- US Space Command, "Vision for 2020".

Capitalism must continually grow to survive. What is called "globalisation" is only the latest stage of this expansion. In the 20th Century, a momentous stage in the ongoing story of imperial expansion was reached after World War II with the US taking over Britain's lead role. Since then there has been continual confrontation with Third World peoples, as well as with other opponents from time to time (most recently in the former Yugoslavia). This is a conflict that takes various expressions, including economic and cultural forms, and it has been fought on many fronts: national sovereignty; trade; debt; access to resources; etc. From the US viewpoint, it is aimed at keeping control of challenges and potential challenges to American hegemony, and more widely, at maintaining Western dominance. Less than one billion of the world's 6.3 billion people control over 80% of the resources. A mere 1% of the planet's population has 60% of the wealth. Corporate globalisation is the latest version of old-fashioned imperialism. If it can be argued that globalisation is more complicated than this, the basic fact prevails that this fundamentalist capitalism comprises an international process whereby the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And this process is happening within the West too.

By 2001, for the most part overt political control has been replaced by economic and commercial ties although the US has again substantially boosted its influence within the United Nations (UN), dramatically highlighted by the conduct of the 1991 Gulf War. Occasionally, global conflict between the West and its antagonists breaks out into major hostilities of this sort. In the early 21st Century the central confrontation has again come to focus on the Middle East and Central Asia, but it should not be forgotten that at present a terrible conflict, in which Western interests are deeply involved, is also being fought in central Africa, mostly out of mind and sight of the media. As well, there continues to be warfare in Colombia and elsewhere in which the US is intimately implicated.

Back in 1972, well-known conservative futurologist and nuclear war strategist, Herman Kahn (& his co-author) of the Hudson Institute had this to say: "… the fact of enormous wealth in the world, and an increased feeling that the 'Establishment', the 'Government', the 'System' is responsible for social injustice, may make the claims of social justice seem paramount. Both domestic and international divisions could be exacerbated and lead to small organisations and individuals resorting to terroristic and anarchistic techniques, in particular to what the 19th Century called 'propaganda by the deed', individual terrorist acts of symbolic value such as burning conscription records (!!) or kidnapping high government officials. Overall, there could be a serious conflict between those who regard the status quo as generally satisfactory and equitable and those who regard it as the dying manifestations of an order that is and should be passing" ("Things to Come: Thinking about the 70's and 80's" by Kahn and B. Bruce-Biggs, Macmillan, p142).

Having been a participant in the movement for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) in the 1970s, I well remember the resolutions of the UN General Assembly endorsing the NIEO in overwhelming majority votes, pledging commitment to justice for the Third World. But, of course, the rich nations, including NZ, had no intention of putting these resolutions into effect and instead cynically subverted them. Yet later, the Brandt Commission reports in the 1980s backed the call for reform and warned of the consequences otherwise. All this has gone down the memory-hole to such an extent you will not even find the NIEO as an entry in many relevant reference books. The basis of the NIEO was to have been a system of commodity agreements delivering a fair deal for Third World producers. But the US would not even accept an international coffee agreement that provided some genuine protection for poor producers. Once again, millions of people dependent on coffee production have been suffering in 2001 the consequences of market failure, while the main preoccupations of the Western media are whether or not the affluent consumer will get cheaper coffee, or the welfare of giant transnationals like Starbucks and Nestle.

For this review of the world crisis on terrorism and its relationship to globalisation, I shall take a standard dictionary definition of "terrorism": i.e. "a policy intended to strike with terror those against whom it is adopted"; while a "terrorist" is "any one who attempts to further his views by a system of coercive intimidation" ("The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary").The semantics of terrorism are highly controversial, both academically and politically - so far as these can be distinguished! (e.g. see the chapter on 'Terrorism' by Conor Gearty in "The Future Now: Predicting the 21st Century", Phoenix, 1998/99). In the past, a most ironic source of tension within the macho mateship of the US and Britain has been the fact of Irish-American funding and support for Irish Republican Army terrorism, and the soft attitude of the US government on this particular matter.

After the debacle and disillusionment of the Vietnam War for the US, it became the urgent task of hawkish hardliners within the American foreign policy system to develop what they saw as an effective military strategy that would best match their country's commercial imperatives. They worked to try and overcome what was called the "Vietnam Syndrome", a perceived widespread reluctance to engage American military forces in direct action overseas. Under the Reagan/Bush Administrations, the "Vietnam Syndrome" was redressed for the hawks, at least to a considerable degree, with the culmination of militarist resurgence in the 1991 Gulf War.

On taking office in 1981 Reagan's Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, had lamented that: "The escalating setbacks to our interests abroad, increasing lawlessness and terrorism, and the so-called wars of liberation are putting in jeopardy our ability to influence world events constructively and assure access to raw materials", especially in the Middle East (Time, 16/3/81, p17). Moreover, the Administration's "principal human rights objective" was broadcast by Haig as combatting terrorism (ibid, p9). In 2001 what has changed since, other than the supposed source of the threat? Back then it was supposed to be Soviet-sponsored terrorism - now it is terrorism arising from maverick Muslim states or extremist movements. What has in fact changed so significantly, as well, is that the US and the West can no longer blame enemies external to the Middle Eastern and South West Asian region. US/Western policies have obviously been destabilising this whole area. The other major related change is that whereas the alleged threat of Soviet-sponsored terrorism was very largely an artifact of far Right propaganda there is some reality to the latest brand of terrorist danger. America's conflict with the Third World has finally struck back home on its own soil.

