Those
Irrational, Misled, Conspiratorial Muslims: Playing The
United States, India and Israel
Writers Articles And Opinions
31 May 2010
By Glenn Greenwald
The New York Times this morning has a
particularly lush installment of one of the American
media's most favored, reliable, and self-affirming
rituals -- it's time to mock and pity Those Crazy,
Primitive, Irrational, Propagandized Muslims and their
Wild Conspiracy Theories, which their reckless media
and extremists maliciously disseminate in order to
generate unfair and unfounded hostility toward
the U.S.:
Conspiracy theory is a national sport in Pakistan,
where the main players -- the United States, India and
Israel -- change positions depending on the ebb and
flow of history. Since 2001, the United States has
taken center stage, looming so large in Pakistan's
collective imagination that it sometimes seems to be
responsible for everything that goes wrong here. . . .
The problem is more than a peculiar domestic
phenomenon for Pakistan. It has grown into a narrative
of national victimhood that is a nearly impenetrable
barrier to any candid discussion of the problems
here. In turn, it is one of the principal obstacles
for the United States in its effort to build a
stronger alliance with a country to which it gives
more than a billion dollars a year in aid.
Initially, it's worth asking how these "conspiracy
theories" compare to this: from the front page of
The New York Times, September 8, 2002:
More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to
give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has
stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and
has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make
an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said
today. . . . In the last 14 months, Iraq has
sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum
tubes, which American officials believe were
intended as components of centrifuges to enrich
uranium. . . . An Iraqi defector said Mr. Hussein had
also heightened his efforts to develop new
types of chemical weapons. An Iraqi
opposition leader also gave American officials a paper
from Iranian intelligence indicating that Mr. Hussein
has authorized regional commanders to use
chemical and biological weapons to put down
any Shiite Muslim resistance that might occur if the
United States attacks.
From the front page of The Washington Post,
April 3, 2003:
Pfc. Jessica Lynch, rescued Tuesday from an Iraqi
hospital, fought fiercely and shot several
enemy soldiers after Iraqi forces ambushed
the Army's 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, firing
her weapon until she ran out of ammunition, U.S.
officials said yesterday. Lynch, a 19-year-old supply
clerk, continued firing at the Iraqis even after she
sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several
other soldiers in her unit die around her in fighting
11 days ago, one official said. . . . Lynch's
rescue at midnight local time Tuesday was a classic
Special Operations raid, with U.S. commandos
in Blackhawk helicopters engaging Iraqi forces on
their way in and out of the medical compound, defense
officials said.
Brian Ross, ABC News, the week of October
25, 2001:
[S]ources tell ABCNEWS the anthrax in the tainted
letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was
laced with bentonite. The potent
additive is known to have been used by only
one country in producing biochemical weapons -- Iraq.
. . . Former UN weapons inspectors say the anthrax
found in a letter to Senator Daschle is nearly
identical to samples they recovered in Iraq in 1994. .
. . At the same time those [anthrax] results were
coming in, officials in the Czech Republic confirmed
that hijack ringleader, Mohammed Atta, had met
at least once with a senior Iraqi intelligence agent
in Prague, raising what authorities consider
some extremely provocative questions.
NBC News, April 26, 2004:
Pat Tillman, who gave up the glamorous life of a
professional football star to join the Army Rangers,
was remembered as a role model of courage and
patriotism Friday after military officials said he had
been killed in action in Afghanistan. . . . [U.S.
military spokesman Lt. Col. Matthew] Beevers said
Tillman was killed by enemy fire, but
he had no information about what type of weapons were
involved in the assault, or whether he died instantly.
Jeffrey Goldberg, The New Yorker, February
10, 2003:
According to several intelligence officials I spoke
to, the relationship between bin Laden and
Saddam's regime was brokered in the early
nineteen-nineties by the then de-facto leader of
Sudan, the pan-Islamist radical Hassan al-Tourabi. . .
. In interviews with senior officials, the following
picture emerged: American intelligence believes that
Al Qaeda and Saddam reached a non-aggression agreement
in 1993, and that the relationship deepened
further in the mid-nineteen-nineties . . . I
learned of another possible connection
early last year, while I was interviewing Al Qaeda
operatives in a Kurdish prison in Sulaimaniya. There,
a man whom Kurdish intelligence officials identified
as a captured Iraqi agent told me that in 1992 he
served as a bodyguard to Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin
Laden's deputy, when Zawahiri secretly visited
Baghdad. . . . [James] Woolsey, who served as
President Clinton's first C.I.A. director, said that
it is now illogical to doubt the notion that
Saddam collaborates with Islamist terrorism.
