9/11 – 5 Years later: what the US has not understood – Part 2

Five year after the Islamic Terrorist attack against America, the US seems unable to define real enemies and potential friends in a war that has become by definition the longest in the American History. Viewing things in a historic perspective would facilitate the task, making clear to every American citizen the identity of both, arch-enemies and besotted / fanaticized puppets.

Mistake 2: False friends

To follow the Gerard Baker's editorial 'Not all Americans now' in the Times (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,31229-2343450,00.html), one is led to the very erroneous assumption that the tragic events "evoked only the sort of strenuous affection that causes a complete stranger to go out and stick bills on lampposts". And to this aberration is added the next: "as it prepares to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the attacks, America stands reviled in the world as never before"! This is called by the author as a "remarkable turnabout".

This sort of Manichaeist thought is inherent element of the European philosophy, political analysis, cultural life, and diplomatic approach; more than the rest, the French have been particularly apt in practicing it anytime anywhere. As one could easily imagine, they have always proceeded so, criticizing the Manichaeism of the others – which they first machinate to generate, and then they attribute it to their opponents. For the sake of their own Manichaeism! One can call it hypocrisy, but it certainly consists in the most execrable form of political amorality.

There was never a turnabout in anyone's feelings about America. And September 11th was a repugnant sort of macabre panegyric that Gerard Baker in his editorial does his ingenious best to forget. Europeans – average European people – did not jubilate on the event; that is true. But there are no Europeans only in this world. There are more than 200 million of Arabic speaking people, and they – and their reactions – cannot be forgotten! Neither their euphoria, their excitement, their antihuman and inhuman happiness that was generated by the terrible events – interpreted as the beginning of the end of the American rule, the mythical Pax Americana!

"Why do they hate us?" is a question one can find on the cover page of many American magazines during the last months of 2001. The question was expressed, but the answer was never obtained! And this is normal, since the top specialist on Islam in America, repeatedly consulted and sought after, was Bernard Lewis, a …. Brit!

This is what would please the Europeans, the Brits and the French in particular:
- that Americans believe that the World for a moment sympathizes with them!
- that some sort of punishment be adjusted to a faraway country, a remote semi-barbaric land, named Afghanistan, which is not at the epicenter of crucial developments for the Colonial powers, and
- that Americans feel that in this way Justice was given!

As if we were attending Act 3, scene I, of Romeo and Juliet:

I beg for justice, which thou, Prince, must give.
Romeo slew Tybalt. Romeo must not live.

As if the threat of Islamic Extremism had never existed! Even before 2001!

Faced with an inhuman, murderous act, America counted among her friends the different NATO countries that had joined forces against the Soviet threat, almost 50 years before 2001 events. This was a terrible miscalculation, and applied to post September 11th era, it became one of the major problems and drawbacks of the American foreign policy and geopolitical planning.

Colonial Powers by their nature cannot be allies or friends of the US.

The American independence became reality only after shedding a lot of blood. Americans know very well their History, and the negative role played by Britain at the end of the 18th century against the perspective of the American independence. France helped the American Independence fighters, but this shows no commitment to the Anti-Colonial Principles of the Founding Fathers; it rather testifies to the terrible competition between England and France for colonial supremacy in the Americas, in Asia, in Africa, and in the Pacific.

The relations of America with either France or Britain during the 19th century were never friendly. Britain played a most negative role in the Civil War; neutrality was not a real British target but a constrained policy. One should not forget that at those days imperial France calculated to colonize Mexico! The arrival of British, French and Spanish naval forces in Veracruz (1862) was followed by the occupation of the entire country by an army of 30000 soldiers sent by Napoleon III.

Practically speaking, France and Britain never accepted the anti-colonial principles promoted by American statesmen, politicians and intellectuals. They managed to always harmonize their differences (Fashoda – 1898), and they did their best, pursuing colonial expansion, and seeking to promote American isolation.

The common policy of the colonial powers towards the US was based on the following considerations / practices:

- making use of American force when necessary (against Germany in WW I) without allowing any American involvement in crucial issues in Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania

- diffusing throughout American universities and cultural life their colonial version of History and exporting to America various European schools of Humanities, and more particularly schools of Orientalism and Classics (that are – all – genuinely anti-American as conception and approach)

- keeping American anti-colonial statesmen, politicians, intellectuals and activists totally misinformed about and absolutely unaware of colonial practices, schemes, targets, and perspectives at all levels: economic, political, cultural, educational, geo-political.