From support for death squad killings and torture throughout Latin America to Israeli attacks on Lebanon, from the secret bombing of Cambodia to the suppression of the Kurds in Turkey, American foreign policy has continually exacted its own terrorist toll and seeded "endless enemies" for the future, to use the phrase of Jonathan Kwitny (of the Wall Street Journal! - see his "Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World", 1984, Penguin). The horrendous attack on the World Trade Center in New York cost about 5,000 lives. Yet certain comparisons can be very enlightening. Suharto's takeover in Indonesia is an especially noteworthy case. Starting in late 1965 US embassy officials in Indonesia checked off the some 5,000 names on a priority death list that they and the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had supplied to General Suharto's military intelligence as the victims were eliminated in the genocide of Communists, Leftists and other groups being conducted throughout the country ("The New Rulers of the World: A Special Report by John Pilger" *, 2001, screened on TV1, 10/10/01; "The Indonesian Killings of 1965-1966: Studies from Java and Bali", ed. Robert Cribb, Monash Paper on Southeast Asia, no.21, 1990, p7). *See review elsewhere in this issue. Ed.

The CIA had planned and implemented, with British and probably other Western help - certainly complicity (including NZ) - a series of massacres during 1965-69 that accounted for possibly over one million lives. Suharto's corrupt regime and Western profits were founded on this slaughter. What seems quite astonishing today was the brazenly open celebration of this mass murder by key elements of the Western media. For instance, an issue of Time (15/7/66; see also "The New Rulers of the World") had a picture of Suharto, the West's Pol Pot, on its cover with the caption "Vengeance with a Smile", accompanied by articles and pictures about the massacres spelling out that all this was the "The West's best news for years in Asia"; while the New York Times' leading political writer, James Reston, wrote glowingly about the genocide as "A Gleam of Light in Asia" (NYT, 19/6/66). Extraordinary stuff which clearly reveals the meaning of terrorism when done for capitalist benefit. Probably the most comparable covert mass slaughter perpetrated by Western agency was President Nixon's carpet bombing of part of neutral Cambodia, which CIA documents show killed about 600,000 people and led to the Khmer Rouge takeover (John Pilger interview, Radio NZ, 22/9/01). These episodes decisively demonstrate the basic historical hypocrisy of Western concern for human rights - something that people in the Middle East in 2001 see happening daily.

As revealed by former CIA agent Ralph McGehee, the US (and British) terrorist and disinformation covert operation in Indonesia 1965-69 served as the model for death squad repression in Vietnam, Chile, El Salvador, etc. President George W. Bush's and Prime Minister Tony Blair's ideas on good and evil have very deep roots. Later, Suharto went on to kill another 200,000 people in East Timor, invading in 1975, again with Western blessing. During 1965-69 in Indonesia, Muslim forces were mobilised to help in Suharto's slaughter of US/British opponents. Currently, however, radical Muslim groups in Indonesia are threatening Westerners and Western interests.

Meantime, in the Middle East, Western trade sanctions imposed on Iraq continue to take the lives of Iraqi children. In 2000, when UN official Dennis Halliday, chief of relief operations, had resigned in disgust over the US/British sanctions programme, there was a flurry of interest in the Western media and then any concerns soon faded. After all, the victims are not white. Halliday denounced the sanctions policy as "genocide" - a whole generation was being damaged, a society destroyed. Altogether, well over one million people have died due to the sanctions, on top of the 200,000 Iraqis killed in the 1991 Gulf War. 5,000 children have been dying a month with UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund) statistics indicating that the death rate for under five year old children had doubled in ten years. In fact, between 1991-1998 half a million children died unnecessarily. Yet Clinton's Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, openly declared that it was worth these children dying to contain Saddam Hussein. For the American government, the ends justify the means. This is a fascist type policy of the most despicable sort and yet the rest of the West has gone along with it. Fanatical extremists like those who attacked the World Trade Center rationalise their own atrocities in the same way. As with US and other Western obstruction of any meaningful UN intervention in the dreadful Rwandan massacres of 1994, the sanctions programme on Iraq reeks of death control for the world's poor.

Corporate globalisation is driving us deeper into resource wars. The Bush Administration is packed with Republican hawks who have very close connections with the oil and energy industries. In an excellent summary of the "Crude Reality" of oil and blood politics, Gordon Campbell has incisively indicated the more covert and substantial US aim behind toppling the Taliban regime in Afghanistan - to gain the cheapest and most convenient access to "the oil and gas rich Caspian/Causcusus regions" (Listener, 13/10/01, p23; for background on this, see Covert Action Quarterly 69, Spring/Summer 2000, also reviewed in Watchdog 96, April 2001). The US and Britain are blatantly moving to put a pliable, dependent government in place. Having once helped initiate/coordinate a protest at the Soviet Embassy, in Wellington, just after the 1979 Russian invasion, I see in 2001 a country that is still tragically torn apart by superpower politics. As Big Oil gets an even tighter grip on so much of the US foreign policy agenda, the American nation state is being reforged further into its coercive arm. With about 25 years' production of world oil left, and gas designated to be the main replacement fuel, the Middle East and Central Asia will remain regions of prime international interest; and the US is determined to call the shots.

