[Peace-discuss] A brief history of 25 years of US terrorism in the GME

[C. G. Estabrook]

[This account begins with the election of Reagan, without
noting that his administration continued policies, notably in
Afghanistan, that originated in the "liberal" Carter
administration.  Carter's national security adviser claimed
that they had begun financing murderous fanatics in
Afghanistan, in keeping with the long-standing US policy of
encouraging religious extremism in the Greater Middle East in
order to undercut local secular nationalism.  --CGE]


Once upon a time, a dangerous radical gained control of the US
Republican Party.

Reagan increased the budget for support of the radical Muslim
Mujahidin conducting terrorism against the Afghanistan
government to half a billion dollars a year.

One fifth of the money, which the CIA mostly turned over to
Pakistani military intelligence to distribute, went to
Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, a violent extremist who as a youth used
to throw acid on the faces of unveiled girls in Afghanistan.

Not content with creating a vast terrorist network to harass
the Soviets, Reagan then pressured the late King Fahd of Saudi
Arabia to match US contributions. He had earlier imposed on
Fahd to give money to the Contras in Nicaragua, some of which
was used to create rightwing death squads. (Reagan liked to
sidestep Congress in creating private terrorist organizations
for his foreign policy purposes, which he branded "freedom
fighters," giving terrorists the idea that it was all right to
inflict vast damage on civilians in order to achieve their goals).

Fahd was a timid man and resisted Reagan's instructions
briefly, but finally gave in to enormous US pressure.

Fahd not only put Saudi government money into the Afghan
Mujahideen networks, which trained them in bomb making and
guerrilla tactics, but he also instructed the Minister of
Intelligence, Turki al-Faisal, to try to raise money from
private sources.

Turki al-Faisal checked around and discovered that a young
member of the fabulously wealthy Bin Laden construction
dynasty, Usama, was committed to Islamic causes. Turki thus
gave Usama the task of raising money from Gulf millionaires
for the Afghan struggle. This whole effort was undertaken,
remember, on Reagan Administration instructions.

Bin Laden not only raised millions for the effort, but helped
encourage Arab volunteers to go fight for Reagan against the
Soviets and the Afghan communists. The Arab volunteers
included people like Ayman al-Zawahiri, a young physician who
had been jailed for having been involved in the assassination
of Egyptian president Anwar El-Sadat. Bin Laden kept a
database of these volunteers. In Arabic the word for base is
al-Qaeda.

In the US, the Christian Right adopted the Mujahideen as their
favorite project. They even sent around a "biblical checklist"
for grading US congressman as to how close they were to the
"Christian" political line. If a congressman didn't support
the radical Muslim Muj, he or she was downgraded by the
evangelicals and fundamentalists.

Reagan wanted to give more and more sophisticated weapons to
the Mujahideen ("freedom fighters"). The Pakistani generals
were forming an alliance with the fundamentalist Jamaat-i
Islam and begining to support madrasahs or hardline seminaries
that would teach Islamic extremism. But even they balked at
giving the ragtag Muj really advanced weaponry. Pakistan had a
close alliance with China, and took advice from Beijing.

In 1985 Reagan sent Senator Orrin Hatch, Undersecretary of
Defense Fred Iklé and others to Beijing to ask China to put
pressure on Pakistan to allow the US to give the Muslim
radicals, such as Hikmatyar, more sophisticated weapons. Hatch
succeeded in this mission.

By giving the Muj weaponry like the stinger shoulderheld
missile, which could destroy advanced Soviet arms like their
helicopter gunships, Reagan demonstrated to the radical
Muslims that they could defeat a super power.

Reagan also decided to build up Saddam Hussein in Iraq as a
counterweight to Khomeinist Iran, authorizing US and Western
companies to send him precursors for chemical and biological
weaponry. At one point Donald Rumsfeld was sent to Iraq to
assure Saddam that it was all right if he used chemical
weapons against the Iranians. Reagan had no taste in friends.

