Essentials

Perfect Pretext

25 Years of the “War on Terror“

On 11 September 2001, 2,977 people died. In the war zones the West opened up afterwards, at least 4.5 million died, by the most cautious serious estimate. This text asks why the ratio looks the way it does, and what the attacks have to do with the war that bears their name.

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In his essay “The Spirit of Terrorism”, published in 2002, Jean Baudrillard wrote of the images from Manhattan:

“And so one finds united, to the highest degree, in this disaster film from Manhattan, the two phenomena of twentieth-century mass fascination: the white magic of cinema and the black magic of terrorism. The white light of the image and the black light of terrorism.”^[1]

Measured by its immediate consequences, 11 September was nothing special at all. Two thousand nine hundred and seventy-seven dead, a considerable figure, but nothing out of the ordinary in the decade that preceded it. What was special about the thing lay in the form and in the radicality of the images the attack supplied. Baudrillard continues immediately:

“Afterwards one tries to impose any meaning at all upon it, to find any interpretation at all for it. But there is none, and it is the radicality of the spectacle, the brutality of the spectacle, that alone is original and irreducible.”^[2]

The violence that had previously happened elsewhere, outside the national we, at most for a moment on the evening news or on Fox News upon the retina of the Western subject, was suddenly with “us”. The people who jumped from those fantastical twin towers were “we” and not “them”. A destruction of this form, absurd and in the heart of the global North, would not have been conceivable in this way ten years earlier. Only the change of place of the violence, from the periphery into the symbolic centre, makes it comprehensible why Baudrillard can speak of singularity. “Seule la violence symbolique est génératrice de singularité.”^[3] For the first time, the order of the West had to recognise itself as a target.

From this reversal one could conclude, as moralists like to do, that the United States had “deserved” the attack. This conclusion follows the same moral-national logic by which the American subject was later persuaded of the so-called “War on Terror”. The wage labourers who died that morning were not the American nation as the capitalist class as a whole. Whoever judges that the American proletarian deserved to die because he draws his wage in the wrong nation thereby pronounces the same judgement upon the Afghan wage labourer, who is made serviceable to the purposes of his rulers in just the same way and who, in the American reckoning, likewise stands in the wrong nation.

The fascination and the everlasting debate about this attack is itself an imperial crack, and derives from the fact that such horror was unimaginable here with us. Out of the same national arrogance, the theories about authorship then find their footing. For the national American it cannot be that a group of supposedly fanatical cave dwellers from the distant Orient so much as looks at the superior American nation, let alone scratches it with so complex an undertaking. “We” do the killing, “the others” do the dying. And if it really was as claimed, then only through the incredible luck of a deranged band of criminals. That a highly intelligent cadre group might have planned and carried out an attack on the centre of the Western world out of comprehensible (which expressly does not mean reasonable) motives must not be so.

This does not dispose of the many-layered intrigues surrounding 11 September; the chapter “Who was it?” will come to speak of them. But the fascination with authorship stems from that arrogance, and it obstructs the view of the question at issue here. 11 September itself is therefore only marginally the subject, and the null hypothesis as much as the maximal hypothesis not at all. The subject is the war that (wrongly) bears the name of terror.

That Was Quick

On 12 September 2001, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder stepped before a Bundestag rarely so full:

“I have also assured him [Bush] of Germany’s unrestricted – I emphasise: unrestricted – solidarity.”^[4]

Seven days later the same Chancellor spelled out what he had been referring to: military assistance was also meant, such assistance could not be ruled out, and therefore he must not rule it out.^[5] Between expression of mourning and alliance obligation lay one week. In Washington, the rule under which the coming decades would be negotiated was already in force by then. George W. Bush had put it to Congress nine days after the attacks: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”^[6]

This bisection moved into the unipolar vacuum that the disintegration of the Soviet Union had brought with it. The “with us or against us” pathos had legitimised the whole of US foreign policy during the so-called “Cold” War (“cold” only for some). Thus Bush made clear very early what the coming years would be about: the absolute subordination of the world to the interests of the United States; contradiction was henceforth recognised as terrorism.

The official narrative has remained stable ever since: attack out of nowhere, answer under duress. The liberal critique of it has settled in just as stably, only doubly inverted. It tells of a chain of mistakes: faulty intelligence, hubris, insufficient knowledge of the country, a good undertaking that got out of hand, or else a conspiracy of interested parties within or without. Both posit 11 September as the origin, and what came after as the reaction — successful or failed, moral or criminal, but in any case a consequence.

Mahmood Mamdani, political scientist at Columbia University, described the mood as early as 2004 as that of a great power stricken with amnesia.^[7] What he set against it is the point of departure of this text.

“I argue that rather than illustrating a deep-seated clash of civilizations, 9/11 came out of recent history, that of the late Cold War.”^[8]

The thesis runs: the War on Terror was not a consequence of 11 September. It was the continuation of a strategy that had been worked out in Washington since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and whose aim was the military securing of a world order in which the United States (not out of malice, but out of quite rational imperialism) controls energy flows, trade routes and world currency, against every conceivable rival (and prevents such rivals from arising in the first place). The attacks supplied the occasion and the legitimation, but they did not supply the cause.

In this, nobody brought the attacks about in order to be able to wage a war. What is being claimed is something more sober: that a worked-out, rational strategy met an opportunity and used it.

Not Out of Nowhere

The narrative of the attack out of nowhere, which also feeds the narrative of the deranged al-Qaedas, has as its precondition that there was nothing before. The national subject enters the region on the morning on which it is attacked, and finds there people who hate it, without it being possible to say what for. Thus a political relation becomes a force of nature. In Bush’s words:

“They hate our freedoms — our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”^[9]

So the subject may also be proud to live in so free a country, one that makes enemies for itself simply by its (doubly) free condition. This narrative of the struggle of unfreedom against freedom is of course likewise a relic of the “Cold” War that persists to this day. This exceedingly vague idealism has a threefold use: first, it obscures questions about freedom (property) itself, since compared with the fabricated unfreedom of the others it appears better in every respect. Secondly, it makes this freedom (which can then again be understood quite subjectively) appear, apart from its (material) conditions, as God-given, and thereby declares one’s own mission to “liberate” the unfree a benefaction, if not indeed God-given itself. Thirdly, and this applies to the United States in particular, it is constitutive of the nation’s ideal self-understanding – to invoke freedom is then as much a legitimation for any action whatsoever as it is to lean on God in a theocracy.

