Gore Vidal on the Lies of American Empire --

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Date Posted: 23:02:50 05/02/02 Thu
Author: Nikolai von Kreitor
Subject: Gore Vidal on the Lies of American Empire

Gore Vidal
Congress should investigate how much the Bush "oil junta" knew in advance about Sept. 11. This and other bombshells from American literature`s leading provocateur.
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By Gary Kamiya, Salon.com
April 24, 2002
Vidal spoke to Salon from his home in Los Angeles.
Let`s start with your new book, "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated." One of the main themes in your work is the perniciousness of what you call the American empire. And you argue that Osama bin Laden was motivated in large part not because he was evil incarnate, as George W. Bush claimed, but out of a very specific and historically based hatred for that empire. So my first question is, what is it about America in particular, whether you call it a superpower or an empire, that inspires hatred, not just with bin Laden, but among others? Do you think that we`re more hated than other empires in the past have been?
Well, I don`t know that we are unique in the fact that we do inspire a good deal of hatred around the world because of the way we throw ourselves about. But the whole story in Afghanistan is not about Osama and his religious views, although they have some bearing, but is about a great coup on the part of the United States to grab all of the oil and natural gas of central Asia. And that is what we set out to do. Mr. Bush Sr. secured the Persian Gulf oil, which is Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, the Emirates, and so on. But far larger than the Persian Gulf is the Caspian Sea oil, and Uzbekistan, and all the other -stans that used to be part of the Soviet Union. We have been deliberately encircling that section of the world -- which is why we were in Vietnam.
We asked "Where`s Osama?" because we always have to personalize everything. Everything is always one evil man, and if we get him, we`ve ended the drug trade. Remember Noriega? If we got him, that was the end of the drug trade. Well, we got him, and it didn`t end.
So with Osama, we say, we will get revenge for the horrible thing he did -- if he did it. Now there is considerable doubt -- he certainly was in on it, and he helped finance what happened on 9/11, but it could well have been somebody else. What we have been looking for is a trigger. We had already planned to go into Afghanistan in October of `01. We have been desperately trying to put in a pipeline that runs through Afghanistan, Pakistan, down to Karachi and the Indian Ocean. The Taliban were just too scatterbrained and too crazy to deal with any longer, although we dealt with them for a long time.
And so we went in there to try and stabilize the place in order for Unocal to build a pipeline. So all of this is about oil. For once we really are doing something practical and not trying to wipe out evil, a task too large even for a Bush.
But, even assuming that the Bush administration was hungering for oil in the region, wouldn`t you agree that the U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan was appropriate and necessary after the major attack we suffered on Sept. 11? Are you saying that oil was more of a concern than terrorism?
Well, the giveaway was, when Tommy Franks, the commanding general of our forces there, arrived in Afghanistan, people kept asking, "Where is Osama bin Laden?" And he said, well, it would be nice if we found Osama bin Laden, but that`s not really why we`re here. And suddenly, it was put on a back burner, and we`ve sort of forgotten about it, because other things have taken its place. In other words, that was never the simple motivation. However, for P.R. purposes, we have always -- this is where I got off on Noriega -- we must always personify, preferably as "evil," one single person.
We did that with Timothy McVeigh. McVeigh was part of a much larger plot which the FBI refused to investigate, just as Congress has refused to find out. Ordinarily we`d have hearings. You`d think that after being hit as we were in New York, there would be hearings immediately, as there were after Pearl Harbor, an investigation into why we spend $30 billion a year on intelligence and we didn`t know about what was obviously a plot that took about four years, they now estimate, to get those planes on target to destroy our buildings and people. We would have an investigation. There is none.
And Bush went to Daschle and said, no, no, we can`t have one now. I don`t know what reasons he gave, but they haven`t had one. Well, any sane country is going to investigate, particularly with such a vast and proud military as we`ve got, why it took 90 minutes before the planes were in the air, our fighters. An ordinary hijacking, they would be up there in about five minutes, in any part of the U.S. But it took 90 minutes before they were in the air. Something is going on.
Are you contending that it`s possible that there was American foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks?
Of course there was. I love it that we like to pose as stupid and incompetent rather than as perhaps canny and up to no good. Maybe it`s easier to sell incompetence out there to the people. But I don`t think taxpayers who pay as much money as we do are terribly pleased that the FBI and the CIA knew nothing at all of this, and didn`t get cracking on it, and that Congress then doesn`t investigate why they didn`t. Any sane normal country, like the U.S. of 50 years ago, would investigate. We would find out immediately what went wrong.
Everybody knew that Roosevelt had considerable foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor. And they also knew, Washington knew, that a strike was coming, and [Gen. Walter C.] Short and [Admiral Husband E.] Kimmel, the two commanders in Hawaii, were not warned, but a lot of other people were. Same thing happened this time.