The Bush family Presidential dynasty is the very epitome of the US military industrial complex. In its so-called "war on terrorism", the plutocratic, militarist set who run American society want to bludgeon the rest of the planet's peoples into globalised conformity. Australasia was coming into line even before the events of September 11. Both NZ and Australia have been eagerly seeking closer economic integration with the US. Australia is currently allying itself as much as it can to the superpower through both economic and military commitments. It will aid the American "Star Wars" missile defence shield system and work more closely on submarine technology. NZ’s Foreign Minister, Phil Goff, has acknowledged that "Australia might feel they had an advantage because of their relatively closer defence relationship with the US" (Press, 13/8/01). While Goff denied that "NZ's nuclear free stance" was proving a problem for the American Administration, it is inevitable that any free trade deal with a ultra-hardline US in these times will sooner or later mean the end of our nuclear freedom - and as well any other meaningful freedoms, including good environmental protection, labour standards, public safety and food safety provisions, public welfare and health systems, etc.

Capitalist forces are using the "war on terrorism" to try and bulldoze forward the programme for globalisation. Unfettered capitalism, so much the cause of the world's present troubles, is the US/British prescription and in practice the NZ government buys into it totally, whatever noises are made, since the eventual endgame is so very, very clear. Global Rogernomics is to reign and NZ to become a virtual mini-US state. A group in the American Congress is keenly promoting a free trade agreement between the US and NZ, as are various NZ business groups, including the new Trade Liberalisation Network. Shortly after September 11, NZ businessmen in the US were calling for NZ to be seen doing more in the "war on terrorism", to stand shoulder to shoulder with the US in promoting freedom worldwide - otherwise we would later suffer from US discrimination. To be sure, Prime Minister Helen Clark was practically crawling to President Bush at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference in China, in October 2001, in order to get a free trade deal. She has been talking trade and war, and signalling a new relationship with the US (Press, 22/10/01). Clark is strutting and smiling while the people of Afghanistan are dying.

Influential strategists like Australian Alan Carroll, connected to the American hard Right, are busy on the APEC scene, pulling strings in NZ. Carroll is the businessman who, in association with a proposed ANZUS* think tank, once suggested threats to the NZ dollar over our nuclear free stance (NZ Times, 1 & 8/9/85). He has been linked to the CIA and was accused of suspect activities in the 1982 Fijian general election. Meantime, Thatcherite business columnist, Fran O'Sullivan, has called on Helen Clark to rejoin ANZUS to curry favour with the Bush Administration in getting a free trade deal, using the terrorism crisis to do so (NZ Herald, 17/9/01). This echoes a proposal previously made in 1989 by the Heritage Foundation, once President's Reagan special think tank, and pushed again publicly in early 1990s, to the effect that the first Bush Administration should offer NZ a free trade agreement as a step toward mending the rift over the ANZUS alliance (Dominion, 22/7/91; Press, 22/7/91). By 1993 the Pentagon had started exploring the use of mechanisms in the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in order to form a military force to intervene in regional conflicts, and of course, suppress terrorism. These days, trade and war are going very much hand in hand. NZ APEC spokespeople have made it plain that a free trade agreement between the US and NZ would mean NZ's virtual incorporation into the US politico-economic system as "English speaking" peoples rally together across the world (e.g. Radio NZ, 23/10/01). *ANZUS – the 1951 military treaty between Australia, NZ and the US. The US unilaterally suspended NZ from it, in 1986, as punishment for NZ’s nuclear free policy. It still exists between Australia and the US. Indeed, Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, was in the US for the 50^th anniversary celebrations, at the time of the September 11 attacks. But as far as New Zealand is concerned, it is dead. Ed.

At the same time, World Trade Organisation (WTO) Director General, Mike Moore, and other key agents of globalisation have been pressing hard for a new negotiating Round in the WTO at its meeting in Qatar in November 2001. However, many developing countries, "feeling they have not gained as much as expected from greater freedom of trade, oppose the launching of a new Round of trade liberalisation negotiations - something rich States strongly advocate" (Press, 13/8; 27/8; & 19/9/01). "Many poor countries" are contending "that they lost more than they gained from the previous 1986-1994 Uruguay Round of market-opening measures" (ibid, 13/8/01). As a bloc, the Third World is very dissatisfied over "the thorny issue of the implementation of agreements from the Uruguay Round . . ." (ibid, 1/8/01). Aileen Kwa, a policy analyst with Focus on the Global South, has again revealed the "ugly power politics" in the WTO negotiations with the Secretariat headed by Moore at the centre of the manipulating. Apparently Moore has been throwing his weight around so much that an African delegate for one of the least developed countries (LDCs) has posed the question as to why Moore is "allowed to behave like a member [state]"?! In carrying out his mandate for the US and the European Union (EU), Mike has been working as usual to effectively sideline the concerns of the majority of developing countries, and shape the WTO agenda for a new Round to fit corporate objectives (Focus on the Global South, 19/10/01 - aileenkwa@yahoo.com). Most developing countries do not want a new Round just like they did not want the Uruguay Round but the big boys are acting tough.

