"The most urgent 'Islamic threat' on the horizon is probably the threat that America's irrational Crusade against 'Islamo-fascism' will explode into nuclear war or seal the doom of democracy in the U.S."

Introduction: In this eleven-legged essay I have done my non-specialist's best to make comprehensive sense of a complex 'hot-button' issue, taking care to give empirical evidence and historical examples based on variety of accessible sources. My goal was to situate the dangerous escalation of the conflict between Western democratic imperialism and radical Islam - the so called War on Terror - in the various contexts of ideology, history, geo-politics and popular struggles for democracy in the Moslem world. The ten short 'legs' of this long essay add up to a coherent argument, but each deals with a specific context and stands on its own. So feel free to click on whatever section may interest you from the menu, beginning, for example with the conclusion. Have a good read and let me know what you think.

Menu: We begin at home, deconstructing 'Islamism' in the Western Imagination and situating its perceived 'threat' in the ideology of imperialism and the history of America's 'Urgent Threats' of Yesteryear. We next analyze the ideological dynamic of Obama's Dangerous Escalations and give various explanations for the apparent irrationality of The U.S.'s March of Folly in Middle-East. We then turn to the Islamic world and look empirically at the history, geography and demographics of Actually-existing Islamic Movements and States among which Moslem Disunity is the salient feature. We then recount How the Islamic Virus Broke out of the Imperialist Laboratory and turned into an urgent threat challenging the West - both through Islamic Forces on European Soil and internationally through Radical Islamic States and Political Movements in the Moslem world. We next theorize today's dangerous impasse in terms of The Contradictions of Empire, pose the question of fascism in the U.S., and ask, following the ancient Athenian historian Thucydides, if democracy and imperialism can co-exist. We conclude with What Is to Be Done: Reject violence and join people-to-people solidarity networks with the women, trade-unionists and democrats fighting against the reactionary forces of both Islamism and capitalist imperialism. (Links provided.)

'Islamism' in the Western Imagination

'There is no more important issue facing the West than Islamism, Islamofascism or - to use another label - radical Islam. And there is no more necessary precondition to countering that threat than understanding it, where it springs from, how it is expressed, and the ways in which it is spreading. But before we do any of that, we have to agree that the threat exists. Thus writes Stephen Pollard, in a recent issue of the N.Y. Times Book Review under the headline 'Appeasers,' his review of Bruce Bower's Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom. [1] But does 'the threat' indeed exist? And is it really 'more important' than catastrophic climate change, proliferating WMDs, or the world economic crisis?

Before beginning our attempt to analyze the social forces which express themselves under the various banners of what Westerners have lumped together under the heading of 'Islamism,' I think we first need to deconstruct the concept and to situate it in the context of the Orientalist ideology of Western colonialism/imperialism. And what better place to start than the moderate, middlebrow Sunday Times Book Review, which has reviewed one or more of the proliferating new books on 'political Islam' almost every week over the past decade and which is generally a good barometer of middle-of-the-road opinion in the U.S.? According to Pollard's 'Appeasers' piece, the 'insidious problem' is that 'many liberals and others on the European left are making common cause with radical Islam and then brazenly and bizarrely denying both the existence of that alliance and in fact the existence of any Islamic threat whatsoever.' Bower's book, Surrender, supports Pollard's thesis by rounding up the usual suspects: the insidiously charming Islamic theologian Tariq Ramadan, the left-wing former Mayor of London Ken Livingston, and the unnamed 'Western leaders' who allegedly failed to defend the publisher of the anti-Moslem Danish cartoons. The Times' Pollard concludes: 'Bower is unquestionably correct, and that fact is quite simply terrifying.'

To be sure the silver-tongued scholar Ramadan does send different messages to the Faithful and to the goyim; and Livingston was an unprincipled, opportunistic Left politician looking for votes among England's fast-growing Moslem population (along with the British Socialist Workers' Party and its erstwhile ally, Respect). But this is old news. Neither has much influence any more, and although 'insidious' they were hardly 'terrifying.' On the other hand, equating Western leaders' alleged 'appeasement' of political Islam with the appeasement of Hitler in the 1930's is sheer hysterical (and historical) lunacy, as those of us who actually live in Europe can testify.

Far from 'appeasing' Islam, the Swiss, after a virulently anti-Moslem right-wing campaign, have just voted by referendum to ban the construction of minarets. Meanwhile, at the time of writing, the right-wing Sarkozy government is orchestrating a summit-level discussion of 'French national identity' while simultaneously demonizing and expelling non-white immigrants, including long-time residents and human rights activists. Nor is there a dearth of French anti-Moslem books denouncing the 'appeasement' of Islamicism with titles like Conquering the West: the Secret Project of the Islamists and France Infected with Islamism: Terrorist Threats within the Hexagon. [2]

Ironically, in the U.S. the domestic War on Terror seems to be aimed exclusively at hunting largely imaginary conspiracies among American Moslems and peace activists - not at interdicting actually-existing white racist militias and violent rightwing Christian terrorist networks. There was no investigation or round up of suspects when Tim McVeigh, an avowed member of a network of right-wing Christian militias, bombed the Oklahoma City Federal building, killing 168 people and seriously injuring 800 more. And although Christian anti-abortionist organizations post the names and addresses of 'Murderers' (abortion providers) and their families on the Internet and openly terrorize women's health clinics, there are no investigations of 'terrorist conspiracies' - even when a saintly Dr. Tiller is gunned down in his church on Sunday by a member of a fanatical Christian organization.

What we are dealing with here turns out to be not so much a Clash of Civilizations as an ideological Clash of Fundamentalisms. [3] While hyping the threat of 'Islamism,' U.S. media and politicians conveniently fail to point out that their own 'Political Christianism' is based on the same kind of reactionary hard-shell fundamentalism as 'Political Islam.' The Christian right in the U.S. aspires to the same kind of theocratic domination over government and peoples' private lives as the Ayatollahs. Its members speak with the same hysterical absolutist certainty, believe the ends justify the means, and are willing resort to violent means - like murdering abortion-providers and bombing women's health centers. Both fundamentalisms offer identity and community to the disaffected masses while silencing opposition and bullying the hesitant through fear. The Zionists and the Jewish Religious Right are equally ruthless, and recently the U.S. Christian right has overcome its traditional anti-Semitism to form a reactionary pro-Israel, pro-U.S. alliance with the right-wing Jewish organizations and leaders like Senator Lieberman - much to the dismay of the vast majority of liberal, secular U.S. Jews.

In any case, writers representing the 'Appeasers' school of anti-Islamism (not to mention the Times' fact-checkers) can hardly be unaware that the U.S. and Britain (not to mention Israel) have been systematically boycotting, bombing, invading and assassinating Islamic leaders and the countries that back them for at least a decade. They call that 'appeasement?' The ongoing wars against Afghanistan and Iraq have already lasted much longer than WWII, with concomitant waste of lives and treasure and no end in sight. Can Messrs. Pollard, Bower and the Book Review editors who commissioned, headlined and ran this hysterical propaganda piece really believe that the feeble, phony left-liberal voices of Ramadan, Livingston and the like threaten to prevail over negative stereotypes with which CNN, Fox News, the N.Y. Times and Western leaders have been bombarding us for years as justification for hugely expensive oil-wars in the Middle-East? What we read in their texts is not empirical argument but ideology which, like religion itself, is supremely indifferent to fact and logic. It is easy for us Westerners to laugh at the Ayatollahs' depiction of dear old Uncle Sam as the 'Great Satan,' but harder to see the ideological demonization of Moslems and Arabs in our own 'liberal' media.

'Urgent Threats' of Yesteryear

To understand the lunacy of the problematic Islamic 'threat' being hyped in mainstream U.S. political discourse, we need to place the concept in the historical context of Western - particularly U.S. imperialism's - collective self-image. White American identity has from the beginning defined itself in opposition to a dangerous, threatening 'other' who had to be conquered, subdued, and/or exterminated: in the first instance the 'savages' native to the Americas. Thus European invaders projected their own inner savagery on the 'Indians' in order to brutally displace them in the name of Civilization, as Richard Slotkin has demonstrated in his seminal Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier (1600-1860) and subsequent works. After the 'Indians' were deprived of their lands and nearly wiped out, the laboring classes replaced them as American capitalism's terror-inspiring 'other.' This 'threat' was incarnated in two fear-inspiring images: the potent Negro slave ready to rape his mistress and slit his master's throat in the South, and in the North the specter of bloody conspiracies among the immigrant workers, whether Irish ('Molly Maguires'), Italian ('anarchist bomb throwers'), Jewish ('subversives, communist conspirators') or just foreign-born ('disloyal'). These demonizing images of the 'other' were useful for ruling class divide-and-rule domination, pitting native workers against immigrants and black bondsmen against free white labor - to the extent that even today labor in Dixie remains largely non-unionized under anti-labor 'right to work' laws.

