On History: Tariq Ali and Oliver Stone in Conversation

^{Chapter 5} Blowback

Oliver Stone: Could you talk about the concept of “blowback”?

Tariq Ali: A very honest, decent, strong-minded, truthful American scholar, Chalmers Johnson, who had worked as a consultant for the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1950s and came from an old naval family, wrote a book in 2000 called Blowback. The book offers a strong critique of US foreign policy. His basic argument was that, given what we have been doing to the rest of the world, it’s only a matter of time before some people take the law into their own hands and decide to hit us. And he developed this argument with great skill. When the book came out, it was either attacked by critics or ignored. He was astonished at the viciousness with which the book was received. I wasn’t, actually. But immediately after 9/11, the book, which had been ignored until then, took off by word of mouth. The book sold and sold and sold, and Chalmers became a world figure. It was translated everywhere.

The idea of “blowback” was about the American support of Arabic Jihadists in Afghanistan, who were fighting the Soviets.

Yes, and many people warned the United States that they were playing with fire, but as Zbigniew Brzezinski said, it’s a small price to pay for bringing down the Soviet Empire. No, the exact words he used were even cruder. He said what are a few “stirred-up Muslims” compared to bringing down the Soviet Empire? Well, we know how that story ends.

The “war on terror.”

I always found the “war on terror” an odd concept. The history of terrorism is real, it exists, and what it means usually is small groups of people, sometimes in the hundreds, sometimes a few thousand, who decide that the way to change the world is to hit strategic targets. The anarchists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used to try to kill presidents, heads of state, the tsar of Russia. Sometimes they succeeded, but usually they failed. In Paris, they would bomb bourgeois cafés, and say “we’re killing the bourgeoisie.” This sort of nonsense has happened for a long time. It never really changes anything, but it makes people who carry out these acts feel good. It was referred to as “propaganda of the deed.” We’re showing we hate X and Y by doing this, even though none of these people they were attacking crumbled as a result. Then you had a big wave of these politics in the 1960s. You had the Weather Underground in this country. They targeted installations, and sometimes they killed themselves by accident. And during this period you also had terrorist groups in Italy, Germany, Japan. Then you had right-wing groups in the United States. I mean, the Oklahoma bombings were carried out by a guy who went hunting with the Aryan Nation, a white supremacist group. You had Cuban terrorists trying to destabilize the Cuban regime, backed in this case by the United States. The foundation of Israel is linked to terrorist groups, in particular the Irgun, which destroyed the King David Hotel. One of the members of the Irgun was Menachem Begin, later given the Nobel Peace Prize with Anwar Sadat of Egypt. When Golda Meir, the former Israeli prime minister, was asked for her comments, she said, I don’t know whether they deserved the Nobel Prize, but they certainly deserve an Oscar for acting.

The history of the world is littered with examples of terrorism. So why make this act of terror so different? The spectacle and scale of it doesn’t make the people who did it different from other terrorists. And we now know from the various books that have come out that immediately after 9/11, senior members of the Bush regime said, we must now use this attack to get our way. Everyone knows that their basic gut instinct was to attack Iraq, not Afghanistan. They wanted to punish Saddam Hussein for something he hadn’t done. So the war on terror essentially became a holdall for US foreign policy getting its own way wherever it wanted to, locking up people, and picking up people all over the world with the help of its allies in the name of this war on terror.

But why Iraq, of all the places on earth?

For two reasons. Some people within the Bush administration felt that Iraq was unfinished business since 1991. That, at the end of the Gulf War the United States should have toppled Saddam Hussein, but Bush, Senior’s advisers had said don’t do it—and, as we now know, for good reason. Bush, Junior. and his advisers wanted to complete what that administration hadn’t done, and what Clinton hadn’t done, even though Clinton had gone a long way in punishing Iraq, with his US ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, defending the deaths of five hundred thousand children as a result of these sanctions.

How many children died?

Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes asked Madeleine Albright, is the death of more than half a million children as a result of these sanctions justified? And Albright replied, yes, “we think the price is worth it.” Now when you have leaders with this mentality trying to teach lessons on morality to the rest of the world, it doesn’t quite wash.

You said there were other reasons for picking Iraq.

Another reason for targeting Iraq after 9/11 was that the Israelis didn’t like the existence of Iraq as an independent state, with an independent army. Even though Iraq didn’t have nuclear weapons, the Israelis felt it was always possible that this army would be used against them in the future, failing to see that the reason for Arab hostility to Israel is linked to their failure to do what they should have done regarding the Palestinians. So there was a lot of pressure from the Israelis as well, and I think that pressure played a much more important part than it should have in impelling the Bush administration to take Iraq.

The Pentagon would also have known that as they knew that the Iraqi army was quite diminished, that Iraq barely had any armaments left to wage a real struggle, that the Iraqi air force had been destroyed. Iraq was already a defeated country, defeated by sanctions, wrecked by the years of US bombings in the “no-fly zones” in the northern parts of the country.

So we were looking for a weakling?

A weakling to demonstrate American power. And, you know, a number of US spokesmen, in their arrogance at the time, said, we did it because we could.

Could you talk about the doctrine of preemptive war?

