Who benefits from the War in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Tom Sunic

August 17, 2010

The following article is the slightly edited version of the speech Mr. Sunic gave on August 7, 2010 at the festival-conference of the NPD (National Democratic Party), near the town of Goerlitz, Germany. 

Sunic’s live speech in German can be accessed on the VOR radio broadcast. The original text in German (“Wem nutzt der Krieg in Irak und Afghanistan?”) will shortly appear in the NPD monthly Deutsche Stimme.

The text that follows was translated into English by the author.

Ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues, dear friends. Thank you all for being here. Many thanks for the invitation to our friends, the NPD chief Mr. Udo Voigt and Mr. Gerd Finkenwirth. Also many thanks to a lovely young lady Silvana for her professionalism and her kindness. I’d like to extend also my best greetings from my friends in the USA and from my colleagues from the American Third Party Position, our Chairman, William Johnson, Prof. Kevin MacDonald, the radio host of Political   Cesspool, James Edwards, and many, many other valiant members. Our recently launched party shares many similar ideas and pursues similar goals.

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Instead of raising the question “who benefits from the war in Afghanistan and Iraq,” one might just as well ask the question: Who was the instigator of these two wars? The latter question does not sound very specific and provides a treasure trove for various conspiracy theoreticians. Wild speculations about the true motives of these wars are of no interest for us despite the fact that some of these conspiratorial allegations may be true. What we wish to find out is how these two wars were justified from the standpoint of international law and how they were legitimized by public discourse.   

By the way, conspiracy theories, often ascribed to proverbial right-wingers, are not only the hallmark of right-wingers. The ruling class in the West does not shun using different types of conspiratorial vocabulary whose prime purpose is to demonize and criminalize the political foe. In addition, the liberal system resorts frequently to conspiracy theories in order to justify its military interventions. Months before the invasion of Iraq, many American politicians, including the media had in all seriousness ranted about the “Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.” It soon turned out that the Iraqis had no such weapons, which was later conceded by the very same politicians.

From my own experience I could give you some firsthand illustrations of this conspiratorial vocabulary.  As a young man in communist Yugoslavia, I witnessed daily the endless verbal demonization of fictitious political opponents. The Yugo-communist system used the words “Nazi and fascist threat” in order to legitimize its repression against its critics. Although there were no more fascists in communist Yugoslavia in the aftermath of the Second World War, the system and its scribes had to dig up fictitious Nazi-Croats in order to justify its shortcomings and its terror. Back then we used a joke, which soon became iconic all over ex-communist Europe: “Even when a fly farts the Yugo-communist judiciary will not level criminal charges against the fly, but will instead apprehend the proverbial ‘Nazi-Croats.’” Similar linguistic escapades have now become part and parcel of the official vocabulary of the European Union, whose politicians dish out their propaganda under the elegant cloak of “freedom of speech” and “human rights.”

It is important to analyze how the liberal politicians and their warmongers manipulate public discourse.  On the one hand we are bombarded by a litany of horrific labels, such as “war on terror”, “Islamo-fascism”, and “Al Qaeda terrorists”; on the other, we must daily stay tuned to their sentimental utterings such as the “fight for human rights,” “multicultural tolerance”, or “freedom for Afghan women.” The German Chancellor Angela Merkel did not sound credible at all when she recently rendered homage to fallen German soldiers and the enduring commitment of German troops in Afghanistan, “which serves the interest of our country.” The entire address by Chancellor Merkel was teeming with theatrical verbiage, better known in Germany as “cemented language” (Betonsprache), once commonly used in former communist East Germany.

Regardless of the hyper-moralistic lexicon used by the Western ruling class, empirical evidence regarding the true motives for the US commitment in Iraq and Afghanistan is very sparse if not completely absent.

A Balance Sheet

The war in Afghanistan was launched 3 weeks after the terror attack on September 11, 2001 in New York. Even a halfwit can tell that a long-term military strategy for Afghanistan could not be readied in three weeks. The plan to overthrow the regime in Afghanistan and Iraq had already been waiting in the wings. The first indications of the upcoming war in the Middle East and Central Asia had been put on paper by pro-Zionist academics in America in the early nineties, namely, after the first indecisive Gulf War in 1991. Many American pro-Israeli journalists and many well-known Jewish-American scholars had began drafting a long term plan for the reorganization of the region — “regime change” in the Middle East and Asia. Especially important was the role of the American Enterprise Institute and the launching of “the Project for the New American Century.” Many important names participated in these projects, names that later came to be associated with the code term “neoconservatives.” September 11, came to them as if sent by God.  

Any war anywhere in the world must be always preceded by cultural warfare. The US neocons understood that very well. The war in Afghanistan and Iraq began first as an academic dispute — largely spearheaded by neocon journals, such as Commentary and The Weekly Standard. Today however, the language of “weapons of mass destruction” has replaced its bellicose denominator with the euphemism of “fighting for democracy.” In retrospect, one must raise the question whether one could also draw parallels between the fraudulent motives for the current war in Iraq and the Allied motives for their WWII commitment in Europe and the subsequent “reeducation” of the German people.