The Red Scare of 1919 mobilized these stereotypes to justify government roundups (the Palmer Raids) more violent than the Cold War witch hunts or the post-9/11 anti-terrorist campaign. At the end of WWI, returning black and immigrant vets were full of democratic aspirations. The high hopes inspired by Wilson's 'self-determination of peoples' and ignited by the 1917 Russian Revolution were met with union-busting, mass arrest and massacre of strikers, deportations of the foreign-born, lynchings and race-riots against 'Negroes.' A nation-wide campaign of Nazi-type raids on Socialists, Communists and Wobblies was organized, with the FBI, vigilantes and local police sacking offices, smashing presses, beating and arresting leaders. It wasn't until the Depression of the Thirties that the American Left came back to life. Likewise, in the Forties, after WWII had once again raised democratic aspirations, the FBI, HUAC and the Truman Administration came up with the mass anti-Communist hysteria of the McCarthyite 'witch-hunts' - investigations aimed at hounding alleged Communists and subversives out of their government jobs, purging radicals from the unions, the schools, the entertainment industry, the universities, thus silencing any political debate about foreign policy - henceforth considered 'treasonable.' Americans were forced to incriminate themselves and rat on their associates through compulsory loyalty oaths taken under pain of perjury. To be sure, there were actually-existing Communists in the U.S., and yes some of them did agree to collect information for the Russians - albeit at a time when the Soviets were U.S. allies against Hitler. But the CPUSA had at most 180,000 members at its height, and by the late Fifties it had dwindled to the point where it was said that the dues payments of FBI infiltrators kept the Party treasury afloat. Yet when I was coming of age in the Fifties, the word 'Communist' was the functional equivalent of 'terrorist' today in the world outside our Left-wing family circle. The sensational Rosenberg atom-spy trial was the Fifties '9/11 wake-up call,' alerting Americans to the 'urgent threat' of us Commies. [4]

After the 1989 collapse of Russian bureaucratic state-capitalism parading as 'Communism' and with 'Red' China born again as a U.S. capitalist trading partner, a new demon was needed to deflect from unrest over increasing economic and social inequality in the U.S. and around the world. The War on Drugs worked for a while. It proved useful for sending U.S. military advisors and equipment abroad to prop up pro-U.S. governments in Latin America while profitably filling the expanding US private prison system with unwilling customers from among unemployed Black and Hispanic youth. But after Osama bin Laden and his cohorts pulled off the attacks of September 11, 2001, the War on Terror took precedence and 'political Islam' was suddenly discovered as the major threat to Western Civilization. This distant threat has proven a sufficient ideological pretext for curtailing democratic freedoms and creating a security state at home while using torture, terror bombing and outright invasion in pursuit of insanely unrealistic hegemonic foreign policy goals in the oil-rich Middle East.

The same 'threat of Islamism' myth was evoked to justify the U.S.'s routine, brazen use of 'secret' torture on captured Moslems. Of course, this torture was secret only to the U.S. media and public, not to the victims and their families. Arabic broadcasters like Al-Jazeerah gave U.S. torture-camps a big play all over the Moslem world. Machiavelli writes that cruelty is useful as a deterrent to enemies only if it is well-publicized. If letting potential 'enemy combatants' know the fate awaiting them if captured by the Americans was the goal of the U.S. torture program, the 'intelligence' community achieved it at the price of alienating a billion Moslems and eradicating any residual pro-American feelings dating from 9/11/01. The irony is that such 'enhanced interrogation' methods have proven notoriously useless for actual intelligence gathering, since people will say anything under torture. Yet the torturers and their superiors in the Bush Administration who sullied America's reputation and who violated U.S. and international law remain unpunished. The new President was made to understand that the U.S. may need these guys in the future and so his Administration decided not to 'look backward' only forward! Forward to what? More useless 'intelligence'? Further degradation of the image of progressive, liberal, Western democratic values exemplified by kidnappings, torture chambers and brutal concentration camps like Abu Graib? As we shall argue below, such extreme methods are evidence of desperation.

Returning now to the ideological nature of today's problematic 'Islamic threat,' we see that historically it fits into an established tradition of hysterical propaganda campaigns which distort and exaggerate real and potential challenges to U.S. capitalism/imperialism so as to justify state terror at home and abroad. Indeed, the most recent published intelligence about Al-Qaeda indicates that its strength is down to 'only about two hundred hard-core followers [...] hunkered down, presumably along the Afghan-Pakistani border [...] with Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.' [5]

This is not to deny the very real challenge to U.S. imperialism and its allies, particularly Israel, posed by the social forces and regimes nebulously grouped under the heading 'political Islam.' We mean only to demythologize the actual threat, contextualize it and reduce it to its just proportions so as to actually understand 'where it springs from, how it is expressed, and the ways in which it is spreading' - something the Times' Pollard promised to do but never quite got around to.

With the oil-wars escalating and with U.S. and British voters less and less enthusiastic about paying for them, there is a need to ratchet up the pitch of anti-Moslem hysteria so as to 'stay the course' in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and now Pakistan and Yemen. Knowledge of the history, politics, sociology and even the languages of these threatening 'others' would only get in the way. In fact, the CIA and State Department actually dismissed their staff of Arabic-language translators years ago, when 'human intelligence' was replaced by spy satellites which capture megabytes of important information in Arabic which the Americans can't read. Who said 'Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad?' Are not ideological constructions like 'terrorism' the blinders rulers put over their own eyes and the eyes of their subjects when they embark on a fatal course of hubris?

Obama's Dangerous Escalations

We can see U.S. imperialism's desperation reflected in Obama's decision to radically escalate the wars he was ostensibly elected to terminate. It's not just that our erstwhile peace candidate and Nobel Peace laureate is withdrawing exhausted U.S. troops from the frying pan of Iraq only to transfer them into the fire of Afghanistan, although that was itself an act of desperation. Many of these 'volunteer' soldiers and reservists, shattered after several devastating tours of duty in Iraq, are being forced to remain in the service years beyond their contracts. Blackwater and other mercenaries now outnumber U.S. troops in Afghanistan with more escalation in sight. Yet, a new and highly dangerous stage was reached in January 2009 when Mr. Obama officially extended the 'anti-terror' oil-war into unstable, corrupt, nuclear-armed Pakistan. And if that weren't enough, as our 2009 Xmas present from the CIA, we have received a new war in Yemen. Thus our new President rounds out his first year in office, which began last January with the drone attacks on Pakistani civilians.

The Obama Administration's fuite en avant, escalating a losing Mideast campaign into dangerous new territory, makes about as much sense as sticking one's member into a beehive. Yet Mr. Obama is no gross fool, unlike his predecessor. The President is wise enough to know that every time he orders another CIA-Blackwater Predator drone to drop out of the sky over Pakistan and blow up a village or family of traditionally warlike Pashtuns, ten or a hundred new dedicated 'enemy combatants' rise from the ashes swearing (by Allah, who else?) eternal vengeance on the West. The President has enough imagination to visualize the consequences, yet like King Cadmus in the Greek myth, Obama is 'sowing dragons' teeth' and 'reaping armed warriors' - myriads of whom spring up from the soil after each cluster-bomb sown. Militant Islamic groups like the Taliban stand ready and eager to inspire and direct such future martyrs. Angry poor men, particularly warriors from 'honor cultures,' are always eager to listen to ministers of religions that sanctify Holy War. In any case, the fierce tribes who inhabit Afghanistan and West Pakistan have never been conquered, having defeated invasions by Darius the Persian, Alexander the Great, the British and the Soviet Russian empires.

Obama's radical escalation into the Pakistani nuclear danger-zone is arguably even more irrational than Bush II's Iraq occupation or Johnson's Vietnam escalations. Yet this new folly was accepted as a matter of course, without any serious discussion, by the U.S. mainstream media and politicians of both parties - the same way they accepted Bush's Saddam=Osama and WMDs lies and Johnson's 'Bay of Tonkin Incidents.' Today, after these gross deceptions, dangerously aggressive irrational policies can no longer be sold on rational political grounds to the wary, anti-war silent majorities in the U.S and Britain. The enemy must be demonized and the threat must be magnified in an atmosphere of a hysterical, irrational Islamophobic and anti-Arab propaganda. Under Bush II, we had an explicit Clash of Fundamentalisms, Judeo-Christian versus Islamic. Yet paradoxically it was born-again Bush who finally signed off on U.S. withdrawal from Iraq just before slinking out of office, leaving his successor a free hand - one hoped to make peace, but in the event to escalate! Was a deal with the Pentagon made quietly behind the scenes during Obama's 'seamless transition?' In any case, we quickly learned the truth when Obama launched a Predator attack on Pakistan during his first week in office, 'blooding' himself as Commander-in Chief and setting a hawkish precedent for his Administration. Thanks to this 'seamless transition' Obama gave new political legitimacy to the hawks in the CIA and the Pentagon - the very people who got Iraq wrong in the first place. And now, in the wake of the botched Xmas Day bomb attack, another 'secret' U.S. war has come to the surface in Yemen, a strategic country divided by decades of civil war, with rival factions armed by Saudi Arabia, Russia and the United States. On January 7, Yemen's Deputy Prime Minister Rashad al-Alami reported declared, 'If there is direct intervention by the United States, it will strengthen al-Qaeda. We cannot accept any foreign troops on Yemeni territory.' Time for 'regime change' in Yemen? Yet how many Vietnamese puppet presidents did the U.S. remove or assassinate before finally withdrawing, humiliated by defeat, abandoning its Vietnamese allies to their fates?

The U.S. March of Folly in the Middle-East

Does desperation alone account for reckless escalation of U.S. military aggression in the Middle East for which the threat of an aggressive Islamism provides the rationalization? Certainly the worsening world economic crisis directly conditions the international context, aggravating U.S. capital's frantic rush to control the world's remaining oil reserves. America's willingness to use excessive force and to go it alone also serves to intimidate would-be imperialist rivals like China, Russia and France so as to retain its lion's share. But it makes little geo-political sense for U.S. imperialism to have become so obsessively focused on its Middle-Eastern crusade that it has apparently lost sight of the main prize in its own back yard, Latin America. Thus Yanqui imperialism's oldest and most important sphere of influence has been quietly slipping out of Washington's grasp. North American capital now faces regional rivals like Brazil and heavy-duty competition from China. An expanding coalition of more or less democratic regimes backed by popular movements has shown itself determined to break free from U.S. economic and political hegemony. Indeed, the U.S. has only two reliable allies left in Latin America, Colombia and Mexico, and both are hopelessly corrupt semi-dictatorships bemired in bloody drug wars. This major setback for U.S. global interests is further proof of the irrationality of the ideologically-driven U.S. campaign against 'Islamism.'

