Читать книгу The Management of Savagery - Max Blumenthal - Страница 9

When Iraqi president Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991, a new chance for glory arrived on bin Laden’s doorstep—or so he thought. The wealthy scion had warned for years that Saddam would eventually threaten Saudi Arabia, and now, here he was, with his million-man army just miles from the kingdom.

Desperate for action after a year of dithering, bin Laden appeared in the office of the Saudi defense minister, Sultan bin Abdulaziz al-Saud. Bin Laden had brought battle plans and an entourage of Afghan war vets spoiling for a new fight. He beseeched Sultan to send his own private militia and a supplement of unemployed Saudi conscripts against the battle hardened Iraqi Republican Guard. Later, he made the same pitch to Prince Turki al-Faisal, one of the few principals who shared bin Laden’s resentment of Saddam. Turki left the meeting astounded by bin Laden’s arrogance and the harebrained quality of his plan, and sent him away almost as soon as the royal family welcomed the American military in as the protectors of its kingdom.

For bin Laden, the rejection revealed to him that his country’s army was little more than a neo-imperial shell and confirmed in his mind how its leadership acted as tools of the godless West—just as Utaybi, the millenarian coup leader, had described them back in 1979.

This offered bin Laden further fuel for his wrath against the United States. A few years earlier, he had celebrated them for supporting the anti-Soviet jihad, but now he echoed Reagan’s language about the Soviet Union, inverting it to slam the United States as an Evil Empire that had to be bled at its weakest points.

For Americans, thousands of miles away, the Gulf War unfolded for the first time on 24-7 cable network broadcasts, with commercial breaks. In a series of essays provocatively entitled The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard captured the way that round-the-clock cable news spoon-fed Americans a simulacrum of the actual event, an electronic war game of camera-tipped, laser-guided missiles, stealth bombers and embedded journalists. For Baudrillard, the war was “a virtual and meticulous operation which leaves the same impression of a non-event where the military confrontation fell short and where no political power proved itself.”

Widely misunderstood as a denial of the carnage and human toll of the war, Baudrillard had produced one of the most enduring critiques of the way post–Cold War conflicts were marketed to the Western public as clinical exercises in freedom-spreading. For most Americans, the digital abstraction of the war and the dual layer patina of patriotic hoopla and humanitarian goodwill overwhelmed their critical faculties and ensured their consent. The stage was set for the era of drone warfare that saw the United States carrying out robotic assassinations from Yemen to the Philippines with little political backlash at home.

Of the few Kuwaitis the American public got to know during the Gulf War, and the most aggressively promoted one, turned out to be a fraud. She was the product of a massive cash infusion from that country’s emir into at least twenty public relations firms through a front group called Citizens for a Free Kuwait. One of those firms, Hill & Knowlton, arranged for an anonymous young woman known as “Nayirah” to testify that she had seen Iraqi soldiers unplug the incubators of Kuwaiti babies. Another firm raking in $100,000-a-month from the Kuwaitis, the Rendon Group, relayed to the US media the girl’s testimony. The human rights group Amnesty International gave the story a veneer of legitimacy when it falsely claimed in a poorly sourced eighty-four-page report that “300 premature babies were reported to have died after Iraqi soldiers removed them from incubators, which were then looted.”

Nayirah arrived in Washington alongside Representative Tom Lantos, a neoconservative Democrat who brought her to testify before his Congressional Human Rights Caucus. At the time, his caucus was renting discounted office space from Hill & Knowlton and had taken a $50,000 payment from Citizens for a Free Kuwait. Before Nayirah appeared in Congress, she was coached by Hill & Knowlton’s vice president, who directed her to deliver false testimony. Reporters repeated the heart-wrenching story of Nayirah in a virtual feedback loop until President George H.W. Bush spun the tall tale during a national address. The star witness of interventionist forces was later revealed to be the Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter—a fact that Lantos knew but knowingly concealed. In fact, the entire story she promoted was a fabrication. But by the time it was exposed, US boots were already on the ground in Kuwait.

“Of all the accusations made against [Saddam Hussein],” wrote John R. MacArthur, author of the seminal book on Gulf War propaganda, The Second Front, “none had more impact on American public opinion than the one about Iraqi soldiers removing 312 babies from their incubators and leaving them to die on the cold hospital floors of Kuwait City.”

For Americans consuming the war through the warped lens of cable news, the enemy appeared either in the form of an imposing Arab dictator or as faceless, pixelated dots in the crosshairs of a “smart bomb.” Mainstream media coverage was driven by public relations firms like Hill & Knowlton, which had market tested the most effective anti-Saddam talking points, and were supplying taped releases to news outlets that published them without acknowledging their source. Nearly unanimous public approval flowed from the coverage, turning generals like Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf into national heroes and dreary studio personalities like Wolf Blitzer into overnight celebrities. Back home, pop stars gathered in studios and football stadiums for elaborately produced tributes to the troops. The tidal wave of nationalistic propaganda ensured that close to 80 percent of the American public supported the war effort, a thirty-point surge from the days before the United States attacked. A study that year by Martin Lee and Norman Solomon found that the more Gulf War-related news Americans watched, the less they knew about the war, and the more likely they were to support Bush’s intervention.

Behind the star-studded hoopla, the FBI embarked on an unprecedented campaign to gather information on Arab American business and community leaders under the guise of “interviewing” them voluntarily. In hundreds of interviews, FBI agents asked Arab Americans about their views on the war, what they thought about Israel, and if they were personally familiar with any terrorists. For the first time, the Department of Justice began fingerprinting and photographing anyone entering the country from Iraq or Kuwait.

The American Civil Liberties Union’s then-director, Kate Martin, described the panicked mood consuming communities of Arab Americans: “One of the questions that we don’t know the answers to is, where did they get the list of people they are interviewing? Did they already have a list of people to be talked to in the event of war with Iraq? That’s the first thing you need to repeat the World War II experience. That also began with interviews, and then it accelerated.”

For those targeted by the government as ethnically disloyal subversives, the war was hardly the simulacrum that Baudrillard described. But for the rest of the public, the victory over a far-off army of evildoers represented a ratification of the post–Cold War “new world order” that George H.W. Bush touted. The country’s reaction to the spectacle of the Gulf War sent the signal that its Vietnam syndrome—the brief national affliction of skepticism toward foreign interventions—had been salved.

Francis Fukuyama, the neoconservative scholar, excitedly proclaimed in a 1989 essay later adapted into a book called The End of History and the Last Man that the world was witnessing “not just the end of the Cold War” but “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” According to Fukuyama, “The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.” His essay perfectly channeled the sense of triumphalism that pervaded the Beltway foreign policy establishment and that led Washington to claim “victory” in the Cold War. The growing cult of American exceptionalism not only assumed an international consensus around market-style democracy, it received the Soviet collapse as carte blanche to spread the system around the world, by force if politically possible.

