May 5, 2006

 

Note: This essay was originally delivered as a lecture at Trinity Episcopal Church of Santa Barbara, Saturday, March 25, 2006; a DVD of this presentation will be available at the end of May.


In this essay, I offer a Christian critique of the American empire in light of 9/11, and of 9/11 in light of the American empire. Such a critique, of course, presupposes a discussion of 9/11 itself, especially the question of who was responsible for the attacks. The official theory is that the attacks were planned and carried out entirely by Arab Muslims. The main alternative theory is that 9/11 was a "false flag" operation, orchestrated by forces within the US government who made it appear to be the work of Arab Muslims.

Originally, a false flag attack was one in which the attackers, perhaps in ships, literally showed the flag of an enemy country, so that it would be blamed. But the _expression has come to be used for any attack made to appear to be the work of some country, party, or group other than that to which the attackers themselves belong.

I will argue that the attacks of 9/11 were false flag attacks, orchestrated to marshal support for a so-called war on terror against Muslim and Arab states as the next stage in creating a global Pax Americana, an all-inclusive empire. I will conclude this essay with its main question

 How should Christians in America respond to the realization that we are living in an empire similar to the Roman empire at the time of Jesus, which put him to death for resistance against it.

1. False Flag Operations

The evidence that 9/11 was a false flag operation is very strong. Many Americans, however, reject this idea on a priori grounds, thereby refusing even to look at the evidence. The main a priori assumption is that America's political and military leaders simply would not commit such a heinous act. This assumption is undermined, however, once we know something about the history of false flag operations.

False Flag Operations by Other Countries

Far from being rare in the history of warfare, false flag operations are very common. They have been especially popular with imperial powers wanting to expand their empires.

In 1931, Japan, which had been exploiting Manchuria for resources, decided to take over the whole province. To have a pretext, the Japanese army blew up the tracks of its own railway near the Chinese military base in Mukden, then blamed the sabotage on Chinese solders. This "Mukden incident" occurred almost exactly 70 years prior to 9/11, on September 18, 1931. It is, in fact, referred to by the Chinese as "9/18."¹

A year and a half later, the Nazis, less than a month after taking power, started a fire in the German Reichstag, then blamed it on Communists. Their proof that Communists were responsible was the "discovery" on the site of a feeble-minded left-wing radical, who had been brought there by the Nazis themselves.²

They then used the Reichstag fire as a pretext to arrest thousands of Communists and Social Democrats, shut down unfriendly newspapers, and annul civil rights.³

That was 1933. Six years later, Hitler wanted a pretext to attack Poland. The solution, known as "Operation Himmler," was to have Germans dressed as Poles stage 21 raids on the Polish-German border. In some cases, as in the raid on the Gleiwitz radio station, a dead German convict dressed as a Pole was left at the scene. The next day, Hitler, referring to these 21 "border incidents," presented the attack on Poland as a defensive necessity.⁴

More germane to the question of 9/11, of course, is whether American leaders would do such things.

U.S. Wars Based on False Charges of Enemy Aggression

In 1846, President James Polk, anxious to expand the American empire, had the U.S. army build a fort on the Rio Grande, some 150 miles south of the commonly accepted border between Texas and Mexico. After 16 US soldiers died in a skirmish, Polk told Congress that Mexico had "shed American blood upon the American soil." This claim was called "the sheerest deception" by a congressman named Abraham Lincoln.⁵

Nevertheless, the Mexican-American war was on and in 1848, Mexico, being out-gunned, signed a peace treaty ceding away half of its country, including California, for a paltry sum.⁶

In 1898, the United States falsely accused Spain of blowing up a battleship, the USS Maine, which President McKinley had sent, uninvited, to Havana Harbor. This accusation, which led to the chant "Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain," was used as a pretext to start the Spanish-American war, through which America took control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. In the latter case, the United States, after helping the Filipinos defeat the Spanish, went to war against the Filipinos, claiming that they had fired on American soldiers. A quarter of a million Filipinos died in the resulting slaughter, which provoked the usually ironic William James to say:

"God damn the U.S. for its vile conduct in the Philippine Isles."⁷

Many years later, General Arthur MacArthur admitted that American troops had fired first to start a pre-arranged battle.⁸

In 1964, a false account of an incident in the Tonkin Gulf was used to start the full-scale war in Vietnam, which brought about the deaths of over 58,000 Americans and some two million Vietnamese.⁹

Of course, we might be tempted to reply, although Americans have done such things to enemy nations

 ("All's fair in love and war"), they would never deliberately kill citizens of friendly countries for political reasons. That assumption, however, is undermined in a recent book, NATO's Secret Armies, by Swiss historian Daniele Ganser. This book demonstrates that during the Cold War, the United States sponsored false flag operations in many countries of Western Europe in order to discredit Communists and other leftists to prevent them from coming to power through elections.¹⁰

Italy suffered a wave of deadly terrorist attacks in the 1970s, including a massive explosion at the Bologna railway station that killed 85 people.¹¹

Between 1983 and '85, Belgium suffered a series of attacks, known as the "Brabant massacres," in which hooded men opened fire on people in shopping centers, "reduc[ing] Belgium to a state of panic." At the time, all these attacks in Italy, Belgium, and other countries were blamed on Communists and other leftists, often by virtue of planted evidence.¹²

In the 1990s, however, it was discovered that the attacks were really carried out by right-wing organizations that were coordinated by a secret unit within NATO, which was guided by the CIA and the Pentagon.¹³

A former member of the organization that carried out the massacres in Belgium, which was funded by the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, explained that the plan was to "make the population believe that these terrorist attacks were done by the Left."¹⁴

