PART ONE

By David North
11 September 2006

The following is the first part of a report delivered by David North, the chairman of the international editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site and national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party of the US, to an SEP aggregate meeting held over the weekend of September 9-10.

What is known about the events of 9/11?

Monday marks the fifth anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001. On that morning, the total number of innocent civilian lives that were lost as a consequence of coordinated terrorist actions was over 2,500. It is difficult to think of another single event in recent history that had such a visceral effect on mass consciousness. The symbol “nine-slash-one-one” does not have to be translated anywhere in the world. It evokes universally not only the mental image of dense smoke billowing out of the Twin Towers, but also the sense that world politics, as a consequence what occurred on that date, veered off radically in new and dangerous directions.

However, the real significance of 9/11 is not as obvious as the Bush administration, the political establishment and much of the media would have everyone believe. There is no question but that September 11, 2001 marked some sort of major turning point in American and world politics. But it is necessary to distinguish between the visual and emotional impact of the events of that day, magnified by relentless state-orchestrated propaganda, and the objective role of the terrorist attacks in motivating the subsequent actions by the US government.

The question is: Were the actions taken by the Bush administration after 9/11 largely determined by the events of that day? Or did the terrorist attacks provide a pretext for the implementation of policies developed long before, but for which, without 9/11, there would have been no substantial popular support?

The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the assault on democratic rights, the violations of international law, and the ever-expanding scale of violence that the Bush administration (joined most conspicuously by the governments of Britain, Australia and Canada) is planning as part of its never-to-end “War on Terror” derive their legitimacy from the claim that brooks no argument: “9/11 changed everything.”

And yet, for so fateful a date in world history, September 11, 2001 remains shrouded in mystery. Nothing remotely resembling a serious, professional and credible investigation has ever been conducted by any branch of government or government agency into the events of 9/11. The so-called 9/11 Commission was nothing more than a cynical and mendacious exercise in politically-expedient cover-up, organized with the more or less explicit purpose of blocking a real criminal investigation and preventing the discovery of evidence that 1) linked the 9/11 terrorists to US intelligence agencies, and 2) exposed criminal complicity on the part of elements within the state in facilitating and abetting the success of the 9/11 conspiracy.

The fraudulent character of the 9/11 Commission was guaranteed by the selection of its leading personnel, beginning with its chairperson, Thomas Kean. He brought to this investigation all the integrity and zeal for truth that one would expect of a former New Jersey governor and board member of Amerada Hess, the international oil corporation. Indeed, among Kean’s special qualifications for serving as co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission may have been his own secretive business dealings with the Saudi-controlled Delta Oil Company, whose owners are believed to have provided millions of dollars in financing to Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

It is worth recalling that Kean received his appointment only after President Bush’s first choice for the commission’s chairmanship, Henry Kissinger, was compelled to withdraw because the stink surrounding his person was too great for even the none-too-sensitive nostrils of the Washington press corps.

Given the fact that more than 2,500 people lost their lives in the 9/11 attacks, the failure of Congress—the putative representative of the people—to conduct an official investigation, with witnesses called to testify under oath, is a damning indictment of that institution. Moreover, that not a single individual has been held accountable, in any way, for what was at the very least a massive failure of government security, intelligence and police agencies defies innocent explanation.

The only real investigation into 9/11 is that which has been undertaken entirely independently of the government and in opposition to its findings—including an important analysis written by Patrick Martin of the World Socialist Web Site that has been cited in a number of books which have exposed the falsifications and absurdities of the official version of events.

To cite only a very few of the facts that expose the cover-up orchestrated by the 9/11 Commission:

*The governments of Germany, Egypt, Russia and Israel gave the United States specific advance warnings of an impending attack using hijacked airplanes.

*President Bush received a CIA briefing on August 6, 2001, five weeks before the attacks, warning that Al Qaeda might be planning to hijack airplanes. The briefing referred to the existence of Al Qaeda cells in California and New York.

*The arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui in August 2001 placed at the disposal of the government information that could leave no doubt that a terrorist operation involving the hijacking of airplanes and their use as bombs was being set into operation. The Pan Am International Flight Academy in Minnesota informed the FBI of its concern that Moussaoui might be planning to hijack an airplane.