The contradictions of late capitalism are really starting to bite, with the overwhelming one coming to be that between the corporate image of free trade/investment, and the reality it ultimately embodies. For its proponents, free trade is supposed to express a world knitted together by benign economic interaction in competitive yet complementary enterprise. At the most obvious level, then, is the question of how such trade and investment are to flourish in a world at "war with terrorism", plagued with a constant preoccupation with security matters? While the arms industry might benefit and prolong the military Keynesianism which has been a critical factor for some major Western economies, the sort of global climate involved will be highly unsettling and punitively costly in the longer term for so many other commercial activities - indeed, generally disruptive for trade/investment, let alone multilateral cooperation on world problems. At the recent APEC conference in Shanghai the terrorism issue overshadowed economic matters.

There are lots of uncertainties and confusion at present and increased protectionism is a possible response. Yet pressure is still mounting in certain quarters for rapid action on freer trade and investment, especially as economic problems worsen. US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick has actually proclaimed that the way to defeat Osama bin Laden is to grant Bush "fast-track" negotiating authority for trade treaties (Observer, 14/10/01). Fast-tracking such treaties circumvents any democratic scrutiny. Similarly, Pilger has pointed out how the British government is playing the same game, trying to accelerate "Western imperial power" under the transparent pretence of offering the poor access to developed country markets in this time of crisis (New Statesman, 15/10/01). At a deeper level, as we have seen, globalisation actually works to generate violent resistance and ultimately, at worst, mass indiscriminate terrorism. Moreover, military and covert operations to counter this terrorism create in turn all kinds of future problems and uncertainties, and unpredicted (or certainly unplanned) outcomes. The ever persistent human folly of it all is neatly summed up by the recurring phrase of Kurt Vonnegut's fine anti-war novel, "Slaughterhouse-Five" - "so it goes . . .".

One legacy of the 1991 Gulf War has been the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia, providing the main reason behind Osama bin Laden's hate for the US. As many have remarked, too, bin Laden was earlier trained, funded and supported as a CIA asset during Afghanistan war with the Soviet Union. Indeed, he was sent to Afghanistan as a semi-official representative of the Saudi regime. Later, the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), in association with the CIA, fostered the growth of the Taliban and their subsequent takeover of the government of Afghanistan. CIA participation is said to have come when "US oil giant UNOCAL stepped in, proposing to build a $US3 billion pipeline to carry Turkmen gas to South Asia - via Afghanistan - . . . (Press, 21/9/01); and, " . . . until 1998, UNOCAL had led a consortium planning" this pipeline which led out through India (Listener, 13/10/01, p23). Then the US realigned its Afghanistan commitment, trying to assassinate bin Laden following the 1998 terrorist attacks on US embassies in East Africa. President Bush has unleashed the CIA, giving it "new leeway" on covert operations (Press, 23/10/01).

Even before the momentous events on September 11, the CIA had been aiding the Northern Alliance in its civil war against the Taliban regime. The Agency is always careful to follow a maxim of a former deputy director, the late Dr Ray Cline, that, as far as possible, "whites" should not be seen fighting "coloured" people without assistance from other "coloureds". Not only is this a most useful "divide and rule" tactic which also helps protect Americans, and so constantly employed by the Agency, it helps obscure the underlying nature of the wider conflict with the Third World. In the Afghanistan situation, the CIA's game is to get more Afghans fighting Afghans - Muslim against Muslim. Ironically, the tangled web woven by the CIA in Pakistan, using the ISI over the years as an arms conduit into Afghanistan, not only spilled arms and instability back into Pakistan ushering in the military coup there, but left an intelligence organisation which still has various ties, however unofficial, with the Taliban and bin Laden's network.

The irrationality of the Western military-industrial complex is driven by a world vision of empire that can somehow accommodate deepening conflict - war without end - with sustained affluence from endlessly expanding trade and investment. In seeking to deal to its enemies (both existing and potential), the US has deliberately fostered an "age of terror", and yet President Bush says the coming times will be instead an "age of liberty". NZ's own Mike Moore said as much in his own free trade manifesto. At the same time as Mike extolled the glorious "brave new world" brought about by free trade, he warned darkly about terrorism and asserted that: "In response to these threats, security will soon be the fastest growing industry outside technology and entertainment" ("A Brief History of the Future", 1998, p28). As Qatar, on the Persian Gulf, was the venue for the WTO conference in November 2001, security was certainly very high on the WTO agenda.

The American Administration is trying to portray its "war on terrorism" as a war that is not targeted at the Islamic world, yet its own position and impetus, along with the dynamics of the new conflict, are drawing it into the "clash of civilisations" scenario. A Rightwing British press article, reproduced in the Press (10/10/01), supported the comments of Italy's Prime Minister, the conservative billionaire Silvio Berlusconi, who has praised what he called the "superiority" of Western civilisation over Islamic civilisation. The article made unfavourable comparisons of Islamic "theocracies" with Western secular democracies, and saw the "conflict" between these societies in this regard as an issue on which there is little room for compromise. So Western ideologues are already broadening the "war on terrorism" into a contest between civilisations whatever Bush and Blair might proclaim. In fact, Berlusconi openly declared that "he hopes the West conquers Islam" (Press, 28/9/01). These are certainly dangerous times.