So, as with your argument about FDR`s alleged foreknowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack, your argument would be that the Bush administration knew in advance of the Sept. 11 attack and planned to use it as a pretext to go into Afghanistan?
You have said it. I didn`t say it. I think it`s a possibility. I would rather the Congress found out for me; that`s what we pay them for.
But it sounds like you believe that to be the case.
I don`t know that I believe it. It seems to be more likely than we were just in a state of paralysis and knew nothing.
Although when one looks at the dubious recent history of the FBI and the CIA, and their lamentable track record in all kinds of things, perhaps it isn`t that surprising that incompetence alone could be the answer for their failure to detect this plot.
I like your optimism.
But in the case of a terrorist attack of this magnitude, to presume that our ruling guardians would be prepared to write off hundreds if not thousands of Americans for the purpose of a casus belli that they could probably find another pretext for anyway, it doesn`t seem to meet the Occam`s razor conditions. It seems like overkill for a casus belli.
Well, I am a devotee of Occam`s razor, and use it daily. What is obviously so is probably obviously so. But it is not obvious that the CIA and the FBI didn`t know. There`s a guy called David Schippers, a law professor who is in charge of a growth industry at the capital, which is impeachment. He handled the Clinton impeachment.
A very conservative Democrat who served House Judiciary chairman Rep. Henry Hyde during the impeachment hearings.
Yes, a very conservative Democrat. I do not know the man, but I`ve been reading about him, because I`ve been studying a great deal about what happened on Sept. 11. According to Schippers, three men from the FBI came to him and told him they had the names, and the time and the place that 9/11 was going to happen. They could not get it through their superiors.
Now you would put that down to the incompetence of the superiors; so would I generally. But there are too many things, in other words, there are other Occam razors hanging on the wall here. They went to Schippers and said, we couldn`t get through. And they wanted to file a suit against their superiors at the FBI. You really ought to get Schippers on this thing, if he will talk. But anyway he now represents, so I read in the press, several other FBI guys who also had stuff that they couldn`t get through, warning that this was going to happen. Now that seems to me to point in another direction from our old friend incompetence. Why they would be dragging their feet, and why they would play so dangerous a game, because it`s going to be found out if somebody deliberately allowed this to happen, it really would be the end of a government, so it is a very dicey situation.
I am not going to make any accusations of any kind, because I don`t know. But I have suspicions, and I know where investigations should go. In the McVeigh case, I wrote a letter to [FBI chief Robert] Mueller at the FBI listing -- it`s in the new book -- I list all of the leads they didn`t follow up on, which I happened to find out about, which were all parts of discovery in various trials across the Middle West, and so are part of the public record. They didn`t follow up on one of them. I`m still waiting for an answer from Mr. Mueller.
There`s too much of this going on, and there is a kind of general policy that the people must know nothing about anything. All of the classification of documents, as you know as well as I do, is not done so that wicked enemies of the United States will find out our secrets; it`s so that Americans will not find out what their government is up to. And what are they up to? Well, the thing that makes the most sense, we are now governed by a junta of oil-Pentagon men. They`re mostly from the oil business, both Bushes, Cheney, Rumsfeld and so on. They are in charge, and this is the last great coup which will benefit them personally, and it will also benefit, I`m sure they`re sufficiently patriotic to believe, the United States, to have this vast supply of oil, out of central Asia, through various pipelines. We can`t use Iran, because we`ve demonized them too much. That would be simpler. Turkey has been dicey. But the Pakistan-Afghanistan route was okay, and then the Taliban got too crazy for us and too unstable.
This seems to me to be what it`s about. It`s usually about something like this, and here it is. They could probably sell that one to the American people. Do you want cheap oil? Every other country has expensive gas for their cars, but we have the cheapest. Well, it will be even cheaper once we get our hands not only on this oil, but what we`ve done is, we`ve encircled this whole area of Muslim republics, the old Soviet Union. We`ve got bases. We`ve got bases in Uzbekistan. And Putin has gone along with it, because he sees us as a balance to a native Muslim movement, which could be unpleasant for them.
So there`s a whole new world in the making here, and no one is even bothering to analyze it, we`re just going on and on about whether Osama bin Laden uses eyeliner.
So you see this as all part of a strategic --
A geopolitical plot of a major scale, and the empire is now spreading its wings over a new area of the earth.
But again, is it plausible that a U.S. government would write off that many of its citizens on Sept. 11?
I have never said they did. I said I`d like it investigated.
