A Essay on September 11

I am anguished about the lives lost in the bombings of that day. I am also concerned about the scenario that is in front of us:
*Plans for massive bombings against Afghanistan and protracted warfare
against a list of countries (perhaps sixty, according to President Bush)
presumably supporting terrorism or lodging terrorists.
*The escalation of xenophobia especially against Arabs, but targeting
all immigrants, and this not just in the US. In Italy the Northern League (part
of the coalition of parties that now govern the country) has already
proposed that all undocumented workers should be treated as potential terrorists.
*The demonization of the anti-globalization movement, accused of being
an enemy of "western civilization."
*New, wide-spread restrictions on civil liberties.
What can we do in this situation?
Our first task is obviously to stop the escalation of violence, and
mobilize against a US-led war on Afghanistan or any other country the Bush
administration picks to be a target for its "war" on "terrorism." We also
need to build solidarity with the Arab and immigrant communities in the US
now under attack physically and ideologically. But these generalized
responses, however correct, are not enough. We must gain a better
understanding of what has happened and why, since any confusion on this
point
can have the most serious consequences for the antiglobalization movement.
For the Bush administration is determined to use the hijackings and mass
murders of September 11 as a political opportunity to transform the
definition of dissent here in the US and to project the US military into the

oil-rich former republics of Soviet Central Asia. A purely generalized
politics is doomed to taking a reactive stance in this historical situation,

even when the Bush administration's contradictions begin to unravel in the
next few weeks.
This essay is inevitably going to be tentative and hypothetical, given
our present lack of precise knowledge concerning the details of the
crimes--even now, three weeks after September 11, there is public confusion
as to the identities of some of the immediate perpetrators. Also, my aim is
classification and explanation, but not vilification. The legal and moral
facts are enough. The killings of September 11 constituted one of the worst
one-day massacres in the last decade, probably only those in the first days
of the Rwandan genocide of the Tutsis can rival it in terms of numbers. The
thousands of murders are a major crime against humanity and, though the
immediate perpetrators are dead, their accomplices, if they had any, should
be captured and prosecuted in the appropriate courts without the US
government committing similar crimes against the humanity of other
countries.
That this last proposition is a matter of controversy in the US at this
moment shows how perilous are the times we are in!

Oil, Globalization, and Islamic Fundamentalism
On a broad level, the events of September 11, 2001 can be traced back to

the economic, social, and cultural crisis that has developed in North
Africa,
the Middle East, and West Asia in the aftermath of the Gulf War and, prior
to
it, the accelerating process of globalization, starting in the late
1970s.(1)
The first aspect of this crisis has been the impoverishment of urban workers

and agriculturalists in this area, due to Structural Adjustment Programs
(SAPs) and import liberalization, dating back to Egypt’s "open door" policy
that cost the life of Anwar Sadat and saw the emergence of Islamic
fundamentalism as a new political force.(2)
From the Cairo’s "bread riots" of 1976, to the uprisings in Morocco and
Algeria of 1988, both crushed in blood baths, to the more recent anti-IMF
riots in Jordan (and the list is much longer) the difficulties of merely
staying alive for workers has become more and more dramatic, causing major
splits within the capitalist classes from Morocco to Pakistan as to how to
deal with this rebellion from below (Midnight Notes 1992). A further element

of crisis has been the situation in Palestine. This too was made more
intense
by the Gulf War and Israel’s response to Palestinian demands with more
settlements, the attempted usurpation of Jerusalem, and escalating
repression. Regardless of their actual disposition towards the Palestinians,

this situation has become a cause of great embarrassment for these ruling
classes, revealing, as it does, their duplicity and the shallowness of their

commitment to Islamic solidarity.
But the most important factor of crisis has been the hegemonic role of
the US in the region, as exemplified by the devastation of Iraq, the US
government’s proprietary relationship to the management of oil resources in
the Middle East, and the building of US bases right in Saudi Arabia, Islam’s

most sacred land. On all these counts, deep divisions have developed within
these ruling classes pitting pro-American governments—often consisting of
royal dynasties in the Arabian Peninsula—against a new generation of
dissidents within their own ranks who, in the name of the Koran, have
accused
them of being corrupt, of squandering the region’s resources, of selling out

to the US, of having betrayed Islam, all the while offering an alternative
"social contract" to the working classes of North Africa, the Middle East
and
West Asia and using their wealth to create a multinational network of groups

stretching through every continent and often taking on a life of their own.