Following the Gulf War, Wesley Clark, a young general possessed with the realist outlook that characterized many in the military brass, entered the Pentagon and headed to the office of Paul Wolfowitz. Clark had come to congratulate him on the victory against Iraq, but instead found himself engaged in a disquieting exchange with one of the neoconservative movement’s leading spokesmen. “With the end of the Cold War, we can now use our military with impunity,” Wolfowitz remarked to a stunned Clark. “The Soviets won’t come in to block us. And we’ve got five, maybe ten, years to clean up these old Soviet surrogate regimes like Iraq and Syria before the next superpower emerges to challenge us … We could have a little more time, but no one really knows.”

Al Qaeda’s Trial Runs

While the neoconservatives plotted a global upheaval, the graduates of the anti-Soviet jihad had metastasized into a revolutionary force. They had benefited as much as any transnational corporation from the process of free market globalization that whittled down nation-states, hollowed out public institutions, evaporated borders, dislocated vulnerable populations and spurred economic disruption. Like the West’s emerging class of disaster capitalists and neoconservatives who preached permanent war, the jihadists made instability their lifeblood, translating crises across the globe into unprecedented opportunity.

The first Gulf War progressed, on the rural outskirts of Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, an alternative desert storm was gathering. Effectively excommunicated by his own government in 1991, bin Laden had migrated to Sudan, where an Islamist-inspired junta had taken power. There, he joined Zawahiri and members of Al-Jihad to train and share lessons from the battlefield. At one dusty plot outside Khartoum, bin Laden hosted veterans from the Afghan theater while showcasing to visiting journalists the ambitious infrastructure projects he had staked out around the country. Robert Fisk, the veteran Middle East correspondent, returned from the camp in 1993 with bin Laden’s first interview by a Western reporter. His dispatch for the UK’s Independent, detailing bin Laden’s myriad businesses and building plans around the country, was headlined, “Anti-Soviet Warrior Puts His Army on the Road to Peace.”

However, this portrayal was difficult to square with the knowledge that bin Laden had already taken credit for inspiring a December 1992 attack on US military installations in Aden, Yemen, a key link to America’s archipelago of bases in the Persian Gulf. Then, a few months later, he admitted responsibility for a rocket attack on the US embassy in Yemen’s capital Sana’a. Scott Stewart, then a special agent for the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, came away from the scene of the bombings with a startling conclusion: “The CIA had trained whoever had conducted them,” he wrote. “Several specific elements of those attacks matched techniques I had learned when I attended the CIA’s improvised explosive device training course.”

At the time, Stewart did not realize he had stumbled onto evidence of a new terror network with global reach. “It would be almost a year before I heard the term ‘al Qaeda,’” he recalled, “and several months after that before I realized the term was the name of a group of former mujahideen who fought in Afghanistan and had turned their sights against the United States.”

Just months before the bombing, a crafty explosives engineer and master of disguises named Ramzi Yousef entered New York City on a tourist visa. Yousef, who had pioneered the use of improvised remote trigger devices, was the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the Pakistani jihadist who honed his craft at the Services Bureau under Azzam’s watch. Yousef refined his skills in the Philippines, arriving as a personal envoy of bin Laden and operating through a constellation of Saudi-backed charities to help establish Abu Sayyaf, the Al Qaeda affiliate founded by fellow Afghan war veteran Janjalani.

Once in the United States, Yousef was determined to detonate a series of bombs at the base of the World Trade Center that would kill as many as 250,000 in a “Hiroshima-like event.” His plan recalled Nosair’s hand-scrawled fantasy of destroying “the structures of [America’s] civilized pillars,” and presaged the September 11 attacks.

On February 26, 1993, Yousef and two assistants personally trained by Ali Mohamed drove a 1,500-pound bomb into the basement lot below the World Trade Center’s North Tower and detonated it with a remote trigger. They killed five and injured around 1,000, wreaking havoc but failing in their mission to topple one tower against the other. “We promise you that next time will be very precise and the Trade Center will be one of our targets,” Yousef warned in a manifesto typed out from the first-class lounge of the Pakistan airline at New York’s JFK International Airport.

In the months after the attack, Pakistani intelligence agencies homed in on the Saudi-founded charity Mercy International and an affiliated charity, the Muwafaq Foundation. Pakistani newspapers had reported that the foundation’s local director, Zahid Shaikh, was Yousef’s uncle, prompting the investigation. Pakistani authorities also looked into “the possibility that Yousef worked for Pakistani and U.S. security agencies during the Afghan war but later turned against them after developing links with the Islamic militants,” according to the newswire, UPI. French journalist Richard Labévière alleged that Mercy International was “able to establish its headquarters in the United States, in the state of Michigan, with the assistance of … the CIA. The [Central Intelligence] Agency provided significant logistical and financial support to this ‘humanitarian’ organization, enabling it to act clandestinely in the various Balkan conflicts as well as within the Muslim communities of several Russian republics.”

Just months before the first World Trade Center attack, another Al Qaeda operative hovering in the immediate orbit of US intelligence agencies, Ali Mohamed, was summoned by bin Laden to train his cadres at the Khost camp—the same mujahedin training base built along the Afghan-Pakistani border during the 1980s with CIA support. During that time, Mohamed also managed a trip to stake out US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and to train a special Kenyan cell for a future bombing plot.

On his way back from one of his trips to the Middle East, Mohamed landed at Vancouver International Airport and nearly blew his cover. He was accompanied by Essam Hafez Marzouk, an Al-Jihad member who handled military logistics for Zawahiri and was traveling on a passport that was clearly forged. Both men were immediately detained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and subjected to an extended interrogation session. This could have been the end of Mohamed’s career in spying, and perhaps another chance to unravel Al Qaeda’s expanding international network. But the FBI had other plans.

When it became clear that the Canadians suspected their two detainees were top-level terrorist operatives, Mohamed demanded his interrogators place a call to the FBI’s San Francisco field office. There, according to journalist Peter Lance, they reached Mohamed’s contact, Special Agent John Zent, who instructed the RCMP to let his asset go. And so they did. Once again, with the help of the US government, Ali the American maintained his cover.

By this time, Mohamed had revealed the existence of Al Qaeda and his own membership in the organization to the FBI. In a remarkably candid discussion with Zent after the World Trade Center bombing, Mohamed had previously freely detailed his training of Al Qaeda recruits and outlined the organization’s network of camps from Afghanistan to Sudan. According to a 1998 affidavit, he even named bin Laden to the FBI as Al Qaeda’s leader. Mohamed then offered more information in a subsequent chat with Pentagon counterintelligence agents. Without explanation, the FBI and Pentagon disappeared the notes of Mohamed’s interview sessions.

A month later, with the full confidence of the FBI, Mohamed led his mentor, Zawahiri, on a speaking tour of California. Posing as a field doctor from the Kuwaiti Red Crescent and traveling with a US tourist visa under an assumed name, Zawahiri surreptitiously raised hefty sums of cash for Al Qaeda, stirring crowds with heartrending stories of Afghan civilians suffering at the hands of Soviet marauders. He found his rapt audiences within mosques and Muslim charities, whose rank-and-file were almost certainly unaware Zawahiri was connected to an international terror network.