We will nevertheless cautiously venture that the United States might perhaps have made enemies for itself apart from its freedom as well.

Saudi Arabia, 1943 to 1945

Since 1943 the Persian Gulf (or Arabian Gulf, depending on who is doing the naming) has belonged to those territories whose defence Washington has formally declared its own affair. In the fifty-six years between that declaration and the end of the century, not one decade passed without American weapons, bases, coup planning or warfare in this region.

On 18 February 1943 Franklin Roosevelt signed a directive to the administrator of the Lend-Lease programme, by which Saudi Arabia was admitted into that programme:

“For purposes of implementing the authority conferred upon you as Lend-Lease Administrator by Executive Order No. 8926, dated October 28, 1941, and in order to enable you to arrange for Lend-Lease aid to the Government of Saudi Arabia, I hereby find that the defense of Saudi Arabia is vital to the defense of the United States.”^[10]

Saudi Arabia had no army that could have made a contribution (the unification of the kingdoms of Hejaz and Nejd as today’s Kingdom of Saudi Arabia lay only nine years back), and it lay far from every theatre of war. What it did have, the concession company of Standard Oil of California (in the form of Aramco) had already drilled into four years earlier. Two years later, in August 1945, the head of the State Department’s Near East division, Gordon Merriam, drafted a paper for President Truman which names the thing without circumlocution:

“In Saudi Arabia, where the oil resources constitute a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history, a concession covering this oil is nominally in American control.”^[11]

The draft was never sent; Acheson noted that the Secretary did not consider this feasible at present.^[12] More interesting than the sentence about the prize is the assessment two pages further on, which describes the actual process of the post-war years: “The British publicly and officially admit that they are no longer able to keep the Middle East in order without our help.”^[13]

On 14 February 1945, on the return journey from Yalta, Roosevelt received King Abd al-Aziz Ibn Saud aboard the USS Quincy in the Great Bitter Lake. About this meeting there circulates the legend of a bargain, “oil for protection”. The American record of the conversation, taken down by Colonel William Eddy, knows of three subjects: the Jewish refugees and Palestine, Syria and Lebanon, and finally agriculture and water.^[14] Oil does not appear in it. Anyone who wants to explain the alliance does not need this legend at all; the Lend-Lease directive of 1943 says the same thing in the language of an administrative decision.

Iran, 1951 to 1954

In the spring of 1951 the Iranian parliament nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Two years later, on 19 August 1953, Operation Ajax brought down Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. In an internal paper of the CIA’s history staff, declassified in 2013, the process is put like this:

“The point that the majority of these accounts miss is a key one: the military coup that overthrew Mosadeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government.”^[15]

The State Department confirmed the same fact in 2017 in the preface to a belatedly issued volume of records, which expressly concedes that the first edition had concealed “the covert action that led to the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Dr. Mohammad Mosadeq on August 19, 1953”.^[16]

The overthrow of Mossadegh and how it ultimately issued in the Iranian Revolution we have examined in detail in our article “The Iranian Revolution: the bitterest fruit of US imperialism”.

In April 1954 the parties agreed in London on a consortium whose shares an American ambassadorial report lists: five American companies with eight per cent each, forty together; the British AIOC likewise forty; Royal Dutch/Shell fourteen; the French CFP six.^[17] Before the nationalisation, American corporations had owned nothing at all in Iran.

Arab Nationalism, 1956 to 1958

In 1956 Washington parted company with its allies: on 26 July Nasser nationalised the canal company holding authority over the Suez Canal. At the end of October Israel, Britain and France attacked – without the United States. These were already thinking of a more durable control of the region. Eisenhower spoke before Congress:

“There can be no peace—without law. And there can be no law—if we were to invoke one code of international conduct for those who oppose us—and another for our friends.”^[18]

We permit ourselves a smile. The United States held back Europe’s oil supply and left London out in the rain over currency assistance until the withdrawal had been decided upon.^[19] What Washington could sell as a legal position disposed, in passing, of the remnants of two colonial empires.

In Lebanon a constitutional dispute had been smouldering since May 1958 over the second term of President Camille Chamoun, the only Arab head of state to have expressly welcomed the American doctrine of supremacy.^[20] At first he did not ask for a landing.^[21]

In our article “The Party of God” we look in detail at Lebanese history and how it was shaped by French and later US-imperialist influence.

What turned this into an American landing happened two hundred kilometres to the east. On the morning of 14 July 1958, Iraqi officers around Abd al-Karim Qasim overthrew the monarchy in Baghdad; Nuri as-Said, for decades the West’s most reliable man and the man who gave the Baghdad Pact its name, was hanged the following day.^[22] Chamoun’s request thereupon reached Washington at 8.35 a.m.; twenty-four and a half hours later the marines stood on the beach at Beirut, reinforced to nearly fifteen thousand men.^[23]

In the meeting that lay in between, there is little talk of Lebanon. Allen Dulles reported that the fate of Kuwait stood “presently in the balance”; his brother, the Secretary of State, reckoned up the costs — “a cutting off of the pipeline, stoppage of transit through the Suez, and hostile activity throughout the area. The British will have to move into Kuwait.” — and divided up the work: “it is preferable for us to go to Lebanon, and for the UK to go into Iraq and Kuwait.”^[24] From this the President drew the conclusion that indicates the order of magnitude in which the thinking was done:

“The President said that the situation is clear to him—to lose this area by inaction would be far worse than the loss in China, because of the strategic position and resources of the Middle East.”^[25]

On the telephone with Macmillan he then formulated the real question: “Are you of the belief that unless we have made up our minds in advance to carry this thing on through to the Persian Gulf, that we had better not go in the first place?”^[26] The Eisenhower Doctrine was not invoked, for the reason the Secretary of State Dulles had already set out to the President in May:

“he did not see how we could invoke the provisions of the Middle East Doctrine relating to the use of United States forces specifically, since that would entail a finding that the United Arab Republic had attacked Lebanon and that the United Arab Republic was under the control of international communism.”^[27]

Neither the one nor the other could be asserted, and Dulles told the congressional leadership so that same day without beating about the bush: “He added that we are not planning to act under the third category above.”^[28] Two weeks later the Security Council’s observer group found nobody who had come across the border to fight beyond doubt.^[29] By 25 October the last American soldier had withdrawn again; Iraq left the Baghdad Pact on 24 March 1959, the alliance moved to Ankara and was thenceforth called CENTO.^[30] What the landing was really directed against, Eisenhower told his Vice President on the morning of the operation.