With all the talk by the American government of fighting terrorism worldwide into the foreseeable future, the politics are rapidly getting very complicated, messy, and volatile. Some Arab nations have already warned that they will not help the US if the superpower starts to target groups like Hizbollah, Hamas or Islamic Jihad (Press, 25/9/01). A short time ago the West was vigorously critical of Russia for its brutal repression of Chechnya. Russian support for the West is now dependent on a sympathetic understanding of Russia's policy towards this part of its territory. For sure, the Russians have suffered similar terrorist attacks, from much closer to home, and have pointed out the connections of bin Laden's network with the Chechen insurgents. Like the Russian rulers, Chinese leaders similarly want to keep the lid on any Muslim or other minority rebellion. Meanwhile, Pakistan, until recently on the US boycott list, continues to foster insurgency in Kashmir where terrorist activity by Muslim groups agitates India - and where there is a Muslim majority. Whereas Pakistan has closed down one group on American insistence, it considers the insurgents generally as "freedom fighters". Up to September 11, the US had been favouring India on this issue.

In treating the issue of terrorism, the Western media have devised many techniques to divert attention away from the causes of this phenomenon as it threatens the West. The main function of the capitalist media system, besides "news", is to protect the dominant power structure, both nationally and internationally, and its economic foundations around the globe. So the socio-economic roots of Middle Eastern terrorism under Western dominance, and its historical context, are regularly played down. At the crudest level, conservative propaganda mainly resorts to psychological explanations, even Freudian-style motivations. For example, journalist/author Bryan Appleyard, a British far Right ideologue, attributes the September 11 attacks and even criticism of US policies to: "anti-Americanism" which springs from "dark wells of malevolence"; "a dark combination of hate the father or leader, and infantile fantasies of rebellion and control"; "vicious, irrational ideology"; "ingratitude"; "wilful, infantile loathing"; "a hatred of the elites"; the "banal rhetoric of envy", etc. ("Why do they hate America?", Press, 1/10/01).

History and context are dismissed by Appleyard to the extent that the US is portrayed as only a terrorist victim and the wider conflict, echoing President Bush and co, as "a confrontation between civilisation and an atavistic savagery that has no time for the delicate ways of life we have built" (ibid). "Civilisation" is becoming a code word or "euphemism", as Pilger indicates, for imperialism. In actuality, Appleyard's own commitment to this "delicate" way of life is expressed by his "anti-pluralistic, anti-egalitarian, indeed, anti-tolerant attitude", strongly opposed to the modern democratic liberalism he sees founded on scientific thought (see his attack on science and his consequent identity with what he takes to be his spiritual "culture" in "Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man", Picador, 1992, pp 249/50). And this is without bothering to take stock of his apologetics for the "delicate" use of US and British power in foreign places.

Appleyard's rambling, lengthy Press article is full of empty rant and bombast but for the Right the appeal to blind emotion, to patriotism, to unreason, and to Western identity is everything in order to carry on the "war on terrorism". His diatribe is representative of this prevalent mode of propaganda, including its much more subtle forms. For Appleyard the US "has always been trying to do the right thing", despite having "made terrible mistakes in the Middle East". While he purports to be against any war of civilisations, his article sees "anti-Americanism" as having "become the savage reflex of the entire region" and, furthermore, that this is all "the result of cynical manipulation by appalling Arab governments and extremists who wish to relaunch a medieval war of civilisations between Christianity and Islam" (Press, 1/10/01). Appleyard is truly another exponent of Western conflict with "fanatical theocrats".

How many of these "appalling governments" the West has actually been propping up, Appleyard does not say; nor how many have been the outcome of previous Western interventions, e.g. Iran and Iraq, a couple no doubt of Appleyard's such governments. However, he does acknowledge one of the US's "terrible mistakes" in that: "In the 1950s and 1960s, the US and her allies worked to subvert (sic) the secular Arab nationalist power of President Nasser of Egypt by backing Islamicist groups. These groups started out pro-American and became anti. The unwelcome result was the destruction of nationalism and the creation of the powerful religious movement that now haunts Arab politics" (ibid). Oh dear, a really fundamental "mistake" - or rather a fundamental consequence of capitalist intrusion?

In the US and elsewhere in the West, there is an intimate working relationship between the corporate sector, the mainstream media, and the State. With the huge concentration of the Western, especially American, mass media in just a few giant corporations like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, and CNN, the US military industrial complex can freely blitzkrieg world audiences. Television and newspaper coverage has poured out a torrent of information, opinion and propaganda ever since the terrorist attacks on the US. Television New Zealand, which virtually operates as an arm of corporate globalisation anyway, is assiduous in its presentation of the US/British viewpoint. Even locally, coverage has been quite unprecedented in slick presentation. For instance, the Christchurch Press, long cultivated by the US Information Agency and part of the Murdoch empire, has expounded the American perspective in vast quantity and detail, all embellished with symbolic logo (comprising the Statue of Liberty, American flag and "terrorist" portrait) and standard banner headline of "War on Terrorism". More generally, the "Establishment" viewpoint is reflected in the type of "expert" and outlook most often paraded for media comment. Dr Paul Buchanan of Auckland University, a former Pentagon analyst, seems to have become the resident expert on TV1's Late Edition, an apt reflection of the colonial mindset. Some other examples of this pervasive syndrome can easily be highlighted from specialist comment cited in connection with the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.