Back in Brooklyn, the Al-Kifah center was sending foreign fighters to Bosnia, where they waged jihad in support of immediate American interests and against the Russian-aligned Yugoslav army. Among those dispatched from the center to the Bosnian battlefield was Clement Rodney Hampton-El, an African American convert to Islam who had been trained in firearms by Mohamed at the Calverton, Long Island, gun range. Back in 1989, the FBI had photographed Hampton-El at the range alongside Nosair and others, clad in their Services Bureau T-shirts.

As the CIA’s “disposal problem” festered in the heart of the Big Apple, the FBI decided it was finally time to move against the Afghan war veterans who gathered around Al-Kifah. But first, it needed a plot it could indict them for. The result was a dubious dragnet that triggered a courtroom cover-up of the government’s ongoing covert operations.

The CIA on Trial

In the weeks before the 1993 bombing, the FBI dismissed a former Egyptian army officer it had been employing as an informant. Emad Salem had become close to the Blind Sheikh, but he secured a promise to never have to wear a wire, and he would not take a polygraph test to back up some of his more questionable reports. Salem had once lied under oath in a criminal court, claiming he’d been wounded while trying to protect Egyptian president Anwar Sadat from assassination in 1981. And he lied to his FBI handlers when he told them he’d been an Egyptian intelligence officer; he was, in fact, a desk officer who never fired a shot in combat. A serial fabulist with a shady background seeking income and intrigue, Salem fit the classic profile of an FBI informant.

Following the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, Salem leaked audio to the press of conversations with his government handlers to create the impression that the FBI was aware of the bombing plot and had sat on its hands. Chastened by Salem’s leaks and embarrassed by its failures in the field, the FBI brought him back on to take down Al-Kifah’s inner circle. To guarantee Salem’s enthusiasm for the ambitious new undercover assignment, the bureau paid him a whopping $1 million.

Salem effortlessly wormed his way back into the Blind Sheikh’s inner circle, recording tapes of himself encouraging followers of the Egyptian cleric to hit targets around the city, from the Lincoln Tunnel to the UN building to the FBI headquarters. The World Trade Center was not among those targets. Some of the zealots Salem approached seemed willing to bomb anything and everything, but they never possessed the actual materials to do so. In fact, many appeared on tape as a gang of comically bumbling idiots. Among Salem’s dupes was Victor Alvarez, a twenty-nine-year-old idler who was judged by a psychiatrist as a mentally unstable cocaine addict and “borderline retarded”—an especially easy mark for an experienced hustler like Salem.

Following months of surveillance, the government arrested the Blind Sheikh and eight of his followers. They were indicted on an obscure, Civil War–era charge of conspiracy to commit sedition against the United States. The prosecution branded the legal extravaganza as the “Day of Terror” trial, suggesting that the defendants had been captured before they could cripple New York City’s vital infrastructure and slaughter hundreds of thousands. It placed a carefully selected jury in isolation and under strict guard, impressing upon them the sense that they could be next if the Blind Sheikh’s gang was not locked away for good.

Abdeen Jabara, a lawyer and founder of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, was a member of the legal team that defended the Blind Sheikh. He described the prosecution’s case to me as contrived and ethically dubious. “Emad Salem was as unsavory a character as you can imagine, a real slimeball,” Jabara remarked to me, referring to the informant who became the FBI’s star witness. “What he really did was help a group of Keystone Kops put together something that was indictable.”

Jabara learned that the government had initially been reluctant to indict Abdel-Rahman. He suspected the hesitation stemmed from its fear of exposing the Sheikh’s long-standing relationship with the CIA, which dated back to Afghanistan. “There was a whole issue about [Abdel-Rahman] being given a visa to come into this country and what the circumstances were around that,” Jabara said. “The issue related to how much the government was involved with the jihadist enterprise when it suited their purposes in Afghanistan and whether or not they were afraid there would be exposure of that. Because there’s no question that the jihadists were using the Americans and the Americans were using the jihadists. There’s a symbiotic relationship.”

Joining Abdel-Rahman in the dock was Nosair, whose lawyers had humiliated the government four years before. With the government back for another round, Nosair procured the services of Roger Stavis, a veteran defense attorney who had conceived a novel and potentially explosive strategy. With his client on trial for sedition, Stavis decided to focus his defense on Nosair’s role as a soldier in America’s most crucial proxy war.

During the trial, Stavis took every possible opportunity to highlight the services the defendants had provided to the CIA, referring to them constantly as “Team America.” In effect, he was putting the CIA and its covert operations on trial. “I spent days in the courtroom saying, ‘It’s all about Afghanistan. Afghanistan! Afghanistan!’” Stavis recalled to me.

Stavis compiled a remarkable body of evidence, beginning with the JFK Special Warfare Center training manuals discovered in Nosair’s apartment by police investigators after his arrest in 1990. The manuals led Stavis to the office of Colonel De Atkine. During his conversations with De Atkine, he learned about Ali Mohamed, the army cadet who had drilled with Fort Bragg’s Green Berets, led seminars on “the Arab mind” before De Atkine’s students and smuggled the special operations manuals to jihadist cadres like Nosair. Stavis soon discovered that Mohamed had participated in the Afghan war through the Services Bureau and that he had frequently visited the Blind Sheikh’s crew in Jersey City. “I had him at Fort Bragg, I had him in New Jersey with the guys from the mosque, and I had him in Afghanistan,” Stavis said. “I called it completing the triangle.”

Stavis now saw Mohamed as the key to his client’s defense. When he moved to subpoena him as a defense witness, he had no idea that Mohamed was busy training a terror cell in Nairobi, Kenya. Nor did he know that the FBI had hired Mohamed as an informant. But it had become abundantly clear to him that the government had a lot to hide.

The prosecution team was led by Patrick Fitzgerald, an assistant US attorney appointed by Reagan who was considered one of the government’s strongest prosecutors. He was joined by Andrew McCarthy, an unabashed right-wing ideologue who exhibited what Jabara described somewhat charitably as “a linear and un-nuanced understanding of Islam.” The federal judge presiding over the case, Michael Mukasey, shared McCarthy’s hard-line views and formed a working relationship with him after the trial. (McCarthy, for instance, used his column at the right-wing National Review to tout Mukasey’s antiterror cred—“Bravo, Attorney General McCarthy,” read one blog—after the latter was appointed US attorney general under George W. Bush.)

In late 1994, the FBI located Mohamed in Nairobi and summoned him back to California for an urgent discussion. Determined to maintain his standing with the bureau, Mohamed obliged, tapping Al Qaeda financiers to cover his flight. McCarthy, as assistant US attorney, rushed over from New York to meet Mohamed in Santa Clara. According to a letter submitted by Nosair’s cousin, Ibrahim El-Gabrowny, a defendant in the “Day of Terror” verdict, “McCarthy advised Ali Mohamed to ignore the subpoena’s order and not to go to testify on Nosair’s behalf and that Mr. McCarthy will cover up for him regarding that.”