*Mohamed Atta, who has been identified as a leader of the conspiracy, was monitored by the German Police throughout 1999, and the FBI followed his movements in 2000. In January 2001, Atta was permitted to enter the United States even though his status as a student taking flying lessons—of which he informed immigration authorities—was in explicit violation of the terms of his tourist visa. The extraordinary ease with which Atta went about his work in the United States is summed up very well by writer Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed in his book, The War on Truth:

“In summary, despite being well known to authorities, Mohamed Atta seems to have led a rather charmed life...He had been under surveillance by US agents between January and May 2000 due to his suspicious purchase of large amounts of chemicals, which might be used to make explosives. In January 2001 he was detained by INS agents at Miami International Airport for 57 minutes due to previously overstaying a visa and failing to produce a proper visa to enter the US to train at a Florida flight school. But that did not stop him. Despite the FBI’s longstanding concern that terrorists might be attending flight schools in the US, Atta was allowed to enroll in the Florida flight school. By April 2001, he was stopped by police for driving without a license. He failed to show up in court in May and a bench warrant was issued for his arrest. But that did not stop him either, because the warrant was never executed—although he was subsequently arrested for drunk driving on two more occasions. Throughout this period in the US, Atta never made any attempt to operate under an alias, traveling, living, and studying at the flight school under his real name. Stranger still, Atta was in regular email contact with current and former employees of major US defense contractors, as revealed by the regular email list of some 40 individuals he maintained, discovered by the FBI in September 2001. ...

“It is hard to interpret this sequence of events in a benign light. In short, it seems to be an unavoidable—if inexplicable—conclusion that the US government knowingly and repeatedly granted free passage to a confirmed terrorist to enter the United States and undergo flight training” [Olive Branch Press, Northampton, Mass. 2005, pp. 205-06].

*No less extraordinary than the VIP treatment extended by the US government to Atta was the hospitality it offered other 9/11 hijackers. Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almidhar were known by the CIA to have attended a so-called “summit meeting” of Al Qaeda in January 2000. Their movements were tracked by the CIA for more than a year, but neither had any problem entering the United States. Almidhar returned to the United States with a multi-entry visa that was renewed in June 2001, although he had been linked to the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole.

*Another future participant in the 9/11 hijackings, Ziad Samir Jarrah, was detained for several hours for questioning on the explicit instructions of the US government when he arrived at Dubai International Airport on January 30, 2001. One must assume that this would not have occurred if the United States did not have serious reasons to be concerned about the activities of this individual. Despite this incident, Mr. Jarrah was able to enter the United States eight months later and enroll in a flight school.

Based on the facts that have already been established, it is beyond question that Mohamed Atta and the other hijackers prepared for 9/11 under a protective umbrella provided by influential elements within the CIA and other intelligence agencies of the US government. Their unhindered movements in, out and around the United States would not have been possible had they not enjoyed the protection of powerful individuals within the state apparatus. The information that has come to light about their clumsy and even reckless behavior while living in the United States, their carelessness in repeatedly drawing the attention of police, hardly suggests that Atta and his colleagues were master conspirators. They did everything but carry signs proclaiming their terrorist intentions. But it is evident that high-level “angels” were looking after them.

But for what purpose? It does not require a particularly conspiratorial imagination to conclude that those who were running interference for Atta and his associates knew that they were planning some sort of terrorist action, and, moreover, believed that the execution of such an act would serve certain policy objectives. What, then, were these objectives?

The global strategy of American imperialism

The answer to this question requires that the events of 9/11 be placed in a broader historical context. The real origins of the policies pursued by the United States during the past five years are to be found not in the events of September 11, 2001, but rather in an event that occurred almost exactly a decade earlier—the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. The collapse of the Soviet Union was interpreted by broad sections of the American ruling elite as an unprecedented opportunity to establish the unchallenged global geo-strategic hegemony of the United States. Without the Soviet Union, there existed no effective restraint on the projection of American military power anywhere in the world. Indeed, the American ruling elite believed that the overwhelming supremacy of the United States in terms of raw military power could be deployed to offset the long-term decline in the country’s world economic position.

Among the most significant consequences of the Soviet collapse was the radical change in the physical balance of power in the vast landmass of Eurasia. The transformation of the Central Asian republics of the former USSR into independent states had created an immense power vacuum that the United States was eager to exploit. Moreover, that vacuum facilitated the aggressive projection of American power into the Middle East.

The American bourgeoisie had not failed to notice that the greatest portion of the world’s strategic oil and natural gas reserves were located in these geographically contiguous regions. The outlines of a new strategy began to emerge in the mid-1990s. In an influential article written by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser under President Carter, and published in the September-October 1997 issue of Foreign Affairs, the critical importance of Eurasia for the world position of the United States was spelled out:

“Eurasia is the world’s axial supercontinent. A power that dominated Eurasia would exercise decisive influence over two of the world’s three most economically productive regions, Western Europe and East Asia. A glance at the map also suggests that a country dominant in Eurasia would almost automatically control the Middle East and Africa. With Eurasia now serving as the decisive geopolitical chessboard, it no longer suffices to fashion one policy for Europe and another for Asia. What happens with the distribution of power on the Eurasian landmass will be of decisive importance to America’s global primacy and historical legacy. ...

