July 31, 2003
Terrorism cont'd.
This is a response to the last comment left by Joshua Ellis. Read that if you want to understand what's going on.
I am fully aware that the Taliban grew directly out of the mujahideen forces supported by America in the 1980s. I am also fully that during the 1980s, the largest supporter of Iraq was, in fact, the United States, for we saw him as a useful tool to counter Iran, an extremist state with connections to Russia. I am also aware that a significant number of the combatants that show up in any theater where Muslim extremeists are involved can be traced back to Afghanistan. Ironically enough, a significant percentage of the munitions used against us in Afghanistan were probably US in origin.
But if you'll notice, the only reason the US was in Afghanistan was to counter the presence of the USSR in the region. We supported the mujahideen in Afghanistan because they were fighting the Russians. This was an international affair. We haven't supported other non-governmental groups because their activities are largely domestic. When the Russians withdrew, there was no longer any reason for the US to support these terrorist organizations, so we stopped. We stopped supporting Iraq Then things got interesting. I submit for your perusal the following document, entitled "Significant Terroist Incidents 1961-2001: A Brief Chronology" put out by the State Department.
Things to notice: first, the number of terrorist incidents between 1961 and 1982 is equal to the number of incidents between 1983 and 1986. A significant ramp up of activity, it seems to me. They only get more numerous from there. Second, until 1993, the vast majority of terrorist targest have been government and/or military targets, all of them overseas.
But in 1993 Islamist extremists planted a bomb in the World Trade Center. They failed to do more than blow up a floor of the parking garage, but he still killed some people. After a years-long manhunt and trial, some of the perpetrators were convicted and imprisoned.
In 1996, the Khobar Towers, an American military housing complex, was blown up in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 and wounding 515.
On February 23, 1997, an Palestinian sniper opened fire from the observation platform of the Empire State building. He killed one person - who happened to be Danish - and wounded several others before turning the gun on himself.
On November 12, 1997, two American businessmen were killed in Pakistan. Two Islamist groups claimed responsibility.
On November 17, 1997, Islamists open fire on tourists visiting the Hatshepsut temple in Egypt, killing 58 tourists and 4 Egyptians. This time, the suspects were probably Egyptian terrorists whose link to Al Qaeda was secondary at best.
In 1998, two US Embassies, one in Nairobi and the other in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, were blown up. Osama bin Laden is the chief suspect.
In October, 2000, the USS Cole was attacked, killing 17 and wounding 39. Again, bin Laden is the chief suspect.
11 months later, 9/11/01, New York was hit again, this time accomplishing what the terrorists failed to do 8 years before.
The list I have compiled is only a small portion of the State Department list, which is itself not complete. But something to notice. The number of attacks has been increasing, and the targeting of Americans is definitely there. We are less safe than we were during the Cold War, when the terrorists had other things to think about, and were often supported by us. You don't bite the hand that feeds you. "Nibble a little maybe, in an affectionate sort of way, but not actually bite." In the last 20 years, we have lost more people to terrorism than military conflict. Hell, 9/11/01 alone would accomplish that. But in any case, I do sincerely believe that since the end of the Cold War, we are much more likely to be hit by terrorists, and much more likely to have those terrorists strike home. The Washington sniper incident, which turned out to be entirely domestic, could have easily been accomplished by foreign nationals. If that guy had been wearing a turban, you can bet your hide that we would have gone into Iraq the next day.
(And if you think about it, those two guys in a car did a far more effective job of paralyzing a city than the WTC hijackers did. Drop 40 guys around the country with high powered rifles, and you've got a very cheap way of scaring millions of people).
The US has been very fortunate as far as terrorism on our soil. The last 10 years only saw four major incidents, and two of them were domestic. Ironically enough, the decade in which the US experienced the most terrorism at home was during the 1960s, and liberals were solely responsible. They were liberal nut-jobs, but liberals nonetheless. (I love the fact that I can say that.) Until 2001, terrorist strikes against the US were growing in number and potency. If they have dropped off, I defy you to tell me it has nothing to do with the fact that the US government has opened up a can. Oh, but I do agree with the idea that a "War on Terrorism" is a really bizarre concept. How do we know if we have won?