The government knew that Mohamed had been involved with the Blind Sheikh while he’d had access to sensitive material at Fort Bragg. And it also apparently knew—a year before the first mention of his name in American media and three years before his first major attack—the identity of Al Qaeda’s top figure. Stavis recalled how Fitzgerald asked one of his defense witnesses seemingly out of the blue if he had ever met Osama bin Laden at the Services Bureau office in Pakistan. The witness answered that he had. As Stavis later recalled, “I said to myself, I don’t know who this bin Laden guy is, but he’s really in Fitzgerald’s crosshairs.”

Oddly, the government took no action against Mohamed after meeting him in California. Whether El-Gabrowny’s startling account of McCarthy’s scheming was accurate or not, Mohamed never testified. Instead, he was listed by the prosecution as an “unindicted co-conspirator,” a legally empty designation. When Stavis attempted to bring Mohamed’s commanding officer, De Atkine, to the stand in his place, the government blocked him too, this time on the suspect grounds that the military academician was not a competent witness.

Finally, when Stavis attempted to introduce Mohamed’s army records as evidence, McCarthy vehemently objected, arguing they were irrelevant to the case. At every turn, the prosecution fought to cover up the US government’s past collaboration with the defendants and its ongoing relationship with Mohamed.

Despite the stonewalling, Stavis managed to extract a stipulation from the government. It read: “From shortly after the start of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 through September 1991, the United States, through one of its intelligence agencies, provided economic and military support to the Afghan Mujahideen through a third country intermediary.” The document represented the first official acknowledgement by the government of one of its worst-kept secrets.

Stavis’s relentless focus on Ali Mohamed also generated the first mention of the shadowy operative’s name in American media. It came in the form of a February 3, 1995, article in the Boston Globe that detailed Mohamed’s relationship with the CIA, his presence at the Al-Kifah Center in Brooklyn, and the fact that he had trained most, if not all, of the defendants in weapons use.

“His presence in the country is the result of an action initiated by Langley,” a senior CIA official told the Boston Globe, referring to Mohamed and to the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

The “Day of Terror” trial was the largest and most complex terror conspiracy prosecution of its day. Despite its contrived foundations, or perhaps because of this, it served as a blueprint for future terror prosecutions. The trial ended with a verdict that surprised no one: a local jury found all the defendants guilty of conspiracy to commit sedition. They delivered their verdict almost immediately, with minimal deliberation. Mukasey proceeded to sentence Abdel-Rahman and Nosair to life and slapped the others with lengthy sentences that amounted to life in jail. Despite the fact that the plot was conceived by an FBI informant in a controlled environment, Mukasey claimed it “would have resulted in the murder of hundreds if not thousands of people.”

Among those found guilty was Mohammed Saleh, a Palestinian refugee and gas station owner who was accused of selling the diesel fuel the would-be bombers planned to use. Despite his insistence that he had no idea whom he was selling gas to or what they intended to do with it, Saleh was sent away for thirty-five years. “I think my client was set up by the FBI,” Saleh’s lawyer, John Jacobs, declared after his conviction. “They bought their conviction with a million dollars they gave the informant. They bought it with the misconduct of the agents.”

Mukasey concluded the trial by launching into a tirade that put his right-wing political outlook on full display: “This country has experienced militant fascism that failed and militant communism that failed,” he railed at the defendants, suggesting that the militant Islam they embraced would be the next ideological movement in America’s crosshairs.

Earlier that day, the Blind Sheikh had belted out a 100-minute jeremiad before Mukasey and the packed courtroom that gained legendary status among his followers. He ticked off a litany of transgressions the United States had committed against Muslims (at least, in his view), from its support for the secular Turkish revolution of Kamal Atatürk in 1923 to its full-scale backing of Israel to the Gulf War. At the crescendo of his address, Abdel-Rahman predicted that the United States would substitute the hammer and sickle with the Islamic crescent as its new national enemy. With America’s Cold War against communism over, he foresaw a hot war in and against the Islamic world. Unlike Mukasey, who appeared to wish for the same scenario, the Sheikh warned that the coming clash of civilizations would end in catastrophe for America. “God will make (America) disappear from the surface of the Earth, as it has made the Soviet Union disappear,” he said, invoking the triumph of the mujahedin over the Red Army. The sheikh appeared to see no irony in the fact that the United States was the guarantor of that victory, or in his own role as a CIA asset.

There were no warnings of any terror plots after the trial and no sign of danger as a result of the verdict. Yet the Clinton administration decided to place airports and government buildings under a sweeping security clampdown, amplifying and extending the atmosphere of fear the trial had inspired. “We’re preparing for the worst,” declared FBI deputy director Weldon Kennedy. Attempts to provide a confused public with a historical framework for understanding the new threat, meanwhile, were harshly punished. When Robert Fox, the FBI’s New York City director, mentioned in a nationally televised 1993 broadcast that the CIA had trained many of the perpetrators of the World Trade Center attack, he was swiftly transferred to a faraway post. The subject was considered taboo thereafter.

While inconvenient truths about CIA collusion with international jihadists were swept away, a coterie of militarists hyped the Al Qaeda threat to weave crank conspiracy theories that advanced an ulterior, interventionist agenda, attracting interest and promotion from influential quarters. Laurie Mylroie, a disgruntled, obscure former foreign policy advisor to President Bill Clinton, had published a dubious 1997 article claiming that Yousef had actually been an Iraqi intelligence agent. Former CIA director James Woolsey and an ex-Reagan administration official named Frank Gaffney seized on Mylroie’s crackpot theory as proof that Saddam Hussein posed an existential threat to the United States. Her research, which linked minuscule islands of truth with bridges of bunkum, became the linchpin for Woolsey and a close-knit band of neoconservative zealots to initiate a multiyear project to build the case for a full-scale military confrontation with Iraq.

Throw Reason to the Dogs

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, a war of warlords had erupted after the removal of the country’s socialist government. As the former proxies of the United States battled one another for control of the capital, destabilizing the country and driving it into further ruin, they gradually set the stage for another American intervention.

The legacy of the CIA’s program in Afghanistan was not only the unraveling of the Soviet Union, but also the systematic destruction of a country. By 1994, half of Kabul lay in ruins thanks to the vicious power struggle that erupted between some of the CIA’s main proxies after they successfully dislodged Najibullah’s Soviet-backed government.

Much of the destruction was the handiwork of Hekmatyar, the ruthless warlord and now heroin kingpin who had received some $600 million in CIA support over the years. Flush with rocket-propelled grenades, munitions supplied by Washington through Pakistan, Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami released thousands of violent convicts to rampage through enemy-controlled areas and rocketed entire neighborhoods. Kabul was left without electricity, water or functioning telephones—a total reversal from the fleeting period of development during communist rule.

After the ousting of Najibullah, Burhanuddin Rabbani, one of the mujahedin’s founding fathers and a Reagan administration favorite, took over the government. He explicitly opposed democracy and sought to install an Islamic State that governed under strict Sharia law.