Mr. Ahmadinejad and his followers clearly believe
that this time is now, and that the terminal struggle
has already begun and is indeed well advanced. It may
even have a date, indicated by several references by
the Iranian president to giving his final answer to
the U.S. about nuclear development by Aug. 22.
. . . This might well be deemed an appropriate date
for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary
of the world. It is far from certain that Mr.
Ahmadinejad plans any such cataclysmic events
precisely for Aug. 22. But it would be wise to bear
the possibility in mind.
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard Myers,
January 11, 2002, explaining the treatment of
detainees:
I mean, these are people that would gnaw
hydraulic lines in the back of a C-17 to bring it down.
I mean, so this is -- these are very, very dangerous
people, and that's how they're being treated.
And that's to say nothing about the orgies of
"conspiracy theories" churned out on a daily basis
from right-wing talk radio, blog outlets, Fox News and
even establishment Republicans over the years -- from
Iranian computer viruses, Vince Foster's murder, the
nefarious Muslim-Leftist alliance, ACORN's
omnipotence, and Obama death panels to The Vicious War
on Christmas, the DOJ's "Al Qaeda 7," Maoist followers
in the administration, Obama's Kenyan birthplace and
Islamic beliefs, and the subversive Congressional
interns serving at the behest of CAIR.
* * * * *
There's little doubt that many Pakistanis believe
all sorts of things that are false and that some
extremist sectors peddle paranoid conspiracies.
Propaganda is a standard tactic used by political and
religious leaders of all types to manipulate their
followers, as is casting blame on external enemies for
those leaders' failures. Indeed, it's virtually
impossible to find a society free of extremist
paranoia, and Pakistan undoubtedly has its share. But
look at the specific beliefs identified by the NYT
as proof of how conspiratorial the Pakistanis are, and
decide where the real propaganda is.
First we learn that "no part of the Pakistani state
-- either the weak civilian government or the powerful
military -- is willing to risk publicly owning [its]
relationship" with the U.S., and that "[o]ne result is
that nearly all of American policy toward Pakistan is
conducted in secret, a fact that serves only to
further feed conspiracies." The NYT
specifically cites the fact that "the Central
Intelligence Agency uses networks of private spies;
and the main tool of American policy here, the drone
program, is not even publicly acknowledged to
exist."
But isn't exactly the same true in the U.S., where
our most consequential acts in Pakistan -- from drone
attacks to Special Forces operations -- are ones
the U.S. Government will not even publicly
acknowledge, let alone debate and describe? Here's
what Hillary Clinton said when asked last December
about the deaths of Pakistani civilians caused by U.S.
actions in that country: "I'm not going to
comment on any particular tactic or technology."
And the NYT should perhaps check its own
front page from yesterday, which detailed a secret
order from last fall directing a massive escalation in
the use of U.S. Special Forces in a whole slew of
Muslim countries -- all without any public discussion,
debate, or authorization from Congress. We're
essentially fighting covert, unauthorized wars in
multiple Muslim nations -- including Pakistan -- all
while the NYT mocks those silly Pakistanis
for failing to publicly discuss their own military
policies and for believing that the U.S. is engaged in
unknown and unseen conduct in their country.
Then the NYT derides some Pakistanis for
their crazy "theory that India, Israel and the United
States -- through their intelligence agencies and the
company formerly known as Blackwater -- are conspiring
to destroy Pakistan." But what the NYT fails
to mention is that the U.S. is
actually using Blackwater for a wide variety of
covert, lethal missions inside Pakistan, as
The Nation's Jeremy Scahill has documented at
length. They may not be "conspiring to destroy
Pakistan," but they are engaged in "targeted
assassinations," "'snatch and grabs' of high-value
targets and other sensitive action inside and outside
Pakistan," and "assist[ing] in gathering intelligence
and help[ing] direct a secret US military drone
bombing campaign that runs parallel to the
well-documented CIA predator strikes."