 The former head of Italian counter-intelligence, in explaining the motivation behind the attacks in Italy, said: "The CIA wanted to create an Italian nationalism capable of halting what it saw as a slide to the left." To achieve this goal, he added, it seemed that "the Americans would do anything."¹⁵

Operation Northwoods

If Americans would do anything to achieve their political goals in Europe, would they do similar things within America itself? Early in 1962, which was shortly after Fidel Castro had overthrown the pro-American dictator Batista, the Joint Chiefs of Staff presented President Kennedy with a plan, called Operation Northwoods. This plan described "pretexts which would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba," partly "by developing the international image of the Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere." Possible actions to create this image included a "Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area . . .

and . . . Washington" and a "Remember the Maine" incident, in which: "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba." Although President Kennedy did not approve this plan, it had been endorsed by all the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon.¹⁶

2. The Probable Motive for 9/11

US political and military leaders, as these examples show, have been fully capable of orchestrating false flag operations that would kill innocent people, including American citizens, to achieve political goals. The political goal during the Cold War was to prevent and overthrow left-leaning governments. But what motive could US leaders have had for orchestrating the attacks of 9/11, a decade after the Cold War had ended? Actually, it was precisely the end of the Cold War that provided the likely motive: the desire to create a global Pax Americana.

Whereas the world during the Cold War was bipolar, the demise of the Soviet Union created in some minds---

the minds of that group known as neoconservatives, or neocons---

the prospect of a unipolar world. In 1989, Charles Krauthammer published a piece entitled "Universal Dominion," in which he argued that America should work for "a qualitatively new outcome---

a unipolar world."¹⁷

A year later, he said the United States, as the "unchallenged superpower," should act unilaterally, "unashamedly laying down the rules of world order and being prepared to enforce them."¹⁸

The most important neocon has been Dick Cheney. In 1992, the last year of his tenure as secretary of defense, he had two of his assistants, Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, write a draft of the Pentagon's "Defense Planning Guidance," which said America's "first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival."¹⁹

 Andrew Bacevich, who is a conservative but not a neoconservative, has called this draft "a blueprint for permanent American global hegemony."²

 An article in Harper's calls it an early version of Cheney's "Plan . . . to rule the world."²¹

During the rest of the 1990s, while the Republicans were out of White House, the unipolar dream kept growing. In 1996, Robert Kagan said the United States should use its military strength "to maintain a world order which both supports and rests upon American hegemony."²²

In the following year, William Kristol, the son of neocon godfather Irving Kristol, founded a unipolarist think tank called the Project for the New American Century, often called PNAC. Its members included Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Libby, and many other neocons who would become central members of the Bush administration in 2001. In September of 2000, PNAC published a document entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses. Reaffirming "the basic tenets" of the Cheney-Wolfowitz draft of 1992, this document said that "America's grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend [its present] advantageous position" and thereby "to preserve and enhance [the] 'American peace.'"²³

What would it take, according to these neocons, to preserve and enhance the Pax Americana? Basically five things. First, control of the world's oil. As Robert Dreyfuss, a critic of the neocons, says, "who[ever] controls oil controls the world."²⁴

 For the neocons, this meant bringing about regime change in several oil-rich countries, especially Iraq. Some neocons, including Cheney and Rumsfeld, had wanted the first President Bush to take out Saddam in 1990.²⁵

They continued to advocate this policy throughout the 1990s, with PNAC even writing a letter to President Clinton in 1998, urging him to use military force to "remov[e] Saddam's regime from power."²⁶

After the Bush-Cheney administration took office, attacking Iraq was the main item on its agenda. The only real question, reports former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, was "finding a way to do it."²⁷

A second necessary condition for the envisaged Pax Americana was a transformation of the military in the light of the "revolution in military affairs"---

RMA for short---made possible by information technology.

 At the center of this RMA transformation is the military use of space.²⁸ Although the term "missile defense" implies that this use of space is to be purely defensive, one neocon, Lawrence Kaplan, has candidly stated otherwise, saying: "Missile defense isn't really meant to protect America. It's a tool for global domination."²⁹

In any case, implementing this transformation will be very expensive, which brings us to a third requirement: an increase in military spending. The end of the Cold War made this requirement challenging, because most Americans assumed that, since we no longer had to defend the world against global Communism, we could drastically reduce military spending, thereby having a "peace dividend" to spend on health, education, and the environment.

A fourth neocon requirement for a Pax Americana was a modification of the doctrine of preemptive attack. Traditionally, a country has had the right to launch a preemptive attack against another country if an attack from that country was imminent---

too imminent to take the matter to the UN Security Council. But neocons wanted the United States to act to preclude threats that might arise in the more or less distant future.³⁰

These four developments would require a fifth thing: an event that would make the American people ready to accept these imperialistic policies. This point had been made in The Grand Chessboard, a 1997 book by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was Jimmy Carter's national security advisor. Brzezinski is not a neocon but he shares their concern with American primacy (as indicated by the subtitle of his book:

American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives).

 Portraying Central Asia, with its vast oil reserves, as the key to world power, Brzezinski argued that America must get control of this region. However, Brzezinski counseled, Americans, with their democratic instincts, are reluctant to authorize the military spending and human sacrifices necessary for "imperial mobilization," and this reluctance "limits the use of America's power, especially its capacity for military intimidation."³

 But this impediment could be overcome, he added, if there were "a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat."³²

The American people were, for example, willing to enter World War II after "the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor."³³

This same idea was suggested in PNAC's document of 2000, Rebuilding America's Defenses. Referring to the goal of transforming the military, it said that this "process of transformation . . .

is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event---like a new Pearl Harbor."³⁴

3. Opportunities Created by the New Pearl Harbor