“In a volatile Eurasia, the immediate task is to ensure that no state or combination of states gains the ability to expel the United States or even diminish its decisive role.”

However, as Brzezinski himself realized, the establishment of American dominance in Eurasia was a daunting project. In a book entitled The Grand Chessboard, in which he elaborated upon the ideas initially presented in the Foreign Affairs article, Brzezinski described Eurasia as a “megacontinent” which was “just too large, too populous, culturally too varied, and composed of too many historically ambitious and politically energetic states to be compliant toward even the most economically successful and politically preeminent global power.” There was yet another obstacle to the hegemonic aspirations of American imperialism. Brzezinski wrote:

“It is also a fact that America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America’s power, especially its capacity for military intimidation. Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifices (casualties even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization” [The Grand Chessboard, Basic Books, pp. 35-36, emphasis added].

The events of 9/11 provided precisely the sort of “sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being” that created, at least in the short term, a constituency for the unleashing of American military power, justified in the name of vengeance and self-defense. This does not prove by itself that the attack on the World Trade Center was directly planned and engineered by elements within the state. But Brzezinski’s analysis demonstrates high-level awareness that the vast geo-strategic ambitions of the United States, which entailed waging war thousands of miles from its own borders, required a dramatic and sudden change in public consciousness.

Whatever the actual degree of involvement and complicity of state operatives in the planning, abetting and execution of the 9/11 conspiracy, there is absolutely no question but that the events of that day were seized upon immediately as a pretext to set into motion a militaristic agenda that had been elaborated and perfected over the entire previous decade.

Let us not forget that the entire history of the United States provides numerous examples of dramatic episodes being used to justify military actions whose ultimate and essential aim was the realization of critical strategic objectives. These trigger events provided, at most, a “good” reason for military action, but not the “real” reason.

We are not being wise after the event. Within hours of the attack on the World Trade Center, the World Socialist Web Site warned of what was to come. On September 12, 2001, the WSWS, in condemning the attack, declared that “terrorism plays into the hands of those elements within the US establishment who seize on such events to justify and legitimize the resort to war in pursuit of the geopolitical and economic interests of the ruling elite.”

On September 14, the WSWS stated: “The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have been seized on as an opportunity to implement a far-reaching agenda for which the most right-wing elements in the ruling elite have been clamoring for years. Within a day of the attack, before any light had been shed on the source of the assault or the dimensions of the plot, the government and the media had launched a coordinated campaign to declare that America was at war and the American people had to accept all the consequences of wartime existence.”

Source: Part One

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PART TWO

By David North
12 September 2006

The following is the second part of a report delivered by David North, the chairman of the international editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site and national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party of the US, to an SEP aggregate meeting held over the weekend of September 9-10.

The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq

The Bush administration responded to the events of 9/11 by proclaiming a “War on Terror.” Just one month after the 9/11 attack, the Bush administration began the invasion of Afghanistan, justifying this action on the grounds that the Taliban government had provided sanctuary for Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. In its wild-eyed enthusiasm for war, the media showed no interest in investigating the history of American involvement in Afghanistan, its relations with the Taliban, the US role in promoting the activities of bin Laden, or the formation of Al Qaeda.

That the events of 9/11 could be directly traced to the decision of the United States, during the administration of Jimmy Carter, to promote an Islamic insurgency against a Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, was not a subject that the media was willing to explore. Indeed, during the 1980s the Islamic insurgents in Afghanistan were the recipients of massive American military and financial support. Representatives of the mujahideen had even been invited into the Oval Office and praised by President Reagan as the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers.

As for bin Laden, he began his terrorist career as a CIA asset in Afghanistan. Finally, the Taliban movement—which emerged out of the US-funded carnage in Afghanistan—came to power in the mid-1990s with the support of the United States.

What was the real purpose of this war? In answering this question, I am reminded of a scene in the opening of the movie Reds, a cinematic biography of the great radical journalist John Reed. He has just returned from Europe, where he was covering the so-called Great War (as World War I was then known). Attending a meeting of the Liberal Club in Reed’s hometown of Portland, Oregon, he is called to the podium to give an eye-witness account of the war.

Reed is asked by the Liberal Club chairman to explain what the war in Europe is all about. Reed surveys the audience, and answers with one word: “Profits.” He then sits down.

One could give a no less concise explanation of the war in Afghanistan—but here the one word answer would be “Oil.” As the WSWS explained on October 9, 2001, in a statement entitled “Why we oppose the war in Afghanistan,”

“The Caspian Sea region, to which Afghanistan provides strategic access, harbors approximately 270 billion barrels of oil, some 20 percent of the world’s proven reserves. It also contains 665 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, approximately one-eighth of the planet’s gas reserves.