“Since 1945 we have been trying to maintain the opportunity to reach vitally needed petroleum supplies peaceably, without hindrance on the part of any one. The present incident comes about by the struggle of Nasser to get control of these supplies—to get the income and the power to destroy the Western world.”^[31]

Even then Washington was aware of the consequence of its regional policy of supremacy – and of how this was objectively not in the interest of the people on the ground, let alone in their subjective perception of their interests:

“The trouble is that we have a campaign of hatred against us, not by the governments but by the people. The people are on Nasser’s side.”^[32]

Half a year earlier the National Security Council had recorded, in its basic study on the Near East, what one was taken for in the region, and why.

“In the eyes of the majority of Arabs the United States appears to be opposed to the realization of the goals of Arab nationalism. They believe that the United States is seeking to protect its interest in Near East oil by supporting the status quo and opposing political or economic progress…”^[33]

The paper enumerates the American objectives, and in first place stands not the containment of Moscow but the disposal over the objects: “Availability to the United States and its allies of the resources, the strategic positions and the passage rights of the area, and the denial to the Soviet bloc of strategic positions and control over such resources.”^[34]

Israel, 1967 to 1970

In June 1967 Israel occupied, within six days, the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank including East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights; in November the UN Security Council demanded withdrawal from occupied territories, without response.^[35]

What changed thereafter for the American-Israeli relationship can be read off a budget series: in 1966 Israel received American aid of 126.8 million dollars; in 1971 it was 634.3 million, with military credits alone rising from 30 to 545 million. After the October War (or “Yom Kippur War”) the sum jumped to 2.62 billion, and for the first time it included military aid that did not have to be repaid.^[36]

We have written a great deal on the Jerusalem war; have a look at our Palestine texts for that.

The popular expression of Israel as a “strategic asset” does not, however, stem from the records of these years; it is a later label. Nixon declared on television in July 1970:

“we will do what is necessary to maintain Israel’s strength vis-à-vis its neighbors, not because we want Israel to be in a position to wage war—that is not it—but because that is what will deter its neighbors from attacking it.”^[37]

A paper of the NSC staff of 23 February 1970 states the second part of the reckoning: “Israel’s ability to defend itself is also important in avoiding direct U.S. involvement in a Mid-Eastern war.”^[38] Whoever defends himself ties down no American divisions. By the same principle the Gulf was ordered a little later. The stationary aircraft carrier was docked.

The Two (and a Half) Pillars, 1970 to 1974

After Britain’s withdrawal from the Gulf in 1971, Washington needed a stable ordering power that it did not have to provide itself. The decision stands in a directive of the National Security Council of 7 November 1970.

“Approved a general strategy for the near term of promoting cooperation between Iran and Saudi Arabia as the desirable basis for maintaining stability in the Persian Gulf while recognizing the preponderance of Iranian power and developing a direct U. S. relationship with the separate political entities of the area.”^[39]

In May 1972 Nixon and Kissinger visited Tehran. What was agreed there was summarised four years later by an investigative report of the American Senate (apparently without diplomatic consideration).

“In May, 1972, President Nixon and then National Security Advisor Kissinger, agreed for the first time to sell Iran virtually any conventional weapons it wanted and so instructed the bureaucracy in a memorandum in late July, 1972.”^[40]

Arms sales to monarchist Iran rose from 524 million dollars in fiscal year 1972 to 3.91 billion in fiscal year 1974; for the years 1972 to 1976 they add up to 10.4 billion dollars.^[41]

The second pillar was put in place in parallel. On 8 June 1974 Kissinger and Crown Prince Fahd signed the founding declaration of an American-Saudi economic commission whose American side was led by the Secretary of the Treasury.^[42]

By 1974, then, the United States had three states (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel) which, for their own national interests, were dependent on American weapons and credits and could accordingly be directed de facto in their foreign policy. Lebanon and Iraq do not belong in this row, and precisely for that reason belong here. Iraq is the state that got away: in 1958 through the overthrow of the monarchy, in March 1959 formally out of the Baghdad Pact, from 1963 on in the American assessment “completely dependent on the Soviets for military equipment”^[43], in 1967 a breaking off of relations, in 1972 a treaty of friendship with Moscow and the nationalisation of the Iraq Petroleum Company.^[44] Lebanon was never a military client but the infrastructure: pipelines in Sidon and Tripoli, banks in Beirut. Between 1958 and 1974 Washington approved military aid for Israel of 3.9 billion dollars and for Iran of 1.18 billion; Lebanon got 20 million, Iraq 11, and after 1967 nothing more.^[45] Whoever is to be directed is equipped. The rest is administered or lost.

1979

In 1979 the internal contradictions of this external US stewardship collapsed into one another. On 16 January the Shah, driven out by months of mass protests, left the country; on 4 November students occupied the American embassy in Tehran and took more than fifty Americans hostage^[46], in order to prevent a Mossadegh-style coup against Khomeini’s revolution. On 20 November armed men occupied the Great Mosque in Mecca and held it for two weeks in protest against Saudi Arabia’s Western orientation (an event possibly more consequential than 11 September). And at the end of December the Soviet Union marched into Afghanistan.^[47] One pillar was gone, the other was wobbling, and the Red Army stood three hundred miles from the Indian Ocean.

Thirty-six years after Roosevelt’s directive, twenty-six after Tehran and nine after the decision in favour of the deputies, the world power no longer had a reliable, stable viceroy in this region. The order it had been trying to hold since 1945 it would from now on have to hold itself.

How to Breed Your Own Enemies

On 23 January 1980, in his State of the Union address, Jimmy Carter drew the consequence from the year of upheaval 1979 and set out how the United States would now proceed:

“The region which is now threatened by Soviet troops in Afghanistan is of great strategic importance: It contains more than two-thirds of the world’s exportable oil […] An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”^[48]

Andrew Bacevich, colonel in retirement and historian, dates things from here: “This statement, subsequently enshrined as the Carter Doctrine, inaugurated America’s War for the Greater Middle East.”^[49]

Six days after the speech, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown laid his annual report before Congress: “A large-scale disruption in the supply of foreign oil could have as damaging consequences for the United States as the loss of an important military campaign, or indeed a war.”^[50] Brown’s warning was enough to give birth to an agency of its own: the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force took up its work at MacDill Air Force Base in March 1980; on 1 January 1983 it became the United States Central Command.^[51] From that day on there was a permanent American military staff whose area of responsibility was the Middle East.

