International Community: Divide and Function

The U.S. is setting the world's foreign policy agenda based on its own interests.

By Liam Bailey

For far too long the U.S. has set the foreign policy agenda, and the "international community" blindly and unquestioningly follows. But with decades of evidence that U.S. foreign policy serves nothing further than their own interests, it is time we opened our eyes and made up our own minds.

Furthermore, major organizations like the U.N, N.A.T.O, the E.U., and the Quartet are all failing miserably as peace-makers. Why? Because the U.S is impeding them from the front, determining efforts at conflict resolution based on its own interests. The "international community" backs their efforts and echoes their words. Really they should know better; the U.S using its influence to have the international community serving its interests is the root cause of most of the world's current conflicts, and one of the main reasons some of the longer-running conflicts haven't been resolved. When is it going to stop?

Part 1: Afghanistan, Al Qaeda and...

The War on Terror:

The two biggest wars of our generation have been started by the U.S. under the umbrella of the War on Terror, but they are not actually lessening terror around the world — in fact if anything they are increasing it. Just last year, a report by 16 U.S. intelligence agencies said that Iraq has become a breeding ground for Islamic radicalism and is providing a training and exercise ground for Jihadis from around the globe. Afghanistan is serving the same purpose, though perhaps on a smaller scale.

It seems, on the back of the notoriety gained from 9/11 and their endeavours in Afghanistan and Iraq, combined with the latter's legitimization of their terrorism as a battlefield war, Al Qaeda has spread terrorism and suicide bombing around the globe. I say this because of the recent spate of suicide bombings in Morocco and Somalia.

Many people believe the War on Terror is a cover for using military force to shore up control of natural resources for America's future. No one doubts that the Bush administration is one of the most conservative we have seen in the White House. The last such conservative President, who put the same weight on oil when making foreign policy decisions, was President Reagan.

Afghanistan:

It was Reagan's determination to stop the Soviet Union and end their control of strategically vital Afghanistan; rather his means of doing so that kick-started the phenomenon of Islamic extremist terror aimed at western interests. Reagan's policies included: funding the extremist of extreme Mujahideen groups, pressuring Saudi Arabia to match their level of funding, and arming the anti-Soviet Afghanistanis with the best weaponry via Pakistani intelligence.

Perhaps the two biggest mistakes were pressuring Saudi Arabia's King Fahd to the point where his intelligence chief Turki al-Faisal hired Bin Laden to recruit fighters and secure funds from rich Arabs for the Afghan Jihad, and having the U.K's Special Air Service give the Mujahideen explosives training, including how to improvise Soviet explosives captured in ambushes and recovered mines. Bin Laden kept a database of fighters recruited for the struggle. Al Qaeda is base in Arabic.

Pakistan also used U.S. dollars to build dozens of religious schools, or seminaries in the border regions. It was the U.S and Pakistan's shared aim, that the seminaries would maintain extremist teachings and provide a steady flow of Muslims to go and fight in the Afghan Jihad. Many of those religious schools remain breeding grounds for Salafist anti-western extremism to this day.

It is because of the policy of fomenting extremism to breed Jihad in Pakistani seminaries working so well that the combined forces of N.A.T.O, the U.S., and the Afghan Northern Alliance haven't fully defeated the Taliban nearly six years after they removed them from power. Piling the pressure on Pakistan's Musharraf to help deal with the problem has led to the balance being tipped, and now Pakistan's border regions are engulfed with Talibanization. The Taliban, meaning seminarian or seeker of knowledge, were raised in the seminaries in the border regions. So their support there has always been high. But now their supporters are angry at what they see as Musharraf picking the U.S. over his own people.

A few years after the Soviet withdrawal in 1994, the Taliban went forth across the border, supported by a Pakistan regime still flush with U.S. dollars and keen to install an Islamic ally in Kabul. When they achieved rapid success and took power in most of Afghanistan by 1996, they allowed the return of Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. By this time Al Qaeda was a well-known terror network that had declared war on America and their allies — in effect the "international community".