On becoming president, George H. W. Bush made a deal with the
Soviets that he would cut the Mujahideen off if the Soviets
would leave Afghanistan. The last Soviet troops departed in
early 1989. The US then turned its back on Afghanistan and
allowed it to fall into civil war, as the radical Muslim
factions fostered by Washington and Riyadh turned against one
another and used their extensive weaponry on each other and on
civilians.

In the meantime, Saddam, whom the US had built up as a major
military power, invaded Kuwait. The Bush senior administration
now had to take on its former protege, and put hundreds of
thousands of US troops into the Gulf and Saudi Arabia. The
radical Muslim extremists with whom Reagan and Bush had allied
in Afghanistan now turned on the US, objecting strenuously to
a permanent US military presence in the Muslim holy land.

>From 1994 Afghanistan was increasingly dominated by a faction
of Mujahideen known as Taliban or seminary students (who were
backed by Pakistani military intelligence, which learned the
trick from Reagan and which were flush from all those billions
the Reagan administration had funneled into the region). In
1996 Bin Laden came back and reestablished himself there,
becoming the leader of 5,000 radical Arab volunteers that
Reagan had urged Fahd to help come to Afghanistan back in the
1980s.

In the meantime, the US had steadfastly supported Israeli
encroachments on the Palestinian Occupied Territories and the
gradual complete annexation of Jerusalem, the third holiest
city to Muslims.

Since the outbreak of the first intifada, Israeli troops had
riposted with brutality. Even after the Oslo accords were
signed, the size of Israeli colonies in the Palestinian West
Bank and around Jerusalem doubled.

A steady drumbeat of violence against Palestinians by
Israelis, who were stealing their land and clearly intended to
monopolize their sacred space, enraged the Muslim radicals
that had been built up and coddled by Reagan.

In 1998, al-Qaeda and al-Jihad al-Islami, two small terrorist
groups established in Afghanistan as a result of the Reagan
jihad, declared war on the United States and Israel (the
"Zionists and Crusaders"). After attacks by al-Qaeda cells on
US embassies in East Africa and on the USS Cole, nineteen of
them ultimately used jet planes to attack the Twin Towers and
the Pentagon.

The Bush administration responded to these attacks by the
former proteges of Ronald Reagan by putting the old Mujahideen
warlords back in charge of Afghanistan's provinces, allowing
Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri to escape, declaring that Americans
no longer needed a Bill of Rights, and suddenly invading
another old Reagan protege, Saddam's Iraq, which had had
nothing to do with 9/11 and posed no threat to the US. The
name given this bizarre set of actions by Bush was "the War on
Terror."

In Iraq, the US committed many atrocities, including bombing
campaigns on civilian quarters of cities it had already
occupied, and a ferocious assault on Fallujah, and tortured
Iraqi prisoners.

In the meantime, the Bush administration put virtually no
money or effort into actually combatting terrorist cells in
places like Morocco, as opposed to putting $200 billion into
the Iraq war and aftermath. As a result, a string of terrorist
attacks were allowed to strike at Madrid, London and elsewhere.

Fred Ikle, who had been part of the Reaganist/Chinese
Communist effort to convince Muslim fundamentalist generals in
Pakistan--against their better judgment-- to allow the US to
give the radical Muslim extremists even more sophisticated
weapons, wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal urging the
nuking of Mecca.

Then in July, 2005, General Richard Myers, the Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced that there was not actually
any "War on Terror:" ' General Richard Myers, chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the National Press Club on Monday
that he had "objected to the use of the term 'war on
terrorism' before, because if you call it a war, then you
think of people in uniform as being the solution." '
(Question: Does this mean we can have the Bill of Rights back,
now?)

The American Right, having created the Mujahideen and having
mightily contributed to the creation of al-Qaeda, abruptly
announced that there was something deeply wrong with Islam,
that it kept producing terrorists.

[From Juan Cole's "Informed Comment."]