Afghanistan, 1979 to 1989

As early as 3 July 1979, almost half a year before the Soviet invasion, Carter signed a presidential finding authorising covert aid to the Afghan insurgents.^[52] Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s security adviser, put a point on this in 1998 in conversation with Le Nouvel Observateur (refreshingly honest!):

“That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap – and you want me to regret it?”^[53]

The note Brzezinski invokes is not on record. The trap remains an assertion by a participant. What is on record suffices without it: how this later aid looked is well documented. The CIA bought, the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) distributed. Steve Coll sums up the division of labour in a formula from the house: in Afghanistan the Agency was to stick to its competence, namely “mules, money, and mortars.”^[54] In Coll’s words: “For many in the CIA the Afghan jihad was about killing Soviets, first and last.”^[55]

Howard Hart, station chief in Islamabad, proposed to the Pakistanis a bounty on Soviet soldiers: ten thousand rupees for a member of the special forces, five thousand for a conscript, double if they were brought in alive.^[56] Half of the business was paid for by Riyadh. The Saudis undertook to mirror the CIA’s contributions dollar for dollar; for fiscal year 1987 alone Congress approved around 630 million dollars, not counting the Saudi funds.^[57]

The ISI distributed according to its own preferences, which benefited the most radical groups, above all the later bin Laden confidant Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. With the American-Saudi money, Pakistan’s military ruler Zia-ul-Haq had hundreds of Quran schools built along the Afghan border, which prepared young Afghans and Pakistanis for the anti-communist jihad.^[58] Mamdani has evaluated the school books which the University of Nebraska produced with a USAID grant of 50 million dollars. An arithmetic problem for third-graders ran like this: “One group of maujahidin attack 50 Russian soldiers. In that attack 20 Russians are killed. How many Russians fled?”^[59] (Distinctly uncreative into the bargain…)

The personnel came out of this constellation too. Volunteers from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Algeria gathered at the border; according to Coll’s finding, the suicide tactic against the Soviets proceeded from them and not from the Afghan fighters, who rejected it as contrary to religion.^[60]

“The source of privatized and globalized terrorism in today’s world, the international jihadis are the true ideological children of Reagan’s crusade against the ‘evil empire.’”^[61]

For this backflow the CIA had a term of its own. Chalmers Johnson, Japanologist and former adviser to the service, titles his book of 2000 with it: “Blowback”, he writes, is

“a term the CIA invented to describe the likelihood that our covert operations in other people’s countries would result in retaliations against Americans, civilian and military, at home and abroad”^[62]

His book appeared eighteen months before 11 September, with the prognosis that the world politics of the twenty-first century would be driven above all by blowback from the twentieth.^[63]

Iraq, 1982 to 1990

In February 1982 the State Department struck Saddam’s Iraq from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, in order to be able to exploit Saddam’s great-power ambitions for its own plans against Iran.^[64] There followed Commodity Credit Corporation guarantees running into the billions, which kept foreign exchange free for Iraq to use on other things: around 400 million dollars in fiscal year 1983, around 1.1 billion in the years 1988 and 1989, 500 million in 1990.^[65] On 20 December 1983 Donald Rumsfeld sat with Saddam Hussein in Baghdad as Ronald Reagan’s special envoy. On which the US embassy record states: “PEOPLE SHOULD KNOW THAT TERRORISM HAS A HOME — IN IRAN, SYRIA AND LIBYA.”^[66]

By this point Washington had known for years that Iraq was using poison gas. A State Department memorandum of 1 November 1983 names the “almost daily” use of chemical weapons by Iraqi units (manufactured, incidentally, in plants supplied by German firms^[67]); a further one of 21 November records their use against Iranian troops and against Kurdish insurgents.^[68] In 1988 the poison gas attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja was to kill some 5,000 people. The former NSC staffer Howard Teicher declared in court in 1995, under penalty of perjury, that CIA Director William Casey had personally seen to it that Iraq received sufficient weapons via third states, above all Egypt.^[69]

The Troops Stay, 1990 to 2003

Two years after the end of the war against Iran, the same Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait; overnight the partner against Tehran became the enemy of the free world. For the region something followed from this that stayed longer than the war itself. On 7 August 1990 the deployment of American soldiers to Saudi Arabia began; on 8 August George Bush explained to the television audience what it was for: “The mission of our troops is wholly defensive. Hopefully, they will not be needed long.”^[70]

They stayed thirteen years. After the war, just under six thousand American soldiers were permanently stationed in the Kingdom; through rotation more than twenty-five thousand passed through annually.^[71] They flew the no-fly zone over southern Iraq, set up on 26 August 1992, for which Washington invoked a Security Council resolution that authorises no force and does not mention the zones.^[72] In December 1998 American and British aircraft bombed ninety-seven targets in Iraq in seventy hours.^[73] The weapons inspectors, whose alleged expulsion later formed part of the justification for the next war, had shortly beforehand been withdrawn on the instruction of their own chairman, on American recommendation.^[74]

Over all of this lay the embargo. In May 1996 Lesley Stahl put it to the American UN ambassador Madeleine Albright that half a million Iraqi children had died, and asked whether the price was worth it. Albright answered that the decision was a very hard one, but “we think the price is worth it”.^[75]

In August 1996 Osama bin Laden published from the Hindu Kush a declaration of war whose title already names the subject: against the Americans occupying the land of the two holy places. The rank order of the grievances is unambiguous: “Clearly after Belief (Imaan) there is no more important duty than pushing the American enemy out of the holy land.”^[76] A year and a half later, on 23 February 1998, he signed with four other men the declaration of the World Islamic Front (or “World Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders”, also “International Islamic Front”). This declaration adduces three facts which rest on the objective conditions of the by then nearly fifty-year US presence in the region. Only the conclusions the group draws from them are idealist nonsense:

“First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.”^[77]

The second names the Iraqi dead, with a figure (not demonstrable for this period) of over a million. The third names Jerusalem.^[78] Out of this there then comes a verdict declaring every American, civilian as well as soldier, a target. Bin Laden’s motives were political, not theological. In his message of 29 October 2004 he dates the point of departure for the jihad against the United States to the illegal Israeli invasion of Lebanon of 1982 and the role of the American Sixth Fleet in it.^[79]