Assuming this were the case, another objection that presents itself is the United States` failure to engage in what Bush once derisively called "nation-building" in Afghanistan after the end of the major military hostilities. Many knowledgeable observers, like Ahmed Rashid, have said that that just as Bush`s critics feared, he has not followed up by preventing internecine strife, keeping warlords in check, and supporting sufficient international peacekeeping forces. But if this was part of a geopolitical strategic plot to gain control of the oil and to stabilize a nation which had been destabilized by the Taliban, it wouldn`t seem to make sense for the U.S. to be standing by and allowing the country to teeter on the edge of anarchy. Wouldn`t one expect that if we were actually engaged in this as a kind of geopolitical move that we would be moving very quickly to shore up the stability of that country?
Well, we have no idea whether we`re moving quickly or not, nor have we any idea what the successor government in Afghanistan is going to be. One interesting dog that barked: For a long time Unocal, Union Oil of California, had plans in the works with previous Afghan governments to build a pipeline. Finally they gave up about three or four years ago and just stopped everything. Then, right after 9/11, the go-ahead came to start building the pipeline. That sounds to me like there`s going to be some kind of nation-building going on, at least pipe, oil-pipe building. That is a sign that something is being stabilized in our favor.
All of this is incremental. I can`t imagine Bush -- I use Bush as a generic term -- would have any idea about how to build a nation. And they`re not even terribly good at tearing them down from 35,000 feet. You hit random buildings rather than specific targets. I always like that precision bombing that we do at 35,000 feet. Nobody has ever done that.
Well, they`re certainly getting better at it with these guided weapons, although they`re obviously not 100 percent accurate.
Well, particularly if you aim it directly at the school while they`re all in there, I guess it does some damage.
In the new book, when you`re talking about our attack on Afghanistan, you write that the media omitted to point out that the Afghans were not our enemy. And I think you compared our campaign against al-Qaida to trying to destroy the Mafia by bombing Palermo.
Well, the way to have handled it is perfectly obvious. First of all, use the U.N. Kofi Annan is generally trusted around the world and quite efficient. You don`t declare war -- first of all, there is no war. You can only do that on a country. You practice war, I suppose, as we did finally against Afghanistan. But this is a mob that struck us, like the Mafia. It may be a religiously inspired mob, but no less a mob, and no less murderous, whoever it was. You use the police. The CIA used to be terribly good at this sort of thing. We could overthrow whole countries and governments, from Guatemala to Africa. We were very, very good at that. You try and find out, where the origins of this were and you send them in there. You do some police work -- you don`t start bombing Afghanistan.
None of the terrorists was an Afghan. They were mostly Saudi Arabian. And the embarrassment is that Saudi Arabia is the center of the plot, and Osama is in with the royal family, his whole family is, and he`s still in with his own family. So the idea that he`s some sort of renegade hiding in the hills, playing Lawrence of Arabia in there, up there in Tora Bora is nonsense. The plot is elsewhere. But we don`t dare go into that, because the oil people who now govern us are too closely allied with the royal family of Saudi Arabia. We haven`t really gone anywhere near where the trouble is.
Speaking of the Saudis, let me ask about the Middle East. Many observers thought that the Bush administration, because of its oil background, would be far less pro-Sharon than they have turned out to be. And certainly their actions vis-a-vis the Saudis, so far, while they have tried to walk a delicate line in trying to prop up the Saudi regime as much as possible, have been remarkably unforthcoming on Israel to the Arab point of view. What do you attribute that to? And what do you think the United States should be doing now to try to end this terrible situation in the Middle East?
Well, it seems that the last chance anybody is going to have will be the Saudi Arabian plan for Israel. And domestic politics makes it impossible even for the Bushites, who owe very little to the Israel lobby. They could afford much more than Democrats could to ignore them. But they have been blocked by Congress. So they`re not going to do much of anything, and the thing will just play its bloody self out.
We have so many great lines going, and I chuckle ruefully every time one of them comes back around again. My favorite one is the wonderful deal that Barak offered Arafat, who turned it down because he just loves terrorism, and just loves blowing up suicide bombers. That is now an article of faith all around the world, but particularly in the United States.
In reality, Arafat was offered the most godawful deal. If you`ve seen the map I have -- Europeans get to see things that Americans never see -- the proposal that Barak made was, breaking up the Palestinians in the West Bank into three clumps, each surrounded totally by Israeli settlements and troops. So you had three cages, and that was the great deal that Arafat turned down. He wouldn`t have remained in office, if that`s what you call it, another day had he accepted that.
Since then the disinformation folks have been so busy working, we now think that they had really offered him the Garden of Eden, with hot and cold running water, and he turned it down because he prefers terrorism. He loves it, he loves suicide bombers. Now to get that lie out, God, it takes such energy and such passion and such ingenuity. But not one word of truth in it.
Another interesting thing is that although Arafat did not accept that particular offer, he never actually withdrew from the entire negotiation process.
Quite the contrary. He was at the beginning of it.
