of integrity and commitment of the average American. However, the evolution of the US Public State, as a genuine democracy with the ability to unify mankind on a broad basis, has been derailed consistently, and perhaps irreversibly, by corporate cliques that have taken the US on the path of global conquest and exploitation of the poor but resource-rich countries. This path will eventually lead to USA’s defeat, beginning in Central Asia, and its rapid and bloody decline in a decade or two, unless, of course, the Americans can bring to book those criminal cabals which currently control, chain and exploit this great nation.

The corporations operate secretly, illegally and without regard for the deeper interests of the people or of humanity. Thus, the exploited countries see the US as a power of unprecedented and unmatched ruthlessness. The US is not only the greatest scientific force in history, but it is also the greatest subversive power ever to afflict this globe.

To murder a few million, to destroy countries and cultures, to plunder like no one has ever plundered before, to burn and to ravage the environment beyond imagination, is something that the US forces do in service of its corporate masters. As General “Howling” Jacob Smith told his troops during the Philippine war: “I wish you to kill and burn. The more you kill and burn, the better you please me.” Or as the contemporary American writer Michael Ledeen wrote: “Every 10 years or so the US needs to pick up some crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show we mean business.” This “business” is corporate business.

Corporations have gained ascendancy in the White House, the US legislative bodies and judiciary, as well as the US agencies, some of which, such as the CIA, were created on the persuasion of, and for Wall Street. This corporate ascendancy in US power structure is now a constant and deeply embedded feature of the American domestic and international politics. The people of the US are now out of the loop completely, and perhaps permanently. Therein lies the real danger to the future of mankind.

The current eruption of US militarism reflects the desperate urge of corporate cabals to hastily enslave mankind and apportion all its resources for the US elite, in the name of the US “people” and “civilisation” of course. It was Orwell who once wrote: “As I write highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.” What took the US into World War I was, more than anything else, the financial interests of the House of Morgan.

The House of Morgan enjoyed a very special relation with the British, who decided to borrow money for its war costs from the J.P. Morgan Bank. Without a British victory these loans would be lost. As noted in 1920 by Morgan’s partner Lamont: “The national debts of the world have increased by 210 billion or about 475 percent in the last six years.” Wilson had been elected on the slogan of keeping America out of the war, but he betrayed his people and entered World War I in the interest of US banking and business. This war, fought secretly for the control of petroleum reserves, resulted in an estimated 16 to 20 million deaths, half of them civilian.

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission (TC) were set up by the Rockefeller family, the latter in 1973. These “think tanks” work perpetually for the interests of “Big Oil” and related businesses owned by the wealthiest families of the planet. Winston Lord, former US Ambassador to China and former CFR member, once said: “The Trilateral Commission does not run the world, the Council on Foreign Relations does that.” In 1973, David Rockefeller met with 27 heads of state, as well as the Pope and representatives of China and the USSR.

However, despite the fact that the US government continues even today to pursue the interests of “Big Oil”, a new cabal involving George Bush Sr, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney et al has emerged – the so-called neocons. This rightwing cabal started gaining influence during the Ford presidency, when Rumsfeld became Secretary of Defence and brought in his unknown 33-year old protégé Dick Cheney. As Professor Peter Dale Scott puts it: “In the November of 1975, the team of Rumsfeld and Cheney roughly occupied the same position of dominance in the Pentagon and White House that they would come to occupy in the George W. Bush administration of 2001.” They sabotaged the policy of détente, forced the US to abandon the policy of peaceful co-existence with the Soviet Union and subverted the normal democratic channels of decision making. Much of the woes of the world of today result from the neocon strategy: permanent war and permanent subjugation of US public interests to corporate interests.

The neocon movement was funded by an alternative group of wealthy men, who wanted to “roll back”, and not just contain Russia and eventually to set up a global US empire. The Olin Foundation, which funded this movement, and the American Enterprise Institute became more important as money was spent on propagating the neocon agenda.

With the advent of Reagan the neocons finally had their way and it was the neocon political trajectory that led to 9/11. It is now very clear that 9/11 was staged so that the US could, under the garb of fighting terrorism, scatter military bases worldwide and embark on its programme of military conquest. As Professor Michel Chossudovsky has put it, the war against terrorism is a “fraud”.

(Prof. Akhbar Navees is the Vice Chancellor of the University of the Punjab,Lahore,Pakistan).