Al Qaeda:

Al Qaeda and Bin Laden weren't taken seriously by the U.S. until their attacks on U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania in 1998, and U.S.S Cole in Yemen in 2000. But Al Qaeda membership was dwindling, despite the acclaim in the extremist world for those attacks, and the anti-Americanism building in the Islamic world for years. Muslims were and are angry at the years of America supporting Israel's theft of Muslim land and other actions against the Palestinians, as well as the U.S. troops stationed in Saudi Arabia after Saddam invaded Kuwait. That deployment and its permanence after the first Gulf war ended were the main causes behind Bin Laden's (Fatwas) declarations of holy war against the U.S. The U.S. was also indirectly to blame for Saddam's invasion, and therefore the Al Qaeda Fatwa's (religious rulings), but part II will cover the Middle East.

9/11 really put Al Qaeda on the world stage. It also gave America the license to fulfill its resource hungry interests. The Taliban was putting the brakes on a massively profitable UNOCAL pipeline, and the U.S. was planning to invade but would have had trouble selling a war of aggression to Congress, the U.S. public, and the "international community". 9/11 provided justification for the invasion, which, in truth was probably necessary as Reagan's policies had turned Afghanistan into a home-base for international terrorism.

Bush declaring a "War on Terror" and then heavily bombarding and invading a Muslim country gave Al Qaeda's now notorious struggle a legitimate battlefield. It also made easier their job of manipulating events to support claims of western aggression against Muslims. This, combined with the conspiracy theories of U.S. and or Israeli complicity in the attacks, which were widely believed in the Arab world, put an end to Al Qaeda's problem with dwindling membership.

Put simply, the United States' self-serving foreign policy is directly responsible for Al Qaeda and indirectly for the Taliban being such thorns in the world's side. So why should the international community follow their lead in dealing with the threat?

Nuclear Iran: If You Can't Beat Them – Infiltrate

By Liam Bailey

The Iranian nuclear standoff is akin to a snowball rolling down a hillside, ballooning with every tumble in rhetoric. What seems clear is this: Iran will not halt nuclear enrichment as a perceived national right to nuclear power, no matter how much the U.S. ramps up the rhetoric and threats - or the UN its sanctions.

Not even negotiations will stop Iran on its pathway into the nuclear club. All the West can do is try minimizing the risk of nuclear weapons development.

But how? I’ll return to this point in a moment

Only a few weeks ago, after the first U.N. sanctions were leveled, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took great pleasure in announcing that Iran's enrichment had proceeded to "an industrial scale." The E.U., Australia, France and Russia, have cast doubt on the claim, But the likelihood of increased U.N. sanctions and the probable American response are merely increasing Iranian determination.

Faced with the likelihood of American military action, Iran has only hinted that it may suspend its enrichment program to allow negotiations to be conducted in good faith.

To this day, nobody knows whether Iran speaks the truth when saying the nuclear program is for civilian power purposes only. However, given hard-liner Ahmadinejad's world view - specifically his rhetoric of wiping Israel off the map, their regional tussle for hegemony, and Israel's sizeable nuclear arsenal - I’m forced to admit that if Iran's enrichment does reach an "industrial level", an Iranian nuclear bomb may be less than a year away.

This changes nothing. Iran's enrichment cannot be halted with the current Western approach, whether a weapons program exists or not. According to many analysts, even air strikes would only delay the process, and in doing so guarantee Iran's resurgent nuclear program focuses on developing weapons.

An invasion may succeed. At their recent meeting the UN put the military option on the table, but given conditions in Iraq, it’s unlikely that anybody would willingly send their forces there. Probably the U.S. would have to go it alone again. But the U.S. military is already overstretched, and given Hezbollah's skinning of Israel's nose in their summer war in Lebanon, the U.S. faces the humiliation of an Iranian defeat in addition to fierce domestic opposition.

So, what should be done? The first thing is removing the precondition for talks. As Iran's Mohammad Saeedi, the deputy head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation, told the ISNA news agency: "We have a superior position. We have passed the stage of setting conditions for talks. We believe that other parties should move forward based on new realities.