“These critical resources are located in the world’s most politically unstable region. By attacking Afghanistan, setting up a client regime and moving vast military forces into the region, the US aims to establish a new political framework within which it will exert hegemonic control.”

The early, though superficial, successes achieved by the American military in Afghanistan in the autumn of 2001, culminating in the installation of a former Unocal oil executive—Hamid Karzai—as the head of a new puppet regime in Kabul, convinced the Bush administration that there was no limit to what could be accomplished through the use of military power. In October 2002, it unveiled a national security strategy that was based on the new doctrine of “preventive war,” which proclaimed the right and intention of the United States to take military action against any country which it identified as a potential threat to America’s security.

Embracing war as a legitimate instrument of foreign policy, applicable in a wide range of circumstances unrelated to immediate and direct self-defense against imminent military attack, the new National Security Strategy placed at the foundation of the foreign policy of the United States conceptions that had been denounced as criminal by the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal in 1946.

The stage was now set for the invasion of Iraq, a country whose government had nothing whatsoever to do with the events of 9/11. While fabricating links between the regime of Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, the US government placed its main emphasis on Iraq’s alleged possession of so-called weapons of mass destruction. Between August 2002 and the beginning of the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the American people were subjected to an unrelenting propaganda campaign of government and media-sponsored lies.

Despite the orgy of pro-war propaganda, popular and international opposition to the war plans of the United States and its British government allies found expression in massive demonstrations held all over the world in February 2003.

On March 20, 2003, the United States launched its war. One day later, the World Socialist Web Site declared,

“The unprovoked and illegal invasion of Iraq by the United States is an event that will live in infamy. The political criminals in Washington who have launched this war, and the wretched scoundrels in the mass media who are reveling in the bloodbath, have covered this country in shame. Hundreds of millions of people in every part of the world are repulsed by the spectacle of a brutal and unrestrained military power pulverizing a small and defenseless country. The invasion of Iraq is an imperialist war in the classic sense of the term: a vile act of aggression that has been undertaken on behalf of the interests of the most reactionary and predatory sections of the financial and corporate oligarchy in the United States. Its overt and immediate purpose is the establishment of control over Iraq’s vast oil resources and reduction of that long-oppressed country into an American colonial protectorate. ...

“The war itself represents a devastating failure of American democracy. A small cabal of political conspirators—working with a hidden agenda and having come to power on the basis of fraud—has taken the American people into a war that they neither understand nor want. But there exists absolutely no established political mechanism through which the opposition to the policies of the Bush administration—to the war, the attacks on democratic rights, the destruction of social services, the relentless assault on the living standards of the working class—can find expression. The Democratic Party—the stinking corpse of bourgeois liberalism—is deeply discredited. Masses of working people find themselves utterly disenfranchised.”

In conclusion, the WSWS stated,

“The twentieth century was not lived in vain. Its triumphs and tragedies have bequeathed to the working class invaluable political lessons, among which the most important is the understanding of the significance and implications of imperialist war. It is, above all, the manifestation of national and international contradictions than can find no solution within ‘normal’ channels. Whatever the outcome of the initial stages of the conflict that has begun, American imperialism has a rendezvous with disaster. It cannot conquer the world. It cannot re-impose colonial shackles upon the masses of the Middle East. It will not find through the medium of war a viable solution to its internal maladies. Rather, the unforeseen difficulties and mounting resistance engendered by war will intensify all of the internal contradictions of American society.”

The bourgeoisie and its apologists proclaim incessantly that Marxism has failed. The refutation of these claims requires only that one compare the analysis of contemporary events made by the World Socialist Web Site, on the basis of the Marxist method, to those offered by the leaders of world imperialism. On May 1, 2003, President Bush proclaimed aboard a US aircraft carrier that the American mission in Iraq had been accomplished. In reality, the disaster predicted by the WSWS was only just beginning.

Five years of the “War on Terror”

Three years after the invasion of Iraq, the so-called “War on Terror” proclaimed by the Bush administration is in utter disarray. The Iraq campaign—the centerpiece of the global war proclaimed by Bush in the aftermath of 9/11—has been a military and political failure. An invasion that began under the title “Shock and Awe” has proved “shocking” only in the degree of incompetence and stupidity that has characterized the management of the entire wretched exercise. And judging by the scale of the insurgency, the Bush administration grossly overestimated the ability of the American military to awe and intimidate the masses of Iraq.

The hegemonic project launched by the Bush administration has suffered a major setback in Iraq. Outside the immediate precincts of the Bush White House, the Iraq invasion and occupation is assessed almost universally as an operational and strategic disaster. The prevailing view of the American intervention in Iraq is summed up in the title of a new book on the war: Fiasco.