“The events that affected my soul in a direct way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon… And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America…”^[80]

To Bush’s declaration that one was hated on account of one’s own freedom he had an answer in the same message: “No, we fight because we are free men who don’t sleep under oppression. We want to restore freedom to our nation, just as you lay waste to our nation [by which he presumably meant the “nation” in the sense of the Islamic umma].”^[81] The freedom that stands opposed here is in both cases one’s own. The second reason, the stationing of American troops in Saudi Arabia, comes from his declarations of 1996 and 1998. It was agreed with by, of all people, Bush’s deputy secretary of war, Paul Wolfowitz. In May 2003 he said of precisely these troops:

“Their presence there over the last 12 years has been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly government. It’s been a huge recruiting device for al Qaeda.”^[82]

The Plans in the Drawer

The Nineties

Back to the year in which the world power lost its adversary. What comes afterwards figures in memory as a pause: a decade without a systemic opponent, without a great war, with a world economy that seemed to regulate itself. A pause it was not. Charles Krauthammer described the situation as early as 1990 without circumlocution:

“The immediate post-Cold War world is not multipolar. It is unipolar. The center of world power is the unchallenged superpower, the United States, attended by its Western allies.”^[83]

What actually happened in these years was the conversion of the world economy to a division of labour that runs across oceans. The World Trade Organization took up its work on 1 January 1995, China acceded to it on 11 December 2001; trade volume grew in the nineties by an average of 6.5 per cent a year.^[84] World oil consumption rose from 66.6 million barrels a day in 1990 to 77.0 million in 2000, and in this period the United States covered a growing share of its own consumption through imports: 42 per cent in 1990, 53 per cent in 2000.^[85] The more closely production was interwoven, the more its functioning hung on conditions that somebody had to guarantee; on sea routes, on energy flows, and indeed on a currency in which both can be settled.

Who was to guarantee that stood written in the American strategy papers of these years. The Clinton administration’s National Security Strategy records:

“A central goal of our national security strategy is to promote America’s prosperity through efforts both at home and abroad. Our economic and security interests are increasingly inseparable.”^[86]

And the same paper names the object: “Conservation measures notwithstanding, the United States has a vital interest in unrestricted access to this critical resource.”^[87] The Department of Defense is still plainer in its East Asia strategy of 1995. The American military presence in the region, it says there,

“guarantees the security of sea lanes vital to the flow of Middle East oil, serves to deter armed conflict in the region, and promotes regional cooperation. It also denies political or economic control of the Asia-Pacific region by a rival, hostile power or coalition of powers, preventing any such group from having command over the vast resources, enormous wealth, and advanced technology of the Asia-Pacific region.”^[88]

The connection was thus neither hidden nor disputed; it was only seldom uttered as impolitely as by Thomas Friedman, who in 1999 in the New York Times magazine supplied the advertising copy of globalisation with its small print:

“The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”^[89]

The relation of fist to hand can be put in figures. Throughout the nineties the United States accounted for between 45 and 51 per cent of world military spending, in the year 2000 two and a half times the next five states combined.^[90] That is the apparatus for which, after 1991, the justification was missing: the planning set in.

The Paper of 1992

In February 1992, three months after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a draft for the Defense Planning Guidance for fiscal years 1994 to 1999 circulated in the Pentagon, worked out under Paul Wolfowitz and Zalmay Khalilzad. The key sentence stands right at the beginning:

“Our first objective is to prevent the reemergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”^[91]

Named are Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union and South West Asia. Among the interests to be secured, first place goes to: “access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf oil”.^[92]

The draft found its way to the New York Times, and of course there was indignation, as there is with documents that write down what everyone knows. What happened to the text afterwards has been reconstructed by Greg Muttitt in his history of Iraqi oil policy. The final version approved by Cheney in May 1992 had, he writes, toned down the more explicit references to self-interest, among them the interest in Gulf oil.^[93] What was struck was of course only the formulation, not the aim. Five years later Brzezinski presented the civilian version of the same consideration. Eurasia is for him “the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played”.^[94]

Brzezinski notes a technical obstacle. “Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization”, it says in the second chapter; and in the concluding chapter, that America as an increasingly multicultural society will be brought to a foreign-policy consensus only with difficulty, “except in the circumstances of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.”^[95]

Why a democracy should be hard to mobilise for imperial exertions he does not explain. It is presumably precisely in a democracy that imperial ambitions can be administered durably. One does after all have to lay a reasonable ground before the (however administered) subject in order to obtain its assent to a war that is objectively not in its interest. But that ground had so far been missing.

The Project for the New American Century, a circle with several later office-holders of the Bush administration, arrived at the same legitimation gap in September 2000. In Rebuilding America’s Defenses it says:

“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.”^[96]

The interests of the oil corporations, too, had been spoken out for years. In 1999 Dick Cheney, as chief executive of Halliburton, told the Institute of Petroleum in London where the reserves lay that the corporations were short of: “the Middle East — with two thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost — is still where the prize ultimately lies”.^[97]

The great Western companies must prove up as much new oil each year as they extract, otherwise their assets shrink. Ever less of it was accessible to them: according to a survey by the consultancy PFC Energy, 77 per cent of the world’s proven reserves lay in the hands of governments that substantially restricted access by international corporations.^[98] How great the pressure was became apparent when Shell had to open its books: in 2004 the American securities regulator found that the corporation had overstated its proven reserves in the 2002 annual report by 4.47 billion barrels, or around 23 per cent, and had done so in every year since 1997.^[99] Iraq was at that point the only large producer whose output could be multiplied. Venezuela was still outstanding:

While Chávez was just then entering his first term, the United States was trying here by every means to bring a state of the twenty-first century back under its power of disposal. The coup against Chávez in the spring of 2002, which the USA helped carry, was however to be pushed back by the Venezuelan masses (after which the attack was pressed with monetary means).

Although Venezuela is of secondary importance at this point, the history of the Bolivarian movement and of American intervention in Caracas’s affairs is well worth understanding for the general context of the “War on Terror”. We therefore recommend at this point our article “Venezuela: burnt dragon”.

