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The Management of Savagery How America S National Security State Fueled The Rise of Al Qaeda ISIS and Donald Trump Max Blumenthal
The Management of Savagery How America S National Security State Fueled The Rise of Al Qaeda ISIS and Donald Trump Max Blumenthal
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The Management of Savagery
The Management
of Savagery
How America’s National Security
State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda,
ISIS, and Donald Trump
Max Blumenthal
First published in English by Verso 2019
© Max Blumenthal 2019
All rights reserved
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
versobooks.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-229-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-743-2 (EXPORT)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-228-4 (US EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-227-7 (UK EBK)
We underscore that states that sponsor terrorism risk falling victim to the
evil they promote.
—President Donald Trump, June 6, 2017
Contents
It was the week after Labor Day and Washington was filling up again
with its chattering class, just back from summer sojourns up and
down the coast. President Donald Trump was in town as well, paying
the White House a visit after a series of golf trips and rowdy rallies
before his Rust Belt loyalists. The White House, however, had been
in a state of siege throughout the summer, as former FBI director
Robert Mueller had led an investigation into Trump’s 2016 campaign
and an allegation that the Russian government had subverted the
presidential election in his favor. Though the Russiagate inquiry had
produced nothing so far to demonstrate collusion, with the political
season kicking back into high gear, the stage was set for two
dramatic events carefully timed to turn up the heat on the president.
The first event was the funeral of John McCain, a former prisoner
of war turned Republican senator. Branded as a “maverick” by the
Beltway press corps, which he half-jokingly referred to as his political
base, McCain had operated throughout his career in complete
lockstep with the military-intelligence apparatus. Over the years, he
had junketed from one theater of conflict to the next, marketing
jihadist insurgents and far-right militiamen to the American public as
“freedom fighters,” clamoring for military intervention and enriching
his donors in the arms industry. A budget-busting $717 billion
defense bill authorized days before his death on August 13 was
appropriately dedicated in his name.
Days later, the authors of some of the most destructive wars in
recent history, from Dick Cheney and George W. Bush to Henry
Kissinger and Barack Obama, filed into the National Cathedral to pay
homage to the late senator. Trump was pointedly uninvited, a snub
that prompted the New Yorker to dub the event “the biggest
Resistance meeting yet.” The president was persona non grata
among the guest list, which represented a bipartisan establishment
that he had ridiculed, denigrated and menaced to the delight of
millions of ordinary Americans. From the dais, McCain’s daytime talk
show host daughter, Meghan, delighted her audience with twenty
minutes of nationalistic cant peppered with subtle digs at Trump
—“America was always great.” A line in her eulogy that repackaged
the Vietnam War as a fight for the “life and liberty of other peoples
in other lands” passed by without controversy. The spectacle had
gone off just as McCain had planned: as a celebration of American
empire and a rebuke to the rogue president who was viewed by its
architects as a clear and present danger to its survival.
The following week, a second attack on the president was
launched—this time from within his administration. An anonymous
figure, self-described as a “senior administration official” and posing
as “the Resistance inside the administration,” published an editorial
excoriating Trump’s “amoral” leadership. The author homed in on
Trump’s supposedly sympathetic posture to Russia and his fulsome
and utterly unexpected support for a peaceful resolution to the six-
decade-long conflict between North and South Korea. The president
had crossed red lines in both areas, the official argued, breaking
from the Washington consensus of regime change in North Korea
and resisting the aggressive containment of Russia. Summoning the
spirit of McCain and branding him “a lodestar for restoring honor to
public life and our national dialogue,” the official revealed that top
figures had begun wresting control of important foreign policy
decisions from Trump. If the anonymous author was to be believed,
then the national security state had effectively conducted a soft coup
inside the White House, just as had been done against so many
foreign governments.
“This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state,” the official
claimed, referring to the unelected and opaque chambers of
government that spanned the Pentagon to the intelligence services
to America’s diplomatic corps. “It’s the work of the steady state,” the
writer insisted.