Given Blackwater's history and the secrecy in which
its conduct is shrouded, isn't it more rational to
worry about their conduct inside one's country than to
ignore it or assume it's benign? After all, if a
foreign country were sending its military and
intelligence services inside the U.S. to assassinate
our citizens, drop bombs on us from robots in the air,
and infiltrate our society with shadowy private
contractors -- as we're doing to Pakistan -- do you
think we might be projecting intense hostility toward
that country and expressing serious suspicions about
what else they were doing inside our country? Is it
conspiratorial paranoia or rational self-interest that
leads one to think that way?
As further proof of this pervasive myth-making in
Pakistan, the NYT article cites the fact that
one Pakistani lawyer with a talk show "argues that Al
Qaeda is an American invention." While that's not
precisely true, it is a matter of undisputed fact that
the mujahedeen who were the precursors to Al Qaeda --
as well as Osama bin Laden himself -- were supported
and funded by the U.S. throughout the 1980s, all the
way up to the formal founding of "Al Qaeda" itself:
Thousands of Muslim radicals joined the CIA and
mujahedeen, including bin Laden, the wealthy son of a
Saudi road builder. Though he didn't actually take up
arms, he helped build roads and arms depots,
using his own funds and CIA money.
"We funded him, we and the
Saudis," said Glynn Wood, professor of international
policy at the Monterey Institute of International
Studies. . . . Pakistani investigative journalist
Ahmed Rashid reported recently that the CIA funded an
underground arms depot, training facility and medical
center that bin Laden helped build in 1986 near the
Pakistan border. There bin Laden set up his
first training camp.
As the
BBC said in 2004: "Bin
Laden and his fighters received American and Saudi
funding" in the 1980s and "[s]ome analysts believe
Bin Laden himself had security training from
the CIA." In 2007, Der Spiegel
called bin Laden "one of the best customers for the
CIA" during that decade.
In light of all that, what's more irrational and
propagandized: believing that the U.S. was
responsible for the birth of Al Qaeda (as some
benighted Pakistanis do) or treating that belief as
though it's some wild, unhinged, crazed conspiracy
theory with no basis in reality (as the NYT
today does)? The same is true for what the NYT
castigates as Pakistani conspiracies "infused with
anti-Semitism," such as the belief that Jewish and
Indian lobbies exert influence on U.S. Government
foreign policy. What rational person denies that such
groups -- along with a slew of others -- exert
political power in Washington, or that Israel
maintains close military and other relations with
Pakistan's arch-enemy, India?
It's not until the third-to-last paragraph that the
NYT article cursorily acknowledges the clear
basis which rational Pakistanis would have for being
highly suspicious of American involvement in their
country:
There are very real reasons for Pakistanis to be
skeptical of the United States. It encouraged -- and
financed -- jihadis waging a religious war against the
Soviets in the 1980s, while supporting the military
autocrat Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, who seeded Pakistan’s
education system with Islamists.
And, of course, the U.S. propped up that country's
oppressive Musharraf regime with massive amounts of
aid -- not to mention the small fact that the U.S.
invaded and has been militarily occupying two of
Pakistan's neighboring countries (one of which shares
a large border with Pakistan) for almost the entire
last decade. In sum, the U.S. has covertly played a
central role in the internal affairs of the region
generally and Pakistan specifically for decades. In
light of that, what's more irrational: to question
what the U.S. is up to or to treat such questions as
the by-product of crazed and deranged fanaticism?
Finally, note how the NYT article is framed at the
top by a photograph of a Pakistani holding a sign that
reads "We Hate America" -- as though the only reason
someone might harbor such anti-American hostility is
because they've been misled with false claims and
conspiracy theories about Our Noble and Magnanimous
Land. That -- about a country where we've propped up
numerous oppressive regimes and continue to slaughter
civilians via sky robots. Of all the myths identified
by the NYT article, the implicit one conveyed
by that photograph -- Pakistanis harbor anger toward
the U.S. only because of false conspiracy theories
they're being fed -- is easily the most extreme.
This game of Let's Mock Those Crazy,
Conspiratorial Arabs and Muslims is as useful as
it is common: recall how only the Paranoid "Arab
Street" believed that the invasion of Iraq would lead
to permanent American military bases in that country,
only for this to be revealed, followed by this. There
is a lot of propaganda, paranoia and myth in Pakistan,
along with most places in the world. But the American
media's fixation on pointing to it and deriding it has
the principal effect (if not intent) of obscuring the
role we play in enabling (and even justifying) those
sentiments, along with at least our own equal share of
such propaganda and our own media's central role in
bolstering it.
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