The White House, January 2001

In January 2001 Cheney moved into the White House as Vice President. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, a participant in the meetings of the National Security Council (in this body the President, Vice President, Secretaries of State and Defense and the intelligence chiefs lay down the main lines), summed up the agenda in one sentence:

“From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go.”^[100] The only open question, he said, was the how: “It was all about finding a way to do it.”^[101]

In the second meeting, on 1 February 2001, Rumsfeld dreamed up the aim, presumably with eyes glittering in excitement: “Imagine what the region would look like without Saddam and with a regime that’s aligned with U.S. interests.”^[102]

Meant was the same Saddam whom Washington had, fifteen years earlier, propped up against Iran with credits, satellite reconnaissance and weapons routed through third parties. Jane Mayer reported that NSC staff had been instructed to cooperate with Cheney’s energy task force, in a melding of policy towards “rogue states” with measures for taking possession of new and existing oil and gas fields.^[103] Among the task force’s papers there lay, in March 2001, a list with the title “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts”.

11 September 2001

Then came the morning that Washington and the Pentagon could only have dreamed of. On 11 September 2001 hijacked passenger aircraft flew into the two towers of the World Trade Center and into the Pentagon; a fourth crashed in Pennsylvania. Just imagine the excitement of the war bureaucracy and the think tanks that morning: not only did a “new Pearl Harbor” arrive; it arrived at the best possible time. Filmed from every angle, on billions of retinas within seconds, perpetrated by creepy-looking Arabs – a little dream. That same afternoon an aide to Rumsfeld in the National Military Command Center took down what the Secretary was ordering:

“best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. at same time. Not only UBL” — “Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”^[104]

Wesley Clark, former NATO supreme commander, hands down a more far-reaching version. Some weeks after the attacks, when Afghanistan was already being bombed, a general at the Pentagon told him of a paper that had just come out of the office of the Secretary of Defense. When he heard that it was classified, Clark expressly declined to be shown it; what he reproduces is the general’s oral account.

“This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”^[105]

Six of the seven countries were struck by American weapons in the following twenty years. The seventh, Iran, followed in February 2026. The sequence Iraq, then Iran, stands in a record of the American Congress. On 12 September 2002 Benjamin Netanyahu (by then already a former prime minister), in the role of “one of the leading experts on the Middle East”^[106], testified before the House Government Reform Committee. Of Iraq he said:

“There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking and is working and is advancing toward the development of nuclear weapons, no question whatsoever.”^[107]

And on the expected effect on the neighbourhood:

“if you take out Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region. And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people and many others will say the time of such regimes of such despots is gone.”^[108]

The official ground for war has been described as a negotiated outcome by the second most important man in the Pentagon himself.

“The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason”^[109]

Who Was Bombed and Who Was Not

Saudi Arabia, Not Bombed

Fifteen of the nineteen attackers were Saudi citizens, bin Laden was a Saudi, and the money of the Wahhabi mission came from Riyadh. Saudi Arabia, however, was not bombed. The Kingdom supplied oil at prices agreeable to Washington, bought American weapons and invested its dollar surpluses in American paper; in December 2025 it held US government bonds worth 149.5 billion dollars.^[110]

Afghanistan, 2001 to 2021

In Afghanistan the official justification was the most plausible. Al-Qaeda had camps there, the Taliban granted bin Laden protection, and the demand for his extradition was unassailable in international law. The war was, however, already under way when an extradition became negotiable. On 14 October 2001, a week after the bombing began, Deputy Prime Minister Haji Abdul Kabir declared that they were prepared to hand bin Laden over to a third country if evidence were presented and the attacks halted.^[111] That same day Bush answered:

“Turn him over. Turn him over; turn his cohorts over; turn any hostages they hold over; destroy all the terrorist camps. There’s no need to negotiate. There’s no discussions. … And there’s no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he’s guilty.”^[112]

Asked whether he was rejecting the offer, he replied in accomplished Bushian manner: “I don’t know what the offer is.”^[113]

Within a few months of the start of the war the USA set up bases in Central Asia, at Karshi-Khanabad in Uzbekistan and Manas in Kyrgyzstan, that is to say in that space between Russia, China and the Caspian Sea which Brzezinski had described four years earlier as the axis of the “chessboard”. Uzbekistan terminated the use agreement in July 2005, the Americans cleared out by the end of November; the Manas agreement ran until 11 July 2014, the base was vacated as early as 3 June 2014. Worldwide the United States today maintains around 750 military sites in eighty countries: half as many installations as at the end of the Cold War, but in twice as many states.^[114]

Within months the military purpose was discharged. The war lasted twenty years. Anand Gopal has reconstructed the years 2002 to 2004 in Kandahar and Uruzgan and describes the situation after the collapse: “The Taliban, meanwhile, had ceased to exist, its members having retired to their homes and surrendered their weapons.”^[115]

From this arose the problem of the following two decades:

“The terrorists had all decamped or abandoned the cause, yet US special forces were on Afghan soil with a clear political mandate: defeat terrorism. How do you fight a war without an adversary?”^[116]

The answer was supplied by local potentates who denounced rivals as Taliban and received construction contracts, fuel contracts and land rights for it. In 2004 one commander was stormed two months after publicly surrendering his weapons, because competitors had fed the Americans the usual false intelligence.^[117] Of course the American intelligence services knew perfectly well who was Taliban and who was not, but out of this practice arose the insurgency the USA could then fight. The liberation of women became a ground for war only retrospectively. What the internal assessments knew was something else. Douglas Lute, the White House’s Afghanistan coordinator under Bush and Obama, told the SIGAR interviewers in 2015: “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing.”^[118]

After the withdrawal in 2021 Washington froze Afghanistan’s currency reserves of around seven billion dollars, while the country fell into a hunger crisis.

Iraq, 2003 to 2011

Iraq really had nothing whatever to do with 11 September. What it did have were the world’s second largest proven oil reserves, at extraction costs of 0.50 to 1 dollar a barrel. Plainer than usual is the record of a meeting at the British Foreign Office of 6 November 2002: “Iraq is the big oil prospect. … BP are desperate to get in there.”^[119]

Here, however, it was less a matter of ownership than of disposal. Faleh al-Khayat, for decades planning director of the Iraqi oil ministry, explained the difference to Muttitt:

“America, Greg, does not care much if American companies win the contracts in Iraq. … But what matters to them is the pool of oil supplied.”^[120]

To dispose over the quantity and price of oil means to dispose over the conditions under which others do business. The addressee was thus not Baghdad but the competition, which is dependent on this oil.^[121] America perfected its control over the oil region in order to make itself the guarantor of global energy supply and to be able to grant or refuse friend and foe alike access to the indispensable substance.