The irony behind this claim could hardly be overstated, though it
was probably lost on most readers of the op-ed and certainly on its
author. The national security state that the anonymous official
claimed to represent had certainly maintained a steady continuity
between successive administrations, regardless of whether the
president was Republican or Democrat. However, the ideology that
animated its agenda has spread unsteadiness around the globe,
especially in the Middle East, where American-led regime change
wars had unleashed refugee crises of unprecedented proportions
and fomented the rise of transnational jihadism. The toxic effects of
the West’s semi-covert intervention in Syria—where the United
States and its allies contributed billions of dollars to the arming and
training of Islamist militias that ultimately fought under the black
banners of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)—
continue to reverberate to this day.
The backlash from America’s proxy wars and direct interventions
has begun to destabilize the West as well. In Europe, a new breed of
ultra-nationalist political parties are extracting a record number of
votes out of a growing resentment of Muslim migrants, and swinging
elections from Italy to Sweden while driving the Brexit agenda in the
UK. Trump, too, owes much of his success at the polls to the anti-
Muslim hysteria whipped up by a well-funded Islamophobia industry
that grew dramatically after the 9/11 attacks, but whose existence
predated the traumatic daylight assault.
For several days after the attacks, while George W. Bush and top
Bush officials shrunk from public view, Trump absorbed the
belligerent sensibility of New York’s tabloid media. He preserved his
image as a B-list celebrity through regular appearances with
nationally famous shock jock Howard Stern. And he likely listened as
Stern translated the outrage of ordinary New Yorkers into a
genocidal tirade that was delivered live as the Twin Towers came
crashing down. Trump also watched carefully as a shell-shocked Dan
Rather, the trusted voice of network news, appeared on David
Letterman’s late-night talk show days after the attacks to spread
rumors of Arab Americans celebrating on rooftops across the Hudson
River.
Trump learned the crude lessons delivered to the American public
through trusted mainstream voices after 9/11 and distilled them into
the 2016 campaign with his trademark flair. On the campaign trail,
he gave the ideologues of the Islamophobia industry a charismatic
voice they had never enjoyed before, pledging a total ban on Muslim
travelers from seven nations before a captive audience of millions of
CNN viewers. On the debate stage, meanwhile, he channeled the
rage of Middle American families who had suffered the moral injury
of Iraq and Afghanistan by humiliating the national security state’s
great white hope, Jeb Bush, over his brother’s failed wars. Insincere
as he might have been, Trump was willing to tap into the deep
wellsprings of anti-interventionism across the country while his
opponent, Hillary Clinton, was clamoring for a no-fly zone in Syria.
This book makes the case that Trump’s election would not have
been possible without 9/11 and the subsequent military
interventions conceived by the national security state. Further, I
argue that if the CIA had not spent over a billion dollars arming
Islamist militants in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union during the
height of the Cold War, empowering jihadist godfathers like Ayman
al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden in the process, the 9/11 attacks
would have almost certainly not taken place. And if the Twin Towers
were still standing today, it is not hard to imagine an alternate
political universe in which a demagogue like Trump was still
relegated to real estate and reality TV.
Tragically, after laying the groundwork for the worst terrorist
attack on American soil, the US national security state chose to
repeat its folly in Iraq, collapsing a stable country run along
relatively secular lines and producing a fertile seedbed for the rise of
ISIS. Libya was next, where a US-led intervention created another
failed state overrun by jihadist militias. The regime change machine
then moved on to Syria, enacting a billion-dollar arm-and-equip
operation that propelled the spread of ISIS and gave rise to the
largest franchise of Al Qaeda since 9/11. In each case, prophetic
warnings about the consequences of regime change were buried in a
blizzard of humanitarian propaganda stressing the urgency of
dispatching the US military to rescue trapped civilians from
bloodthirsty dictators.
It should be considered a national outrage that so many of those
who have positioned themselves as figureheads of the anti-Trump
“Resistance” were key architects of the disastrous interventions that
helped set the stage for Trump and figures like him to gain power.