Concerning the awarding of contracts in the rebuilding of Iraq I have two things to say. First, Cheney divested himself of all holdings in Halliburton after the election, so he isn't going to be making any money here. Brown & Root is a subsidary of Halliburton. My source for this kind of information, OpenSecrets.org won't display Bush's financial holdings at the moment, so I have no way of verifying your claim about Bush. But second, doesn't it make sense to hire the largest petroleum services corporation to take care of Iraq's problems? Certainly they would be the best choice. And about Bechtel: they're the largest general contractor in the world, and responsible for constructing the Alaska pipeline. Why wouldn't they be given the contract for Iraq? They have the experience, infrastructure, and resources to take on this kind of project. Who do you want them to hire, Bob the Builder?
Granted, Halliburton and Bechtel were two of the largest contributors to the Bush campaign. But if you, like Michael Moore, are going to alledge that the reason we went to war is solely for some kind of quid pro quo, I really don't have anything else to say.
For continuing coverage of the state of affairs in Iraq, I would direct you to Andrew Sullivan, who is doing a wonderful job of both getting the word out about how things really are in Iraq, and the disasterous job the media is doing of covering it. Certainly if the allegations you level against the government are true they would be far more damaging than the entirely mythical quagmire that they keep on about.
Gosh, that was long.
The reason I know that Bush is a major shareholder in Brown & Root is because, when my grandfather wanted to get my mother her first after-school job in Houston in the mid-1970s, he called George and asked him to get her on there. My family has known the Bushes for a very long time. My grandfather was heavily involved in Texas politics in the 1960s; he's also an electrical engineer who builds oil-related projects. He was one of the men who literally turned the Alaska Pipeline on; he was in Saudi Arabia and China in the 1970s, Turkey and Korea in the 1980s and Kuwait (rebuilding the oil infrastructure after the first Gulf War) in the 1990s. I've grown up knowing what these people were doing. Of the six companies awarded contracts to rebuild, he has worked for three over the years that I know of -- Bechtel, Fluor, and Parsons.
While the article you read says that Cheney divested himself of all Halliburton holdings, most of the accounts I've read run completely counter to that. OpenSecrets doesn't have his holdings listed, but the evidence I've seen suggests that he is still, in fact, a major shareholder, who also receives a retainer. (I can't find any quotes on this at the moment, since I'm about to head out to have dinner, but I can add them later).
So when did Halliburton acquire Brown & Root? And who negotiated that deal? That's a useful question to ask. All of this data should be publicly available somewhere.
I think that the primary motivations for conquering Iraq were financial. Absolutely. These men are businessmen first and foremost. Bush, as far as my personal knowledge and all the available evidence suggests, is pretty much owned by the oil industry. Show me a single action he has performed since he was President that actually went against their interests -- even at the expense of the people of the United States.
Iraq is a Third World country. Clearly, they are not a threat to us, considering that we broke their back in a matter of what, a couple of weeks? And if Saddam really had those WMDs, wouldn't he probably have used them right about the time we started dropping bombs in his swimming pool?
He was a terrible thug and a horrible leader, but that's simply not our business. You don't see Bush storming the gates of Kim Jong Il's palace -- and there's a guy who is a serious, credible threat, who openly admits to having nuclear weapons. I'm far more concerned about the North Korean Communists than I am about Saddam Hussein -- who had weeks to prepare for our invasion and still got his ass kicked.
We went into Iraq for oil. The President as much as admitted it in the State of the Union address he made right before the festivities started. We need oil, they have it, we don't like Saddam anyway, Bush Sr. was humiliated by him in 1991...so why not kill four birds with one stone?
