Oh, excellent. Quotable. I'll add Alfred Korzybski to the Eventual Reading List.
with a number of other articles fitting the theme of "September 11th: On This Date In History (OR: THE DEVIL'S CALENDAR)"
Sept. 11, 1990
"President George H.W. Bush delivers 'New World Order' Speech to Congress."
Iraq occupied Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990. At that point, the U.S. government had armed and assisted the Iraqi tyrant for more than a decade, pitting him against the despised Shiite theocracy in Iran. The Iraqi invasion came as the climax of an enormously complicated history of secret deals and double-crosses, which bears reviewing because of its relevance to events today.
In 1978, an Islamic fundamentalist revolution overthrew the Shah of Iran. He had been the country's dictator since 1953, when the CIA and the British had helped him overthrow the parliamentary government of Mossadegh, who had committed the crime of nationalizing the country's oil assets.
In November 1979, Iranian students seized the personnel of the U.S. embassy as hostages, creating a terminal crisis for the Carter administration.
Carter's domestic situation was further exacerbated by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan of Dec. 1979, although this was the intended effect of a U.S. covert destabilization of Afghanistan, as admitted since by Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. The idea was to get the Soviets into their own "Vietnam," and it worked.
In the next decade, the U.S. would covertly funnel four to six billion dollars (matched dollar for dollar by the Saudis) into the Afghanistan jihad, organizing the effort under the Zia heroin-money dictatorship in Pakistan and assembling an "International" force of Islamist mercenaries loyal to warlords and sponsors like Osama Binladin: the "Afghan Arabs."
In Sept. 1980, Saddam invaded Iran in an attempt to grab oil-rich territories - after receiving a green light from the U.S. government, which thus thought to extract revenge and put pressure on Iran. At the same time, the Reagan presidential campaign under William Casey was engaged in the illegal "October Surprise" negotiations with Iran, promising to supply arms if the Iranians held the hostages until Carter had lost the Nov. 1980 election.
The Iranians released the hostages a few minutes after Reagan's inauguration, and the covert U.S. arms shipments to Iran began in early 1981, via Israeli arms dealers. Casey became the chief of a CIA that ran the ongoing war in Afghanistan, training the likes of Osama Binladin, and started a series of genocidal conflicts in Central America.
In other words, from the beginning the key players inside American politics acted in away that encouraged the mass slaughter between Iran and Iraq, by giving clandestine support to both sides. The Iran-Iraq war continued for eight years, during which the arms dealers of the West celebrated it as an opportunity to sell to both sides.
The U.S. arms shipments to Iran became a scandal with the "Iran-Contra" revelations of 1986, but the most significant U.S. support went to Iraq. The Atlanta branch of the CIA-connected Italian Bank Lavoro financed Saddam's arms purchases with billions in loans guaranteed by the U.S. Agriculture Department. American defense contractors built Iraq's supergun, and even its weaponized anthrax originated with a U.S. company in a government-approved deal.
Early in the war, Saddam discovered that it was not so easy to take territory from a country with three times the population of Iraq. By the mid-1980s the Iranians were inching towards Baghdad, and the long-suffering peoples of Iraq grew restless. Luckily for Saddam, the CIA fed him the satellite surveillance data that he needed to survive the various Iranian "final offensives" of 1985 to 1987.
Reports in 1987 that Iraq had used poison gas to kill 5,000 civilians in the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabjah passed with little more than a burp of protest from the United States - although they have since been taken up as Exhibit A in the list of Saddam's crimes. This is almost certainly a myth. The Iraqi victims of Halabjah died during a battle in which Iranian and Iraqi forces both used poison gas against each other.
Regardless, Bush and Saddam were allies throughout the 1980s, at a time when Iraqi forces commited horrific crimes. Saddam's ultimate victory in the war he began consisted in staying in power and battling the numerically superior Iranians to a final stalemate in 1988.
And what had he gained? All he held, in the end, were untold billions in debt, the lion's share due to the two countries who financed and benefited most from Iran's containment: Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Following the war, these same two rich ingrates raised oil production, against the wishes of Iraq and other OPEC hardliners, causing prices to fall and putting the squeeze on Saddam's ability to pay them off.
But Saddam still had his arms, if not the cash, and decided this was a good moment to rediscover the injustices of colonial history: In the 1920s the British, the better to control their Empire in the Near East, had peeled an oil-rich coastal section of Iraq away and bestowed it upon a local feudal clan, known today as the royal family of Kuwait. As long as Saddam was fighting Iran, and Kuwait was willing to give him money, this had not mattered. But now his speechwriters recalled that Kuwait is the "17th province" of Iraq. Further, Kuwait was drilling diagonally into oil fields under Iraqi territory, and disputing Iraq's claim to two unoccupied coastal islands.
Saddam saw a chance to cut his debt and solve many other issues to his favor, maybe even grab the whole of Kuwait. He massed his forces to the south and began issuing ultimatums to the Kuwaitis. Most readers are probably aware that as the crisis peaked, on July 30, 1990, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, visited Saddam and delivered a non-committal statement of neutrality in this conflict among Arab neighbors. To Saddam (and to anyone who has read the transcript of his talk with Glaspie, released years later), it sounded just like the green light for an invasion of Kuwait.
When the invasion came, President Bush had a revelation. At last, he saw the insanity of covert entanglements with military dictatorships, fundamentalists and feudal monarchies.
He saw the folly of a whole economy based on the territorial resource of oil, and he was appalled at the great cost of America's attempt to control that resource at the source by maintaining a military hegemony on the other side of the world. Above all, he understood that government by secrecy had led to nothing but disaster.