Another explanation for the U.S. government continuing blindly to pursue failed polices was put forward most recently by the Nobel prize-winning liberal economist Paul Krugman. Beginning in the 1970s, the enormous cost of political campaigns, the growing power of corporate lobbies, the direct and overwhelming domination of big money over every aspect of government has made reform impossible. Today, the demands of individual special interests predominate over the collective national interest, even over those of U.S. capitalism taken as a whole. The government is thus reduced to the role of hired 'enforcer' for the coal, petroleum, arms, pharmaceutical, insurance and banking industries in their frantic rush to accumulate short-term profits. Although Krugman - who is a Keynesian, not a Marxist - doesn't go quite that far, he does conclude that this system of legal, quite open corruption has led to a paralysis of the U.S. political system, which is no longer able to change course or even to make token reforms to satisfy the aspirations of Obama's multi-class, multi-ethnic, heavily feminine, youthful and anti-war electorate. Within this corrupt system, the petroleum-military-industrial complex is by far the most powerful lobby and the one most deeply invested in continuation of that multi-billion-dollar boondoggle known as the crusade against radical Islamism - at whatever cost to the taxpayer and to U.S. long term political interests.

Yet another factor limiting U.S. imperialism's ability to correct its course is the domination of the Religious Right over the American political system. During the Bush years, it spoke directly through the drawl of the born-again Texan in charge. Since losing the White House, a headless Republican Party has now apparently been completely taken over by the Christian Right. Its deafening noise machine barks a crypto-racist message of hate through the halls of Congress and the media, harping on Obama's 'foreign birth certificate,' his 'forced-euthanasia communist healthcare plan,' his Arab middle name, his 'appeasement' of the Islamists. What should objectively be termed 'Political Christianism' (to balance 'Political Islamism') is arguably in an even stronger position under a Democratic President dedicated to 'bi-partisanism' who will predictably hold out his hand to the rabid, no-compromise Republicans and get his arm bit off. These economic and political pressures combine with ideological rigidity to make rational reform impossible.

Given this delusional and self-defeating outlook, I can only conclude that the U.S. Establishment (dare I say 'Corporate Ruling Class'?) is literally on the Road to Folly - a mental state defined as pursuing an irrational course without regard to the predictable consequences, refusing to listen to critics, and making the same mistakes again and again without drawing the lesson of past failures. 'Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.' The erudite military historian Barbara Tuchman studied five historical examples of such disastrous 'Pursuits of Policy Contrary to Self-Interest.' Her brilliant 1984 March of Folly, From Troy to Vietnam concludes with mad King George III's loss of his American colonies and (then) contemporary America caught in the Vietnam quagmire. To crown eight years of failure in Iraq and Afghanistan by destabilizing Pakistan and invading Yemen seems the height of folly, yet it is the (ideo)logical consequence of today's Clash of Fundamentalisms. So much for deconstructing the ideological threat of 'Islamism' in the Western Imagination and the U.S. political and military follies it both justifies and engenders. Let us now turn to Islamism as it expresses itself concretely on the ground in the Middle-East/Arab world and the Moslem diaspora.

Actually-existing Islamic Movements and States

As we have seen above, U.S. imperialism, deluded by its own ideology, has joined the March of Folly in Afghanistan/West Pakistan - following in the illustrious footsteps of other would-be conquerors including the Persian Emperor Darius I, Alexander the Great, the British Empire under Queen Victoria and Brezhnev's Soviet Russian empire. All these great powers lost entire armies in the region before being driven out by the fiercely independent natives. The U.S. Government, dominated by powerful lobbies whose special interests trump the national interest, appears unable to change its irrational course. American imperialism justifies its dangerous and self-defeating policies through ideological constructs rooted in America's long history of conquest, projecting white American aggression outward onto a series of threatening 'others' from the 'Indians' to the 'Commies' and most recently the 'urgent threat' of 'Islamism, Islamo-fascism or ... radical Islam' (in the words of the Times). Having thus deconstructed and contextualized the contested concept of the Islamic 'threat,' we now have a more objective perspective from which to examine Islamism empirically, on the ground as it were.

Here we must account for two distinct, but related geographical and political phenomena. (1) Militant Islamic movements, parties and states in the Moslem Middle East/Arab world (ME/A for short) and (2) Islamic fundamentalism among immigrant or immigrant-descended youth in Western countries who adopt it as an expression of their alienation, humiliation and need for cultural identity. Naturally these two strands are intertwined. Radical Islamic states and movements in the ME/A seek to influence and recruit among the Moslem diaspora in the West; they weave international propaganda networks aimed at gaining cultural and political hegemony over communities of often indifferent or irreligious Moslem immigrants, where family, cultural and emotional ties with the homeland nonetheless remain strong. Such networks may also be used to recruit militants for combat and suicide attacks among the disaffected masses of unemployed youth in the ME/A world and the frustrated, humiliated, educated elites in both Europe and the Moslem countries. Taken as a whole, these state and non-state actors form what has been described as a 'nebulous,' and the most striking thing about this nebulous is its lack of internal unity and coherence.

To begin with, the 'Islamic world,' with its 1.3 billion inhabitants (1/5 of the world population), is itself as various as the so-called 'Christian-heritage' world with its right-wing Evangelicals and politicized Vatican at one extreme and its vast un-churched European majority at the other. Similarly, Islam as it is lived and practiced by millions of East Asians has a much less significant political role than in the Middle East/Arab (ME/A) lands, where it has become the ideological expression of exacerbated nationalism and a vehicle to political power. And even within this geographical area, division - or rather violent schism - predominates over unity and coherence. The intensity of the rivalry between Shiite and Sunni factions, each with its alliances of states and insurgent groups, has been compared to that of the16th Century European inter-Christian religious wars between Catholics and Protestants, which continued through the 17th Century here in France and were bloodier and more destructive than the Crusades. A propos, the Crusades of the Middle Ages were organized under the Popes of a united Catholic Europe, which accounted for much of their success against the Moslems, who were divided, then as now. [6]

Moslem Disunity

Returning to Political Islam today, it is obvious that for a movement to be a serious threat to the imperialist West, it must be coherent and united, which is simply not the case here. A united militant Islamic ME/A world would indeed be a serious threat to the West, but nothing like that is in the offing, with the result that 'Political Islam,' divided, remains weak and ineffectual. So much for the Clash of Civilizations theories - based on ideology rather than concrete history. To be sure, Islamicist terror is a very serious daily threat to its principal victims, Moslem civilians in the ME/A lands, as well as to its more occasional victims, civilians in Western cities. But the actually existing Islamisms within the divided Moslem world represent no serious threat to U.S./Western hegemony, only obstacles to its control of the extraction and transit of petroleum.

The most dramatic evidence of continuing Moslem impotence is the freedom and impunity with which Israel was able to invade first southern Lebanon in 2006 and then Gaza in 2008-09, deploying massive bombardments of civilian areas and scandalous attacks on schools, ambulances, and hospitals. Ostensibly Moslem pro-Western authoritarian states like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco et al. responded to these brutal aggressions 'by tacitly supporting Israel's offensive in the hope of weakening a resistance movement which they see as a proxy for Iran and Syria.' [7] Egypt has even closed its border with Gaza to humanitarian aid. Only when faced with huge spontaneous pro-Palestinian street demonstrations at home did these U.S.-propped 'Moslem' despotisms eventually consent to send some aid for the rebuilding of Gaza.

Similarly, the U.S. occupiers in Iraq have successfully played the imperial divide-and-rule game by paying off Sunni militias to 'keep order' and serve as a counterforce to the restive Shiite majority. Likewise in Afghanistan, the victorious 2001 U.S. invasion was made possible by the divide-and-rule tactic of arming the Northern Alliance of Islamic warlords from the ethnic Tadzhik, Usbeck, and Hasara nations against the Taliban government, whose ethnic base is the Pashtun nation, large but still a minority. However the Pashtuns' territory bleeds far into Pakistan, and the U.S.-supported Pakistani government quietly supports the Pashtun/Taliban cause in Afghanistan (though not within its own borders) so as to undermine a rival Afghan state allied with Pakistan's nemesis, India. This is a situation of immense complexity in which regional inter-state conflict and ethnic/national rivalry on the ground apparently trump religion. [8]

Thus, put to the empirical test, the concept of the 'Islamic threat' as a unified actor simply falls apart - or rather dissolves into a nebulous. The word 'nebulous' is apt, because it suggests a swarm of bees, in this case angry Islamic bees, including heavily armed Shiite wasps and Sunni hornets. Now the trick around bees is to move slowly and leave them alone. They become a 'threat' only when you stir them up, which is exactly what Obama is doing in Afghanistan and now Pakistan and Yemen. It has become obvious to the world that every time the U.S. bombs Moslem civilians (or allows Israel to bomb Palestinian civilians) the imperialists create new Islamic militants who rise up and join the growing swarms of 'political Islam.' Indeed, news anchor Tom Brokaw recently described what the US was engaged in as the 'war against Islamic rage.' Would it not then be fair to conclude that in some non-metaphorical sense Western imperialism creates 'the threat of political Islam?'