And at the end he was still committed to continuing negotiations. And when Sharon was elected, Sharon made it clear that --
He tore it all up.
-- that it was no longer operative.
Oslo was dead.
To return to the question of Bush and the political constraints imposed by Congress` virtually monolithic and uncritical support of Israel, there`s a long history in the U.S. of the executive branch butting heads with Capitol Hill and sometimes being able to get their way over the generally pro-Israeli Congress. And Bush would seem to have enough political capital to do that, invoking the strategic needs in the region. A lot of Congress` impassioned rhetoric about Israel is a lot of hot air, they`re answering to lobbyists and to important constituencies, but when the chips are down, they will accept an American policy that is more evenhanded than their rhetoric would seem to imply. Don`t you think that Bush would have enough political capital to push for a genuine Mideast peace settlement if he wanted to?
Well, who knows what he wants. But no, he doesn`t really. And I think the proof of it was a few years ago when Arafat was supposed to come and speak at the United Nations, and the Senate passed a sense of the Senate resolution that he not be allowed in the United States. Well, the United Nations is not supposed to be in the United States, though it physically is. It`s a separate entity. And they forbade it. And it was by a two-thirds vote. Well, you don`t have to be a great parliamentarian to know that two-thirds is all that`s needed to override a presidential veto. So Arafat didn`t come. That`s what Bush is up against. And his handlers, as much as they might want to kick Sharon`s ass, they can`t do it to the Congress. And I don`t see how they would get around it if two-thirds of the Senate -- and it`s a reasonably good Senate, from my point of view -- are adamant on this because they`ve either been paid or intimidated or whatever, on this issue.
So no, I don`t see that he has any leeway at all there.
Well, what about the argument that even the most fervent pro-Sharon, pro-Likud Zionists are now beginning to despair of his policies? I shouldn`t say the most ardent, because that would take us to Netanyahu and those who support "transfer" for Palestinians --
That would take us to metaphysics.
Right. But let`s say you`re a mainstream blank-check backer of Israel -- at this point you`re beginning to realize, as much of the Israeli press does, that Sharon, like many generals, is a brilliant tactician but a terrible strategist; that he has no endgame at all; that he has no vision beyond repeated military assaults, which as everyone knowledgeable about the region predicts will only breed more terrorist attacks, and that there is no ultimate military solution that`s palatable to the world. Because it`s probably not possible to absolutely wall off the two people from each other. So even the hawkish element in Israel must be realizing that their policies have reached a dead end. Don`t you think that opens up some new possibilities? Or do you remain a pessimist?
Well, yes, I am. See, the longer this thing goes on -- it`s a very small place, Israel. And the hatred between the two sides is now beyond anything that has been seen in the world for quite some time. Before, our enemies were thousands of miles away, if you`re an American, and you don`t really get to see them. But these people are on top of each other. Something must be done soon -- either following the Saudi plan, or perhaps just cutting off all aid to the Middle East from the United States -- that would shake things up. It might speed up a solution, or an armistice anyway, while people try and put it back together again.
But the longer it goes on, the more members of families that have lost people will be seething and waiting to get revenge. That`s how human beings respond to this sort of thing. And it can`t go on another day. And unfortunately, we have no government in the U.S. We have no foreign policy. We have oil policy. We have a lot of realpolitik stuff going on, which has to do with our national wealth and private wealth as well.
Aside from that, there is no policy. The junta, the oil junta in charge of us, regards all the world as its enemy. And its largest enemy are the American people, and they know it. A majority of the American people voted against Bush. We not only have a minority -- in my mind an illegitimate -- president, but one who does not represent the people at large and does not like the people at large.
You, I know, have had your ears flapping over the years as have I at Republican rhetoric when they think they`re not being overheard. Their loathing of the people. I remember Barry Goldwater saying to Mr. [F. Clinton] White, in my presence and Norman Mailer`s, this was in `64 at the [GOP convention in San Francisco`s] Cow Palace, "Well," he says to White, "you know, you can`t say that. Because the whiny American people will get upset." I love that image. I took that away with me: "the whiny American people."
Well, the American people may not have much feeling for the actual power brokers around him, but in the case of George W. Bush, while he may be a figurehead, he does seem to be widely regarded as a hapless Everyman who really does have the common touch.
You are plainly a misanthropist.
Well, it`s remarkable how many journalists who have covered him, including ones that don`t like him politically, report that he actually does seem to have a kind of frat-boy geniality and ability to connect with ordinary Americans, that his problem isn`t the elitism or the Machiavellian detachment of the oil cabal. His problem would be that he`s not actually the guy in charge.

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Gore Vidal on the Lies of American Empire (2) -- Nikolai von Kreitor, 23:04:44 05/02/02 Thu