Paul Wolfowitz

By Binoy Kampmark at Oriental Review on September 10, 2021

It was all marvellous for Paul Wolfowitz to get on Australian television (why bother?) to brusquely discuss those attacks on US soil in September 2001 and criticism of the invasion of Iraq by US-led forces.  After two decades, the former US deputy secretary of defense has not mellowed.

With each show, interview and podium performance Wolfowitz gives, there is a sense that the hole he has dug for himself has become an oasis of reassuring delusion.  Iraq’s despot Saddam Hussein, executed at the behest of authorities sponsored and propped by the US, gave Wolfowitz an ecstatic excuse to explain the rationale of American power: he was a threat, and worldly threat at that.  In 2003, there was little evidence to suggest that, but neoconservatism has always been a doctrine in search of cartoonish myths.

The fact that Weapons of Mass Destruction featured prominently as the reason for overthrowing Saddam became the necessitous outcome of bureaucratic sensibility: “for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy,” he told Vanity Fair in 2003, “we settled on the one issue everyone could agree on: weapons of mass destruction”.

When those elusive WMDs proved stubbornly elusive, PW shifted his emphasis from security rationales to one of liberation.  Along the way he blamed the “consensus judgment of the intelligence community” for not getting it right in the first place, an assessment verging on the mendacious.

While Saddam Hussein was a high grade butcher and villain to many of his people, it is hard to credit him with the Bond villain, pulp view Wolfowitz gives him.  Evidence chasers such as Ben Bonk at the Central Intelligence Agency were frustrated in being thrown at the fruitless effort to link Saddam to al-Qaeda.  Intelligence operatives were effectively being leaned upon to confect the record and find justifications.

In 2013, Wolfowitz was still insisting on uncertainty as a principle.  “We still don’t know how all of this is going to end.”  He accepted that the decapitation of the Iraqi leadership without an immediate substitute might have been unwise.  The “idea that we’re going to come in like [General Douglas] MacArthur in Japan and write the constitution for them” was erroneous.

That did not matter.  The threat was there and present, growing like a stimulated bacillus.  Depraved and disoriented, he takes the argument that invading Iraq at the time was appropriate because it would have had to happen in any case. Saddam was street store vendor, sponsor and patron of terrorism (he never defines the dimension of this, nor adduces evidence) and needed to be dealt with.  The sword would eventually have to be unsheathed.  “We would very likely either have had to go through this whole scenario all over but probably with higher costs for having delayed, or we’d be in a situation today where not only Iran was edging towards nuclear weapons but so was Iraq and also Libya.”

In 2003, the aptly named Jeffrey Record reflected his surname’s worth by taking a hatchet to the Wolfowitz view in a scathing assessment for the Strategic Studies Institute.  In declaring a global war on terrorism (GWOT), the Bush administration had identified a range of states, weapons of danger, terrorists and terrorism while conflating “them into a monolithic threat, and in so doing has subordinated strategic clarity to the moral clarity it strives for in foreign policy and may have set the United States on a course of open-ended gratuitous conflict with states and nonstate entities that pose no serious threat to the United States.”  Not sloppy, is Record.

He goes on to note, relevantly, the conflation premise: that al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein was seen, amateurishly, “as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat.”  This “strategic error of the first order” ignored “critical differences between the two in character, threat level, and susceptibility to US deterrence and military action” led to “an unnecessary preventive war of choice against a deterred Iraq.  The result: “a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism” and the diversion of “attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable al-Qaeda.”

The 9/11 Commission Report, despite noting “friendly contacts” between Osama bin Laden and Iraqi officials at various points, similarly found “no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative personal relationship.”  Nor was there “evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.”

Critics suggest incompetence and bungling in the invasion of Iraq.  They exclude venality and calculation.  Wolfowitz, as if anticipating a prosecution in some faraway court, has been busy covering his tracks and pointing the finger at other decision makers further up the greased pole.  The top suspect: current retiree amateur painter President George W. Bush.  “I don’t think I ever met the president alone.  I didn’t meet him very often.  [Secretary of State Colin] Powell had access to him whenever he wanted it.  And if he was so sure it was a mistake why didn’t he say so?”  What a merry band they make.

Wolfowitz, for the defence, always has to play some useful (or useless) idiot card, proffered from the surrounds of the tired lecture circuit or the American Enterprise Institute.  He is ideologically inclined, evidentially challenged, and keen to accept material that confirms his prejudice rather than contradicts it.  When found wanting about his decisions on accepting, for instance, the bargain basement material of Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, he returned to common cultural themes.  “I don’t think anybody in that part of the world was completely straight with us.”