How the Islamic Virus Broke Out of the Imperialist Laboratory

To sum up so far, we have seen that linguistically the concept of 'Islamism' is a product of the Orientalizing Western imagination and that it fits into a longstanding paradigm of demonizing the inferior, yet threatening 'other' (Indians, Negroes, anarchist immigrant laborers). We have also observed that empirically speaking the concept 'political Islam' does not qualify as a unified actor, and that its strength grows in reaction to each new Western outrage (invasions, bombings, kidnappings, assassinations, torture) against Moslem states and populations that resist U.S. hegemony over their oil and strategic position in the Great Game. We have also observed how this contested concept has been mobilized for propaganda purposes in order to justify unpopular, hugely expensive oil wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Pakistan. Functionally speaking, the War on (Islamic) Terror, like the War on Drugs, provides a blank check for domestic repression and foreign aggression. Indeed, if we can be permitted to paraphrase Voltaire's remark about God, if Islamism didn't exist we would have to invent it.

In what concrete ways can it be said that the West 'invents' what it calls Islamism? As we have seen, contemporary imperialism inadvertently spreads Islamic militantism by stirring up the ME/A hornets' nest through torture-camps and attacks on civilians. But Western agents have long supported Islamic movements in the region as a way to divert nationalism and democracy. Historically, the British Intelligence Service nurtured the Islamicist movement at its very origin. Said Aburish and Caroline Fourest among others have documented how the Moslem Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, was encouraged by the British as a diversion against Egyptian secular movements for labor rights, democracy and national independence.

Likewise, the strict Wahhabi Islam of Saudi Arabia, encouraged by the British and then the Americans, has long been the main political prop of the despotic pro-Western Saudi monarchy - itself an invention of British colonialism. [9] This convenient relationship provides immense royalties to the U.S./British oil companies operating in Saudi Arabia as well as lucrative sales of F-16s to protect the Saudi royals from their benighted subjects - an imperialist sweetheart deal if there ever was one. No one seems to notice that Saudi Arabia, like Hamas which it has historically financed, remains an Islamic state which refuses to recognize the state of Israel. And although the Western media occasionally react to such barbaric incidents as the beheading of a young princess for the crime of kissing a boy, somehow the Saudi Wahhabi fundamentalist semi-theocracy is never counted under the heading 'threat of political Islam.' Proponents of this concept also conveniently forget that Osama bin Laden and most of his September 11 hijackers were Saudi subjects and that their avowed purpose was to expel from Saudi Arabia the U.S. bases, established during Bush I's Gulf War against Iraq, which were seen as polluting Islam's Holy places. Another 'open secret' is the longstanding relationship between the Bush and bin Laden clans which culminated in the expatriation to Saudi Arabia of dozens of bin Laden family members residing in the U.S. in the days following the 9/11 attacks - despite the grounding of all civilian aviation and without any FBI or other interrogation as to their possible knowledge of the attacks. Blood may be thicker than water, but oil is thicker than both.

Over the years, the British-backed Moslem Brotherhood's activities spread far beyond Egypt - for example to Palestine. There in the 1970s the Israelis encouraged and financed its evangelical and social activities in newly occupied Gaza and the West bank through its 'Moslem Center' front in a 'tactical alliance' against the Palestinian resistance led by the secular PLO. These activities were directed by the Brotherhood's Palestine Apparatus as a base on which to prepare the creation in the 1980s of the Islamic political party Hamas and for its future armed struggle against both the PLO and Israel. [10] Divide-and-rule continued to bear fruit for the Israelis in the Twenty-First Century, when actual armed hostilities broke out between Fatah- and Hamas-oriented militias in the West Bank, demoralizing the Palestinians and paving the way for fresh Israeli incursions. Similarly, the 'Islamicist' tactic of attacking civilians by placing car bombs in front of mosques was first introduced by the CIA in Lebanon in the 1970s, according to award-winning journalist Allan Nairn. [11] In the 1980s we find the CIA playing the Islamic card against the Communists in the Great Game between Russia and the West over control of Afghanistan. If Osama bin Laden didn't personally work for the CIA in the 80s (as did Saddam Hussein) his fighters received U.S. arms and money through the Pakistani secret services (ISI) to combat the Russians and the Afghani Communists (who incidentally had brought secular education, gender equality and relative lack of corruption to Afghanistan during their years in government).

Throughout ME/A history the imperialist West has consistently preferred to support pliant reactionary despots over democrats and nationalists for the simple reason that it is cheaper and more profitable to pay off a small ruling group and keep the lion's share of the profits than to submit to popular demands for better wages, local development and a fairer distribution of the oil revenues. By and large, these divide-and-rule tactics have worked. And although the Clash of Civilizations paradigm presents the Islamic world as an aggressive, expansionist, religious threat to pacific Western democratic liberalism, the historical record shows that the Western governments have consistently crushed every attempt at democracy or secular nationalism in the ME/A lands. One needs only to recall the 1953 CIA-organized overthrow of the elected government of Iran and its mildly nationalistic prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who had dared to impose partial nationalization of Iran's oil-fields (while offering to pay 25% royalties to the British), or the 1956 French-British-Israeli invasion of Egypt, when the secular pan-Arabist government of Nasser threatened the Suez Canal.

The reason secular strongman and former CIA 'asset' Saddam Hussein suddenly got transformed from cherished ally in the war against the Ayatollahs into an Islamic 'Hitler' had nothing to do with religion. The Iraqi dictator got too big for his britches and tried to take a bigger cut of the profits. This would have set a very bad precedent, and it took the West two wars and an invasion to cut him down to size - naturally in the name of 'democracy' and the 'liberation' of the Iraqi people. And although the Bush II administration attempted to link Saddam Hussein with the religious fanaticism of Osama bin Laden as a pretext for invasion, Baathist Iraq was arguably the most secular, progressive, technically advanced state in the region. One recalls that women occupied roughly half the jobs in the Iraqi civil services as well as in education and medicine. Well-trained Iraqi engineers and administrators were able to successfully repair the infrastructure after the devastations of the first Gulf War, despite the continuing U.S. embargo - something Halliburton has been unable to do after spending billions. Not surprisingly, the U.S.-British occupiers immediately pushed aside the actual democratic forces within Iraq - women, organized labor, and the educated middle class of doctors, lawyers and engineers - and based themselves exclusively on the reactionary religious and tribal elements whose civil wars reign of Islamic terror continues to this day. Another case of divide-and-rule imperialism 'creating' Islamism - and then getting caught in the 'blowback.'

Islamic Forces on European Soil

Much of the Western hysteria over Islamism focuses on the perceived threat posed by the fifteen million Moslems presently residing in Western Europe. This horde is seen as poised to burst out of the Wooden Gift-Horse of hardworking, peaceful immigration in order to murder and plunder the unsuspecting 'Trojans' within the European citadel. We find this Trojan Horse paradigm, minus the racist hysteria that often surrounds it, on the front page of our old friend the N.Y. Times Weekly Book Review which sympathetically reviewed Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West under the headline 'Strangers in the Land.' The Times' reviewer, Fouad Ajami of the conservative Hoover Institution, presents these potentially dangerous Moslem 'Strangers in the Land' as if they had been smuggled into the European heartland by liberal 'elite opinion.' He writes: 'The native populations in Western Europe hadn't voted to have the Turks and the Moroccans in Amsterdam, the Kurds in Sweden, the Arabs in London and the Pakistanis and Indians in Bradford and West Yorkshire.' The 'Strangers in the Land' are described by Ajami, himself an assimilated 1970 immigrant from Lebanon, as 'bold immigrants [...] keen on imposing their will on societies given to moral relativism and tolerance' and as 'guests' who have 'overstayed their welcome.' This kind of talk puts the shoe on the wrong foot.

First off, the native populations of Pakistan, India, Iran, Iraq, Algeria, Morocco, et al. didn't exactly vote to have their countries taken over by the British (or French) Empires. Nor did they vote to have their local cultures and economies destroyed and their natural resources siphoned off to Europe, leaving their homelands mired in mass poverty and unemployment. As a result of these Western incursions, members of despoiled native populations were obliged to 'vote with their feet' and seek work (and safety from post-colonial despots) in the colonial and post-colonial imperialist capitals. The 'elites' that smuggled these immigrant Trojan Horsemen into the European citadel were not trusting, bleeding-heart liberals obsessed with the plight of colonialism's economic and political refugees, but hard-headed businessmen who needed abundant sources of cheap foreign labor to drive down the favorable wages and conditions won by well-organized, militant post-WWII native European workers. Guest-workers, refugees and illegal immigrants lacking political rights and subject to expulsion represent a perfect source of cheap labor for European (and U.S.) capital.

'Unwelcome guests' indeed! Unwelcome only to competing native workers whose economic pain fueled the racist anti-immigrant right. Cheap Moslem immigrant labor was the dirty secret that fueled the Thirty Glorious Years of European capital growth. Here in France, for example, anti-Arab racism undercut class unity with the complicity of the Left (SP, CP and CGT) to the point where the formerly Communist 'Red Belt' of Paris suburbs ended up voting for LePen's racist National Front. Speaking of LePen, European white racism is another subject which Western proponents of the Trojan Horse paradigm conveniently neglect while accusing its victims of refusal to 'integrate' themselves. Nearly a half-century since Algerian independence, France remains a de facto segregated Republic as far as the roughly 10% of Arabs are concerned. Naturally, they live largely among themselves and seek support in their own communities. After living for twenty-odd years in Montpellier, a southern French city with a big North African population, I can't recall ever seeing an Arab face behind any of the ubiquitous grilled windows at the railroad station, the post office or any public administration. In contrast, colored citizens of France's West Indian départements are thoroughly integrated into the civil service, and educated black Africans are more or less tolerated according to economic status. Day after day immigrants from Moslem countries and their European-born children and grandchildren face the pain and humiliation of racism, social exclusion, and discrimination - when they are not actually being persecuted or forcibly deported because of problems with documents. They should feel grateful? Put yourself in their place: European imperialism made your ancestral homeland unlivable, so your family painfully pulled up roots to seek work and/or freedom from persecution in Europe, where they treat you like a pariah. Wouldn't you feel 'disaffected'?