But in the era of Russiagate, when so many liberals cling to
institutions like the FBI and NATO as guardians of their survival, the
dastardly record of America’s national security mandarins has been
wiped clean. This book will excavate their crimes and expose the
cynicism behind their appeals to democratic values.
A 2004 paper by a pseudonymous jihadist ideologue in Iraq, Abu
Bakr Naji, provided the inspiration for this book’s title. Entitled “The
Management of Savagery,” Naji’s paper outlined a strategy for
building an Islamic State by exploiting the chaos spawned by
America’s regime-change wars. He urged jihadist forces to fill the
security vacuum opened up by Western intervention by establishing
“administrations of savagery” at the state’s outer reaches, while
waging ruthless “vexation operations” against the central institutions
of the state. Naji’s paper dovetailed neatly with the regime-change
blueprints conceived by national security hard-liners in Washington,
and it hints at the symbiotic relationship that these two extremist
elements have enjoyed. In Libya and Syria, where the CIA provided
arms and equipment to jihadist insurgents, this ideological symbiosis
was consolidated through direct collaboration. But as I will
demonstrate in the coming pages, savagery by its very definition
cannot be managed. In fact, it has already found its way back home.
—Max Blumenthal
Washington, DC
September 11, 2018
1
The Afghan Trap
On February 11, 1979, the West lost its frontline client government
in the Middle East when Iranians ousted the corrupt, repressive
monarchy of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. The shah was and
ultimately replaced with a glowering theocrat, Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini. As Khomeini declared full support for the Palestinian
national struggle and swore to repel the West’s imperial designs
across the region, American media overflowed with Orientalist
commentaries on “the Persian psyche.” “American television treated
the Iran crisis either as a freak show, featuring self-flagellants and
fist-wavers, or as a soap opera,” Wall Street Journal columnist
Morton Kondracke observed in January 1980.
The anxiety over Iran’s revolution was also palpable in Israel,
where the right-wing Likud Party had wrested power for the first
time from the Zionist movement’s Labor wing. In Jerusalem, just
months after Khomeini swept to power, a young Likud Party upstart
named Benjamin Netanyahu organized a conference under the
auspices of the Jonathan Institute, a think tank he named after his
brother, who had been killed while leading the legendary 1976 Israeli
raid at the Entebbe airport in Uganda.
In attendance was George H.W. Bush, neoconservative standard
bearers like Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, staff from newfangled
conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and
the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and sympathetic
policymakers and journalists from across the West. Netanyahu’s goal
was to internationalize the Israeli understanding of terrorism. In
short, he sought to deny rational motives to the Arabs, who had
been militarily occupied for decades or had seen their nations
ravaged by Western colonialism, casting their violence instead as the
product of the most primitive impulses—“part of a much larger
struggle, one between the forces of civilization and the forces of
barbarism,” as he wrote in his 1986 tract on terrorism and “how the
West can win.”
Netanyahu had cleverly reimagined right-wing scholar Richard
Pipes’ vision of a global struggle between communist and “anti-
communist” nations as a battle over “values” waged between the
civilized “Judeo-Christian” West and the barbaric Eastern hordes.
When Washington embarked on a “war on terror” two decades later,
the clash of civilizations narrative Netanyahu helped construct
provided the George W. Bush administration with the language it
needed to market its unilateral military doctrine to a
discombobulated American public. The crude mantra of the post-
9/11 era in America, “They hate us because we’re free,” seemed to
have flowed directly from Netanyahu’s world-view and into George
W. Bush’s teleprompter. History had been erased and the West was
cast as a blameless victim of stateless totalitarians driven by nothing
more than a pathological urge to dismantle democracy. Anyone who
attempted to place Al Qaeda in context, particularly by explaining
how its early antecedents emerged thanks to semi-covert US
warfare, was likely to be accused of “blaming America first.” Either
you were “with us, or you’re with the terrorists,” Bush and his
supporters often said, putting a distinctly Texan spin on Netanyahu’s
Manichean discourse.