As a social program, Islamic fundamentalism has distinguished itself, in

addition to its unmitigated bolstering of patriarchal rule, for its attempt
to win over the urban populations through the provision of some basic
necessities such as schooling, healthcare, and a minimum of social
assistance. These initiatives were undertaken often in response to the
ending
of government subsidies and programs in these areas which was dictated by
the
Structural Adjustment Programs designed by the neoliberals in the World Bank

and IMF. (3) Thus, for example, it is the Islamic fundamentalist networks
that organize health care and education in the Palestinian"territories,"
almost functioning as an alternative government to the PLO at the grassroots

level.(4)
Over the last decade as the crisis in the Middle East and
internationally
has intensified, so has the antagonism of the Islamic fundamentalist
networks
against the US and its domestic supporters in the different Islamic
countries. But this conflict has been stalemated in key countries in the
1990s. In Algeria, for example, the Islamic Salvation Front, which grew
rapidly after the anti-SAP riots of 1988 and almost took state power
electorally in 1991, was stopped by a military coup. For the last decade,
through a horrendous civil war where between 60,000 to 70,000 were killed,
the Algerian Islamic fundamentalists have been decisively weakened by
attrition and military repression. In Egypt, the Mubarak regime has used
direct repression as in Algeria as well a system of microscopic social
surveillance. For "the [Mubarak] government acted to stem the proliferation
of private mosques and associated charitable foundations and to end their
extragovernmental autonomy" (Faksh 1997: 54). The result has been a major
defeat of the fundamentalism in, perhaps, the second most important Islamic
state. These setbacks have not been dramatically reversed by fundamentalists

seizing state power in Sudan and Afghanistan, for in both countries they
inherited, and have not been able to end, long-standing civil wars.
But stalemate does not mean defeat, and there is no doubt that Islamic
fundamentalism continues to have an attraction within the ruling circles of
the wealthiest Islamic nations. This internal contradiction has created a
tangled net of consequences which are now embarrassing and endangering many
people in the US government and in the governments of the Middle East. For
they have financed and trained the very generation of dissidents who are now

so violently turning against them. On the one side, a portion of the Middle
Eastern oil revenues has been used to finance assaults on symbols of the New

World Order, because of the divided loyalties of the Middle Eastern ruling
classes; on the other, the US government has financed and trained many
members of this dissident branch of the Middle Eastern ruling classes in its

effort to destablize the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
The governmental and informal financial and military support of armed
Islamic fundamentalists did not end with the Soviet pullout from Afghanistan

in 1989. These militants played important economic, military and ideological

roles that forwarded US policy against Yugoslavia (in Bosnia and Kosovo) and

against Russia (in Chechnya, Dagestan, Uzbekistan) up until September 10,
2001. The deal apparently was: do the dirty work of fighting and
destabilizing secular communist, socialist and nationalist regimes in
Eastern
Europe, Caucasia and Central Asia and you will get rewarded. These "free
floating" militants did the US's dirty work for twenty years, but they
obviously increasingly were convinced that the US had not delivered. They
were not given their proper reward: taking power at the center of the
Islamic
world, the Arabian Penninsula.
This complicity and deal-making is why, perhaps, the Bush administration

is so hesitant to do what would be natural after such a massive intelligence

and security failure attested to by the September 11 crimes: get rid of the
incompetents. That would be difficult, for many of those who have been
brought back in power into George W. Bush's administration were the ones who

were responsible, during his father's presidency, for the training and
financing of the very organizations they now hunt under the banner of
"terrorism." Therefore, the executive dynasties in both the US and Saudi
Arabia must both be worried about "family members" who have been compromised

by their past connections to the networks they now claim to be responsible
for the events of September 11. This goes up to the President's family. For
example, the Wall Street Journal (9/28/01) reported that the President's
father works for the bin Laden family business in Saudi Arabia through the
Carlyle Group, an international consulting firm as do other close associates

of the President like former Secretary of State James Baker.
The crude and desperate attempts by ideologists of the Bush
administration to somehow connect, in ever more arcane ways, the
antiglobalization movement with the Islamic fundamentalists is fueled by
desire to distract public attention and hide a real anxiety on its side
which
is summed up in the question: when will the long list of real connections
between "terrorist network" the Bush adminsitration is hunting and its own
personnel be revealed? That is why, perhaps, President Bush harkened back to

his childhood memories of "Wanted Dead or Alive Posters" (with the emphasis
on "DEAD") when speaking of Osama bin Ladin and his associates. For the
administration's legitimacy would be undermined, if they ever spoke the
truth.