Yet despite discrimination, the vast majority of the fifteen million non-white Moslems in Europe lead normal immigrant lives, struggling to stay afloat or get ahead, concerned with children and relatives back in the mother country, indifferent to politics except when it is forced down their throats. Moreover, the demographic Great Fear of an exploding Moslem immigrant population overwhelming Europe's low-birthrate native populations turns out to have been without basis in fact. According to the respected sociologist Emmanuel Todd and his associates, overall fecundity in Moslem lands has been declining rapidly from an average of 6.8 children per woman in 1975 to 3.7 in 2005. In Algeria the birthrate is down to 2.6 and in Iran and Tunisia to 2... the same as in swinging France! [12] Moreover, despite the increased visibility of Islam in France (provoked by official ban on head-scarves and its inevitable defiance by Moslem girls and women), the practice of Islam in France has stagnated for the past twenty years and may actually have declined. [13] Even more surprising, mixed marriages with Franco-Algerian women grew from 6.2% in 1975 to a whopping 27.5% in 1990. [14]

Nonetheless, the Trojan Horse/population bomb myth persists, and even the Times' moderate Lebanese immigrant Ajami reproaches these ungrateful militants as 'second generation immigrants who owed no allegiance to the societies of Europe.' Indignantly, the Times' successfully integrated academic cites 'the hostility of the new Islamism to the idea of assimilation, to the principle of nationality itself.' Here, Ajami apparently confuses 'integration' with 'assimilation' - as does nominally anti-racist French society. He also forgets that nationality may be a portable identity for uprooted Pakistanis in Yorkshire or Algerian kids born in the dismal projects outside of Paris. In any case, unemployment among Arab youth in France is probably at least three times the already discouraging 11% figure for Franco-French. It would be hard to imagine a more fertile ground for the growth of Islamic or any other sort of militantism among disaffected nominally Moslem youth than the ghettos on the fringe of Paris and other large French cities. Yet significantly, when police brutality touched off the powder-keg and ghetto youth rioted for several days in 2005, religion had nothing to do with it, and radical Islamic militants were no where to be seen. Indeed it was Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior (Police), who in desperation introduced Islam into the discussion. Thus, after first denouncing the slum-dwellers as 'scum' and promising to 'scour them with a high-pressure hose,' Sarko summoned the Council of the Islamic Clergy of France, appointed them to speak for their community and promised them funds to build Republican mosques and madrases to train 'French' Imams. So much for the 'secular' République laïque.

No doubt there are plenty of fundamentalist Islamic preachers in store-front mosques around Europe (and the U.S.) trying to recruit militants and impose Shariah on their immigrant communities. They are not, however trying to impose Moslem customs on the surrounding 'societies given to moral relativism and tolerance' (Ajami's words). Where else besides Islam are angry, disaffected youth in search of identity and dignity in Europe's streets or universities to turn in the absence of secular political civil rights and labor movements defending their cause? Yet sadly in the French Republic, where racism is officially invisible and thus not on the political agenda, no Left parties - Socialist, Communist or even the various Trotskyists - have attempted to register Arab citizens for suffrage or bothered to solicit their votes. Only the National Front, led by Jean-Marie LePen's daughter Marine, attempted go for the Arab vote. In 2007 they ran Arab candidates, and the NF presidential campaign poster depicted two attractive young women, one white the other visibly North African!

Of course the clinching evidence for the Islamic Trojan Horse thesis are the terror bombings carried out with the help of Islamic kamikazes recruited from among European Moslems, for example the three thousand U.S. civilians killed in the 9/11/01 attacks on the Twin Towers and the victims of the London Underground bombings. Indeed, Ajami begins his article citing 200 killed and thousands wounded in Madrid in 2004 thus framing it as a 'Moor's revenge' - alluding expulsion of the last Moorish ruler of Granada in 1492. One problem with this truly shocking evidence for the Trojan Horse theory is that most of these horrific attacks were instigated not in Europe, but in the ME/A lands and that they were conceived as retaliation for perceived Western aggression there. Such attacks are inevitable in this asymmetrical war where one side has Predators, F-16s and cluster-bombs while the other side uses box-cutters and home-made improvised explosive devices. But the Islamic terrorist foot-soldiers who carry out such attacks, whether immigrant, European-born or foreign, are merely agents of the West's true antagonists, the radical Islamicist states and political movements in the ME/A lands. So the best that can be said for the Islamic Trojan Horse thesis is (1) that among the fifteen million nominally Moslem immigrants living more or less peacefully in various parts of Europe a few thousand disaffected youth have been won over by various competing Islamist networks and that (2) among these new militants, a few dozen have shown themselves willing to act as terrorists and martyrs for the cause. Islamic terrorists represent a very real threat to the potential victims of suicide attacks on peaceful Western commuters, but they are not likely to take over the European heartland in any foreseeable future. Scary as suicide attacks may be, the origin of this threat lies not in Europe but in the Moslem ME/A world, to which we now turn.

Radical Islamic States and Political Movements in the Mid-East/Arab World

Historically, today's ME/A area corresponds geographically with the Moslem Empire of the Ottoman Turks, which lasted from 1453 to 1918 and once extended eastward deep into Central Asia and westward to Morocco and to the gates of Vienna. Although by and large tolerant of other religions, the Ottoman Empire was nominally unified by a common faith - a mild form of Islam. In the 19th Century, a weakened Ottoman Empire, the so-called 'sick man of Europe,' fell prey to the appetites of the Western Great Powers, especially their appetite for oil, which was beginning to replace coal as Europe's principle energy source. When oil was discovered in Iran and Iraq, Germany - then the rising industrial power - drew the Ottomans into their sphere of influence. One of Britain's principal war aims in 1914-1918 was to take over the Kaiser's Ottoman oil monopoly - to the extent of diverting whole armies from the Western Front to fight the Turks (think Gallipoli).

What was left of the Ottoman sphere of influence was carved up by the victors at the Versailles Peace Conference, with Britain getting the lion's share in the form of humanitarian Protectorates on which to impose unpopular neo-colonial puppet governments. For example when Britain placed a Sunni dynasty on the throne of Shiite Iraq and the local tribes revolted, Churchill ordered the British Flying Corps under 'Bomber' Harris (the future architect of the WWII Dresden raids) to bomb and machine-gun their camps and villages from the air. Churchill's rickety biplanes were less sleek than Obama's drones but quite effective against horsemen armed with sabers and muskets, or women and children in tents. [15] Thus the arbitrary borders drawn on maps at Versailles in 1919 became the fault-lines of today's civil wars. Nearly a century later, the U.S. (with Britain as a junior partner) is still putting down the same insurgencies for the same oil.

One reason radical Islamic movements have grown so powerful is that they fill the political vacuum created by the crushing of democratic social movements defending the rights of workers, women, students and national minorities. Looking at the ME/A world today, we find nothing but dreary despotisms of one kind or another - the secular, democratic, socialist option having been ruled out by Western intervention and Western support for local Islamic reactionaries. 'It's not that the Taliban is very strong,' an Afghan politician was recently quoted as saying, 'but that the government is very weak.' [16] This observation could be expanded to comprise many of the corrupt, despotic, ineffectual Western-backed regimes in the ME/A world.

When occasional show elections are organized, Islamic parties rush in to fill the political vacuum. For example, it is generally accepted that the reason Hamas pulled off a surprise victory in the Palestinian elections of 2006 was that Arafat's ruling Fatah, having agreed at Oslo to become Israel's gendarme in return for a shred of legitimacy, had become dictatorial, corrupt and ineffectual in dealing with the Israelis. The voters were so disgusted they went for the image of a pure, uncorrupted, socially-concerned Islamic party willing to stand up to the occupiers. The same analysis seems to apply to the Algerian elections of 1990 when the Islamist FIS outpolled the historical party of Algerian independence, the ruling National Liberation Front (FLN). In both cases the results of Western-style electoral democracy were annulled with the support of the Western democracies themselves. As soon as the Palestinian election results were known, Israel and the U.S. refused to recognize the Hamas victory, while in Algeria the French backed a military coup by the Army/FLN. Both situations led to prolonged and bloody civil wars between the Islamists and the illegitimate Western-backed secular dictatorships during which civilians bore the brunt of the violence.

The history of modern Iran reveals a more complex, but essentially similar pattern, where the Islamist party eventually did take and hold power. In 1953 after the CIA overthrew Iranian democracy, the U.S. restored the monarchy and installed Reza Shah Pahlavi on the Peacock Throne. (One recalls that the Shah's father had been removed by his British patrons in 1941 for collaboration with the Nazis.) The new Shah, although a sadistic dictator and megalomaniac was a pro-U.S. secular modernizer, and after a quarter of a century of torture-based economic development, the royal peacock was swept away on a tide of demonstrations by revolutionary students, women and men, non-commissioned officers, oil-workers and technicians who had grown up under his progressive, yet oppressive regime. For a while Marxists, feminists, and revolutionary workers' councils flourished along with middle-class professionals and democratic exiles, provoking fears of new Mossedeghs and expropriated oil-fields.

