The Management of Savagery. Max Blumenthal
Knowlton, which had market tested the most effective anti-Saddam talking points, and were supplying taped releases to news outlets that published them without acknowledging their source. Nearly unanimous public approval flowed from the coverage, turning generals like Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf into national heroes and dreary studio personalities like Wolf Blitzer into overnight celebrities. Back home, pop stars gathered in studios and football stadiums for elaborately produced tributes to the troops. The tidal wave of nationalistic propaganda ensured that close to 80 percent of the American public supported the war effort, a thirty-point surge from the days before the United States attacked. A study that year by Martin Lee and Norman Solomon found that the more Gulf War-related news Americans watched, the less they knew about the war, and the more likely they were to support Bush’s intervention.
Behind the star-studded hoopla, the FBI embarked on an unprecedented campaign to gather information on Arab American business and community leaders under the guise of “interviewing” them voluntarily. In hundreds of interviews, FBI agents asked Arab Americans about their views on the war, what they thought about Israel, and if they were personally familiar with any terrorists. For the first time, the Department of Justice began fingerprinting and photographing anyone entering the country from Iraq or Kuwait.
The American Civil Liberties Union’s then-director, Kate Martin, described the panicked mood consuming communities of Arab Americans: “One of the questions that we don’t know the answers to is, where did they get the list of people they are interviewing? Did they already have a list of people to be talked to in the event of war with Iraq? That’s the first thing you need to repeat the World War II experience. That also began with interviews, and then it accelerated.”
For those targeted by the government as ethnically disloyal subversives, the war was hardly the simulacrum that Baudrillard described. But for the rest of the public, the victory over a far-off army of evildoers represented a ratification of the post–Cold War “new world order” that George H.W. Bush touted. The country’s reaction to the spectacle of the Gulf War sent the signal that its Vietnam syndrome—the brief national affliction of skepticism toward foreign interventions—had been salved.
Francis Fukuyama, the neoconservative scholar, excitedly proclaimed in a 1989 essay later adapted into a book called The End of History and the Last Man that the world was witnessing “not just the end of the Cold War” but “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” According to Fukuyama, “The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.” His essay perfectly channeled the sense of triumphalism that pervaded the Beltway foreign policy establishment and that led Washington to claim “victory” in the Cold War. The growing cult of American exceptionalism not only assumed an international consensus around market-style democracy, it received the Soviet collapse as carte blanche to spread the system around the world, by force if politically possible.
Following the Gulf War, Wesley Clark, a young general possessed with the realist outlook that characterized many in the military brass, entered the Pentagon and headed to the office of Paul Wolfowitz. Clark had come to congratulate him on the victory against Iraq, but instead found himself engaged in a disquieting exchange with one of the neoconservative movement’s leading spokesmen. “With the end of the Cold War, we can now use our military with impunity,” Wolfowitz remarked to a stunned Clark. “The Soviets won’t come in to block us. And we’ve got five, maybe ten, years to clean up these old Soviet surrogate regimes like Iraq and Syria before the next superpower emerges to challenge us … We could have a little more time, but no one really knows.”
Al Qaeda’s Trial Runs
While the neoconservatives plotted a global upheaval, the graduates of the anti-Soviet jihad had metastasized into a revolutionary force. They had benefited as much as any transnational corporation from the process of free market globalization that whittled down nation-states, hollowed out public institutions, evaporated borders, dislocated vulnerable populations and spurred economic disruption. Like the West’s emerging class of disaster capitalists and neoconservatives who preached permanent war, the jihadists made instability their lifeblood, translating crises across the globe into unprecedented opportunity.
The first Gulf War progressed, on the rural outskirts of Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, an alternative desert storm was gathering. Effectively excommunicated by his own government in 1991, bin Laden had migrated to Sudan, where an Islamist-inspired junta had taken power. There, he joined Zawahiri and members of Al-Jihad to train and share lessons from the battlefield. At one dusty plot outside Khartoum, bin Laden hosted veterans from the Afghan theater while showcasing to visiting journalists the ambitious infrastructure projects he had staked out around the country. Robert Fisk, the veteran Middle East correspondent, returned from the camp in 1993 with bin Laden’s first interview by a Western reporter. His dispatch for the UK’s Independent, detailing bin Laden’s myriad businesses and building plans around the country, was headlined, “Anti-Soviet Warrior Puts His Army on the Road to Peace.”
However, this portrayal was difficult to square with the knowledge that bin Laden had already taken credit for inspiring a December 1992 attack on US military installations in Aden, Yemen, a key link to America’s archipelago of bases in the Persian Gulf. Then, a few months later, he admitted responsibility for a rocket attack on the US embassy in Yemen’s capital Sana’a. Scott Stewart, then a special agent for the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, came away from the scene of the bombings with a startling conclusion: “The CIA had trained whoever had conducted them,” he wrote. “Several specific elements of those attacks matched techniques I had learned when I attended the CIA’s improvised explosive device training course.”
At the time, Stewart did not realize he had stumbled onto evidence of a new terror network with global reach. “It would be almost a year before I heard the term ‘al Qaeda,’” he recalled, “and several months after that before I realized the term was the name of a group of former mujahideen who fought in Afghanistan and had turned their sights against the United States.”
Just months before the bombing, a crafty explosives engineer and master of disguises named Ramzi Yousef entered New York City on a tourist visa. Yousef, who had pioneered the use of improvised remote trigger devices, was the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the Pakistani jihadist who honed his craft at the Services Bureau under Azzam’s watch. Yousef refined his skills in the Philippines, arriving as a personal envoy of bin Laden and operating through a constellation of Saudi-backed charities to help establish Abu Sayyaf, the Al Qaeda affiliate founded by fellow Afghan war veteran Janjalani.
Once in the United States, Yousef was determined to detonate a series of bombs at the base of the World Trade Center that would kill as many as 250,000 in a “Hiroshima-like event.” His plan recalled Nosair’s hand-scrawled fantasy of destroying “the structures of [America’s] civilized pillars,” and presaged the September 11 attacks.
On February 26, 1993, Yousef and two assistants personally trained by Ali Mohamed drove a 1,500-pound bomb into the basement lot below the World Trade Center’s North Tower and detonated it with a remote trigger. They killed five and injured around 1,000, wreaking havoc but failing in their mission to topple one tower against the other. “We promise you that next time will be very precise and the Trade Center will be one of our targets,” Yousef warned in a manifesto typed out from the first-class lounge of the Pakistan airline at New York’s JFK International Airport.
In the months after the attack, Pakistani intelligence agencies homed in on the Saudi-founded charity Mercy International and an affiliated charity, the Muwafaq Foundation. Pakistani newspapers had reported that the foundation’s local director, Zahid Shaikh, was Yousef’s uncle, prompting the investigation. Pakistani authorities also looked into “the possibility that Yousef worked for Pakistani and U.S. security agencies during the Afghan war but later turned against them after developing links with the Islamic militants,” according to the newswire, UPI. French journalist Richard Labévière alleged that Mercy International was “able to establish its headquarters in the United States, in the state of Michigan, with the assistance