In a daring Sept. 11 speech to the Congress, he set the nation on a bold new course. He revealed the full details of the above history and promised there would be no more secret deals and subversions of democracy. The United States would cease to arm its future enemies. It would redirect the untold billions until then devoted to subsidizing the profits of American oil companies to measures of energy conservation and to the development of alternative energies and sustainable settlements. This would serve ultimately to end dependence on oil from the Middle East, and usher in a new age of peaceful coexistence with the world.
Ha ha ha! But seriously, folks...
After Saddam took the bait and invaded Kuwait, the United States began deploying half a million troops to Saudi Arabia, starting on Aug. 7. That date became the obsession of a Saudi hero of the Afghanistan jihad, Osama Binladin, who objected to the presence of U.S. troops, and who insisted that Saudi Arabia could organize its own defense.
This was actually true, for several reasons. For one thing, Saddam was never going to invade Saudi Arabia in the first place, as was clear already at the time. The alleged Iraqi threat to Saudi Arabia was little more than a pretext to deploy the American troops, and based on U.S. intelligence reports that a St. Petersburg, Florida newspaper was able to show were false by purchasing Soviet satellite photos of the actual situation on the Saudi-Iraqi border. These showed that Iraqi forces were not deployed for an attack on the Arabian peninsula.
Second, Saudi Arabia was extremely well-armed, having bought an estimated $200 billion in military technology from the United States during the 1980s. Much of this went into the construction of a network of sophisticated military harbors and "superbases," with secure underground tunnels and bunkers criss-crossing the landscape. (One day "we" may get to bomb these, just like with the ones we built in Afghanistan.) These bases, built by local contractors like the Saudibinladin Group, met the exacting technical specifications of the U.S. military - so that as the American troops arrived, they found themselves well-provided with a familiar and extensive infrastructure already in place.
It was as though someone had been preparing for ten years to accommodate a large American force in Saudi Arabia. Which they had! Plans for a massive U.S. ground deployment in the Middle East dated back to a Kissinger plan following the OPEC oil embargo of 1973 and to Carter's later establishment of the Rapid Deployment Force for this purpose and declaration of what became known as the "Carter Doctrine" (that the U.S. would be willing to intervene militarily to secure the continuing global oil supply from the Persian Gulf region).
So nicely set up, the war to expel the Iraqi force from Kuwait still needed its political justifications. Bush martialed a coalition of 28 allies and got the Japanese, Germans, Saudis and Gulf States to pony up tens of billions for the liberation of Kuwait. (The war was the first ever to make a direct profit for the Pentagon.) At home, he was confronted with a moderate level of protests and nearly half the Senate against him. With the deployments underway, Bush therefore spoke to a joint session of Congress on Sept. 11, 1990, delivering a speech entitled: "Towards a New World Order."
Here is the passage where he uses the miscreant phrase:
We stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment. The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective -- a new world order -- can emerge: a new era -- freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony. A hundred generations have searched for this elusive path to peace, while a thousand wars raged across the span of human endeavor. Today that new world is struggling to be born, a world quite different from the one we've known. A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. A world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak.
A new era was indeed a-dawning, above all because the Soviet Union was in a state of advanced collapse. Brzezinski's Afghanistan gambit had succeeded as one of many factors in the Soviet decline. (It had also spread the CIA-trained network of "Afghan Arab" veterans around the world.) Bankrupt and plagued by nationalist uprisings, the Soviet empire was opening up to Western capital, as China had done since the late 1970s. The Western power elite understood that great changes were coming in the world order. The old system was entering a new phase, which has been called globalist, and which involves a greater role for openly "internationalist" institutions.
But nobody needed Bush to tell them that!
Many people think Bush's speech was the declaration of a one-world government. They seize on the phrase, "new world order," as though it signifies a specific, organized power, the N.W.O. - something apart from "America," something that may one day subject the U.S. government and its people to the strictures of the United Nations, NATO, the IMF, or some other globalist structure.
To me, this idea is hash. Bush was always the player and front-man of the Old World Order, the same American-centered power elite that governed most of the planet long before the Berlin Wall fell.
Bush needed a war. For many reasons, in part because we live in a system that requires the periodic real war as a condition of its reproduction - but mainly to preclude the possibility that the decline of the Soviets would be accompanied by a call to withdraw American military hegemony over the world. The true enemy was the potential for a "Peace Dividend," now that the Cold War was ending.
This was why Saddam was so convenient. A cornered animal, he joined the ranks of renegade tyrants when he swallowed Bush's bait, and tried to take his cut of the international gangsters' pie by force.
In reality, the function of the "New World Order" speech is depressingly ordinary. Bush does not want to "supplant" anything. He intends to prove the rule of the jungle, in which the strong subjugate the weak, by showing that the strongest can subjugate anyone they please. Since this is not the sort of justification for war that flies with the voting public, Bush says the opposite of what he means. When politicians go to war, they always rediscover the lofty Western ideals that they otherwise never mention. Their speechwriters reach into the Churchillian bag and pull out assurances about how war brings peace, justice and order to the world. This allows them to go blow up and starve a few hundred thousand Iraqis, during the war and in the 10 years since killing a larger number of civilians than the population of Kuwait itself, so as to keep restore a medieval regime with a clear conscience.
In the process, the United States itself suffers on the order of 100,000 casualties. Or didn't you realize? "Casualties" includes the wounded as well as the several hundred American soldiers killed during the deployment and hostilities (mostly of them in friendly fire incidents or accidents). What do you call a victim of the no doubt multi-causal ailment known as "Gulf War Syndrome"?
Although I can believe that the Bush mob (or their friends and underlings) are involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, I doubt the timing was meant to secretly honor Bush the Father's words. Brigands plunder when the time is ripe for plunder; they do not ask a calendar for permission.