Why now and why so desperate?
These generalized facts concerning the hidden civil war within the oil
producing countries from Algeria to Iran serve to describe the context of
the
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. For I am assuming that
the immediate perpetrators of the attacks were committed to some branch of
Islamic fundamentalism. But these facts do not help us understand why the
attacks took place in September 2001 and why the resistance to the US took
such a desperate form. For these attacks are symptoms of desperation not of
power, as they will likely lead to a devastating US military response with
predictable results: the destruction of thousands of Islamic fundamentalist
militants along with a tremendous collateral damage on the people of
Afghanistan and many other countries in North Africa, the Middle East and
West Asia. Who on the ground can survive in such a maelstrom? Indeed, the
actual perpetrators and their accomplices, whoever they are, must have been
very desperate to take such a risk with their own network and the lives of
millions of people of the region. It is also probable that many (perhaps
most) people even in the most militant Islamic fundamentalist circles object

to the bombings in New York and Washington DC, if not for moral, then simply

for strategic reasons, knowing full well that their hard-fought for
achievements might all go up in smoke as a result these actions.
Clearly something very important was in process of occurring that the
perpetrators of September 11 needed desperate and inherently uncertain
measures to thwart. What was it? If my hypothesis is right, the source of
this desperation are events at the geographical center of Islam, Saudi
Arabia, which echoed throughout the Islamic world.
My view is that the political factors motivating the mass murder and
suicides of September 11 involved the oil industry and globalization in the
Arabian Peninsula. Here is the story.
Beginning in 1998 (after the collapse of oil prices due to the Asian
Financial Crisis), the Saudi monarchy decided, for "strategic reasons," to
globalize its economy and society beginning with the oil sector. The oil
industry had been nationalized since 1975, which means that foreign
investors
were allowed to participate only in "downstream" operations like refining.
But in September 1998 Crown Prince Abdullah met in Washington DC with senior

executives from several oil companies. According to Gawdat Bahget, "The
Crown
Prince asked the oil companies' executives to submit directly to him
recommendations and suggestions about the role their companies could play in

the exploration and development of both existing and new oil and gas fields"

(Bahget 2001: 5). These "recommendations and suggestions" were then
submitted
to a Supreme Council for Petroleum and Mineral Affairs in early 2000 (after
being vetted by the Crown Prince), and, by mid 2000, the Saudi government
began to cautiously respond to them, by ratifying a new foreign investment
law. Under the new law, "tax holidays are abolished in favor of sweeping
reductions in tax on profits payable by foreign entities, bringing them

nearer to levels that apply to local companies. Wholly owned foreign
businesses WILL HAVE THE RIGHT TO OWN LAND, sponsor their own employees and
benefit from concessionary loans previously available only to Saudi
companies" (Bahgat 2001: 6, my emphasis) [Note bene: it is obvious why "the
right to own land" would be a red flag for anyone committed to the sacred
character of the Arabian Peninsula.] The Middle Eastern experts were
literally falling over themselves in their effort to highlight the new
Investment Regulation. One described it in the following words, "Keep your
fingers crossed, but it looks as if Saudi Arabia is abandoning almost
seventy
years of restrictive, even unfriendly policy toward foreign investment"
(MacKinnon 2000). This law constituted, in effect, a NAFTA-like agreement
between the Saudi monarch and the US and European oil companies.
At the same time as this law was being discussed, a ministerial
committee
announced that up to $500 billion of new investments would be deployed over
the next decade to change the form of the Saudi national economy. $100
billion of this investment was already promised by foreign oil companies.
In May of 2001 the first concrete step in this stepped up globalization
process was concluded when Exxon/Mobil and Royal Dutch/Shell Group led eight

other foreign companies (including Conoco and Enron from the US) took on a
$25 billion natural gas development project in Saudi Arabia. The financial
press noted that the deal would not be very lucrative in itself, but that
"It's part of a long-term ploy of the oil companies, [which] want ultimately

to get access again to Saudi crude" (LA Times 5/19/2001).
Thus, by the Summer of 2001, the Saudi monarchy cast the die and then
legally, socially and economically entered the Rubicon of globalization (but

with its "fingers crossed," undoubtedly). It "globalized" not because the
Saudi Arabian debt was unmanageable (as was the case with most other
countries which bent to the globalizing dictates of the IMF) but because,
faced with a intensifying opposition, the King and his circle realized that
only with the full backing of the US and European Union could they hope to
preserve their rule in the coming years. In other words, confronted with
significant social problems and an insurrectional element within its own
class that could not be defeated by open confrontation, since it took on the

garb of Islam too, the Saudi Arabian government seems to have decided that a

rehaul of its economy would defeat its dangerous opposition through
attrition
and would further solidify its alliance with US and European capital. The
strategy was aimed at reducing the large and growing unemployment rate among

its young citizens, its dependence on oil exports, and its huge foreign
labor
force (in 1993 there were 4.6 million foreign workers out of a total
population of 14.6 million; today they are approximately 6-7 million in a
population of about 22-23 million) by "getting the economy moving again."(5)