With Hekmatyar’s militia at the outskirts of Kabul, Rabbani relied on his defense minister, Ahmad Shah Massoud—the guerrilla tactician regarded by the CIA during the anti-Soviet jihad as a kind of pro-Western Che Guevara—to repel the assault. For years, Massoud and Hekmatyar waged a battle of all against all that reduced half of the city to rubble. Hekmatyar’s brutality knew no limits; when journalist Leslie Cockburn arrived in 1993 to interview him, he had just beheaded five political opponents—and would later kill Cockburn’s translator. The post-communist regime had been reduced to the squabbling of despotic warlords with no political vision or bureaucratic competence. Its agenda was focused entirely on battling for power.

Abdullah Mirzoy served as a diplomat in Afghanistan’s Foreign Ministry in Kabul under successive governments from 1979 to 1994. He described himself as an Afghan nationalist who supported any government that was committed to his country’s development, irrespective of its ideology. When the former mujahedin commanders entered power, Mirzoy watched in agony as his country was systematically plunged into despotism. Today, like many of Afghanistan’s brightest minds, he resides far from his homeland, in the city of Lafayette, Indiana.

“I was in Kabul and I saw with my eyes the fighting there, how they destroyed the city,” Mirzoy recalled to me. “The city was not destroyed before, it was a nice city, and [Massoud and Hekmatyar] completely ruined it.”

Mirzoy recalled the day a delegation of European diplomats arrived in Kabul to discuss ending the civil war with Massoud. “He didn’t even have a logical explanation why he fought,” he said. “I had some discussion with Massoud and his people and they didn’t have any vision for the country. All they wanted was power. They had no economic plan, nothing. They even destroyed a very strong army and took all of the tanks to Pakistan, sent all the weapons away. In the end, we had nothing.”

Mirzoy said he pleaded with the government to salvage what was left of the country. “If you would have seen the children in the city you would have cried. But they didn’t care,” he said of the warlords. “They were all fighting for somebody else, they were slaves for outside powers without thinking about their own country and what is human dignity. Sure, you have to have money but not at the expense of the other people.”

In the areas that Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami controlled, Mirzoy said the warlord attempted to impose a de facto Islamic state on the local population. During a bus trip from Peshawar to Kabul, the vehicle was stopped at a Hezb-i-Islami checkpoint in the Surobi district east of the Afghan capital. He said militiamen demanded as a matter of policy that each passenger leave the bus to recite the shahada, the Muslim profession of faith.

“I told the commander, ‘I’m already Muslim, why are you trying to convert me?’” Mirzoy said. “‘How is it logical to force people to say the shahada and convert to Islam?’ I asked him. ‘Why should I say if I’m Muslim or not, it’s my problem, not yours.’” Thanks to Mirzoy’s protests, he and his fellow travelers were allowed to go without reconverting to Islam.

“It was a really bad situation there,” Mirzoy remembered. “Out of all my friends in the [Foreign] ministry, I was the only one who didn’t have fear. One of them passed me in the office and asked why I even bothered showing up to work in a suit.”

Hekmatyar’s rampage ultimately led to the collapse of his popular base. His support of Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait also lost him the patronage of Saudi Arabia and bin Laden. As his influence faded, Pakistan shifted its support to a little known group of religious zealots known as the Taliban. Educated in Saudi-funded religious schools in Pakistan’s northwest frontier region, the Taliban’s founders modeled themselves after the Saudi morality police. With powerful allies in the West, they were poised to suffocate Afghanistan’s tradition of diverse Islamic scholarship and practice beneath a uniformly fundamentalist, ruthlessly enforced theocracy.

For many average Afghans driven into ruin under the rule of former mujahedin commanders, the Taliban were a welcome change. “Nobody had ever imagined that the situation could get this bad,” reflected Mullah Mohammad Omar, a famed Afghan war veteran who helped found the Taliban. “Nobody thought it could be improved, either.”

By September 1995, with Kabul under siege by the Taliban, Washington backed a secret Pakistani-Saudi plan to replace the Rabbani government with a coalition that included the Taliban. The Pakistani government of Benazir Bhutto wanted to go further and made installing the Taliban in sole power a top priority. Pakistan then helped to set up a wireless network for Taliban commanders, repairing its airports and fleet of captured Soviet jets, providing it with a communications network to advance its radio propaganda, while the Saudis directly armed the movement with Datsun pickup technicals that provided its forces with superior mobile warfare capacity.

In contrast, the Clinton administration’s considerations were guided largely by a plan from petroleum company Unocal to build a pipeline through Afghanistan that would break Russia’s control over oil from the Caspian Sea and marginalize Iran. As Ahmed Rashid, a leading journalistic chronicler of the Taliban’s rise to power, wrote, “There was not a word of US criticism after the Taliban captured [the Afghan city of] Herat in 1995 and threw out thousands of girls from schools. In fact the USA, along with Pakistan’s ISI, considered Herat’s fall as a help to Unocal and tightening the noose around Iran.”

That same year, a Unocal executive named Chris Taggart publicly volunteered his opinion that the Taliban would ensure the most secure environment for the pipeline. His employer had even bribed warlords like Hekmatyar with “bonuses” in exchange for guarding of the pipeline.

With the backing of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the Taliban bristled with firepower that left its foes stunned. Human Rights Watch documented a white-painted C-130 Hercules transport aircraft identified by journalists as Saudi Arabian on the tarmac at Kandahar airport in 1996 unloading artillery and small-arms ammunition to Taliban soldiers. With its superior firepower and political discipline, the Taliban drove the Rabbani government from Kabul in 1996 and announced the birth of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan that same year.

To secure the Taliban’s theocratic stronghold, Saudi Arabia kicked in millions for its own morality police: the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. The sister organization of the Saudi service that bore the same name and meted out similarly harsh punishments to those who violated Wahhabi interpretation of Sharia law, this ministry was the most generously funded and powerful of all the Taliban’s government agencies.

Draconian rule descended on Afghanistan, with women forbidden from attending school and required to wear full facial and head-to-toe covering. Music was banned and public executions in stadiums became the order of the day, with walls bulldozed atop accused homosexuals. Forced out of jobs in the civil service and education system, many women turned to begging in the street. An entire generation of Afghan children was subjected to the Taliban’s indoctrination, with recycled USAID-designed textbooks as their guide.

In fact, the CIA-backed author of those textbooks, University of Nebraska’s Gouttierre, was paid by Unocal to train the staff that would maintain its expected pipeline in Afghanistan. In July 1999, when Taliban commanders and a few Al Qaeda operatives were junketed to the United States by the American government and Unocal, Gouttierre was assigned as their personal guide. For several weeks, the professor escorted his guerrilla guests to local malls for all-expenses paid shopping sprees, and to Mount Rushmore, where they gazed blankly at a rendering of the vehemently anticlericist Thomas Jefferson. When he brought the illiterate Taliban men to his university department, a horrified female Afghan assistant took shelter in the basement. Back in Afghanistan, the Taliban’s Saudi-trained religious police adopted the slogan “Throw reason to the dogs.”