The doctrine of preemptive war is totally against the UN Charter. The UN Charter was meant to guard nations against so-called preemptive wars. The only condition for waging a war is if there is real evidence that you’re about to be attacked. And the reason that was written into the UN Charter is because the biggest defender of preemptive wars was Adolph Hitler. Every time he invaded a nation, whether it was Poland, Czechoslovakia, or Austria, he would say, our interests are under threat. Or in the case of Czechoslovakia, the minority German population in the Sudetenland is under threat from the majority Czechs. Or in Poland, they threatened our security. We want Danzig back. Why should we have a Polish corridor? All these things were perfected, which is why the UN Charter was written to prevent that. And Wolfowitz, Cheney,—

And Perle—

—Perle, all these guys, with the journalists supporting them, and egging them on. Christopher Hitchens, Kanan Makiya, and the House Arabs, as I’ve referred to them. Trained to bark loyally when the United States goes to war, “you will be welcomed, you will be greeted with sweets and flowers, yes, come and liberate, liberate us, liberate us.” All these people were braying away. And so, Bush made the jump, and the result is what we see. More than a million Iraqis have died since the occupation of that country by the United States. It’s no good saying, “But we haven’t killed all of them,” as some are prone to do. You may not have killed all of them, but you created the conditions in which they could be killed by occupying that country.

And Afghanistan now?

Afghanistan now is a total and complete mess. Everyone knows it. President Obama knows it. His advisers know it.

Is the United States in another Vietnam-style quagmire in Afghanistan?

I think the only way it could become a Vietnam is if they sent in at least a quarter of a million more troops. I think then they would be in a quagmire. There would be heavy US causalities. They would kill a lot of people. They would wreck that country. The war would spill over into Pakistan, involve large segments of the Pakistani population and military on both sides, and there would be hell to pay. Afghanistan is a mess because the government the United States put in is a totally corrupt government, which is feathering its own nest, stealing massive amounts of money from the foreign aid coming in, not doing anything for the people.

Then, on top of corruption, there are too many civilian causalities, too many deaths. You become dependant on air power, as in Vietnam. And the drones come and bomb villages, they bomb innocents, and that is creating a situation that is unwinnable. The British couldn’t defeat the Afghanis, the Russians couldn’t, and the United States is not going to defeat them either, unless they wipe out half the population and occupy that country permanently with half a million US troops, which I think won’t wash. The region wouldn’t bear it, and the US population would have something to say.

You know, it’s a mystery to me why Obama didn’t use his election victory to say we’re going to end that mess. We’ve got to pull out. Some of his advisers know that situation better than anyone else. So an exit strategy to get the United States and NATO out of Afghanistan is needed before the situation gets only worse.

What about women’s rights in Afghanistan?

It was shameful when Cherie Blair and Laura Bush went on television to justify the Afghan intervention by saying it’s a war to liberate women. I pointed out at the time that, if this was the case, it would be the first time in history that an imperial power had waged war to liberate women. It wasn’t going to happen, and it didn’t happen. The condition of women is as bad as ever, and these are reports from women’s groups in Afghanistan.

So what would you do?

I don’t think anything can be done from the outside. I think in order to change these conditions, change has to come from the inside. There was a very interesting development when pro-Taliban groups in Pakistan publicly flogged a poor woman. Pakistani television showed a video of the flogging, and there were protests in large cities in Pakistan. Women’s groups denounced it. The chief justice summoned the attorney general to a court and said our laws are being violated, what on earth are you doing about this? Then the Taliban retreated, and said it wasn’t us, we didn’t do it. So people in Pakistan are now saying, no, these are not “outside values.” It was never the case that we liked anyone being flogged. Public floggings and all that is something that started in Pakistan during the Zia-ul-Haq military dictatorship. We never had it before, and you’re now doing it to women. That’s not part of our law, either.

And Sharia law?

This is a Wahabi version of Sharia law, which is not accepted by many Shias or an overwhelming majority of Sunni legal scholars. It is a sectarian Wahabi interpretation. And why has this now suddenly landed in Pakistan? Why should women suffer? I mean, you know, women under control of these wretched Wahabists suffer more than Muslim women did in the medieval period in Islam. And that is something they don’t even realize. And honor killings, which are going on in different parts of the world. I mean, I know that it’s not exclusively Islam. We had honor killings in South America, But the point I’m trying to make is that in a world without any positive values, in a world totally obsessed with money and celebrity culture and all this, people are becoming slightly crazy.

Do you think that’s new?

It’s not new, but in the 1940s and 1950s, the 1960s and 1970s, people did think the world could be changed for the better. And when that feeling goes away, then all these retrogressive groups and movements come to the fore.

Could you talk about the use of torture in Guantánamo, elsewhere?

Well, the fact that torture has become acceptable again is all part of the war on terror logic. It’s right to torture because we have to torture them to get information from them, they’re going to attack us. This is an old, old argument which goes back to the medieval era, to the Inquisition. That’s where we are now. And if you can’t torture them in the United States proper, torture them in Guantánamo. If you can’t torture them in Guantánamo, torture them at the Bagram base and prison in Afghanistan, where the Russians used to torture people. The United States and its allies are torturing people in exactly the same place. And there are horrific stories coming out of there. Or use the Pakistani torture system, or the Egyptian, or the Syrian. Send in our people to soften up a guy until he tells the truth, never asking how do you know it’s the truth? This guy was waterboarded, god knows how many times, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. I mean, what value does his testimony have in any court of law after that? You’re basically destroying anything you might have got from a serious interrogation of these people. So these are the values. You know, after the 9/11 attacks, Bush and Blair used to say, we will never let these people change our way of life. But you have.