To the power of disposal belongs the currency in which accounts are settled. The dollar is world money because oil is invoiced in dollars and surplus countries hold their proceeds in American paper; the American central bank puts the dollar share of disclosed currency reserves at 72 per cent for 2001 and 58 per cent for 2024.^[122] Baghdad had set a precedent on this point. On 30 October 2000 the UN sanctions committee approved the Iraqi application to receive its oil proceeds in euros instead of dollars; the letters of credit in euros came into force on 7 November 2000.^[123] The sum was small, the gesture was not.

Upon the bombs followed “the radical economic shock therapy imposed on the still-burning country by the American chief envoy L. Paul Bremer”^[124] Bremer’s first important decree was “the dismissal of around 500,000 state employees, the majority of them soldiers, but also doctors, nurses, teachers and engineers”^[125]

When the extraction contracts were awarded from 2009 on, after the total destruction of Iraqi sovereignty, it turned out that the reckoning was not the one a superficial view would lead one to expect. Rumaila went to BP and the China National Petroleum Corporation, West Qurna-1 to ExxonMobil and Shell, West Qurna-2 to Lukoil and Statoil, Halfaya to CNPC, Petronas and Total.^[126] They were service contracts, not production sharing: at Rumaila the Iraqi side holds a quarter of the operating company, the corporations receive two dollars per barrel extracted.^[127] The Iraqi oil boom thus did not primarily benefit Western corporations; CNPC became the most important foreign operator in the country. If the war was supposed to hit China (even then probably the greatest competitor to American hegemony), it missed its aim. If it was supposed to expand global supply and place its conditions in American hands, it achieved it, to the benefit of all importers, the rivals included.

The Islamic State, 2004 to 2017

Part of the military leadership of the Islamic State was recruited from the dismissed officers; the occupation’s camps supplied the networks for it. Around 96,000 Iraqis officially passed through American internment after 2003 (among them Muhammad al-Jolani, today called al-Sharaa), a further 100,000 or so were briefly detained; Camp Bucca at times held 14,000 to 18,000 prisoners, most of them without charge.^[128] The narrative of Saddam’s generals at the head of IS is, however, in part false. Abu Ali al-Anbari, for years listed as a major general of the Iraqi army, was a physics teacher and had been a jihadist since the 1980s.^[129] Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi spent ten months in American custody in 2004, eight of them in Abu Ghraib; he did not come to Camp Bucca until 13 October 2004, less than two months before his release.^[130] An occupation that dissolves an army, interns hundreds of thousands and administers a country along confessional lines produces the cadres it later fights (see blowback). The US prisons in Iraq were to become known as “jihadi universities”^[131]. Andrew Thompson, a US veteran of the war against Iraq, wrote in the New York Times about Camp Bucca:

“At Camp Bucca, the extremists forced moderate detainees to listen to clerics who advocated jihad. The majority of prisoners were illiterate, so they were particularly susceptible. Prisoners frequently refused medical attention and vocational training for fear of breaking religious rules. The prisons became virtual terrorist universities: The hardened radicals were the professors, the other detainees were the students, and the prison authorities played the role of absent custodian.”^[132]

This is no peculiarity of this war. Imagine the position of the individual. A superior force, which already carries a reputation, bombs the town in which one lives — in Fallujah Iraq Body Count counted between 572 and 616 civilians killed in April 2004, between 581 and 670 in November; both figures are lower bounds, because the town was closed to journalists. Relatives may well be among them. Out of Abu Ghraib come the photographs from the American torture prisons, out of Haditha twenty-four corpses. On the other side stands a growing movement against the occupation, which offers to repay what was taken.

What it did not offer, however, was money. The claim that the insurgency bought its fighters has the advantage of being able to rest on the participants’ poverty. But it is false: in 2006 a member of al-Qaeda in Iraq received sixty thousand dinars a month in Anbar, around forty-one dollars, plus thirty thousand per dependant. Per head that left twenty-nine dollars a month against the seventy-three that an average household in the province earned. The annual risk of dying violently was 0.36 per cent for civilians and 17.3 for members. One was therefore joining an organisation that paid forty per cent of the going local income and fifty times the mortality. Luke Condra and Jacob Shapiro have geocoded the incidents from 2004 to 2009 and arrive at the result:

“Coalition killings of civilians predict higher levels of insurgent violence and insurgent killings predict less violence in subsequent periods.”^[133]

The religious component finds a hearing in the ranks of those who need this opium of the people most for their wounds. It is, after all, no wonder that the Islamic State and its cohorts sprang up everywhere the coalition forces left their bombs and their putrefaction. Washington never raised the point; and yet a divided state is a good deal more lucrative for the purpose the United States pursued in Iraq as well. In 2008 RAND recorded for the Department of Defense how matters stood:

“Unfortunately, for a period of more than four years, funding for a comprehensive motivation and morale study of the insurgency was rejected by authorities and agencies in Washington, D.C., as well as by some senior officers forward.”^[134]

Libya, 2011

Between 2003 and 2011 Libya was a partner of the West. Gaddafi had given up his nuclear programme, cooperated in counter-terrorism and concluded oil contracts with BP, Eni and Total. That he would become a NATO target in 2011 was put on record by the Foreign Affairs Committee of the British House of Commons in 2016 as follows:

“This policy was not informed by accurate intelligence. In particular, the Government failed to identify that the threat to civilians was overstated and that the rebels included a significant Islamist element. By the summer of 2011, the limited intervention to protect civilians had drifted into an opportunist policy of regime change.”^[135]

There followed political and economic collapse, fighting between militias and tribes, the dispersal of the regime’s weapons across the region and the growth of the Islamic State in North Africa.^[136] The weapons from Gaddafi’s depots reappeared in Mali, in Niger and on the Sinai Peninsula; oil production, the basis of the state budget, collapsed and became an object of the civil war between the government of Fayez al-Sarraj (supported by the United States, Italy, Turkey and co.) and the formation of Khalifa Haftar (supported by Russia, Egypt, the UAE and co.). Slave markets came shortly afterwards.^[137] What remained of Libya took over a task for which Gaddafi had previously been paid: the European Union moved its border to the Libyan coast and has since financed militias that intercept and imprison those fleeing. A state that had banked on keeping to its contracts was taken apart; others drew the lesson from it. The DPRK kept its bombs.