More than 2,600 American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq. The number of Iraqis that have been killed as a result of the violence unleashed by the US invasion is in the area of 100,000. Despite the brutal pacification campaigns undertaken by the American military, all objective indices indicate that the strength of the insurgency continues to grow.

Aside from the horrible toll in human lives—more than 1,000 Iraqis are being killed every month in Baghdad alone—the economic impact of the invasion and the resistance it provoked has been devastating. The Bush administration’s expectation that the unimpeded flow of Iraqi oil would finance the cost of the war failed, like so many other calculations of the US government, to survive contact with reality. Since the invasion of Iraq, insurgents have carried out as many as 700 attacks on oil facilities. According to a study produced by military analyst Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies,

“Oil production dropped by 8 percent in 2005, and pipeline shipments through the Iraqi northern pipeline to Ceyhan in Turkey dropped from 800,000 barrels per day before the war to an average of 40,000 barrels per day in 2005. In July 2005, Iraqi officials estimated that insurgent attacks had already cost Iraq some $11 billion. They had kept Iraqi oil production from approaching the 3 million barrel a day goal in 2005 that the Coalition had set after the fall of Saddam Hussein, and production had dropped from pre-war levels of around 2.5 million barrels a day to an average of 1.83 million barrels a day in 2005, and a level of only 1.57 million barrels a day in December 2005. These successes have a major impact in a country where 94 percent of the government’s direct income now comes from oil exports” [Iraq’s Evolving Insurgency and the Risk of Civil War, p. viii].

The conduct of the war has exposed the almost unfathomable stupidity and incompetence of not only the president but also of all the key personnel in his administration. The assessment made by Cordesman of the pre-invasion planning and subsequent conduct of the war is a shattering indictment of the entire administration. His report, issued on June 22, 2006, states,

“Much has been made of the intelligence failures in assessing Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. These failures pale to insignificance, however, in comparison with the failure of US policy and military planners to accurately assess the overall situation in Iraq before engaging in war, and the risk of insurgency if the US did not carry out an effective mix of nation building and stability operations. This failure cannot be made the responsibility of the intelligence community. It was the responsibility of the President, the Vice President, the National Security Adviser, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

“All had the responsibility to bring together policymakers, military planners, intelligence experts, and area experts to provide as accurate a picture of Iraq and the consequences of an invasion as possible. Each failed to exercise that responsibility. The nation’s leading policymakers chose to act on a limited and highly ideological view of Iraq that planned for one extremely optimistic definition of success, but not for risk or failure.

“There was no real planning for stability operations. Key policymakers did not want to engage in nation building and chose to believe that removing Saddam Hussein from power would leave the Iraqi government functioning and intact. Plans were made on the basis that significant elements of the Iraqi armed forces would turn to the Coalitions’ side, remain passive, or put up only token resistance.

“No real effort was made to ensure continuity of government or stability and security in Iraq’s major cities and throughout the countryside. Decades of serious sectarian and ethnic tension were downplayed or ignored. Actions by Saddam Hussein’s regime that had crippled Iraq’s economic development since the early years of the Iran-Iraq War—at a time when Iraq had only 17-18 million people—were ignored. Iraq was assumed to be an oil wealthy country whose economy could quickly recover if the oil fields were not burned, and transform itself into a modern capitalist structure in the process” [Iraq’s Evolving Insurgency and the Risk of Civil War, p. xv-xvi].

Cordesman is, in so many words, accusing the leading personnel in the American state—President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell (who held that post at the time of the invasion), former National Security Adviser (and now Secretary of State) Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Meyers (who held that post when the invasion began)—of dereliction of duty that, in the context of war, rises arguably to the level of criminal incompetence. This accusation is entirely justified. However, he fails to provide an explanation for how such a situation could exist within the highest levels of the state.

If the real aim of the American invasion had truly been the establishment of a stable democracy in Iraq, the absence of any serious planning for the situation that the US military would encounter after the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime would seem to defy rational explanation. However, the failures seem far less incomprehensible when they are examined in the context of the real war aims of the Bush administration.

The invasion of Iraq was not about democracy; it was about plunder—the establishment of US control over Iraqi oil reserves. To be sure, the Bush administration grossly underestimated, or didn’t even seriously think about, what would be required to establish the minimum political and social prerequisites in Iraq for the success of the American looting operation. But, in the final analysis, the strategic and operational failures of the Iraqi war are rooted in the essential nature and aims of the enterprise. The Bush administration launched its war not to rebuild Iraq, but to rape it.

The Iraqi catastrophe is not merely the failure of a military plan. It is a comprehensive systemic failure involving all branches of government, the two corporate-controlled political parties, the media, and an entire system of class rule in which those who make decisions affecting the lives of millions of people, in their own country and beyond its borders, operate in an environment which imposes upon them few democratic and popular constraints nor holds them accountable for the consequences of their actions.