One frequently cited terrorist expert is Brian Jenkins, the top authority at the Rand Corporation, a private, self-proclaimed "independent" think tank mostly funded in actuality by the US Air Force, the US Army, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Essentially the function of think tanks like the Rand Corporation in Washington is to formulate strategic policy and options for the Pentagon and other agencies of the American Administration, in conjunction with the big defence and security contractor firms. Rand was very influential in developing US support in the 1960s for authoritarian, military-ruled (or enforced) regimes in the Third World as in Vietnam, Iran and Saudi Arabia, and so the development of counter-insurgency programmes, i.e. terrorist oppression for the most part. Such regimes were touted as bringing "modernisation" to countries deemed backward. This conveniently served a number of US State and corporate purposes, not the least being those of the arms industry.

Brian Jenkins was interviewed on Radio New Zealand (20/9/01) as an "expert on terrorism" about what should be the right response to Osama bin Laden and co. Jenkins certainly knows something about terrorism. "In fact, for many years Jenkins has been actively involved in formulating terrorist strategies for his own Government. Having served in the Green Berets, Jenkins became a counter-insurgency specialist at Rand, writing and advising on the best ways to defeat America's insurgent enemies in Guatemala, El Salvador, and elsewhere" ("The Terrorism Industry: The Experts and Institutions that Shape our View of Terror" by Edward Herman & Gerry O'Sullivan, Pantheon, p151; and that was written in 1989). Jenkins was an important adviser and apologist for State terrorism in Guatemala and El Salvador as well as a key strategist for President Reagan's favourite bunch of "freedom fighters", the murderous Contras in the US's war on Nicaragua. The Contras accounted for over 30,000 civilian dead. In the context of the Western terrorism industry, analysts Herman and O'Sullivan actually consider Jenkins one of the "moderates"! Although Jenkins obviously supports what he denounces as "terrorism" - i.e. according to his own definition of the term - so long as it is targeted at US adversaries, he is not as ideologically rigid in his presentations as some other experts. In this way, of course, he may be even more insidious in peddling propaganda.

In praising the study by Herman and O'Sullivan on the Western terrorism industry cited above, Archbishop Desmond Tutu has commented: "We have wondered why it was that Dr Savimbi's UNITA * in Angola and the Contras in Nicaragua were 'freedom fighters', lionised especially by President Reagan's White House and the conservative Rightwing of the United States of America, whereas our liberation movements such as the African National Congress and the Pan African Congress were invariably castigated as 'terrorist movements' . . .We had our suspicions that there was a coherent, well thought out policy by the West to exercise a selective morality" (from a quote on the cover of "The Terrorism Industry"). Archbishop Tutu went on to endorse Herman and O'Sullivan's book as clearly demonstrating that "the terrorism industry has been very much needed in the West as a cover for its own activities and crimes. It is frightening to see how Western media have been coopted in this nefarious enterprise" - and a "chilling" subject to learn in detail (see also Herman's superb study, "The Real Terror Network", South End, 1982). * UNITA, headed by Jonas Savimbi, was an Angolan "liberation movement" that fought in the interests of the US and apartheid South Africa in the civil war that followed the 1970s’ independence from Portugal. Today, still headed by Savimbi, it continues to wage war against the Angolan government. The decades-long war in Angola has left one of the highest death tolls in recent history. It is ignored by the Western media, because no American interests are any longer at stake. The African National Congress (ANC) has gone from being a "terrorist" group to being the elected government of South Africa, and the favourite business partner of the very same transnationals that profited so handsomely from the apartheid system that the ANC fought for generations. Ed.

Another terrorism expert quoted in the mass media soon after the September 11 attacks was Professor Paul Wilkinson, director of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism, University of St Andrews, Scotland. Professor Wilkinson warned that NZ "is not immune to the terrorism that brought death and destruction to New York" (Press, 19/9/01). Since NZ has been one of the handful of countries to almost immediately commit its military to America's campaign against Afghanistan - in the form of Special Air Service (SAS) soldiers - it must certainly be acknowledged that the current Government has substantially increased this risk, whatever scare-mongering Wilkinson may have been doing to try and draw NZ deeper into the US-led "war on terrorism". Wilkinson was quoted at some length on the possible threat to NZ security, including the suggestion that "New Zealand is a potential haven for terrorists wanting to set up international networks" - another Afghanistan perhaps?! (ibid).

Professor Wilkinson "has been one of the leading figures in Western terrorology" and a regular source on terrorism for the Western media in general ("The Terrorism Industry", p176). A former Royal Air Force officer, Wilkinson is an effusive enthusiast for the British armed forces who, naturally, are always striving for "stability" and "order" in contrast to Third World "sudden explosions of anti-Western fury and hate" (ibid, p177). No doubt, Wilkinson would have seen the British warship escort of some of Suharto's death squads to new killing fields at the time of the 1965-66 Indonesian coup as bringing order and stability to this particular country ("The New Rulers of the World"). After all, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, the then British Ambassador to Indonesia, recommended "a little shooting as an essential preliminary to effective change" (ibid). As with Appleyard-style ideologues, for Wilkinson and co British and American forces only ever make "mistakes".