The reality: Iran is already enriching uranium, creeping towards industrial level, and Russia is assisting by building them a nuclear reactor, although their assistance currently appears to hang in the balance. Why would Iran stop enriching uranium to enter talks on their stopping enrichment?

President Bush can butt heads with Ahmadinejad till he's blue in the face, and coax the UN to do the same, but only until he admits that Iran is holding all the cards.  His only option is threatening or using military force. The latter is an option that nobody (bar American Neocons and Israel) wants to see.

Even if the precondition is removed and leads to negotiations on Iran's nuclear program, it is still highly unlikely that enrichment will halt. Although the release of the 15 British sailors and marines shows that Iran can be successfully negotiated, a civilian nuclear power program is their national right as a signatory to the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty.

And - the pomp and ceremony of Iran's latest announcement indicates that Ahmadinejad is instilling a sense of national pride into advances into the nuclear club. No amount of nuclear power generated by a Russian nuclear reactor, or uranium enriched outside Iran, will replace that pride.

Put simply. Neither threats, negotiations nor air strikes have any real chance of stopping enrichment, and an invasion would be disastrous for the Middle East - a region with more than enough conflict already.

I believe that negotiations should focus on ensuring a high level of Western assistance to Iran, reaching industrial level enrichment, and from there building a civilian nuclear power program. This could involve a large number of the UK and International Atomic Energy Agency's top nuclear scientists, and an equal number of "understudies". If the U.S. was excluded from the negotiations, as it was with the successful hostage diplomacy, then Iran's trust could be secured. With that, Iran is more likely to exhibit its program to observers.

With Iran already enriching uranium and advancing somewhat alarmingly, and with the low likelihood of stopping its program short of an invasion, cooperation leading to infiltration by Western interests may be the answer.

Are We Losing the War on Terror?

I wrote this article Oct. 4 2006, all articles I wrote before that can only be read at War Pages on Wordpress

Are We Losing the War on Terror

Has the level of threat changed since 9/11?

By Liam Bailey

In the aftermath of 9/11 the onslaught against Afghanistan was understandable given the atrocious attacks on the World Trade Center and the strong links with the terror networks and training camps there, which explains the relatively weak resistance to the war by the international community. Afghanistan has been a NATO concern, but because other NATO countries are reluctant to make an endless commitment of troops to a large counterinsurgency operation, it is mainly U.K. troops that have taken this responsibility. Iraq, however, is a different story.

Iraq has turned into a major concern for the U.S., Britain and the world. Not only has it replaced Afghanistan as the main haven for al-Qaeda's violent jihad, it is the ultimate example of the aggressive invasion and lengthy occupation of a Muslim country. That this should have been by the U.S., Islam's biggest enemy, completes the outrage. The U.K.'s involvement has made it Islamic enemy number two. Iraq quickly became a self-sufficient recruiting machine for terror networks, as well as the training and battleground for brainwashed jihadis worldwide.

During the Afghan war, indefinite, secret detention at Guantanamo, without charge or the right to a trial, started turning Muslims everywhere against U.S. and U.K. foreign policy, showing our governments' bigotry against Muslims purely on the basis of their appearance, religion and location. The thousands of innocent Iraqis killed as "collateral damage" in the shock and awe bombing campaign continued to turn Muslims against the U.S. and U.K., as did all the atrocities committed by U.S. forces, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Fallujah, as well as who knows how many other smaller incidents.

The War on Terror has had some successes -- the U.S. Patriot Act abolished the bureaucratic prohibition on the sharing of intelligence among the various U.S. agencies at the front in the fight for homeland security. The removal of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan rid al-Qaeda of its state-based operational center, but the government installed by the U.S. has had to struggle against the warlords, and Taliban forces have reemerged. In Iraq, the defeat of Saddam Hussein by coalition forces rid the country and region of a vicious and cruel regime as well as eliminating a potential state sponsor of terrorism and a source of WMD. Continued instability, however, has made the country a breeding ground for extremism and anti-U.S./U.K. terrorism, as the recent report by 16 U.S. intelligence agencies showed.