Perhaps, after two decades, it is time to sort the books, order the records and call forth those architects of war who, dismally deluded and acting with criminal intent and incompetence, plunged a good part of the globe into conflict, leaving a legacy that continues to pollute with tenacious determination.  Along the way, we can mourn the dead of 9/11 and all the dead that followed.

Original here.

END

Nine Eleven

A “Grande Mentira”, do alemão ‘große Lüge’, é uma deturpação, ou distorção, da verdade, usada para descrever o uso de uma mentira tão colossal que ninguém acreditaria que alguém “pudesse ter o atrevimento de distorcer a verdade de forma tão infame”.

Faz hoje vinte anos que na cidade de Nova Iorque foram demolidos vários edifícios usando uma técnica de demolição que todos os engenheiros civis e militares conhecem.

A forma como os edifícios se “afundam na vertical” e “caem para dentro” é típica da técnica e permite facilmente identificá-la.

No vídeo um exemplo:

Controlled Demolition, Inc. (CDI) of Phoenix, Maryland, USA (acting as Explosives Subcontractor to Main Demolition Contractor, Haines & Kibblehouse, Inc. of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) performs the successful planning of, drilling for and explosives felling of the 34-story, reinforced concrete Plaza Tower in Atlantic City, New Jersey on Wednesday, February 17, 2021.

The 34-story tower was 370' tall. CDI loaded 1,900 lbs of explosives in 2,300 locations over 14 floors of the structure and installed over 700 delays using a non-electric initiation system to carefully control the fall of the structure while maximizing debris fragmentation to facilitate removal of the tidy 70' tall pile of post-implosion debris.

Plaza Tower Implosion - Controlled Demolition, Inc.

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Eurasia

The Taliban’s Strategic Dilemmas

By Ridvan Bari Urcosta at Geopolitival Futures on September 8, 2021

As the Taliban once again transition from an insurgency to a political institution, questions surround the kind of government they want to be. Domestic policies are one thing; the nature of their foreign policy, if they even decide to have one, is quite another. Will they, for example, join the regional system of Central Asian autarkies, or become a base for Islamic radicalism worldwide? Either answer will have major implications for regional powerbrokers like Russia, China and, to a lesser extent, India and Turkey. These countries have an interest in maintaining ties to a Taliban government even as they have serious concerns about what an empowered Taliban might mean for their own territories.

The Taliban and the Islamic State

It’s well known that Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar ruled Afghanistan in accordance with Shariah prior to the 2001 invasion, but it’s important to remember that Afghanistan at this time was an Islamic state, not the Islamic State. The Taliban never extended their banner much beyond their borders, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. In 1998, Omar said the goal of his movement was, “To end the mischief in the country, to establish peace and security, to protect life, wealth and honor and to enforce the Sharia, do jihad against the leaders who were devoted for power, and endeavor to make the land of Afghanistan an exemplary state.” As an experiment in transnational jihadism, Afghanistan may have failed, but it did become one of the premier havens for terrorist groups throughout the world.

Fast forward to the mid-2010s, when the Islamic State exploded onto the scene in Iraq. Plenty of other Islamist groups existed before it – al-Qaida, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Taliban, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Boko Haram, Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Caucasus Emirate, just to name a few – but none was as systemic a threat as IS. For the other groups, the caliphate was a secondary concern, not because they didn’t want one but because they believed the historical conditions weren’t quite ripe yet. Moreover, many of these groups were formed with geographic and ethnic bases and as such were either less suited or less immediately interested in global dominance. As an extra-ethnic and extra-territorial entity, IS was different and, to those at risk of its attacks, scarier. Now that the Taliban is back in power, groups operating in Afghanistan, such as Islamic State-Khorasan, are reviving those fears.

Some regions have a dominant or official madhhab; others recognize a variety.

However, those fears may be a little misplaced. Ties between the Taliban and the Islamic State were icy from the beginning. The Taliban always saw IS as an alien presence in the country and thus as a political opponent, and their ideological differences are such that the Hanafi principles of Islam practiced by the Taliban are considered heretical by the Salafists of IS and other pan-Islamist organizations. Moreover, it’s important for the Taliban to achieve some degree of normalization and stability. That very well may include a readiness to fight IS for what took 20 years to retake.

The new Taliban government thus faces two challenges. The first is to gain international recognition and legitimacy such that they can govern, trade, acquire investment and participate in the global system (if they want to). The second is to prevent extremist groups or other rebels from challenging their rule. What complicates things further is that IS-K sees itself as a constituent part of a future caliphate, and much of its leadership were former Taliban fighters. In other words, some factions from the Taliban share the Islamic State’s global revolutionary agenda and so may be less inclined to building a nation-state.