Herman and O'Sullivan also point out Wilkinson's "corrupt use of sources", again in line with Wilkinson's political bias (pp177-83). A revealing tendency is Professor Wilkinson's penchant for deliberate perversions of history such as that the massacres of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila camps in Lebanon during September 16-18, 1982, demonstrated the "inability of the Israelis . . . to protect them" (ibid, p180). Israeli authorities, of course, had allowed the Phalangist militiamen into the Sabra and Shatila camps to murder the refugees (up to about 3,500 dead), including a large number of women and children. This has been very well established and the present Prime Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, who has a long terrorist history (just like his Palestinian counterpart, Yasser Arafat), was deeply implicated in these massacres.

One highly significant and regular media source of expert opinion on terrorism and strategic affairs in general is another Washington-based think tank, the Georgetown University Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). This outfit is a particular favourite of Radio NZ. To be sure, Herman and O'Sullivan regard the CSIS as "the most important of the terrorism industry institutes" (ibid, p81). Its most infamous representative with a NZ connection has been the late Dr. Cline, who tried to set up an ANZUS think tank in NZ at the time of the crisis over visits by US nuclear warships in the mid-1980s. A combination of some independent, searching journalism (a most rare thing these days!) and peace movement agitation, especially by the NZ Nuclear Free Zone Committee, obliged Cline to call off his venture as originally envisaged.

The very Rightwing CSIS has been closely associated with the CIA and has often promoted grossly inaccurate propaganda. More perniciously, it has indulged in anti-democratic interference in other countries. CSIS even played an important role in the destabilisation of the Allende government in Chile in 1973 and the subsequent Pinochet takeover * (ibid, pp82/83). In March 2001, NZ Radio's Morning Report interviewed a CSIS member who backed President Bush air strike on Iraq (18/2/01). Among the points this "expert" cited in justification of the military action was the fact that the Middle East has two thirds of the world's proven oil reserves. *In 1973, the Chilean military, headed by General Pinochet, and backed by the US (with the CIA to the fore) violently overthrew an elected Leftwing government, killing President Salvador Allende. Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship held power until 1990, when civilian rule was restored. He retains immunity from prosecution for crimes against humanity. And the date of the coup? September 11. Ed.

With the US and Britain (and evidently NZ) prepared to wage its "war on terrorism" at the expense of Afghanistan and its people, no matter what the human cost, there continues to be a lot of indications of mounting support among Muslims worldwide for bin Laden's view of the wider conflict, whatever reservations might be held about specific things that have been done. Like the Christian fundamentalism which is so strong in the US, Muslim fundamentalism represents a religious revivalism that seeks the roots of faith. In a world disrupted by globalisation: "Muslim fundamentalists try to rally the alienated and underprivileged on the basis of Islam. They present it as a religion of justice and equity and decry the current ruling elite as unjust, unIslamic and corrupt which deserves to be overthrown, or at the very least replaced non-violently, by true believers" ("Islamic Fundamentalism" by Dilip Hiro, Paladin, 1989, p274). Bin Laden's appeal to the Muslim masses on such burning issues as the question of a Palestinian state and Western sanctions on Iraq projects a message that makes sense for many.

The massive, ferocious violence of current US/British reaction, and the humanitarian disaster in Afghanistan will serve to spawn terrorist cells in the years to come. With winter upon Afghanistan, and infrastructure, communications and transport disrupted, a war in process, the afflictions of drought and the failure to plant crops: all this in an already ruined and destitute country points to calculated genocide by Bush and Blair. French military intelligence indicates that the Taliban can draw on "the support of most of the population" (Press, 3/10/01). Although at odds with such an assessment, former Afghan foreign minister Najibullah Lafraie, now living in NZ, has said that American attacks on Afghanistan are driving ordinary people there to "support the Taliban hard-line leadership" (Press, 26/10/01). By hitting tremendously hard in such military actions as "Enduring Freedom", the US message is always to demonstrate that one Westerner's life is worth 100 in the Third World; and by enforced starvation of the Taliban population base, a covert silent war, the Bush/Blair duo can hope to wear down resistance. Certainly, a strategy of genocide is Noam Chomsky's assessment of the policy adopted by the US and Britain (Radio NZ, 29/9/01). Even the Northern Alliance has said that a war is not necessary to capture bin Laden (Press, 8/10/01). Coordinated outside pressure could do it.

While a wide range of commentators have stressed the glaringly obvious point about Western violence spawning terrorism, the imperialist mindset will remain inflexible if world opinion is not sufficiently mobilised in opposition. The greatest danger is the likelihood of Muslim extremism and capitalist extremism feeding off each other. Irish statesman, diplomat and writer, Conor Cruise O'Brien, was someone haunted by war with the Third World and, indeed, someone who can be accused of having helped to promote it. He had a kind of "decline of the Roman empire" perspective. O'Brien supposedly stood for the values of the Enlightenment but saw the future, about which he thought we could do little in constructive terms, as the affluent West (or North, i.e. industrialised nations) in the form of a "closed and guarded palace", increasingly under attack from Third World (South) aggression, most notably by Muslim extremists ("On the Eve of the Millennium: The Future of Democracy through an Age of Unreason", Free Press, 1994).

