Iraq Through The American Looking Glass
by Robert Fisk

An organic reconsideration of US history and major "conspiracy theories" of the past 40 years, including those pertaining to the 9-11 attack, and how they
shed light on America's present drift into fascism.

Hijackers?

What makes you think you actually KNOW what happened on those planes? All four were obliterated, along with everyone on board, remember? No crime scene, no direct evidence, no recognizable remains, no witnesses whatsoever -- it's a blank canvas. How convenient for any party intent on launching a new era of global imperialism, and willing to spin this tragedy into a viable excuse. Indeed, all of the attack's consequences are far better explained by this agenda than by Bin Laden's purported death wish. Those presuming to examine this matter, i.e. ALL OF US, need to recognize that such trickery is a timeless specialty of governments.

And yet from that very day we have allowed the government-media complex to focus all attention on one rather thin explanation: Crazy Arabs did it! George W. Bush and his cabinet have made it known to us, in the most arrogant terms, that they will brook no discussion of other possibilities -- an edict most Americans, in their desperation to believe in this man, seem to have embraced. The Bush Administration even withholds its "proof" of Al Qa'eda's guilt; clearly, it considers mere citizens too unimportant to require full explanations, and once again, we're just rolling over and taking it.

The phrases 'spiritually broken' and 'morally adrift' come to mind...

Until the full case against Al Qa'eda is made available for public review, we have absolutely no assurance that this "proof" isn't exactly like the "proof" of Iraq's weapons programs -- i.e., a big fat lie from top to bottom. On these terms, wholesale acceptance of the hijacker scenario will continue to be what it has always been: a pathetic display of blind faith in this administration's utterances, and in those of its media accomplices. At present, it is astonishing that anyone places faith of any kind in either party: by means of the "WMD" debacle, both have proven themselves amoral, duplicitous, and utterly devoid of humanity. Indeed, why do we give them so much as a moment of our attention? No one with a lick of sense would do this.

A rigorous civilian investigation of 9-11 would help resolve such doubts. If Bush and the rest were standing on firm ground, they would fully support such a thing. Instead, they have worked to thwart both its formation and its progress, using every resource within their reach. Some time last year, they seem to have realized they were only fueling suspicions this way, so Bush grudgingly approved an "independent" investigation. The arrogance of this bunch is so disabling, however, that they actually damaged their credibility even further by naming Henry Kissinger to lead it. This is a man whose dedication to "US interests" verges on homicidal psychosis (see his treatment of Cambodians 1970, Chileans 1973, East Timorese and Kurds 1975, MUCH more). He could only be expected to skew this investigation accordingly, i. e., to omit and cover up any issue not conducive to empire building. Ironically, even Henry had the sense to admit he was an inappropriate choice, thus resigning from this duty, whereupon Bush immediately returned to his original tactic of stonewalling (1). Could the man possibly have something to hide?

To appreciate the ugliest possibilities of the 9-11 attack, one must first become aware of the continuous practice of such manipulations by the entire progression of American politicians. The need to cultivate this awareness is itself an enigma: if you have the honesty to see this pattern at all, its full enormity, emerging over time, will at some point cause your previous ignorance to amaze you. Imagine living your entire life with an 800-pound gorilla, then realizing one day it's not a sofa, after all. At the same time, finding this enlightenment is challenging, because the relevant facts are usually withheld from the public for decades, seldom appearing in mainstream discourse even after they become common knowledge -- not because of some grand conspiracy, but because legions of 'America Firsters,' including most of the famous and powerful, simply don't want to hear it. The telling of these facts is an affront to their most cherished political assumptions. Invariably, they respond with hostile apologetics, ranging from simple denial and ridicule to the claim that such incidents are random and unrelated "mistakes." That they can sincerely believe this 'unrelated' claim is remarkable, given the way it crushes into dust under any burden of historical proof: America's state crimes have been ethically monstrous, vast in both scale and number, unilateral in their aggression, virtually uninterrupted in their chronology, and very coherent in both motive and method. Certain themes just keep popping up:

1) Greed, particularly for territory;

2) Supremacism, driven only partly by race, perhaps more so by delusions of national grandeur allowed to ramify without limit;

3) An enthusiasm for "total war" -- i. e., the indiscriminate butchery of entire populations. This seems most likely to happen when "strategic" territories, resources, or victories are at stake. That is, when those in authority feel they "must win," and so discard principle to whatever extent is necessary;

4) The systemic corruption and antidemocratic functioning of every level of American government, made abundantly clear by its relations with sworn enemies of the public interest, namely corporations;

5) The bid for global empire that has all but defined the American agenda since W.W.II, in flagrant violation of democratic principle.

This last "US interest," discussed openly by flacks and shills only since 9-11 suspended all moral judgment on such matters, actually represents the driving passion of our ruling elite, going all the way back to the Revolution. Indeed, grasping the means of power, beginning with sovereign domain, was their main motive for pursuing revolution at all. Starting then and continuing ever since, they have whipped the people up to support their warped appetites, even as they have misrepresented them spectacularly. EVERY SINGLE TIME we as a people have committed to a war of expansion, we have been duped into doing so by their twin handservants, American politics and American media:

