03 June, 2009
In one of the most famous novels by Graham Greene, ‘Our Man in
Havana,’ a man yields to a Secret Intelligence Service’s
recruitment pitch out of a desperate need for extra money to
maintain high living standards for his pretty adolescent daughter.
The man starts inventing agents and sub-agents to justify the money
he gets, but suddenly real people around him are involved in his
game, including his friends, and then they start dying for real.
The protagonist is a middle-aged Briton who lives in pre-Fidel
Havana.
In 2001, another man repeated this fate with a twist: he took a
real enemy – international and militant but lacking any actual
military force – reinvented it as a ‘network supported by
certain countries’, and declared a war. This leap of his
imagination, supported by the imaginations or cold-blooded
interests of those in his immediate circle of associates, caused
several real shooting wars and thousands of totally unnecessary
casualties.
The biggest problem with this second protagonist was that he, at
the moment when his mind was in its most creative mode, occupied
the most powerful office on Earth – that of the President of the
United States of America.
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Generations of historians will busy themselves with defining the
role George W. Bush played in the history of the U.S. and the
world. One fact, though, will remain unchallenged by any of them:
that the man
invented the war on terrorism.
For a historian, terrorism is nothing new. Definitions vary in
wording every time a new wave of it starts in the world, but every
one of them presumes that terrorism is an attempt to reach
political or ideological ends through criminal means (murder, mass
murder, hijacking, etc) in order to terrorize society into
accepting a certain course of action or a certain idea.
Terrorism is always a militant action by armed criminals against
unarmed civilians or against a public figure, guarded by armed
bodyguards but denied the possibility to stay protected at all
times and against all threats by the very essence of his/her public
status. In fewer words, terrorism is always an attempt by a group
of people to impose their own rules on society by force.
Prior to the Russian revolution, the best known revolutionaries
were the terrorists, or ‘the bombists.’ Very few people knew of
Lenin and the Bolsheviks before 1917. Everyone knew Prince
Kropotkin, the members of ‘The People’s Freedom’ and later the
Socialist Revolutionaries. The latter group evolved into a whole
political party which had, like the IRA after it, a political wing
and a combat (terrorist) wing.
They proclaimed Socialism as the objective of their struggle and
made terrorism their means of choice: the idea was to kill as many
officials of the Monarchic state as would be needed to make the
people understand that the Romanov Monarchy ruled not by divine
right, but by the submission of the people. The ultimate goal was
to provoke the people into an uprising against the Monarchy and
stand at the head of that uprising.
What the Socialist Revolutionaries failed to achieve by terror
from1860-1914, the Bolsheviks achieved in one summer; the summer of
1917, by clever and well-addressed propaganda and by taking over
the Soviets – the grassroots democratic institutions, naturally
born all over the country during the February 1917
liberal-democratic revolution.
The ‘Red Terror’ of 1918–1920 that the Bolsheviks pursued when
they were already firmly in control, was a government policy of
suppression that was aimed at eliminating any tiny spec of
opposition. It was bloody and ruthless – but it was terror, not
terrorism, if you know what I mean.
As for the most active period for the terrorist wing of the
Socialist Revolutionaries, the first decade of the 20th Century,
their multi-level clandestine operation met with an equally
multi-layered and complex response from the ‘Okhrana,’ or
‘Protective Police Unit,’ a police Special Branch of sorts. The
terrorists were the primary targets, because their own main target
was the person of the Russian Emperor and members of the Imperial
family.
The Okhrana was a mixture of a police agency and intelligence
service. It worked both in Russia and abroad, with small but
effective networks in Europe and in the United States, especially
on the American West Coast. California in those days was the
preferred rest and recreation destination for Russian ‘bombists.’
In San Francisco they lived openly, without fear of prosecution or
persecution, they gathered and argued about politics and they
published their own periodical publications and books in
Russian.
In California, Russian terrorists planned their operations. The
Okhrana had imposed on itself a permanent ban on any forceful
actions in America. The rules were strict: no arrests, no
shoot-outs. The objective was to penetrate the revolutionary
circles and find out their immediate and long-term plans. It was
done, and most effectively, by the means of good old ‘Humint’ –
human intelligence: agents or moles planted within the terrorists’
organizations.
The same was done in Europe, where the conditions were not as
favorable for the terrorists and local police forces often helped
their Russian colleagues (Europe still had most of its Monarchies
in place, and Monarchies tend to think alike about regicide, even
if they are enemies or rivals).
As a result, all the activities by the terrorists were under
close scrutiny of the Okhrana, and even their loudest success, the
murder of Interior Minister Stolypin in 1912, is tainted by the
fact that the assassin was simultaneously a member of a terrorist
combat group and an Okhrana mole.
Russian historians still argue today about the reasons for the
killing of Stolypin. They agree that the only party that benefited
from it were the land-owning nobility and the court, because
Stolypin’s unfinished land reform was rapidly Westernizing the
Russian agricultural sector, making a farmer out of the Russian
peasant, at the time free more in name than in fact.
The long historical discourse above shows one thing clearly:
terrorism is best fought via police and intelligence methods. More
than that: it never occurred to anyone in Tsarist Russia to fight
terrorism with military force. Or to blame the U.S. government of
the time for support of terrorism.
Let us remember that, in the first decade of the 20th Century,
Russia, even weakened by the war with Japan and the unsuccessful
revolution of 1905-07, still was a superpower rivaling Britain,
France and Germany, while America was taking its first steps in the
international political arena.
Let us remember as well that Britain and Germany were Monarchies
and France, itself a republic, wasn’t trying to impose its
democracy on fellow superpowers but, to the contrary, at every
opportunity emphasized its deep respect of European Monarchic
values. If, in that context, Russia had raised the question of the
U.S. supporting and harboring terrorists with known regicidal
intentions, it could have led to consequences well beyond simple
diplomatic reprimands.
But that never happened. First of all because all European
governments understood: terrorists may occasionally use a country
or a city as their base, known or unknown to the local authorities,
but it doesn’t mean that their cause is not alien to most of the
people who give them shelter.
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was not a very tolerant state and
definitely not a democracy. But it didn’t share a cause with
Al-Qaeda. And there is still no proof that any connection between
them existed at all.
The Taliban in Afghanistan before the 2001 invasion harbored
Al-Qaeda. But it also had no common cause with it before foreign
soldiers arrived. The Taliban was not even as anti-American as some
other regimes in the Middle East and Central Asia.
What has the U.S.-led alliance achieved by the military
operations in Iraq and Afghanistan? Regime change. In the both
cases a regime was changed and replaced with chaos.
Has anybody caught Bin Laden? Have the two wars weakened
Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups around the world?
No, to both questions. And that should be the end of the war on
terror. But somehow there is a feeling that it is not…
Evgeny Belenkiy, RT.
http://www.russiatoday.com/Politics/2009-06-03/
By the cynical standards expressed in your conspiracy theories
in the US Government policies, should one then safely subscribe
that it is also a myth in the US Government accusation
that Osama had funded and planned the 9/11 attack on the WTC
Twin Towers of New York City ?