Like it or not, these challenges may be easier to manage with international recognition and backing. Eurasian powers such as Russia, China, Turkey, Iran and the European Union may well back the Taliban if they believe the group can be trusted to at least maintain stability again, especially if stability can be used as a bulwark again the Islamic State.

Concerns of Eurasian Powers

It wasn’t easy to defeat the Islamic State, but it wasn’t hard to assemble a coalition against it. When it came to power in Iraq, it was close to strategically important places such as Turkey, the North Caucasus, the Balkans and the EU. It was also an existential threat to regional Arab monarchies.

Rightly or wrongly, Afghanistan is less urgent. No one is going to cobble together an international military force to protect or oust the Taliban at this point. But necessity often dictates behavior, and if international powers believe IS to be a more dire threat than the Taliban, they may tacitly endorse the Taliban even if they don’t directly, materially support them.

Each of the major powers in Eurasia has its own set of concerns when it comes to Afghanistan and the Taliban’s resurgence. Let’s begin with Russia. Moscow has a long history of confronting Islamic extremism in the North Caucasus, especially in the restive regions of Chechnya and Dagestan. Throughout the 1990s, it faced significant levels of resistance from non-Slavic Muslim populations there, and the Kremlin even launched a full-fledged war against the Chechens and other groups in the region.

To the east of the North Caucasus, Moscow still has significant influence in the former Soviet states of Central Asia. These countries themselves experienced a struggle between secularist and Islamic extremist forces two decades ago, as newly independent nations. Today, they also have an impact on what happens in Russia, especially considering that millions of migrants from Central Asia and Russians with Central Asian heritage live in Russia. Given that three Central Asian states share borders with Afghanistan, Moscow is concerned that the instability there could spill over into Central Asia and then spread into the North Caucasus.

Indeed, the profile of terrorists in Russia has changed over the past few years. Terrorists of Central Asian descent have increased in number compared to those originating from the North Caucasus. The Islamic State is also increasingly influential among these groups. According to Russia’s FSB security services, in 2015, 20 percent of the Muslim population in the Far East region of Khabarovsk, mostly consisting of immigrants, shared the views and vision of the Islamic State. Rising tensions between ethnic Russians and immigrants from Central Asia in major Russian cities have also led to further isolation and radicalization of these groups in recent years. For Moscow, therefore, it’s crucial that secular regimes remain in power in Central Asia. These regimes themselves became increasingly concerned with the situation in Afghanistan as the government in Kabul began to crumble. The Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization, which has among its members three Central Asian states, launched large-scale exercises in Tajikistan near the Afghan border in recent weeks.

Russia and Central Asian states also closely coordinated their responses with China, whose own concerns about Afghanistan relate to its Uyghur population. The mostly Muslim Uyghurs are concentrated in China’s eastern province of Xinjiang, which gives Beijing an advantage over a place like Russia, where the Muslim population is scattered throughout the country. Still, Xinjiang is linked to Afghanistan through the Wakhan Corridor, meaning extremist elements there still present a danger to Beijing.

India and Pakistan’s concerns about the Taliban’s resurgence relate to the disputed region of Kashmir. Pakistan has drawn criticism from India for its long-standing support for the Taliban and related militant groups. The Taliban’s rise to power strengthened Pakistan’s position in the region and made India hyper-vigilant about an increase in anti-government activity in Muslim-dominated Kashmir. Thus, extremist activity there has the potential to draw Pakistan and India into direct confrontation. Pakistan also has close ties to China, which has territorial disputes with India in the Laddakh region, east of Kashmir. India must therefore consider China’s potential response to any moves it makes against Pakistan.

Turkey is not as well-positioned to act in Afghanistan as the other Eurasian countries, but it has made moves to remain active in the political and diplomatic realms. Ankara is trying to expand its influence in Central Asia through economic investments and by leveraging its cultural ties to other Turkic nations in the region. Its worry in Afghanistan is the potential for extremists to reignite problems closer to home. Hizb ut-Tahrir, a transnational group that aims to establish a global caliphate, is of particular concern because of its attempts to unite the Turkic peoples of Central Asia.

The Eurasian powers have adopted a mostly wait-and-see approach to the Taliban for now. Despite the Taliban declaring the country the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the international community isn’t like to unite a fighting force against it. The coalition against IS was formed not only because of the group’s threat as a terrorist organization but also because the West, Eurasian powers, and secular and moderate Muslim regimes in the Middle East wanted to quash a movement that presented the first serious claim to caliphate status since the Ottoman Empire. But the Taliban are different. Their Islamic revolution is confined to Afghanistan.

Original here.

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