Five years have passed since the beginning of the “War on Terror.” That represents a longer period of time than the duration of the War of 1812 (three years), the Civil War (four years), the Spanish-American War (several months), the American involvement in World War I (a year and a half), the US participation in World War II (less than four years), and the US-led so-called “police action” in Korea (three years). Clearly, this new war, in terms of duration, is already a substantial event in the history of the United States. This makes it all the more remarkable that the Bush administration is still trying to explain what the so-called “War on Terror” is really all about. Even after the passage of a half-decade, the government is still unable to concoct a plausible, let alone rational, explanation of what it is fighting for, and against whom or what it is fighting.

In one of several speeches that Bush has given during the past two weeks aimed at rallying support, he proclaimed, “The war we fight today is more than a military conflict; it is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century.”

Upon reading these words, one is compelled to ask how the ideological struggle being waged by the Bush administration has found practical expression.

The “War on Terror” has been from its very first days accompanied by efforts to undermine and destroy the whole structure of constitutionally-guaranteed democratic rights that is the legacy of the genuinely democratic ideology that inspired the leaders of the American Revolution of the eighteenth century. The principles to which the Bush administration is devoted are those of incipient dictatorship. They have been most clearly articulated not only in the words of such open advocates of presidential tyranny as Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, but also in the deeds committed by American military and intelligence personnel in the torture chambers of Abu Ghraib and in the secret CIA prisons, the existence of which has now been publicly acknowledged by Bush nearly five years after they were first put into operation.

Bush’s attempt to defend his “War on Terror” abounds in the most glaring and absurd contradictions. For example, he stated on August 31,

“To understand the struggle unfolding in the Middle East, we need to look at the recent history of the region. For a half-century, America’s primary goal in the Middle East was stability. This was understandable at the time; we were fighting the Soviet Union in the Cold War; and it was important to support Middle Eastern governments that rejected communism. Yet, over the decades, an undercurrent of danger was rising in the Middle East. Much of the region was mired in stagnation and despair. A generation of young people grew up with little hope to improve their lives, and many fell under the sway of radical extremism. The terrorist movement multiplied in strength a resentment that had simmered for years and boiled over into violence throughout the world.”

What Bush seems to be saying—and in this he is correct—is that the emergence of terrorist movements in the Middle East is the result of the repressive policies pursued by the United States for more than a half-century during its struggle against the growth of communist and socialist influence among the masses.

In passing, Bush cited, as an example of the growth of extremism, the seizure of American hostages in Iran—though he failed to note that this occurred in the midst of a revolution that had just overthrown a military-police dictatorship that had come to power as a result of an anti-democratic coup staged by the CIA in 1953.

Putting aside all the demagogic claims made by the Bush administration, the real purpose of the “War on Terror” remains the establishment of the global hegemony of the United States. Notwithstanding the failures and setbacks that it has suffered since 2001, the objective of the “War on Terror” remains world domination. This is the perspective not only of the Bush administration, but of all major factions, Democrat as well as Republican, of the political establishment.

The drumbeat for war against Iran grows louder each day, even though the consequences of such a war would be catastrophic. An attack by the United States against Iran would set into motion a cataclysm of global dimensions. That such an action is even contemplated—even as the US has yet to come to grips with the consequences of its fiasco in Iraq—is an indication of the disoriented and delusional state of mind that exists in the highest levels of the American state.

It is necessary to examine the material and social conditions of American society that have produced this level of recklessness.

Source: Part Two

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PART THREE

By David North
13 September 2006

The following is the third and final part of a report delivered by David North, the chairman of the international editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site and national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party of the US, to an SEP aggregate meeting held over the weekend of September 9-10.

The state of American society

In his speech of August 31 before the national convention of the American Legion in Utah, President Bush proclaimed that “Governments accountable to the voters focus on building roads and schools—not on weapons of mass destruction.” By that measure, there is no government less accountable to the people than that of the United States! The portion of the federal budget allocated to road building and education is less than 10 percent of the official military budget.

There is no impenetrable barrier that separates foreign and domestic policy. Both express in different forms the interests and outlook of the ruling elite. The foreign policy of the United States is the expression within the sphere of world politics of the class interests of the financial-corporate oligarchy that rules the United States. Indeed, there is a striking parallel between the indifference displayed by the Bush administration toward the critical needs of the people of Iraq in the aftermath of the US invasion and its callous neglect of the citizens of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The government stood by as an entire city was destroyed, thousands of people lost their lives, and tens of thousands were rendered homeless.

Not only the cruelty but also the incompetence of the ruling elite was demonstrated in New Orleans no less than in Baghdad.