For O'Brien the US was his hero nation but he feared fascism as likely to rise again in Europe. In truth, there has been a Rightwing revival of open theorising on the global war scenario of rich against poor, white against coloured. French politician and first chairperson of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Jacques Attali, has pictured Muslim immigrants as the barbarians at the gates; and his "image of protracted war with the South is strikingly similar to the one outlined in 1988 by the US Presidential Commission on Long Term Strategy's Discriminate Deterrence . . ." (Dark Victory", p108). Likewise, in 2001, the US Space Command's documents make very clear the American goal of trying to suppress the world's poor. Rogue or "backlash" states are a continuing prime US concern (see e.g. Foreign Affairs, March/April, 1994). Ex-Pentagon analyst Dr. Paul Buchanan advocates that the US adopt a "street fighter's" approach in its "war on terrorism", discarding any ethical concerns if it is to win this war (Morning Report, Radio NZ, 29/10/01). So even the veneer of civilisation is starting to wear thin as the predatory logic of capitalism is pursued - evil is to be met with evil. How about the Indonesian genocide of 1965-69, Paul? - is that the sort of street fighting you want? Buchanan ought to study his own American history more closely. But, significantly, fascist-type policies are again being unashamedly articulated.

As the West's dirty warfare becomes more open, the more obviously the values that the West claims to stand for will be corrupted. The "death squad", genocidal culture of covert action threatens to bring the mindset of the national security state home, as well as overseas. A new social Darwinism is on the rise. As in Vietnam the practice grew of destroying a village to save it, so the great values of the Enlightenment could be destroyed in order to save them.

As the US's "war on terrorism" continues to dominate the international political agenda, the public relations campaign of the Western terrorism industry will reach even greater levels of organisation and propaganda. With all the confirmed disinformation in the past by the CIA and other Western spy agencies, monitoring of Leftists, and even "dirty work" within Western countries, we have very real grounds for concern for the future of individual freedom and civil liberties. At the same time, Rightwing elements are striving to crank up the very policies that have brought about the crisis for us all in the first place. Given, too, that there is now some substance to possible threats, and the corresponding creation of a climate of fear, paranoia and uncertainty with its enormous scope for cynical manipulation under the veil of secrecy in the name of national security, here is the excuse and opportunity that the hard Right has always been seeking to stifle its Leftist opposition.

Locally, for instance, a sub-headline in the Press - over another British Rightwing article - has darkly warned that: "As well as the enemy, the far Left at home needs to be faced" (24/9/01). The Press's 'Right On' columnist, Neil Birss, whose ideas of the free market are epitomised by Nestle and News Corp, and who specialises in Appleyard-style vitriol and empty rhetoric, has predictably suggested that: "We may have no choice but to trade a slice of democracy for more security" (Press, 29/9/01). This sort of stuff can be placed in context of the suggestion by US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick that anti-globalisation dissidents might come into the same category as the Al Qaeda network (Observer, 14/10/01). The spectre of McCarthyism* is again raising its head as the criminalisation of dissent comes further up on the corporate agenda. Stresses within American society are surfacing too with the anthrax scare being attributed to neo-Nazi hate groups (Press, 30/10.01). * US Senator Joe McCarthy, with his inquisitions and deranged accusations, became synonymous with the anti-Communist witchhunts and hysteria in the 1950s. Ed.

It was very significant that in past training exercises the NZ armed services adopted the terminology of targeting "dissidents" (Peace Researcher [first series], Special Issue: "NZ Ready Reactionaries Practise Repression", 29, August 1991; see also 30, December 1991). Starting in the 1980s, this approach came under the rubric of fighting "an updated notional enemy" (Christchurch Star, 8/11/82). Information publicly provided about the military exercises showed that this enemy is poor, "coloured', and troubled by resource and energy shortages as well as population pressures. The exercises often involved war with a mythical country of this character by the name of Musoria (for detailed analysis see the Peace Researchers cited above). In 2001, as the West's most belligerent powers pound Afghanistan further into rubble, with the world's richest country attacking one of the poorest, the meaning of the Musorian resource war scenario is clearly visible. Its domestic implications should be seen just as clearly before it is too late.

As we have noted, the US is looking to eliminate its enemies across the globe. Propaganda is pouring out to portray the Taliban as bad as can be imagined, and bin Laden's terrorist network as vastly, diabolically dangerous. Some gullible journalists and radio talkback hosts have been spinning wild stories, e.g. how bin Laden has 20 nuclear bombs; how he is responsible for mass killings in Algeria and virtually everywhere else; that there is a terrorist cell in Auckland, etc. On his visit to Aotearoa/NZ in 1986, Ralph McGehee described how it was the boast of the CIA that it could play the world's media like a giant Wurlitzer (super organ). There has never been such scope for it to call the tune.

While it is easy to see a downward spiral in the future, we should be aware, more than ever today, that crisis can mean opportunity. If terrorism - whether Western, Islamic, or whatever - is to be countered effectively, the international anti-globalisation movement has already laid a great platform for expansion into a genuinely anti-terrorist, peace and justice movement with signs of this developing here, as well as overseas. Even in the US resistance has begun to the war on Afghanistan and a national campaign initiated for a much more positive and constructive US foreign policy. Peace marches have been held and groups like the War Resisters' League are networking across the country. The shock of the events of September 11 may well galvanise action for a future that means hope for Afghan children and American children, for Iraqi children and for the children of Aotearoa/New Zealand. As the Texan cowboy and his rather manic British sidekick say, we have to choose whose side we are on.