So how did the stern, fanatical, bearded, reactionary Ayatollahs take over? To begin with, Rockefeller protégé President Jimmy Carter deliberately alienated the Iranian people by offering U.S. asylum to the dying, deposed Shah rather than reaching out to these newly liberated democratic and nationalist forces. [17] Moreover, the democratic forces, having grown up under the eye of the Shah's dreaded secret police, Savak, had no pre-existing structured organizations - aside from the opportunistic Tudah Communist Party which called for a popular front with Khomeini's 'progressive' Islamists! The Ayatollahs, on the other hand, were superbly organized. They already had their religions networks in the villages and among the bazaaris. Following a general plan outlined years earlier by the Moslem Brotherhood, the Islamists rapidly infiltrated all the workers' councils and neighborhood Committees as well as the revolutionary militias. At first they talked tolerance and preached a populist social gospel, but later they attacked and marginalized their secular adversaries. Meanwhile, the Ayatollahs made a deal with Savak, which had remained dormant behind the scenes following the collapse of the monarchy. When the moment arrived, the Ayatollahs tightened the noose, and suddenly the leftists and democrats found themselves once again in Iran's torture-prisons.

So far, the case of Iran seemed to follow the established pattern of authoritarian right as spoiler, foiling the social and political aspirations of democratic Left during crises of the established order to the ultimate benefit of Western oil interests. But once the Ayatollahs took power, there was no stopping them. Their Islamic Republic incarnated the national aspirations of a historically rich, powerful nation which had long been manipulated, repressed and humiliated by Western imperialism. Once again, Iran would rise to its ancient status as major West Asian power, like the Persian Empire which dominated the region for centuries B.C.E. Although repressive, the Islamic Republic was at first popular. From a Western point of view however, it became clear that if the Iranian revolutionaries were allowed to succeed in defying the United States, their example of radical independence would spread. The seething masses among the other pro-Western Moslem despotisms in the region would rise and the corrupt U.S.-backed dictatorships would fall like so many dominos, depriving the West of 'its' oil.

Once again, divide-and-rule tactics came to the rescue of the imperialists when neighboring Iraq (instigated, financed and armed by the U.S.) initiated a bloody eight-year war against Iran during which huge battles on the scale of World Wars I and II were fought. While millions were killed, mutilated, or lost their homes, the U.S. profited both politically and financially through arms and equipment sales (remember the famous photograph of Saddam Hussein shaking hands over a deal with Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney?) Both countries were bled white, but in the end Saddam ended up with a surfeit of modern U.S. arms which tempted him to take a bite out of plump, oil-rich Kuwait next door. Indeed, with Persia out of the way, why shouldn't Mesopotamia be the regional bully? Believing he had the green light from the State Department in 1991, [18] Saddam made his incursion into Kuwait. Suddenly the CIA's fair-haired boy became the new 'Hitler,' and the U.S. organized a military coalition to put the mustachioed upstart in his place. However, unlike his idiot son, Bush the First was smart enough to leave Saddam's Sunni-based regime in power as a foil against Shiite Iran. Indeed, he even allowed him to use his elite Republican Guard to crush the restive Shiites and Kurds, who had risen up in response to the Coalition's promises of liberation. Thus for ninety years, from 1919 to 1999, Anglo-American interests successfully dominated the oil-rich ME/A world, suppressing, subverting or containing democratic and nationalist revolutions while relying on reactionary despots to rule - so long as they remained pliable clients.

The Contradictions of Empire

As we have seen, Anglo-American domination of the oil-rich Middle-East based on Moslem disunity, exacerbated by insidious divide-and-rule tactics and punctuated by occasional invasions or coups d'état, brought relative stability to the region for the better part of the 20th Century. It took the born-again genius of Bush II and the Republican Right to invade an already helpless Iraq in 2001, wreck the infrastructure, turn power over to the pro-Iranian Shiites, tip the regional balance of power in favor of Iran, and successfully destabilize the whole Middle East. After eight years stuck in the Bush administration's deepening military quagmires, the U.S. elected a centrist Democratic policy wonk on an implied promise of peace. Once elected, however, Bush's Democratic successor enlisted in the U.S. Middle-East March of Folly. As we have seen, President Obama has escalated the hopeless war in Afghanistan, further destabilized regimes teetering on the brink of civil war in both Yemen and nuclear-armed Pakistan, and employed terror tactics guaranteed to antagonize the populations of much of the Moslem ME/A world - all the while talking about 'winning their hearts and minds.' Moreover, unlike the case of Dubya, we cannot attribute Obama's irrational Pursuit of Policies Contrary to Self-Interest and self-willed ignorance of consequences to an obvious personality disorder.

The danger today is not only that the Obama Administration might ignite a nuclear war in West Asia but also that its escalation of Bush's War on Terror might provoke a domestic crisis fatal to U.S. democracy as well. To illustrate the danger, allow me to compare today's Middle-East crisis with the war in Vietnam. As a campus activist, I was one of the earliest (1961) critics of U.S. intervention in Vietnam - thanks to my familiarity with France's earlier defeats in Indochina and Algeria. I was also active during the scary Berlin crisis and the terrifying nuclear showdown over Russian missiles in Cuba, and believe me I was scared. Yet today at the age of seventy I am appalled to confess I consider Bush-Obama's March of Folly in the Middle-East more dangerous still.

Back in the Sixties Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon had a tacit agreement with Khrushchev and his successors to contain these regional conflicts, to fight each other mainly through proxies, above all not to go nuclear. Today, President Obama has no way of foreseeing who will have his hand on the Pakistani nuclear trigger a year from now. Unstable Pakistan has a history of political assassinations and military coups. The Pakistani government harbors Islamic fundamentalists in its intelligence/security apparatus and unleashes them against regional rivals like India and India's ally Afghanistan. A recent Taliban offensive within Pakistan came close to threatening the capital before the military intervened, at U.S. insistence, perpetrating a bloodbath and a humanitarian nightmare. Meanwhile the father of the Pakistani atom bomb, although convicted of selling nukes to the North Koreans, remains at large and influential. Paradoxically, the U.S. and the U.N. Security Council express hysterical concern over nuclear reactors in Iran that might produce enough weapons-grade uranium to build a bomb, but no one seems excessively concerned about the nuclear cannons loose on the pitching Mid-East deck in the form of combat-ready Israeli, Indian and Pakistani nuclear bombs.

Further, in the Sixties, thanks to the pioneering Civil Rights and Black Power movements, there was political space for protest in the streets, and the media were compelled to pay attention to the anti-Vietnam-war movement. Our teach-ins, mass demonstrations, acts of civil disobedience and military insubordination thus played a generally-recognized historical role in ending the Vietnam War. Perversely, this victory for democracy and sanity over murderous Folly has been stigmatized as 'the Vietnam Syndrome' - as if our protests were the disease, not the cure. This bogus label allows today's pundits to dismiss out of hand the obvious comparison between the military Follies of Iraq/Afghanistan and those of Vietnam. And so I wonder if such a successful anti-war movement is still possible in the U.S. today. Alas, the Pentagon and its allies learned the perverse lesson of the 'Vietnam Syndrome' all too well: In order to pursue imperialist aggression abroad, personal liberties and the right to free speech, free assembly and political organization must be curtailed at home.

The U.S. national security state has long been preparing for a preventive or pre-emptive counter-revolution. Police and other security forces have been super-armed with tasers, water-cannons, percussion grenades, tear-gas, and lethal riot-weapons. Protected behind armored vests, plastic shields and Darth Vader helmets, trained in violent riot-control methods, the forces of repression stand ready and eager to crush any suspicious gathering of hippies, weirdos, feminazis, gays, tree-huggers peaceniks and other government-designated 'terrorist suspects'. Today's protestors are often confined to 'Free Speech Areas' enclosed by chain-line fences and established far from the targeted event and attendant media. There we are free to march in circles carrying signs and chanting slogans to each other. This reminds my of the old philosopher's paradox: 'If a free speech is emitted in the forest and nobody hears it, does it exist?' Worse still, today's peace activists and indy journalists are routinely subject to groundless arrest, warrantless searches, seizure of their computers, cameras and poster-making equipment before they can even get their protests off the ground. The same thing happens to community and environmental activists, like the ones who were rounded up in Pittsburgh before the 2009 economic summit even began. Apparently, the Establishment - never hospitable to whistle-blowers - is bent on removing the democratic safety-valve that during the Sixties shrieked loudly enough to prevent the U.S. from going all the way down the Road to Folly in Vietnam.

It doesn't take a rocket-scientist to see that today's American-led March of Folly in the Middle East, by attempting to impose imperialist hegemony through military power alone, will inevitably lead to catastrophic U.S. defeats if not to generalized catastrophe. But what other alternatives do the rulers of what some call the 'Empire' really have? Democracy? If we return to the comparison between the Middle East and Latin America, we see that the main threat to U.S. imperial interests south of the border is not reactionary nationalism but a sudden outbreak of democracy after decades of U.S.-backed dictatorships. This return to relative democracy was based on the growth of powerful social movements among the poor as well as burgeoning national economies. Today, Latin American regional trade groups openly challenge U.S. hemispheric hegemony and invite Chinese and other foreign capitalists into Uncle Sam's 'back yard,' ending the two centuries-old Yankee sphere of influence.