This element of incompetence is not an incidental phenomenon, but reflects real and profound tendencies of decomposition and decay in the entire social structure of the United States. The wealth of its ruling strata increases exponentially in proportion to the disintegration of the industrial and social infrastructure of the country.

The ruling elite assumes more and more the social physiognomy of the underworld. Massive personal wealth is accumulated not through the development of the productive forces, but through their destruction. The era of industry titans, whose personal ruthlessness was at least associated with the creation of gigantic industries, belongs now to the distant past. The corporate CEO in contemporary America is the personification of a parasitical economic system whose central purpose is the immediate financial gratification and enrichment of a small, privileged elite. Corporate planning consists to a great extent in diverting company resources away from productive and long-term investments and into the personal bank accounts of executives and large shareholders.

On July 15, 2006, the Wall Street Journal published a front-page analysis of the response of major American corporations to the tragedy of 9/11. While tens of millions of ordinary Americans grieved over the deaths of more than 2,500 fellow citizens, leading executives at the largest US corporations rejoiced over the unexpected opportunity provided by the tragedy to enrich themselves.

The stock exchanges were closed for six days following the attack on the World Trade Center. Share prices fell more than 14 percent following the reopening of the market on September 17, 2001. Leading executives at 186 major companies took advantage of the precipitous and temporary fall in share values to award themselves lucrative stock options at bargain basement prices. Ninety-one companies that did not normally grant options did so after September 17, 2001, handing out options valued at $325 million.

Some of these companies had lost employees in the 9/11 tragedy. For example, Teradyne Corporation had lost a worker on American Flight 11. But the company’s CEO did not miss the opportunity to turn the tragedy into a personal windfall. He was awarded 600,000 options that enabled him to buy stock at 24 percent below the pre-9/11 levels.

Teradyne’s CEO was one of many executives for whom 9/11 was a lucky strike. T. Rowe Price granted 280,000 options to two top executives. The CEO of Merrill Lynch received 753,770 options. The CEO of Home Depot was granted one million options. The Wall Street Journal asks: “Did companies take unseemly advantage of a national tragedy?” You might say so, but I could not possibly comment!

This dark and ghoulish tale of Wall Street executives reaping rich rewards from death and destruction is a true expression of the social reality of post-9/11 America. During the last five years of the “War on Terror,” the pre-9/11 tendencies of wealth concentration and social inequality have accelerated.

A recently released report on income inequality prepared by noted economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez documents the acceleration in the pace of wealth concentration in the United States. Supplementing the results of their 2003 path-breaking analysis of income inequality in the United States between 1913 and 1998, the latest data reviewed by Piketty and Saez establishes that gains in the income of the wealthiest one percent of American society is a substantial multiple of the increases realized by the bottom 99 percent. Moreover, that the greatest increases were enjoyed by the top 0.1 percent of society.

According to a summary of the Piketty-Saez findings prepared by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

* Inflation-adjusted average incomes of the bottom 99 percent of households increased by only 3 percent in 2003-2004. This average income figure largely reflects the gains registered in the upper 20 percent of households. In other words, income growth among the lower 80 percent of households either stagnated or declined.

* 41 percent of gains in average income went to the top one percent of households—those earning above $315,000 annually.

* The share of pre-tax income garnered by the top one percent increased from 17.5 percent in 2003 to 19.5 percent in 2004. An increase on this scale has occurred only 5 times since 1913.

* The top one percent’s share of total US income in 2004 was greater than at any time since 1929—with the exception of the years 1999 and 2000, the climax of the market bubble of the last decade.

* Among the top one-tenth of one percent of households, the share of national income increased by 1.3 percent—that is from 7.9 percent to 9.2 percent—between 2003 and 2004. This actually means that more than half of all income gains in the top 1 percent of households went to the richest 0.1 percent of US households—that is, to the upper levels of the American social oligarchy.

The figures for 2003-2004 continue a trend toward ever-greater levels of social inequality that began in the mid-1970s. Prior to that, from the end of World War II until the recession of 1973-75, the share of national income realized by working class households grew substantially. That trend was reversed by the corporate offensive against the working class that began in the Carter administration and was accelerated by President Reagan and his successors.

The staggering level of wealth concentration in the United States is not an unfortunate blemish on an otherwise healthy society. Though it arises on the basis of private ownership of the means of production, and is embedded in the social relations of capitalism, the uncontrollable increase in the wealth of the richest people in the United States has assumed such huge dimensions as to become a major and determining factor in the direction of political and economic life. Every aspect of foreign and domestic policy and the setting of national priorities is determined, directly and immediately, by the insatiable demands of the ruling oligarchy for ever greater levels of personal wealth.

The setting of corporate priorities and the working out of business strategies are determined almost entirely by their anticipated impact on the personal income of company executives. The principal and overriding purpose of the modern American corporation is to ensure the annual delivery of millions and tens of millions of dollars to its executives and principal shareholders.