The War on Terror has also led directly and indirectly to the capture or death of an estimated two-thirds of al-Qaeda's leadership, although its membership is estimated to have more than doubled from 20,000 in 2001 to the current 50,000. Little wonder then that the various countries involved in fighting the War on Terror alongside the U.S. have foiled some 15 serious terrorist attacks since 9/11. The War on Terror has also been successful in limiting the capabilities of al-Qaeda's leadership to communicate with its various cells and members around the world, so they can no longer safely use e-mail, mobile or satellite phones for fear of detection by the intelligence services; but they are still thought to be using anonymous internet chat rooms.

Despite these successes in the War on Terror there have been around 12 major terrorist attacks on Western interests, excluding attacks inside Iraq and Afghanistan. This is because the defeat of the Taliban and U.S. control of Afghanistan removed al-Qaeda's central base of operations. Almost immediately after 9/11 al-Qaeda became famous in most of the Muslim world and notorious throughout the non-Muslim world. The ensuing war in Afghanistan, the arguably illegal detention of Muslims at Guantanamo, the arguably illegal invasion of Iraq and subsequent pattern of atrocities committed by U.S. forces not only made it easier for the terror networks to radicalize and recruit but created a new threat of "self generating" terror cells. These have been radicalized by current events and inspired by al-Qaeda but are not part of the central chain of command, which makes it harder for our intelligence services to protect us from the expanding threat.

Perhaps the recent fertilizer plot was an example of this new threat, maybe Omar Khyam was in some way connected to al-Qaeda central command, but Jawad Akbar was the man coming up with all the plots and ideas. As we know from experience, if it was an al-Qaeda cell the targets would have been predisposed and the attack fully planned when the cell was alerted.

Although the number of terrorist attacks around the world fell from 426 in 2000 to 355 in 2001 and to 205 attacks in 2002, the jihadist propaganda inspired by the invasion of Afghanistan, then Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and support for Israel against Lebanon etc., has brought about a constant rise in terrorist attacks ever since. This is displayed in the U.S. annual patterns of terrorism reports, the 2003 patterns of global terrorism report contains, in the statistics section, a bar graph of the number of attacks each year from 1982-2003, which shows the number of attacks rising to 208 in 2003.

The biggest factor in the rise in terrorism, however, has been the Iraq war, according to the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) statistics for 2004 the number of attacks rose dramatically to 651, attacks in Iraq also rose to 198 from 22 in 2003. NCTC figures for 2005 show an even more dramatic rise to 11,114 attacks, but the center had changed the way attacks were counted, so comparisons couldn't be made to previous years. The only way I could create such a comparison was to look at how terrorism was measured in 2004, the 2004 chronology by the NCTC counted only significant attacks, i.e., one or more fatalities or above $10,000 damage, fatalities or not, in figures for 2005 all attacks were counted, but in the statistics section a graph shows that the number of attacks involving one or more fatalities was 2,884, with attacks killing between two and four people at 1,614 in 2005. I therefore deem the comparable total for 2005 to be somewhere between the two figures.

Therefore, as our forces are still involved in heavy fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq and between the two war zones, fierce gun battles, allied and non-combatant deaths and terrorist attacks happening daily, the Afghan and Iraq invasions must surely be deemed mistakes in the fight against extremism in its current form for homeland and global security. Unfortunately, things are also going wrong at home.

Consider U.S. failures in the months before 9/11, when its intelligence agencies noted a surge in intercepted "chatter" about an impending al-Qaeda attack in the spring and summer of 2001. In July 2001, a Phoenix, AZ, FBI agent issued a memo warning of al-Qaeda operatives enrolled or enrolling in U.S. flight training schools, and in August 2001, Zacarias Massaoui was arrested at a Minneapolis flight school. He had been asking how to get into the cockpit of a 747, and his sole interest in learning to steer the plane after takeoff caught the attention of the flight trainers.