This loss may be partially a consequence of the U.S. fixation on the Mid-East over the past decades: when the cat's away the mice will play. In any case, the Genii of democracy is out of the Latin American bottle now, and the over-extended U.S. military no longer has the power to stuff it back in. Unfortunately, the lesson for the Middle-East that Washington has apparently drawn from this historic hemispheric defeat is this: 'No more Mr. Nice-Guy. At the slightest sign of independence or weakness on the part of a client government, go for 'regime change' and install a more compliant or more repressive one. Let's talk about 'nation-building,' 'winning hearts and minds' and 'development,' but keep control by spending on military equipment, mercenaries, bribes to enemy combatants and alliances with war-lords and drug-lords - like we did in Vietnam, which we could have won if only we had kept our nerve!'

Of course this blind militarism won't work in the ME any more than it did in Vietnam, but it is the logical consequence of the basic contradiction of capitalist imperialism since the end of the First imperialist World War and the revolutionary wave the followed it in 1917-21 - the contradiction between imperialism and democracy. Although parliamentary democracy was the ideal political form for the establishment of bourgeois-capitalist rule in the 19th Century, allowing as it does for the interplay of various propertied interests, during the 20th Century's revolutionary crises it became necessary to replace it with dictatorship through 'preventive counter-revolution.' This is precisely the historical role played by the various forms of what are properly called 'fascist' movements, beginning with Mussolini's March on Rome after striking Italian workers occupied their factories in 1919-1920. It includes the Catholic clerico-fascism of the Iberian dictators Franco and Salazar and of course Nazi-fascism under Hitler, who sent German trade-unionists, socialists and communists to the concentration camps years before he sent the Jews.

All these fascist movements were broadly supported by the propertied ruling classes in the capitalist democracies. The U.S., France and Britain didn't just appease Hitler after he took power. From the Twenties on as the Depression and the social crisis deepened in Europe, the democracies both openly and surreptitiously supported European fascist movements as a foil against Socialism, Communism, and plain old democracy. In 1936, they backed Franco's Falangist rebels against the legitimate government of Republican Spain. [19] But playing with fascism is like playing with fire, because fascism is both a fanatical racial/religious ideology and an expression of exacerbated nationalism. To survive, German and Italian fascism required an expansionist, aggressive type of regime, projecting each nation's inner crisis outward. The Western capitalist democracies thought they were clever, fighting fire with fire. They had second thoughts when the upstart Hitler conquered continental Europe and threatened island Britain. The irony of the anti-Iraqi 1991 Coalition painting a puny peanut like Saddam Hussein as a 'second Hitler' is that both Hitlers were nurtured by the Western democracies before they got too big for their britches.

Having played the Sorcerer's Apprentice for too long, U.S. imperialism is now dependent on little Hitlers around the globe any of whom might at any moment go 'rogue' or switch sides in what is now a multi-lateral world. Of course, no conceivable coalition of rival regional imperialisms (ie. China, Russia, the European Union or even all combined) has the military or financial might to challenge the U.S. super-power militarily. Yet America with its hollowed-out economy may once again prove to be the 'helpless giant' it was in Vietnam. Despite Wall Street's artificial recovery, the Great Recession of 2008 has left Main Street in a deepening depression. In the wake of mass disillusion over Obama's unredeemed promises of 'change' and a renewal of virulence on the racist, religious Right, the U.S. stands polarized as never before. What is most to be feared is that America itself may undergo a preventive counter-revolution under the pressure of democratic imperialism's contradictions and succumb to its own brand of fascism. The demise of the world's first democracy, Athens, as a result of the contradiction between Athenian democracy and her imperialist expansionism, was theorized by Thucydides in his 5th Century B.C. History of the War between Athens and Sparta. Thucydides, a former general, claimed that his History was 'written in bronze' because given human nature and similar circumstances in the future, one could expect the same results. And so it goes.

Before concluding this cursory survey of a complex crisis, we must ask where Israel fits into the picture. I have always seen Zionism as a Hebrew remake of the American frontier movie transposed to Palestine, with the Arabs in the role of the Indians: a matzoh-ball Western called 'How the East Was Won.' Like the courageous Euro-American colonists occupying an 'empty' American continent, the Zionists fulfilled their own Manifest Destiny in an 'empty' Palestine. The Zionist settlers saw themselves as 'a people without land in a land without people,' creating a City on the Hill in the wilderness, making the desert bloom. The necessary ethnic cleansing was carried out by the same John Wayne methods: First encourage peaceful settlers to take over the natives' land; then when the natives fight back and some settlers get killed, holler 'atrocity' and send in the Cavalry to exterminate the savages or drive them into camps and barren reservations to rot in idleness. When necessary, negotiate treaties you have no intention of keeping. Above all, demonize the natives so as to prevent poor or disaffected settlers from fraternizing or running off with them. Soon the only 'good' Indian or Arab becomes the 'dead' Indian or Arab.

To me the tragedy of both the Jewish and Arab peoples is to be led by violent, corrupt, reactionary, religiously-inspired ultra-nationalist leaders who more and more resemble their opposite numbers and whose reciprocal power depends on mutually maintaining a state of crisis so as to silence internal opposition. I think the term 'clerico-fascism,' applied above to Iranian Islamism and Franco's Phalange, is a useful way of describing these movements and regimes. It is more general (and less biased) than the ideological formulation 'Islamo-fascism,' since it illuminates the symmetrical threats to peace and democracy posed by Zionist Judeo-fascism and the Christo-fascism of the Religious Right in the U.S. I can only conclude that the most urgent 'Islamic threat' on the horizon is probably the threat that America's irrational Crusade against 'Islamo-fascism' will explode into nuclear war or seal the doom of democracy in the U.S.

What Is To Be Done?

Can this vicious cycle of 'democratic' imperialism leading to fascism be broken? Only, perhaps, through the emergence of powerful planet-wide social movements of oppressed women, peasant farmers, idealistic youth, indigenous peoples and discriminated minorities. Only such movements from below, combined with global general strikes of salaried and waged workers against global capitalist corporations, have the potential to actually change the system before time runs out for the planet. [20] As we have learned from our disappointment with Obama's Democrats (as well as Blair's New Labour and France's Socialists) changing the personalities and parties in power has become a useless diversion. How then to promote such a solution? We can begin 'thinking globally and acting locally' by forging people-to-people links of solidarity with the democratic forces - mostly invisible in the media - struggling to emerge in the nominally Moslem ME/A world.

There can be no 'solutions' to the Middle East crisis under capitalist imperialism with its unquenchable thirst for oil - only continuously escalating wars and more barbaric depredations with the possibility of nuclear war or a preventive U.S. counter-revolution are on the horizon. Islamism is only a symptom, not the cause of the disease. But this does not mean that we should stand aside paralyzed or support, out of desperation, the Islamic 'resistance' to Western imperialism as some wayward Leftists have done, forgetting that the main enemy is always at home. Nor is it useful to declare 'a plague on both your houses' while waiting for capitalism's collapse and the hypothetical world revolution which we devoutly desire. Rather, our place is alongside the civilians like ourselves who live in the 'Moslem' ME/A: teachers, students, health-care professionals, office and factory workers, trade-unionists, civil servants, and homemakers, women and men, gay and straight, struggling for their rights against the double terrorism of G.I.s breaking down their doors and Islamicists blowing up their markets. Some examples:

In Pakistan, the civilian population is currently under simultaneous attack from the Taliban, U.S. drones, and the armed forces of the brutal, corrupt Pakistani regime. Recent government sweeps in Swat and South Waziristan have killed hundreds and created an estimated five million (!) refugees. Yet less than two years ago, protests by courageous Pakistani judges and lawyers followed by mass demonstrations drove out the U.S.-backed military government of Gen. Musharraf and restored formal democracy, such as it is in that vast impoverished country where the political parties are dominated by a small number of rich families. Even today, the struggle continues, with peasant women confronting police attacks, and peasants in Hari, who occupied the Karachi Press Club to protest land seizures. [21]

Last June in Iran, after far-right President Ahmadinejad apparently stole his re-election, masses of courageous women and men took to the streets day after day in defense of democracy and defiance of the Ayatollahs and of brutal attacks by police and Islamic militias. Although the Western media were flooded with spectacular images and bla-bla about 'democracy,' the reaction of heads of state, from Obama to Chavez, was curiously cold and reserved. These spontaneous, self-organized demonstrators - women and men of all ages and social classes - are still continuing their protests in less spectacular forms. They have creatively appropriated modern technologies like cell phones and Twitter to mobile street tactics, revealing the high degree of political maturity of the Iranian people, who, as we have seen, have a long revolutionary past. In any case, what the media didn't publicize was last Spring's wave of Iranian workers' strikes (naturally illegal) in transport, auto, construction, even oil which set the stage for the big democracy demonstrations. Many workers participated as individuals in 2009's democracy demonstrations; others reinforced them through daily work stoppages in sympathy with the big crowds. The slogan of the workers, parodying Marx, was 'we have nothing to lose but our unpaid wages.' The Iranian working class, with its long memory of betrayal by middle-class movements, had no illusions about the 'moderate' candidates from whom Ahmadinejad stole the election or the 'Green' leaders, mostly former officials of the Islamic Republic whose hands are bloody with earlier massacres. [21] The world economic crisis has hurt Iran badly, and struggles are bound to become sharper. Iran is a modern, developed country with a large educated population, mostly young but wise in experience. Future developments there promise to be interesting. Click on hopoi.org to find out more about the Iranian labor movement and show your solidarity with hopoi: Hands Off the People of Iran.