Awarding the contracts to companies that the P and VP own stock in was just a bonus, of course; the real money comes from the oil itself. Fluor is an oil company, first and foremost. That's all they do. And this contract will put them in Bechtel's league, absolutely. Where is Fluor based out of? Houston, Texas. All of these people -- Bush and the CEOs and the shareholders of these companies -- go back decades in Texas. I know this for a fact.
So we start taking Iraq's oil so we don't have to deal as much with the Saudis anymore. The American oil industry is tired of being dictated to by the Saudis; I've been hearing about it over the dinner table from my grandfather my entire life. So Bush sets up a puppet government in Iraq, which will sell us oil for a fraction of the cost that the Saudis do...or maybe just allows us to set up shop there in return for economic "aid". Voila! Cheap gas.
Stop me when it sounds like I'm going off into fantasy land here. This is the way that business is done in America. And for people like Bush, politics is a continuation of economics by other means.
It's a misuse of his elected office, at the very least, and antitrust at the worst. I don't see how it can be seen otherwise.
Now: terrorism. First of all, let me ask you: when you're talking terrorism, are you talking specifically Islamic terrorism or terrorism in general? There were far more terrorist organizations operating a decade ago than there are now; Action-Directe out of France, the Red Brigade in Italy, the IRA...the list goes on and on.
Secondly; when you say "terrorist attacks", do you mean terrorist attacks on Americans, or terrorist attacks on nationals from any country? Because while the number of attacks on Americans might have gone up, the number of attacks in general have gone down...simply because the groups I mentioned are mostly no longer in existence.
The reason the USSR backed the People's Democratic Party in Afghanistan in the late 70s was because we refused to. I don't know who exactly made that decision, but I suspect it was Bush Sr. when he was running the CIA. We funded the mujahideen, trained them and financed them...while conveniently ignoring the fact that they thought all secular governments are the Great Satan.
They freaked out when we stopped funding them. One of them -- bin Laden -- decided to start attacking us, but most of them drifted off to other hotspots. I recommend Bruce Sterling's Tomorrow Now (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679463224/qid=1059720022/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/104-9135400-8667101) as an excellent beginning point for looking at these guys. They ended up in Chechnya, Bosnia, Turkish Cyprus, Somalia, all the fun vacation destinations. Most of them, as I said, were simply running drugs or handling the black market.
The only guy who really went after us was bin Laden and his group, which we really know very little about. Nobody knows how many members Al Qaeda has, or if it's even that well-organized. Some sources suggest as many as 10,000 members, but I find that hard to swallow. There's more likely a few hundred with a lot of sympathizers.
And we broke them. The chances of Al Qaeda mounting another serious attack on America soil is about as likely as my chances of winning the Miss Kentucky Pageant. Not only does it seem unlikely that they have nukes, it seems doubly unlikely that they could get them into the country. Nuclear weapons are a lot harder to move than movies or hysterical media makes them out to be. And while there has been a great deal of research into building "briefcase nukes", the reality is much different than that name would suggest. A chunk of uranium that would fit in a briefcase would weigh about eight hundred pounds, according to the calculations I did for a column on the subject; and such a load would yield an insignificant amount of explosive power. You could level a city block, maybe, with that. And at a going price of probably $30 million dollars, it's simply not worth the effort.
I'd write more, but I'm absolutely exhausted and need to sleep. I'm curious to hear your responses, and I'm glad we can have this discussion in a civilized fashion. I hope we can both learn something from one another.
Posted by: Joshua Ellis at August 1, 2003 02:47 AMOkay, that's quite a bit to respond to. Unfortunately, I'm relocating this weekend, and will be spending most of today packing, most of tomorrow in the car, and most of Sunday driving to Philadelphia to visit some friends. I'll try and get back to you when I've got the time.
And yes, civility is a wonderful thing.
Posted by: ryan at August 1, 2003 08:52 AMI'm relocating this weekend too, oddly enough, to San Francisco. :-) So I guess we can resume this when we're both settled in.
Posted by: Joshua Ellis at August 2, 2003 05:21 PM