The social being of the ruling elite is dependent upon the ruthless exploitation and despoiling of society as a whole. The longer-term impact of the decisions made in the frenzied pursuit of grotesque and really obscene levels of personal wealth—the starving of the corporations themselves of the funds required for research, development and the replenishing of their productive base, the diversion of resources away from productive investments and toward flimsy, ill-conceived and socially destructive ventures, and, above all, the erosion of the social infrastructure and impoverishment of ever-larger sections of society—is of no particular interest to the ruling elite. It is as blind to the consequences of its actions as the French aristocracy that amused itself at the court of Versailles.

Looking at the activities of the ruling oligarchy in America, one can better understand the social processes that created, during the French Revolution, an enthusiastic mass constituency for the guillotine. More and more, the ruling elite functions as an alien and toxic element in society, whose demands and prerogatives are incompatible with and destructive of the needs of society as a whole. To state the matter bluntly, the rich have become a real social problem.

The entire existing political set-up in the United States is nothing else but the concentrated expression of this obsolete, reactionary and socially stultifying environment. The entire political establishment inhabits a world that is totally insulated from and unresponsive to the needs and sentiments of the broad masses of people.

None of the problems that confront society can be discussed openly. The mass media, controlled by massive corporations, seek to maintain at all costs the threadbare fiction that the United States is a democratic society, in which all citizens enjoy equality of opportunity.

The political mechanism that guarantees the uncompromising defense of the interests of the rich, that protects the financial-corporate oligarchy from any challenge to its prerogatives, and which effectively leaves the broad mass of the working population without any independent political voice is the two-party system of Democrats and Republicans.

How is it possible to explain the fact that the massive popular opposition to the war in Iraq finds absolutely no serious expression within the political establishment? In fact, the more the popular opposition to the war grows, the more intransigent the political establishment becomes in its insistence that the war must continue and be expanded.

No struggle against the war and for a change in the direction of social policy within the United States is possible without the destruction of the two-party dictatorship and the creation of a genuinely independent, socialist political movement of the working class.

The experience of the Socialist Equality Party in recent weeks had shed important light on the parlous condition of democracy in the United States. Any “third party” that attempts to obtain ballot status and challenge the hegemony of the two-party oligarchy immediately confronts a mass of procedural obstacles whose sole purpose is to protect the Democrats and Republicans from facing political opposition.

Even after a “third party” gathers the thousands of signatures required by law to achieve ballot status, it is confronted with innumerable cynical and bad-faith legal challenges whose sole purpose is to deprive the people of any alternative to the two parties of the ruling oligarchy.

The struggle that the SEP has been compelled to wage in Illinois’ 52nd District is a paradigmatic expression of the repressive and utterly anti-democratic character of the political set-up. Thousands of residents—a substantial percentage of registered voters in the district—signed petitions to place the SEP candidate, Joe Parnarauskis, on the ballot. And yet, the Democratic Party has spent tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees to keep the candidate off the ballot. And now, even after every objection made by the Democrats has been shown to be without any legal substance, its operatives are simply refusing to certify the SEP candidate and allow his name to be placed on the ballot.

If this is what is done to prevent an independent candidacy in a contest for a single small state Senate seat, imagine the reaction to the development of a mass political movement that threatened even more directly the interests of the ruling elite!

By its own actions the ruling elite is proving that no progressive change in either the domestic or foreign policy of the United States—that is, no measure that threatens the wealth and global interests of American capitalism—is possible without revolutionary struggle.

In conclusion, let us sum up as concisely as possible the situation that exists five years after 9/11. The drive by American imperialism to employ the pretext provided by the events of that day to expand its quest for global hegemony has encountered unexpected resistance and difficulties. The failure to conquer and pacify Iraq has undermined the image of American military invincibility. The hegemonic project of American imperialism now appears far more problematic than it did five years ago.

However, the American ruling elite does not consider a retreat from its global aspirations to be a viable option. The logic of imperialism forces the United States to prepare for new and more violent interventions—first against Iran, later against China, and whatever other country or group of countries might threaten American dominance.

But the “wars of the 21st century” promised by Bush must inevitably deepen the social contradictions within the United States and generate ever greater levels of popular opposition and struggle. The mood of popular discontent and anger that is already discernible will broaden and intensify. The inter-related issues of social conditions and inequality, democratic rights and imperialist war will become increasingly unified in popular consciousness.

The protracted period of political stagnation is drawing to a close. A new and tumultuous period of social and political struggle within the United States is rapidly approaching. This is the perspective that will animate the work of the Socialist Equality Party during the fall election campaign that is now getting under way.

Source: Part Three