The 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was supposed to bring 'democracy,' particularly women's rights, to what was depicted as a totally backward land. The tragic irony is that the Western occupation, by replacing the Taliban with Hamid Karsai's corrupt Islamic regime of violent, reactionary warlords under a Shariah Constitution, made the situation of Afghani women even worse. Far from being totally backward, Afghanistan abolished purdah (the banning of women from public life) as early as 1959, when women began attending co-educational universities and joining the workforce. Women made more progress after the popular 1978 Peoples Democratic Party coup abolished feudal privilege and confiscated royal land and even after the Russian invasion of 1989. All these democratic advances were abolished after 1992 when U.S.-backed Islamist warlords and militias overthrew the Communist puppet government. So oppressive was warlord misrule - now once again restored by the Western coalition - that in 1996 much of the population felt relieved when the Taliban took Kabul. But not for long.

By 2001, Afghani women and democrats were ready to welcome the U.S. invaders as liberators. Popular participation in the 2002 loya jurga (the traditional gathering delegated to create a new government) was enthusiastic. According to participants, 'Women played a leading role at these meetings ... The one issue that united the delegates above all others was the urgency of reducing the power of warlords and establishing a truly representative government'. [23] Of course the U.S. occupiers ignored the loya jurga and set up a powerless reactionary puppet, while the country slid into violent chaos. Today, according to Zoya, spokeswoman for RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan which has been organizing and struggling among Afghani women since 1977, 'Afghanistan is now a free country: free for the rapists of women and children, free for the warlords, for drug lords, terrorists and occupation forces. It is not free for the people of Afghanistan.' To find out more about RAWA and support the Afghani women's struggle go to www.rawa.org

Finally, since Obama's 'surge' in Afghanistan, Iraq has slid largely under the media's radar, but huge U.S. bases remain and the bloody occupation/civil war continues. Meanwhile, women and trade unionists are fighting desperately for their rights - and sometimes their survival - caught in the cross-fire between Islamist militias on the one hand and on the other the U.S. Occupation and its Iraqi client government, which is still enforcing Saddam Hussein era anti-labor laws. Despite persecution, Iraqi workers and unemployed have organized, held national conferences, and successfully sought international support from trade-unionists in Japan, Europe and the U.S. To find out more, get involved and contribute money, contact U.S. Labor against the War at www.uslaboragainstwar.org

As for the fate of Iraqi women, one recalls that before the U.S.-led invasion, Iraq was a modern society with women occupying more than half the civil service jobs and working as doctors, lawyers and professors (even under Saddam's horrid Baathist dictatorship). Since the beginning of the U.S.-led occupation, Iraqi women have been courageously organizing OFWI, the Organization for Women's Freedom in Iraq in defiance of rapes and attacks on militant or unveiled women committed by both occupiers and local reactionaries. OWFI has been building battered-women's shelters, fighting honor killings, rapes and sex-trafficking that flourish under the U.S.-imposed regime. These women - not the bearded killers - represent the true 'Iraqi resistance' which decent people ought to support. To find out more about Iraqi women's struggles and join them in solidarity, go to www.equalityiniraq.com

Finally, there is a growing movement among U.S. veterans and active duty soldiers speaking out against America's oil-wars, testifying to the horrors against Iraqi and Afghani civilians that they and other U.S. soldiers routinely committed, and more and more frequently going AWOL or refusing orders to ship out. They urgently need our support. To find out more and support their struggle, go to: Iraqi Veterans Against War at www.ivaw.org or Courage to Resist - Support the Troops Who Refuse to Fight at www.couragetoresist.org/x/ or to Veterans and Service Members Stand up against War and Racism www.MarchForward.org

By joining in solidarity with these brave anti-war soldiers and with the non-violent resistance of Iranian, Iraqi and Afghani women and men, we can become 'part of the solution' - rather than 'part of the problem.' By helping our civilian counterparts in the ME/A lands to make concrete gains, like building a union hall or a battered women's center we can build bridges of international solidarity and weave networks uniting the freedom struggles of the oppressed 'colonial' world with the anti-capitalist resistance in the dominant imperialist world. By these simple, useful, concrete actions we can overcome our own paralyzing despair; indeed, we can incarnate, today, the image of a future planetary social movement which alone can conceivably bring humane solutions to the crises created by capitalism. Join us now.

Richard Greeman is a long time socialist and international activist best know for his studies and translations of Victor Serge, the Franco-Russian novelist and revolutionary. His recent book Beware of Vegetarian Sharks: Radical Rants and Internationalists Essays (Illustrated) is available online at www.lulu.com/content/923573 (free downloads).

Endnotes

1. Stephen Pollard, 'The Appeasers (review of Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom by Bruce Bower)', N.Y. Times Book Review, Sunday July 26, 2009, 12.

2. Sylvain Besson, La Conquête de l'occident: Le projet secret des islamistes (Paris, 2005), cited in Patrick Haenni and Samar Amghar, 'Un spectre hante l'Europe: Le mythe renaissant de l'islam conquérant', ('A specter is haunting Europe: the rebirth of the Myth of Islam the Conquerer') Monde diplomatique, Jan. 2010; See also Mohamed Sifaoui, La France malade de l'islamism: Menaces terroristes sur l'Hexagone (Paris, 2002).

3. See Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms (Crusades, Jihads and Modernity) (Verso, 2002) ; In my opinion, given the retrogression of both fundamentalisms to rape, torture, extermination of civilian rights and contempt for the rule of law or public opinion, 'The Clash of Barbarisms' would be an even more appropriate description of the putative 'Clash of Civilizations.' As for 'Western Civilization,' I agree: "It would be a good idea."

4. I well remember the electrocution in June 1953 of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, parents of two boys more or less my age, which took place in Ossining, N.Y. near my boyhood home. It took several jolts to kill the mother, Ethel, who looked like my aunt; the lights browned out in some places, and the kids in school were telling "frying" jokes. At thirteen I was old enough to know that the Communist couple had not been given a fair trial, that the intelligence work Julius was accused of carrying out for Russia took place during WWII when the Soviets were our allies, and that there was no such thing as "the secret" of the A-bomb that could justify a death sentence.

5. See Steve Coll, 'Threats,' The New Yorker, Jan. 18, 2010, 19.

6. Cf. Amin Malouf, The Crusades through Moslem Eyes. In fact there was internal division on both sides. The Crusaders' most significant victory was to lay waste to the Christian kingdom of Armenia and destroy Constantinople, the thousand-year-old capital of Eastern Orthodox Christianity (and the commercial rival of Catholic Venice). For a pagan like me, the only positive part of the Crusades was that some filthy Europeans adopted the Eastern practice of bathing - which the Church later banned when the bath-houses turned into brothels.

7. Rashid Khalidi, writing in the London Review of Books, 29 Jan. 2009, 5.

8. I am not asserting here that all, or even a majority of Pashtuns support the Taliban. But when U.S. drones bomb Pashtun civilian villages or compounds on 'intelligence' provided by locals (who might be personal enemies) that 'Taliban' (including relatives and fellow tribesmen) might be present there, the Pashtuns can only see this as a war against them as a nation.

9. Cf. Said K. Aburish, A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite (1997) and Caroline Fourest, Frère Tariq (Paris, 2005); Not by coincidence did the first Arabic translation of 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,' still in circulation today, appear in the 1920s. This anti-Semitic forgery was created by the Imperial Russian secret services around 1905 in order to designate a scapegoat and divert the growing Russian revolutionary movement into reactionary channels (pogroms, Black Hundreds). Today, as in the Twenties, it serves to divert the anger of the Moslem masses away from their despotic governments toward Zionism and the Jew-dominated West.

10. Cf. Adam Shatz, 'Michal's Luck', London Review of Books, May 14, 2009, 5.

11. http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/6/obama_has_kept_the_machine_set

12. Youssef Courbage and Emmanuel Todd, Le rendez-vous des civilizations (Paris, 2007).

13. 'Décryptage: l'islam en France et en chiffres 1989-2009'.
http://religion.info

14. Emmanuel Todd, Le destin des immigrés (Paris, 1997), quoted in the Jan. 2010 Monde diplomatique, 7.

15. Eventually the pilots, who had volunteered to fight German airmen, not Arab tribesmen on the ground, became sickened by the sight of the slaughter, revolted, and demanded to be discharged back to Britain. Nonetheless, Churchill's 1919-1921 British Iraqi campaign deserves historical recognition as the first use of deliberate terror bombing of civilians, an innovation unjustly attributed to the 1936 bombing of Guernica by Herman Goering's Luftwaffe.

16. Patrick Cockburn, 'Return to Afghanistan', London Review of Books, 11 June, 2009, 14.

17. See Richard Greeman, 'Obama: The New Carter of the Pax Americana?', Divergences, December 2009.
http://divergences.be/spip.php?article1657

18. Whether through ineptitude or by design, on the eve of Saddam's incursion into Kuwait, the U.S. Ambassadress to Iraq was reported to have reassured him that it was "not U.S. policy" to intervene in inter-Arab conflicts.

19. Most famously by enforcing a hypocritical, one-side 'arms embargo' on the Left-leaning Republic, while allowing Hitler and Mussolini to 'smuggle' into Spain whole armored regiments and Luftwaffe squadrons to aid Franco's Church-backed military rebellion of fascist officers.

20. Is such 'Another World' really 'Possible?' Please see my 'Ecotopia: A bet You Can't Refuse', State of Nature, Autumn 2009.
http://www.stateofnature.org/ecotopiaABet.html

21. See 'Editorial: Pakistan needs a revolution', News & Letters, December 2009.
www.newsandletters.org

22. See Yassamine Mather, 'Iranian Workers say: "We have nothing to lose but our unpaid wages"', New Politics #48, Winter 2010.

23. See Terry Moon, 'Afghan lives and freedom sucked into U.S. quagmire', News & Letters, Oct.-Nov. 2009 (from which much of the information in this paragraph was gleaned).
www.newsandletters.org