Even after nine years of war in Afghanistan, even after seven years of Iraq, the security climate in the Middle East and Afghanistan, or for that matter in the entire West, has not improved. It has deteriorated. There is far more terrorist threat today than eight or nine years ago. One can argue that the risk of Islamic terrorism in Europe and the USA grows in proportion to the continuation of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And what happened with European politicians during that time?  In 2001, during the deployment of US troops in Afghanistan, as well as two years later during the invasion of Iraq, the consent of the European allies was difficult to come by. European NATO members, apart from their servile policies toward Washington, knew well that no quick war results were at hand. Official Germany and France were skeptical because they have twice as many Muslim immigrants than the entire U.S., and in addition, they have different visions about how to fight terrorism. For Germany, as a valiant US ally and a NATO member, it was not easy to openly defy the Americans. It is not worth talking about this post-World War II German subservience now. In order to grasp German foreign policy somersaults over the last 60 years one must first delve into the Allied laundering of the German character and the process of massive reeducation which is still part of the German media landscape.  

Unlike Germany and France, the Bush administration had no problem drumming up support among Eastern Europeans for their foreign expeditions. Here are two reasons: 

Only two decades ago all East European countries were allies of the Soviet Union; they became NATO members just a decade ago. The political and cultural mimicry of Americanism — albeit with a broken Slavic accent — in this part of Europe is more widespread than in Germany or in France.  

The other reason is that the bulk of politicians and academics from the Baltics to the Balkans, is made up of rebranded  communist apparatchiks and their progeny. In order to cover up their own criminal past, or for that matter their former communist terror policies, they needed to become more Catholic than the Pope, i.e. more Americans than the  Americans themselves.

Hence the reasons Eastern Europeans politicians can now be far better manipulated and are far easier to bribe into political servility than Western European politicians — with the exception of Russia. Once upon the time East European politicians made obligatory pilgrimages to Moscow, Belgrade, or Havana. Today, their mandatory places of pilgrimage are Washington and Tel Aviv.

American Political Theology

The beneficiaries of these two wars were, at least at the beginning of the hostilities, US neoconservatives and the state of Israel. But it is wrong to blame them only. To understand the deep-seated motives of U.S. foreign policy, one has to delve into American political theology — the conviction of many American politicians of their country’s divine chosenness. The architects and beneficiaries of these wars are motivated by secular political consequences, but the root causes of these wars have a theological dimension. These two cannot be separated.  Uri Avnery, an Israeli leftist writer, remarked some time ago that “Israel is a small America, the USA is a huge Israel.”  

Sure, it goes without saying that an Israeli journalist, but also many left-leaning Jewish American scholars, such as Noam Chomsky or Norman Finkelstein can easily get away with such an anti-Israeli rhetoric. Its is questionable what type of grammar, let alone language structure a non-Jewish intellectual, or some “right-winger” would need to use in order to express the same judgments.

Over one hundred years US politicians and their advisors have tapped into the Old Testament in quest of their notion of the political. Many American politicians have adopted their political conceptualization from the ancient Hebrew thought.  One hundred and fifty years ago it was the ante bellum secessionist South which became the symbol of absolute evil; later, at the beginning of the 20th century, the symbol of the absolute evil became the “bad German” and shortly afterwards the proverbial  “Nazi.” During the Cold War it was temporarily the role of Communists in the Soviet Union to play the bad guys. As there are today no more Communists, no more Fascists, no more Southern Segregationists, some substitute had to be urgently looked for. So for many American Bible do-gooders the Ersatz was to be found among the so-called Islamo-fascists, or Islamic terrorists.

Soon this new category of absolute evil expanded to include the Palestinian Hamas, the Lebanese Hezbollah and  “rogue states”, like Iraq, Syria and Iran. Geopolitically, these states, including Israel, are of no importance to America’s security whatsoever. But America's metaphysical ties to Israel make many American politicians perceive Israeli's enemies as their own.
It is wrong, therefore, to solely blame the Israelis and US neoconservatives, or for that matter the Jews for these two wars. They were or may still be the beneficiaries, but much of the popular support for this “make-the-world-safe-for-democracy” political theology comes from the millions of Christian-Zionists.   

Their spirit of chosenness has had its offshoot in a secular ideology of human rights, taken now for granted as something humane and indispensable by the entire world. Yet it is in the name of human rights that the worst mass crimes are often committed. It is in the name of “human rights” that many non-conformist intellectuals can be easily shut up. When a self-proclaimed democrat talks about human rights, one should raise a critical question: “What happens then to those who do not fit into the category of humans or democrats?” Logically, they must be tagged as beasts and animals and therefore, cannot be re-educated, but must be physically wiped out or shut down. Let us try to picture what was crossing the mind of young American pilots who flew over Cologne and Hamburg in the summer of 1943. They had no remorse firebombing these cities below. They viewed the creatures down below as the embodiment of the absolute evil, as the most dangerous beasts that needed to be exterminated for good.

Christian-Zionists bear some of the responsibility for these two wars. Their self-serving idea of some special divine election does not lead to better understanding among different nations and different races, but to endless and futile wars.

Dr. Sunic (www.tomsunic.info) is a writer and former U.S. professor in political science. He is on the Board of Directors of the American Third Position. He is the author of several books. His latest book, dealing with the meaning of national identity is in French, La Croatie; un pays par défaut? (Paris: éd Avatar, 2010)

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