It would therefore be totally erroneous to assume that France and Britain were allies and friends to President Wilson's America. French and British media of the days of the Versailles Treaty depicted him as totally ignorant of issues related to Europe and the Middle East, and so he was. The issuance of mandates for the French and the British in the vast areas of the defunct Ottoman Empire did not help the US to understand to what extent these policies were contradicting American anti-colonial principles and ideals. Certainly, the US did not ratify the Versailles Treaty, but American idealism proved to have no effect on European paranoia, to paraphrase Henry Kissinger.

As in WW I, the US were sought after by Britain and USSR in the most difficult moments of WW II. Japan only facilitated the task. During and after the war, the US attempted to get involved in the Middle East; however, the deal struck between Roosevelt and the nomadic and murderous bogus-king of the desert bears witness to total American ignorance of the problematic situation that had prevailed in the Middle East, and in which the US was about to enter.

What happened in that meeting in February 1945 is what has to be reversed; without assessing correctly the situation that ensued after Napoleon's invasion of the Ottoman province of Egypt (1798), America has never been able to perceive the modern Middle East in a genuinely American anti-colonial way, and has therefore been driven from misunderstanding to oblivion, and from antipathy to enmity, without disturbing at all the French – British colonial scheme that has been functioning against both, the local peoples and any eventual intruder who would be deprived of nuance.

France and Britain were never friends or allies of the US.

This statement became even more real after the 1956 Suez Canal crisis. In the days of the so-called Cold War, the US failed to realize that the then collapsed colonial powers

a) had established throughout their colonial empires (and even beyond) structures that would allow them to control the international developments, even after their political – military withdrawal from the colonies.

By this we do not refer to local needs for transfer of technological know how but to
1) a perplex system of educational – cultural ties that permitted the maintenance and the persistence of basic colonial concepts in the minds of even local rebels and revolutionaries who were falsely presumed as anti-colonial, and
2) a complex system of political relations that allowed the external manipulation (by the colonial powers only, since they only were aware of the system in question) and the generation of developments through machinations involving proxies instead of the colonial powers

b) tried to mislead the US and drive Washington to a frontal battle against the USSR, supposed to be the only enemy of the Free World, something that was not true at all. At those days, vast parts of the non-Soviet world were ruled by murderous totalitarian officers, the likes of Nasser, Assad, Idi Amin Dada, and were therefore controlled from distance by the Colonial powers that were exhausted because of WW II, and needed time to recover, and

c) promoted Anti-Americanism as epitome of their international policy that spans over Latin America, Europe, Africa and the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific. People failed to wonder why nations that had been colonized by the French or the British and never saw American interference in their territory had to be so Anti-American!

Believing that the US was the leading force of the Free World – as opposed to the Soviet totalitarianism (that was to be perceived as the only threat) – was the subtle trap that France and Britain machinated against America at the peak of its power (1945). This trap would make the US focus on the USSR and at the same time disregard and neglect Africa, the Middle East, India and the Pacific. The rest of the world would start having a certain 'value' for America, only if the threat of Soviet subversion appeared.

Like this, the world as planned by the Colonial powers would be perpetuated, Britain and France would recover after some time, they would absorb the other countries of Western Europe, all collected into a resemblance of Union, and America would face the cost of the Cold War almost alone. This did happen because gullible American statesmen and diplomats believed it was in the interest of America to support Western Europe and to avert the Soviet threat.

During all this time, America erroneously believed in its own technological superiority, whereas the Colonial Powers through machinations generated all the developments that occurred sooner or later, targeting the only real enemy: the anti-colonial USA. For decades, the main target of the French and British foreign policy was the absorption of America into a 'fight' with the USSR, in which the Colonial Powers would spend little many and resources.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the French and British anti-American policy makers decided to use the situation these very colonial powers had already created in the Islamic World in order to engulf America in a destructive war against ghosts and millenarists. In this long war, France would generate opposition to the US, regrouping Germany, Russia, China, etc., whereas Britain would hypocritically and successfully play the role of the American 'friend' to closely monitor developments, and eventually avert American policy details that would derail the Colonial Scheme.

America can win the War on Islamic Terrorism, only if Washington identifies Colonial France and Britain as its top enemies. In addition, America must compose a genuinely American and anti-colonial perception of historical developments that took place in the Middle East over the past three – four centuries. Only if America unveils the Colonial Scheme, Washington has a chance to win over what was geared to be an important stage of that scheme: the Islamic Terrorism.

Then, the terrible enemy of America is not Ossama bin Laden, but Napoleon.