Covert Action The Roots of Terrorism

Covert Action
The Roots of Terrorism
Edited by Ellen Ray and William H. Schaap
This book includes some of the best investigative journalism from Covert Action Quarterly, the most authoritative magazine in its field. The editors present a comprehensive examination of U.S. interventions from Africa, Central America, Panama and Kosovo to Iraq and Afghanistan, offering an essential background to understanding the "war against terrorism" today. Contributors include: Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, Philip Agee, Eqbal Ahmad, Diana Johnstone, Michael Chossudovsky, Jack Colhoun, Karen Talbot, William Blum and many others.
.The practical, economic forces driving resurgent imperialism-in essence unmitigated greed-are not alone enough to explain current conditions. There are more metaphysical forces at play, undercurrents of the U.S. psyche as old as the nation itself. One such theme is U.S. exceptionalism, the notion that the United States is somehow unique, somehow beyond any need for international consensus, somehow entitled to do whatever it wants. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington has pursued a policy of unilateral, world-wide military conquest, attacking and destabilizing weak "rogue" states in the name of democracy.

Another element driving this unilateralism is a form of religious fundamentalism endemic to the United States from its earliest days, the messianic notion that the United States represents God's chosen people, God's chosen system of government, God's chosen way of life: Triumphalism. In one poll, forty-six percent of the people of the United States-including the President-described themselves as "evangelical" or "born-again Christians," an astonishing figure. Many of them, and most of their shepherds, do not believe we should merely offer our God-given way of life to the other peoples of the world; we should foist our brand of democracy upon them whether they like it or not, and by military conquest if necessary, appropriating their resources as God intended. God has chosen America to cleanse the world and George W. Bush to lead that battle.

As much of the material in this book makes clear, the strongest (and often the only) ally of this new U.S. triumphalism has been the government of the State of Israel. While many of Bush's key administration figures are indeed self-professed Zionists, many others are deeply fundamentalist Christians. Any detailed analysis of the complicated philosophical underpinnings of this alliance is beyond the scope of this book, though touched upon throughout.

The influence of the Israel-firsters cannot be gainsaid. It was the Jonathan Institute, described below in our introduction to The New Red Scare, that first promoted the notion of pre-emptive and punitive strikes. As this became U.S. doctrine, it served as an ex post facto justification for Israeli policies already in place. And it was the Jonathan Institute that provided the framework for the anti-U.N. sentiment that appears to have subsumed Washington.

The impetus for this collection is two-fold. Much of the world's turmoil is in response to the upsurge in U.S. imperialism, increasingly unchecked for decades. No one can truly analyze the dramatic rise in terrorism without conceding that it is largely reactive, largely driven by one brutal ploy after another by the western powers, almost exclusively the United States. Not just invasions and wars, not just the removal of leaders distrusted by the west, not just the subversion of international institutions-but also the rape of the planet's environment, the dumping of dangerous products on the unwary of the world, and the callous disregard for the proliferation of disease and malnutrition everywhere.

For more than twenty years, CovertAction magazine reported on the relatively secret machinations of imperialism. When we began publication, few U.S. citizens even knew what the CIA was, much less what it did and had done-in stark contrast to its victims around the world. Today, much of what was done in secret in the past is done openly, and one can barely imagine what continues under cover.

The introduction to each section of this book is designed to highlight the connections between the articles and the situation today. In some cases, the connections are by analogy; in some they are simply the continuation of unfinished or interrupted game plans. In many cases, indeed, the main players are identical.