For at least the initial period of its rule, the dystopian regime the Taliban imposed on a once vibrant society was at best a secondary concern to Washington. As State Department spokesman Glyn Davies said at the time, the United States found “nothing objectionable” in the new Afghan government’s intention to impose Sharia law. A top State Department diplomat justified the Faustian bargain with the Taliban to Rashid in February 1997: “The Taliban will probably develop like Saudi Arabia. There will be [the Saudi-owned oil company] Aramco, pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that.”

In a remarkable interview five years after 9/11, Iranian American filmmaker Samira Goetschel asked Brzezinski, the original author of the strategy that aimed to induce a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by covertly supplying the mujahedin, if he had any regrets about the role the United States had played in Afghanistan. He was entirely unrepentant.

“Can you imagine what the world would be like today if there was still a Soviet Union?” Zbigniew Brzezinski asked indignantly. “So yes, compared to the Soviet Union, and to its collapse, the Taliban were unimportant.”

A Very Hard War

Years of US-backed war had not only deluged Afghanistan with weapons and left its infrastructure in ruins; the country was also being flooded all over again with foreign fighters magnetized by the rise of a Saudi-backed Islamic Emirate. Among them was bin Laden, who had been driven from his haven in Sudan by American pressure and was desperate for new sanctuary. Though the Taliban viewed him with deep suspicion, it was in desperate need of his patronage. A marriage of convenience was born that breathed new life into bin Laden’s movement just as Al Qaeda had reached its nadir. “I call on Muslims to support this nation, because God willing, this nation will raise the banner of Islam,” bin Laden said of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, linking his own fate to that of the government.

In 1996, soon after bin Laden’s arrival to Afghanistan, British reporter Gwynne Roberts, working at the time on a documentary about Saudi opposition movements, secured an interview with the Al Qaeda leader. Before meeting bin Laden in Jalalabad, Roberts stopped in on one of his associates, a Saudi professor teaching in the crumbled, hollowed out classrooms of Kabul University, which was now off-limits to female students. He was one of many Saudi dissidents who had found sanctuary within the realm of the Taliban and who was determined to ultimately seize power in the country of his birth. What would happen if the United States insisted on maintaining its military presence inside Saudi Arabia? Roberts asked the professor.

“An international war that will affect everyone,” he replied matter-of-factly. “A very hard war between Muslims and Westerners in ten years.”

Back in Egypt, Zawahiri’s Al-Jihad was on a rampage. Activists connected to the group, many of them Afghan war veterans, had killed over a thousand people throughout the early and mid-1990s. But the worst was yet to come. The Egyptian government had struck a deal in July 1997 that saw thousands of Islamist activists formally renounce violence in exchange for freedom from prison. Abdel-Rahman, the Blind Sheikh, signed off on the initiative from his own cell. Having just joined bin Laden in Afghanistan, Zawahiri raged against the deal, blasting it as a catastrophic sellout. He immediately put into motion a plot to shatter Egypt’s tourism sector, the beating heart of the country’s economy.

On November 17, 1997, six jihadist cadres methodically butchered fifty-eight tourists and six Egyptian locals at Luxor. Just a month prior, the same resort on the banks of the Nile had been the site of a performance of Verdi’s Aida attended by President Mubarak and Sean Connery. The killers’ methods—aiming at victims’ legs before executing them at close range, and disemboweling their bodies with knives—had been seen before on the Afghan battlefield, and as Cooley put it, “had been so rare as to be unknown until then in Egypt.” The sheer savagery of the attack turned the Egyptian public wholly against the jihadists, giving the government all the space it needed to clamp down.

Zawahiri’s dream of an Islamic State in Egypt had been extinguished, and with it, the war against the “near enemy” seemed over. From Kandahar, he and bin Laden festered in a squalid encampment with little food or provisions for their bedraggled underlings. Brought to their lowest point by their own hubris, they hashed out an ambitious plan to strike America and its assets abroad. Their former frenemy was now the “far enemy.”

In Washington, the threat from Al Qaeda was little understood. “We probably should have been more concerned about it at the time than we were, but in the first term we did not see Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda as a major factor, or one that we were concerned with,” then-defense secretary William Cohen reflected years later.

In March 1998, Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya became the first country to issue an international Interpol arrest warrant for bin Laden. The warrant was studiously ignored by American and British intelligence, which had apparently judged toppling Gaddafi a greater priority than disrupting Al Qaeda’s growing global network, according to French journalist Guillaume Dasquié and Jean-Charles Brisard, an advisor to French president Jacques Chirac. At the time, the British MI6 was grooming a group of veterans of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan who had formed into the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an Al Qaeda ally dedicated to assassinating Gaddafi and replacing his rule with an Islamist theocracy.

Five months after Gaddafi’s Interpol warrant was ignored, on August 7, 1998, Al Qaeda struck the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people. The attack was carried out under bin Laden’s personal orders as retaliation for the American military intervention in Somalia.

The most deadly Al Qaeda attack to date had been a pet project of Ali Mohamed. It was Mohamed who scouted the US embassy in Nairobi in 1993—right after being released from Canadian police custody on the word of his FBI handler. (“I took pictures, drew diagrams and wrote a report,” he later admitted, describing how he passed off his files to bin Laden in Sudan.) And it was Mohamed who personally trained the local cell, which was led by a former Al-Kifah staffer named Wadih el-Hage. Mohamed’s involvement with the Al Qaeda unit in Kenya should not have been a secret to the national security officials working on a budget of around $40 billion a year. By the spring of 1996, they knew of the existence of the East African cell and had received Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants to monitor Mohamed and el-Hage’s calls, even as they paid Mohamed’s salary as an informant. But the presence of an admitted terror operative in eastern Africa failed to trigger any action by the FBI.

Ten months before the bombings, US attorney Patrick Fitzgerald had a rare chance to meet with Mohamed in person. Having gained acclaim prosecuting the “Day of Terror” trial, during which his ultra-conservative assistant counsel, Andrew McCarthy, apparently prevented Mohamed from taking the witness stand, Fitzgerald was appointed to direct I-49, the government’s newly formed “bin Laden Unit.” And now, inside a restaurant in Sacramento one block from the California statehouse, he sat face-to-face with Al Qaeda’s top spy in America.

Fitzgerald listened to the seasoned operative freely declare that he did not require any fatwa to attack the United States, that he “loved” bin Laden, and that he had personally trained bin Laden’s bodyguards. “This is the most dangerous man I have ever met. We cannot let this man out on the street,” Fitzgerald concluded. And yet, Mohamed was allowed to do just that—he walked out of the restaurant a free man.

Why was Mohamed allowed to walk away? Did Fitzgerald believe he did not have enough to indict him? Was the FBI concerned with losing its eyes and ears on Al Qaeda? Or did the fear of public exposure and embarrassment over the FBI and CIA’s long-standing relationship with Mohamed—as well as many of the founding fathers of Al Qaeda—trump any concern about Mohamed’s danger to the public? For raising these questions in his book-length investigation into the case of Ali Mohamed, Triple Cross journalist Peter Lance was faced with a libel lawsuit by Fitzgerald. (Fitzgerald was ultimately forced to drop his claim.)