1776 to 1890 Innumerable 'Indian wars': In which the western frontier was pushed through the territories of one Indian confederation after another, all the way to the Pacific. An early and definitive example is George Washington's post-revolutionary conquest of the Ohio Valley, where the Washington Family held deeds to immense tracts of prime real estate never actually ceded by the Indians. The lore that George was a "surveyor" is a populist distortion; he was no blue collar grunt, laying out property lines to earn a living. He was in fact the most ambitious of an elite family of 'land speculators' -- the colonial equivalent of venture capitalists -- and his toils were in the service of his own family fortune. Already one of the richest people in post-revolutionary America, he was determined to get even richer through the sale of his Ohio holdings, and wasn't about to be stopped by 'two-legged vermin' like the Shawnees and Miamis. To this end, he abused his dominance of the early federal government, arranging for Revolutionary War veterans (a battle-hardened militia) to be compensated with "land warrants" deep in Ohio's wilderness, far beyond his own holdings. He also encouraged the issuance of large bounties, equivalent to several months' income, for Indian scalps along the upper Ohio River. These were essentially open murder contracts that targeted ALL Indians, regardless of age, gender, or tribal affiliation. By this means, genocide was openly subsidized for decades wherever intact Indian cultures presented an obstacle to "progress." Primitive as media was, its role in all this was crude but sufficient: posting the bounties while inflaming the settlers' hatred with tales of Indian atrocities, real and imagined. In the Ohio Territory, these tactics rapidly progressed to open war, orchestrated by Washington against Tecumseh's Shawnee Confederation, and then to the total extermination and westward displacement of the Ohio tribes (2).

1846 to '48 The Mexican War: Beginning in 1818, when the Oregon Territory was acquired, American imperialists developed an intense interest in California. Simply adding it piecemeal to their territorial inventory wouldn't have worked, however: it was too isolated, too defensible by the Mexicans. To take California, all of northern Mexico -- what is now California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and portions of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Colorado -- would have to be taken, requiring the invention of some PRETEXT for doing so. In 1836, American "adventurers" (freelance political operatives) instigated a regional coup in the Mexican province of Texas, splitting it off to form an independent country, the Republic of Texas. Nine years later, this nation was annexed as the 28th state. Immediately afterward, President Polk made the predictable move of sending belligerent military incursions into disputed lands along the new border with Mexico. The Mexicans replied with patrols of their own, and then clashes developed, leading to the "spilling of American blood on American soil." Or so the press told it (their bias could be summed up in a phrase they coined around this time: "Manifest Destiny"). In fact, the soil in question was situated between the Nueces and Rio Grande rivers, an area both governments held equal claim to. But no matter -- the people eagerly accepted this distortion, Polk got his dirty little war, and then proceeded to steal something like 650,000 square miles of territory from our next-door neighbor. Add to this the previous criminal acquisition of territory from Mexico, i.e. the "Lone Star State," and the area usurped approaches one-third of the contiguous 48 states, or HALF of what was originally Mexico (3).

Some years later, a fantastic mineral strike in this stolen territory -- the Comstock Lode -- would provide the Hearst Family with an immense fortune, soon parlayed by William Randolph into an infamous media empire.

1898 to '99 The Spanish-American War / Philippine Campaign: Though still a colonial client of Spain during the 1880s and '90s, Cuba was also a hotbed of insurrection, thanks to the efforts of Jose Marti and others. By 1898, the Cuban independence movement had Spain's colonial government on the ropes. The prominence of blacks among the rebels made this situation alarming for fin de siecle American royalists, among whom "Darwinist" (i.e. proto-Nazi) political thought was at the height of its popularity. Also, having just recently subdued the last free-roaming Indian tribes back home, their passion for grabbing other people's land could now be expanded into the Caribbean, Central America, and Pacific, via expanded activities of that handy agency, the US military. So in the fall and winter of 1897-98, the Hearst syndicate and other news organizations were blasting Americans with "yellow journalism" on the subject of Cuba -- sensational and often ludicrous accounts, custom made to induce support of US military intervention. The public thus primed, the sinking of the battleship USS Maine in Havana Harbor gave McKinley all the excuse needed to commence grabbing up not only Cuba, but also Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. It was in the Philippines that the US military took "total war" beyond North America for the first time. Encouraged by the Filipino's uncanny resemblance to Native Americans, US troops mass-murdered something like 25% of the civilian population. As imperial outrages go, this was the equal of anything that's happened since (4).

A 1975 investigation led by Admiral Rickover determined that the Maine's hull was breached by an explosion originating INSIDE the ship. This could have been a spontaneous "coal-bin explosion," or it could have been a bomb placed by an imperialist traitor. As with 9-11, this catastrophe neatly erased any inconvenient witnesses to its real mechanics.

1917 to '18 World War I: Three years into the "Great War," it looked as though Germany would defeat Britain and France, our primary capitalist hosts in Europe. Big financiers like J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, who between them had billions invested "over there," weren't about to just sit back and watch this happen. They barked orders to their underling, Woodrow Wilson, who then declared war, using German interference with US shipping activities as a feeble pretext. Leading up to this, the media minions whipped the public into a war frenzy, basing their wildly manipulative propaganda on incidents such as the sinking of the Lusitania, two years earlier. Funny thing about the Lusitania: it's hold contained a secret, illegal, and massive cargo of ammunition and other materiel bound for Liverpool, and its passengers were used as unwitting human shields for this cargo by the US government, which is why they died. Neither Wilson nor the media of the day ever admitted any of this (5).

The dynamics behind America's entry into World War II were virtually identical. Over 500,000 Americans died in these two wars, with 875,000 more wounded, and an additional and unknown number emotionally shattered, all of which brought untold misery to their families and communities. Given the choice between destroying all those lives or allowing the likes of Morgan and Rockefeller to suffer the tragedy of somewhat less obscene wealth, our "representatives" chose the former as the lesser sacrifice.

Continue with... JFK, 911, And The Real America:
Tying It All Together