Cold-War budget cuts meant U.S. intelligence didn't have the translators or the staff to cope with the surge in "chatter", meaning it was largely just that, and for the same reason an antiquated computer system left FBI analysts unable to send e-mails or link up field reports, like the Phoenix memo and the details of Massaoui's arrest. Also, U.S. government rules prohibiting the sharing of information between criminal enquiries and counter-intelligence investigations meant that the CIA didn't tell the FBI for months that two terrorists were in the country, who, in hindsight, were two of the 19 hijackers. It is clear to me that a lack of resources played a part in 9/11, which became the catalyst for conflict as Bush went to war on Islamic terrorism, starting with Afghanistan and finishing -- no one knows when or where.

The Afghan war cost the U.S. government $18.1 billion in its first fiscal year (2001-02), according to CRS (Congressional Research Service) figures. The war went well in its infancy, as evident in the reduced cost for FY2003, lower by $1.1 billion. The Iraq war began at a cost of $51 billion in its first fiscal year. U.S. war spending on Afghanistan continued to drop in line with coalition success in the country, at $15.1 billion in FY 2004, while Iraq, costing $77.3 billion, began a continuous rise. In FY 2005, U.S. Iraq spending rose to $87.3 billion and, for the first time since the conflict started, the Afghan war costs rose to $18.1 billion. Costs of both wars continue to rise; in the latest figures released by the CRS for FY2006 Iraq cost the U.S. $100.4 billion and Afghanistan cost $19.9 billion.

U.K. forces have fought alongside the U.S. in both wars since they began. Funding for U.K.'s involvement in the War on Terror comes from the "special reserve," according to Iraq analysis, corroborated by The Times and The Guardian, this reserve has been constantly increasing since the initial £1 billion pledged in the pre-budget report for 2002. In the 2003 budget another £2 billion was secured for the special reserve to cover "the full costs of the U.K.'s military obligations" in Iraq. Another £800 million in the pre-budget report for 2004 released later in 2003 brought the total to £3.8 billion, which rose to £4.32 billion with the £520 million pledged in the pre-budget report in late 2004. Another £380 million was pledged in the 2005 budget, followed by £580 million in the pre-budget report for 2006 later in the year and a further £800 million in this year's budget, bringing the total to £6.44 billion. The Guardian reported in its coverage of U.K. war spending that Gordon Brown had pledged an additional £135 million for MI5 in late 2005. An announcement coming after 7/7, pledging a fraction of the money Iraq has cost, to the only people who had any chance of stopping them, can easily be seen as too little too late.

The U.K. government, like the U.S. government, is spending the biggest proportion of its defense budget on two foreign wars, both for homeland security, and like the U.S. all the while, mistakes are being made inside the U.K. in the same fight for homeland security.

Take the year before the atrocious attacks of the July 7, 2005. According to the ISC (Intelligence and Security Committee) report (p18 of 52) into those terrible attacks, also from The Guardian, Siddeque Khan and Shazad Tanweer, two of the London bombers attended meetings with others under investigation by our security services in 2004. MI5 didn't seek to investigate or identify them or several other unidentified men at the meetings, although it is believed this would have been possible had the decision been taken to do so. This is because the man under investigation was not himself an "essential target," and U.K. intelligence at the time suggested the men's focus was training and insurgency operations in Pakistan. July 7 then lead to the mistaken shooting by the MET of Jean Charles De Menezes, and finally the joint failure of the MET and MI5, which led to one of the biggest media storm fiascos in the U.K.'s war against extremism, the Forest Gate raid.

So, who can say whether the money being spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars could have prevented these mistakes had it instead been funneled into U.K. police and intelligence agencies, but as a lack of resources was already a problem before 9/11, such high war costs can only have made things worse. The failure of MI5 to investigate two of the London bombers a year in advance was also put down to a lack of resources, and the many U.S. agencies that some senior military officials, like Gary Cheek, believe really hold the key to defeating terrorism also suffer from the same problem, so we can't help but connect this lack of resources where it matters, at home on both sides of the Atlantic, with the massive budget given to maintaining a war on two fronts, a war that after the early weeks began exacerbating the threat from global terrorism, while bearing a new "home-grown" or "self-generating" threat.

If our governments continue to take actions that unintentionally increase the risk, while the money spent on these actions weakens our defenses at home, one must wonder when the balance will be tipped in the terrorists' favor, if it hasn't been already.