It would not be until September 10, 1998, that the government began to take measures against Mohamed—and it was only because of Mohamed’s own arrogance that the United States took the opportunity to scrutinize him. Following the arrest of el-Hage and the subsequent indictment of the key figures behind the East African embassy bombings, Mohamed scrapped his plans to join bin Laden in Afghanistan and accepted a subpoena to testify before a secret grand jury in New York.

Having outsmarted the feds for years, Mohamed probably thought he could remain one step ahead if he faced them down one more time. But Fitzgerald had had enough. Concluding that Mohamed had lied to the grand jury, he ordered his arrest. When FBI agents arrived at Mohamed’s hotel room to cuff him, they allowed him a visit to the bathroom. There, he tore pages from his notebook containing Zawahiri’s address and satellite phone number, and then flushed them down the toilet.

In federal custody, Mohamed’s name was registered as “John Doe.” A date was set for sentencing, but the hearing never took place. He gave up his right to appeal and the defense raised no objections. Mohamed was sent to a secret location that was most likely the witness protection wing of a federal prison. His file remained sealed and Fitzgerald kept him off the witness stand in the embassy bombing trial, once again averting embarrassment to the CIA, the Department of Defense and the FBI.

It is unclear if Mohamed was ever sentenced, or if he struck a secret deal with the government. The thick shroud of secrecy draped over his very existence meant that Fitzgerald denied the American public a chance to learn about their government’s colossal failures in judgment—and its sordid history of collusion with jihadist elements. As former FBI special agent Joseph F. O’Brien told Lance, if Mohamed had been allowed to testify in open court, he “would have been opened up by defense lawyers and told the whole sad tale of how he’d used the Bureau and the CIA and the DIA for years. The Bureau couldn’t risk that kind of embarrassment.”

On November 4, 1999, Mary Jo White, the US attorney who oversaw Ali Mohamed’s peculiar prosecution, was asked about his case at a press conference about his activities. All she could do was reply, “I’ve read what you read and I can’t comment.” The cover-up to protect the reputation of Ali the American’s employers in the US government had turned into a disappearing act.

A Catastrophic and Catalyzing Event

Two weeks after the embassy bombings, Clinton authorized Operation Infinite Reach. It was the most aggressive US response to a terrorist attack since the country tried and failed to assassinate Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi in 1986 for his supposed role in downing Pan Am flight 103. As with that botched missile strike, which wound up burnishing Gaddafi’s image as an anti-imperialist lion, Infinite Reach revived the beleaguered bin Laden’s global status.

From both a military and political standpoint, the American operation was a disaster. Cruise missiles fired from a navy warship in the Persian Gulf had aimed to destroy an Al Qaeda nerve gas factory in Sudan that, according to Clinton, was co-owned by bin Laden. Instead the strikes, launched on the basis of bunk intelligence, decimated a pharmaceutical plant that supplied 50 percent of the medicine to one of the poorest countries in the world. The bombing wiped out Sudan’s supply of TB vaccinations and eliminated its supply of crucial veterinary drugs that prevented the transfer of parasites from animals to small children.

Furthermore, several cruise missiles failed to explode; Al Qaeda seized them and sold them on the black market for $10 million each, allegedly to China. A separate series of cruise missile strikes hit an Al Qaeda camp in Khost—the old network of bases and tunnels that bin Laden had built for the CIA—but he and Zawahiri were hundreds of miles away thanks to a likely tip-off from the Pakistani ISI. “It was like a script [bin Laden] has written for the Americans and the Americans just went along,” Khaled Batarfi, a childhood friend of bin Laden’s, remarked to an interviewer. “He wanted to provoke the Americans into such actions against Muslim countries.”

“Bin Laden’s interest was not in killing a few Americans in the embassies. He intended to have a response from Clinton—this cowboy response,” said Sa’ad Al-Fagih, a Saudi dissident who had known bin Laden since the days of the anti-Soviet jihad. Citing his contacts in Saudi intelligence, Al-Fagih alleged that no less than 11,000 people enlisted to participate in Al Qaeda–related organizations between 1998 and 2001. He explained, “It’s all because of the successful PR service from the Americans.”

The response authorized by Clinton might have been badly off the mark, but it did not produce the kind of cataclysmic effect that Al Qaeda could exploit to the fullest extent. As Al-Fagih explained, “What bin Laden wants is a full chaos in the region. And with the chaos in the region, those local regimes will collapse very easily and the culture of jihad will supersede. It’s not just a matter of a military coup or one or two operations, it’s going to be a new culture of jihad, a new thinking in the mind of the people is going to be default.”

It would not be long before bin Laden was presented with the situation he sought. Frustrated by Clinton’s insufficient belligerence, a coterie of endowed university chairs and neoconservative zealots nested in think tanks was hatching plans for military interventions that would topple governments across the Middle East. In the global war bin Laden envisioned, these foreign policy fanatics would make the perfect partners.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s 1996 election victory as Israel’s prime minister electrified a group of foreign policy zealots stationed in think tanks on America’s coasts. A graduate of MIT from suburban Philadelphia who later worked at Boston Consulting alongside Mitt Romney, Netanyahu was at least as American as he was Israeli. During the Gulf War, Netanyahu became a familiar face on American cable news, single-handedly turning CNN into what one PLO official called “a propagandist for the Israelis.” For his extended tirades branding the PLO as a front organization for Saddam Hussein, the Washington Times recommended Netanyahu for an Emmy Award, the honor bestowed on American daytime TV actors. The new prime minister was intimately connected to ideological movement that extended from Jerusalem to a network of neoconservative think tanks and policy journals in Washington, all dedicated to advancing the imperatives of Israel’s right-wing Likud Party.

At the heart of this network was Richard Perle, a neocon hard-liner who emerged during the 1970s out of the office of Democratic Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a cold warrior who favored massive defense buildups. While on Jackson’s staff, Perle was overheard on an FBI wiretap furnishing classified information that he had received from a National Security Council staffer to an Israeli embassy official. When Perle entered the Reagan administration’s Department of Defense, he hired the son of a major pro-Israel donor and Likud Party activist named Douglas Feith. In 1983, Feith was fired from a job at the National Security Council and stripped of his security clearance when he became the target of an FBI investigation for forking over classified material to the Israeli embassy. Perle continued to promote his understudy, however, shielding him from scrutiny for allegations of double-dealing.

Following Netanyahu’s ascension to the prime minister’s office in 1996—a victory made possible by the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, whose widow openly blamed Netanyahu for inciting his murder—the prime minister tapped Feith and his allies to help him devise a strategic doctrine for engaging and disrupting the region. Gathered under the auspices of the Institute for Advanced Strategy and Political Studies, an Israel-based think tank with offices in Washington, Feith joined Perle and a collection of neocon and Likudnik ideologues, from David and Meyrav Wurmser to former Mossad commander Yigal Carmon, to draft a sweeping blueprint for remaking the Middle East in Netanyahu’s vision.