But only a few months after the first Jonathan Institute
conference, in December 1979, Netanyahu’s understanding of
“terror” had begun to resonate throughout the West. By this point,
much of the American public was transfixed by the US embassy crisis
in Iran that had erupted a month before, tuning in to nightly news
coverage that focused in on the ayatollah as the new icon of
international terror. Meanwhile, another event was unfolding largely
In 1985, as US support for the mujahedin reached its height,
journalist Helena Cobban discovered how deeply the fetishization of
the Afghan rebels had penetrated American culture. Cobban had
been invited to an event advertised as an academic conference at a
resort hotel in Tucscon, Arizona. When she entered the hotel,
Cobban found herself inside a Cold War political rally. “I remember
mingling with all of these wealthy Republican women and being
asked, ‘Have you adopted a muj?” Cobban recalled to me. “Each one
had pledged money to sponsor a member of the Afghan mujahedin
in the name of beating the communists. Some were even seated at
the event next to their personal ‘muj.’”
The keynote speaker of the evening, according to Cobban, was a
hard-charging freshman member of Congress named John McCain.
During the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese Army had captured
McCain after he was shot down by a Soviet officer on his way to
bomb a civilian light bulb factory. He spent two years in captivity at
the so-called Hanoi Hilton, during which he provided the Vietnamese
with valuable intelligence on US war planning. McCain returned from
the war with a deep, abiding loathing of his former captors,
remarking in 2000, “I hate the gooks. I will hate them as long as I
live.” His visceral anticommunist resentment informed his vocal
support for the mujahedin as well as the right-wing Contra death
squads in Central America.
So committed was McCain to the anticommunist cause that he
momentarily served on the advisory board of the United States
Council for World Freedom, the American affiliate of the World Anti-
Communist League (WACL). Geoffrey Stewart-Smith, a former leader
of WACL’s British chapter, described the organization as “a collection
of Nazis, Fascists, anti-Semites, sellers of forgeries, vicious racialists,
and corrupt self-seekers. It has evolved into an anti-Semitic
international.”
Joining McCain in the organization were notables such as
Yaroslav Stetsko, the Ukrainian Nazi collaborator who helped oversee
the massacre of thousands of Jews during the 1941 Lviv pogrom;
the brutal Argentinian former dictator Jorge Rafael Videla; and
Guatemalan death squad leader Mario Sandoval Alarcón. Ignoring
the rogue’s gallery that comprised WACL’s leadership, Reagan
honored the group for playing “a leadership role in drawing attention
to the gallant struggle now being waged by the true freedom
fighters of our day.”
Before journalists Scott and Jon Lee Anderson published their
damning investigative book on the WACL, Inside the League, in
1986, the unsavory connections fostered by the Reagan White
House and its Republican congressional allies received little attention
from the mainstream press. The same was generally true for
Washington’s anticommunist proxies, from Central America to
Afghanistan.
When mujahedin rebels committed atrocities, like the massacre
by bin Laden’s fighters of seventy Afghan government officers who
had surrendered at Torkham in 1988, newspaper editors generally
turned their attention elsewhere. The rebels’ rampage on Kunduz in
1988, which saw rape and pillaging on a mass scale, also drew little
attention. And when Hekmatyar’s forces butchered thirty fellow
rebels—all top CIA trainees—State Department spokesman Richard
Boucher casually dismissed a lone reporter’s critical questions: “I
think what you’re doing is taking one incident and blowing it out of
proportion,” Boucher protested.
A year later, with encouragement from the CIA to “put pressure”
on Kabul, Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami opened up a campaign of
terrorist bombings around the city. When Ed McWilliams, a foreign
service officer at the US embassy in Kabul, attempted to report back
to Washington about a car bombing by one of Hekmatyar’s men that
had torn through a neighborhood of minority Hazaras and left a pile
of dead civilians, he was rebuked. McWilliams explained to journalist
Andrew Cockburn that the CIA had demanded that he “report a little
less specifically about the humanitarian consequences of those
vehicle bombs.”