This required a radical departure from the clientelistic methods of social
control the Saudi monarchy had used in the past to keep social peace, which
was made possible until recently by its immense oil wealth. But this wealth
is not infinite and indeed was declining on a per capita basis--for example,

GNP per capital fell from approximately $13,000 to $8,000 from 1983 to 1993
and has since continued to fall (Cordesman 1997: 64). Inevitably, this
initiative would impact the economic policies of the other oil producing
governments in the region, especially the Gulf Cooperation Council
states--Oman, Qatar, UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait.
If it works, this strategy would deal a decisive blow to the Islamicist
opposition, undermining its ability to recruit converts who would be
employed
in the upper echelons of a "globalized economy and society" instead of being

driven to despair by political powerlessness and long periods of
unemployment. But the introduction of foreign ownership of land and natural
resources, backed up by large investments, and the hiring of more
expatriates
>from Europe and the US, would force a major social change.(6) The
cat-and-mouse game that the Saudi monarchy had played with the
fundamentalist
dissidents (by which the King and his dynasty claimed to be even more
fundamentalist than them) would end. Whatever hopes the Islamic opposition
in
the ruling classes of the Arabian Peninsula had ever harbored of getting
their governments to send the American troops packing and turning their oil
revenues into the economic engine of a resurgent Islam were facing a
historic
crisis in the summer of 2001. Without a major reversal, the Islamic
fundamentalist opposition would have to face the prospect of a total civil
war in their own countries or face extinction. Certain elements--whether
they
were individuals or groups, I cannot know now--of this opposition decided
that only a spectacular action like the September 11 hijackings and
destruction of thousands of people in New York and Washington could turn
back
the tide. Perhaps they hoped that if enough turmoil and uncertainty can be
generated by the attacks in the US, they will generate a strategic US
retreat
>from the Arabian Peninsula just as the bombing in Lebanon in 1983 lead to
the
US pull out there.
We could speculate to what extent the election of the George W. Bush
administration accelerated the timing of the attack considering that in the
eyes of the world it represents a government not ready to make any sort of
concession, a government even more likely that the one preceding it, to
claim
possession of minerals in the Middle East subsoil, a government ready to
break all treaties, to allow Israel to have its way in Palestine and so
forth.
On the basis of this analysis, then, the September 11 attacks on New
York
City and Washington DC were the "collateral damage" of a struggle over the
fate of oil politics in its heartland: the Arabian Peninsula. Moreover, in
order to test this hypothesis in the coming weeks we should investigate the
developments in the Peninsula, which will undoubtedly be hidden from sight,
more than the sound and fury that will be directed towards Afghanistan for
more obvious reasons.

The Bush Reaction:
A "War" on "Terrorism" and the US Military Penetration of Central Asia
It is important that we understand the political and economic aims of
the
hijackers and their accomplices, but it will be even more important for us
to
be clear about the Bush administration's agenda. For one need not indulge in

conspiracy theories to recognize that the Bush administration will use the
events of September 11 as best as it can to forward its program (while
acknowledging that the shock of the destruction of lives and property on
that
day has profoundly destablized President Bush's domestic economic and social

agenda).
There are two clear territories which the Bush administration has
strategically used the death and destruction of September 11 to move on: a
conceptual restructuring of the political horizon and a geo-political thrust

into the former Central Asian republics of the U.S.S.R. which became nation
states in 1991. These states, especially Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and
Turkenistan, have significant oil and gas reserves. "The proven and possible

energy reserves in or adjacent to the Caspian region--including at least 115

billion barrels of oil--are in fact many times greater than those of the
North Sea and should increase significantly with continuing exploration.
Such
pleatiful resources could generate huge returns for US companies and their
shareholders. American firms have already acquired 75 percent of
Kazakhstan's
mammoth Tengiz oil field, which is now valued at more than $10 billion."
(Kalicki 2001: 121). These countries, along with the former and present
Caucasian republics, form the southern border of Russia's "Near Abroad"
which
the US has been aiming to penetrate militarily for some time both for
immediate economic purposes and for the ultimate goal of disintegrating
Russia itself into a set of pliable statelets.
The minute President Bush named Osama bin Ladin as "the prime suspect"
and "his" camps in Afghanistan as the training ground for the terrorists
that
destroyed the Twin Towers every diplomatic move aimed at setting up forward
military bases and fly-over rights to attack bin Ladin also doubles as a
tool
for the US military occupation of Central Asia itself. After all, we are
being told equivocally by the administration both that bin Ladin is the
center of the evil and that even his capture ("DEAD or alive") will not end
the threat of terrorism from that quarter. Therefore, the military campaign
against both bin Ladin and terrorism (we are assured) will be quite
prudential and take months, even years to accomplish. Perhaps the most
damaging thing that might happen to this double-edged US government campaign