They called their vision for the incoming Israeli administration, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” The document recycled many of the revisionist Zionist ideas introduced in Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s high colonial-era “Iron Wall” manifesto, which urged the application of pure force against the native Palestinian population to secure the Jewish state’s deterrent capacity, and reapplied them to the post–Cold War Middle Eastern geopolitical chessboard. Essentially, the neocons’ paper amounted to a call to violently replace the leadership of any regional state that challenged Israel’s expansionist agenda—a feat that could only be accomplished with direct American military intervention.

The “Clean Break” authors envisioned the first target as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which had supported the PLO and fired Scud missiles at Israel during the first Gulf War. As Feith and his co-authors wrote, “removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq [was] an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right.” But Iraq would only be a stepping-stone to a greater war that would extend to Syria, a country under the control of Hafez al-Assad that based its strategy of deterrence on close alliances with Iran, Russia and Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia militia that was well on its way toward dislodging the occupying Israeli military from southern Lebanon.

Through a joint effort by US-allied countries like Jordan, Turkey and a new, US-friendly Iraqi regime, the neoconservatives hoped to “squeeze and detach Syria from the Saudi Peninsula. For Syria … this could be the prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East which would threaten Syria’s territorial integrity.” They proposed weaponizing the heavily religious, rural Sunni population as a proxy force in Syria’s eastern hinterlands: “Israel has an interest supporting diplomatically, militarily and operationally Turkey’s and Jordan’s actions against Syria, such as securing tribal alliances with Arab tribes that cross into Syrian territory and are hostile to the Syrian ruling elite,” the neocons argued, alluding to the Salafi-centric rural population that would later rally behind Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and the Islamic state.

“A Clean Break” presented a microcosm of the vision outlined on a global scale in an essay published the same year, 1996, by two of the neoconservative movement’s principal ideologues, Robert Kagan and William Kristol. Published in the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, the essay’s title, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” was clearly intended to soften the nakedly militaristic thrust of its contents. Kagan and Kristol called for exploiting the void left by the Soviet Union’s collapse to intervene wherever and whenever the United States felt it could exert “preponderant influence and authority over all others in its domain.” The goal, they wrote, was “benevolent global hegemony.”

In the post–Cold War status quo, where under Pax Americana the United States had no viable competitors to fear, Kagan and Kristol pointed to a pacific domestic atmosphere and latent antiwar sentiment as the key obstacle to a renewed drive for imperial expansion. “In a world in which peace and American security depend on American power and the will to use it,” they wrote, “the main threat the United States faces now and in the future is its own weakness.”

A year after the publication of “A Clean Break,” Kagan and Kristol organized a virtual who’s who of neoconservatives into an informal working group to push for the “benevolent global hegemony” they sought. Centered in the offices of the American Enterprise Institute, the nest of Washington’s neoconservative second generation, this group called itself the Project for the New American Century, or PNAC.

Signatories of PNAC’s first letter included civilian national security figures like Feith, Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Christian right moralists like Gary Bauer, William Bennett and the blue-blooded Republican political upstart Jeb Bush. The neocons found a few liberal allies as well, like New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier, an ardent Zionist and reflexive military interventionist who tended to favor progressive social policies at home. PNAC was determined to maintain a patina of bipartisanship, but its true base lay in the Republican Party. In the Clinton era, this meant that its membership would be relegated to firing off open letters, delivering congressional testimony and publishing op-eds.

While the neocons cooled their heels in Beltway think tanks, they conjured up dreams of a national emergency that would electrify their imperial agenda. One PNAC manifesto read, “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”

In Iraq, to the great dismay of the regime change advocates in neoconservative circles, the Clinton administration was then invested in a strategy its foreign policy hands described as “dual containment,” adapting the prevailing American approach to the Soviet Union from the days of the Cold War. The concept was formally introduced in 1993 by Martin Indyk, a former staffer for the pro-Israel lobbying group, American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), who was appointed to Clinton’s National Security Council. Rather than removing Iraq’s government in one fell swoop, dual containment aimed to erode the country’s stability through slowly imposing unilateral “no fly zones” that enabled the United States to bomb Iraq once a week at a cost of over a billion dollars. It was complemented by crushing sanctions that targeted Iraq’s infrastructure and civilian population. While the sanctions’ death toll remains hotly disputed, one 1995 study by the medical journal Lancet and sponsored by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization found that 576,000 children under the age of five had died. Grilled by Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes, then-secretary of state Madeleine Albright infamously declared that the containment policy was “worth it”—even if it triggered half a million infant deaths.

Though Clinton resisted neoconservative calls for a full-scale invasion, he gave PNAC a boost in 1998 when he signed the Iraq Liberation Act, a congressional resolution that budgeted $97 million to assist anti-Saddam proxy groups and that called for complete regime change. The money went straight to Ahmad Chalabi, a shady Iraqi exile who had been sentenced to twenty-two years in jail for a banking scandal in Jordan before resurfacing in London as the leader of the Iraqi National Congress. At the time, the four-star general who oversaw US military operations in the Persian Gulf, Anthony Zinni, privately dismissed the scheme as “harebrained.”

The congressional sponsors of the Iraq Liberation Act drew explicit inspiration from the Reagan-era strategy of undermining sovereign states from within by arming and training opposition groups as proxy militias. “At the height of the Cold War, we supported freedom fighters in Asia, Africa and Latin America willing to fight and die for a democratic future. We can and should do the same now in Iraq,” said Republican senator Trent Lott in his argument for the bill’s passage. Senator Jesse Helms, the old anticommunist stalwart, declared that the Iraq Liberation Act “harkens back to the successes of the Reagan doctrine, enlisting the very people who are suffering most under Saddam’s yoke to fight the battle against him.” Thus, the Cold War’s covert anti-Soviet operations were adapted by the world’s lone superpower to violently destabilize the states that remained opposed to Western influence. In the case of Ba’athist-run Iraq, then-Democratic senator Bob Kerrey insisted America should accept nothing less than the messianic goal of “replacing it with a transition to democracy.”

Though the rising aggression against Iraq was a bipartisan effort in Washington, it met with stiff resistance from a burgeoning grassroots antiwar movement. In February 1998, when Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, National Security’s Sandy Berger and Defense Secretary William Cohen convened a special CNN town hall to defend their plan to launch a punishing military strike on Iraq, they faced withering criticism from among the audience of 6,000.

Challenged by a caller over the hypocrisy of American support for ruthless dictators in allied countries while Washington sanctioned Iraq, Albright responded, “No one has done what Saddam Hussein has done, or is thinking of doing. He is producing weapons of mass destruction, and he is qualitatively and quantitatively different from other dictators.” When an audience member grilled Berger about the casualties US bombing had already exacted on Iraqi civilians, the national security advisor claimed without evidence, “you’re dealing with someone who uses people as human shields.”

The botched attempt at pro-war public relations helped expose the flabby justifications for bombing a country whose danger to the United States was questionable at best. What’s more, it boldly displayed the American public’s healthy skepticism of military interventionism. A caller from Oklahoma wondered if the United States was entering a state of permanent war. He pleaded, “How many times are we going to send our children and our children’s children to fight Saddam Hussein?”

The exponents of empire were unable to answer inconvenient questions like these. They could only draw up plans and wait for some “catastrophic and catalyzing event.”