would be for bin Ladin and his circle to depart from the scene while leaving

behind a well-documented history of their involvement with the US government

over the last twenty years!
The recognition that this US war against Osama bin Ladin and his
supporters in the Taliban government is also a way to realize one of the
main
post-Communist goals of US foreign policy was immeditely apparent to
analysts
of the oil industry and critics of the NATO war in Yugoslavia after
September
11. The new "Great Game," a.k.a. "the war for oil and destablization in
Central Asia" reading of the Bush administration's moves, was easily
documented because much of the relevnt material required for this
interpretation had been researched in 1999 when many were trying to
understand the motivations of the Clinton administration's involvement in
the
war against Yugoslavia above and beyond its ostentationally decried (and
newly found) concern for Kosovars' human rights (cf. for example,
(Chossudovsky 2001), (Federici and Caffentzis 2000), (Talbot 2000)). It
became clear then that one of the reasons the US attacked Yugoslavia (one of

the few remaining Russian allies in Europe) was to impress on the Russians
that it will use all of its might to discourage them from interfering with
its investments in Caucasia and Central Asia. It is now a foregone
conclusion
that anyone interested in understanding Afghan-centered aspects of the Bush
administration will have to take into account the "oil factor" (especially
given the direct involvement of many members of the Bush administration in
the oil companies that are heavily invested in this area.)
This is not to say that this geo-political thrust into Central Asia was
high up on the Bush administration's agenda prior to September 11. The
expansion of drilling rights within the US was one of its first oil-related
initiatives and preoccupied it throughout the summer of 2001. Indeed, Jan
Kalicki, a "point man" in the Clinton administration on Central Asian oil,
wrote an article for the September/October 2001 Foreign Affairs complaining
about Bush's back sliding in Central Asia. After detailing the Clinton
administration's accomplishments, he fretted that they "are now at risk of
unraveling due to inadequate attention from the Bush administration and
restrictive US policies. In contrast to the Clinton adminsitration's
vigorous
support of Caspian energy initiatives, the Bush team seems to have placed
theose issues on the back burner" (Kalicki 2001: 130). Kalicki ended his
article with the following words: "For the US to squander its past success
and future potential in the region through complacency and inattention would

be a serious mistake." He is undoubtedly now pleased by the swift end of
Bush's "complacency and inattention" to Central Asia after September 11 and
welcomes a return to oil business as usual there.
There is another territory that the Bush administration forcefully moved

into after September 11 that is more abstract, but perhaps even more
important for our movement. It is the territory of words. By declaring the
piracy, murders and devastation in New York City, Washington DC and Western
Pennsylvania on September 11 an "act of war" and the start of its own "war
on
terrorism," the Bush administration is attempting to restructure the
conceptual future of humanity for many years to come. By imposing a false
dichotomy--you must approve my policies or you are on the terrorists'
side--on the moral conscience of majority of people on the planet who are
stunned, frightened and disgusted by the mass murder of September 11, it
hopes to take these consciences hostage, using the thousands dead in New
York
and Washington as talismans. This moral hocus pocus will fail in the long
run, of course, because the overwhelmingly large number of people on this
planet do not fit into the "us" versus "them" model that Bush's war
configuration of September 11 requires. Most reject, heart and soul, both
futures offered by either capitalist globalization or its desperate Islamic
militant opponents. There will be, in the meantime, innumerable attempts by
the administration to equate dissent from the Bush policies as complicity
in,
or condoning of, or indifference to the dead of September 11.
These attempts at intimidation and equation of dissent with terrorism
will eventually fail, largely due to their own contradications. We did not
have wait too long for these contradictions to reveal themselves. After all,

high officials of the Bush administration financed, armed and trained the
now
decried "terrorist network" of Islamic militants, not the antiglobalization
movement! Moreover, the semantic strain between Bush's "war" description of
September 11 immediately ran into conflict with the way that these acts are
being considered by the relevant authorities, the NYC Police Department, the

courts, the insurance companies and the FBI. These acts are being
investigated as crimes. Suspects are being questioned, material witnesses
who
might flee are being kept in prison, the sites of the crashed airliners are
being treated as crime scenes and are being seached for evidence. The
suspects are not classified as prisoners of war, they are being treated as
potential criminals with rights to counsel.

Fortsetzung folgt