Syria and Rojava, 2013 to 2026

In Syria the CIA equipped insurgents from 2013 on under the name Timber Sycamore, co-financed by the Saudis. A situation report of the Defense Intelligence Agency of 30 July 2012 had anticipated the consequence.

“IF THE SITUATION UNRAVELS THERE IS THE POSSIBILITY OF ESTABLISHING A DECLARED OR UNDECLARED SALAFIST PRINCIPALITY IN EASTERN SYRIA (HASAKA AND DER ZOR), AND THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT THE SUPPORTING POWERS TO THE OPPOSITION WANT, IN ORDER TO ISOLATE THE SYRIAN REGIME, WHICH IS CONSIDERED THE STRATEGIC DEPTH OF THE SHIA EXPANSION (IRAQ AND IRAN).”^[138]

Against this principality the USA banked from October 2014 on the Kurdish-led forces of north-eastern Syria, or Western Kurdistan (Rojava). Rojava cooperated in order to survive, and was to pay for it. Four days before Turkey attacked Afrin on 20 January 2018, spokesmen for the Pentagon and the anti-IS coalition declared that they were not operating there and did not support those forces.^[139] When Ankara marched into Rojava in October 2019, Trump justified his standing by with history: “They didn’t help us in the second World War, they didn’t help us with Normandy for example.”^[140] In which he is of course right that the YPJ were indeed not involved in the Allied landing in Normandy – they ought to have thought about that beforehand.

Mazloum Abdi, commander-in-chief of the SDF, wrote in those same days.

“We lost 11,000 soldiers, some of our best fighters and commanders, to rescue our people from this grave danger.” — “But if we have to choose between compromises and the genocide of our people, we will surely choose life for our people.”^[141]

After the fall of Assad in December 2024 the second choice remained to him. On 10 March 2025 he signed an agreement with Damascus on the incorporation of all civil and military institutions of Rojava into the state; border crossings, the airport and the oil and gas fields included.^[142] On 25 August 2026 he dissolved the SDF as an independent armed force.^[143] The American special envoy Tom Barrack had summed up the situation in January 2026: the Kurds’ role as the most important anti-IS force had largely run its course.^[144] An ally that has fulfilled its task ceases to be one.

We have written on few subjects more than on Rojava and Syria. To understand the developments of the Syrian civil war, the Kurdish freedom movement and Rojava, have a look at our Syria page.

In Damascus the former emir of the Nusra Front has governed ever since. On the capture of Ahmed al-Sharaa (actually known by his nom de djihad Muhammad al-Jolani) the USA had put a bounty of ten million dollars; on 7 November 2025 he was struck from the terror list, on 10 November the White House received him. According to a reconstruction by Reuters, the insurgents informed Ankara half a year before the offensive; on 13 August 2025 Turkey and Syria signed an agreement on military training, advice and arms procurement.^[145] At the end of August al-Jolani published a video of himself making the country’s first Visa payment in an upmarket restaurant in Damascus.^[146] Mission Accomplished!

Somalia and Yemen, 2003 to 2015

Somalia and Yemen show the same procedure on a smaller scale. Jeremy Scahill has traced how the CIA financed a network of warlords in Mogadishu from the beginning of 2003 in order to eliminate suspected Islamists.

“It was the beginning of a multiyear relationship among a network of murderous warlords and the CIA that would set Somalia on a course toward even further chaos and bloodshed.”^[147]

Out of the Union of Islamic Courts, defeated in 2006, came al-Shabaab. In Yemen an American cruise missile killed 41 people at al-Majalah in December 2009, among them 21 children; al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula grew thereafter, and from 2015 Washington covered the Saudi war that plunged the country into the greatest famine of this century. Cheney had announced the method:

“We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. … A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion.”^[148]

Excursus: The German Share, 2002 to 2026

In December 2002 Defence Minister Peter Struck stated the purpose of the German deployment in one sentence: Germany’s security was also being defended in the Hindu Kush. What began with that ended twenty years later with an evacuation from Kabul airport. The Bundestag itself has drawn up the balance. The commission of inquiry “Lessons from Afghanistan” presented its final report in January 2025.

“The commission of inquiry came to the conclusion that Germany, together with its international partners, has failed strategically in Afghanistan.”^[149]

As causes it names the absence of an implementable strategy, aims set too high, and the lack of self-critical stocktaking.^[150] The interim report puts a figure on the price: 59 German soldiers dead, total costs of 17.3 billion euros according to the federal government, of which 12.3 billion in the defence budget.^[151] On the night of 4 September 2009, Colonel Georg Klein had two hijacked fuel tankers bombed near Kunduz, around which hundreds of villagers had gathered. The ISAF investigation report of October 2009 recorded that the number of dead and wounded varied between 17 and 142. Amnesty International counted 83 probably civilian dead by name, the International Committee of the Red Cross 74. The Federal Prosecutor General discontinued the proceedings in April 2010.

But to the Iraq war the German nation said no: on 5 August 2002 Schröder opened the election campaign in Hanover with the formula that one would render solidarity to one’s partners but was not available for adventures.^[152] The election was on 22 September. In August, 73 per cent of those surveyed rejected German participation even with a UN mandate; in September, 4 per cent came out in favour of participation without a mandate.^[153] A government that had said yes in this situation would not have been re-elected. The refusal moreover applied only to direct participation. Through Ramstein ran, and runs, the satellite relay station without which the American drone war in Yemen and Somalia does not function; German authorities tolerated it. Yemeni plaintiffs, relatives of the victims of an attack in 2012, won in 2019 before the Higher Administrative Court in Münster, lost in 2020 before the Federal Administrative Court, and failed on 15 July 2025 before the Federal Constitutional Court.

Whether Germany failed depends on what one measures failure against. Measured against the declared aim, yes. Measured against what remained, the reckoning looks different: Afghanistan has been eliminated as an independent factor in the region for decades. The Bundeswehr has accumulated two decades of operational experience, which stands it in good stead today in national and alliance defence, and the alliance whose junior partner the Federal Republic is has kept the cohesion on which its export economy hangs. What arose in twenty years of Afghanistan as a matter of course — that German soldiers fight and die — became after 2022 the basis of decisions of a different order of magnitude. On 3 June 2022 the Bundestag amended the Basic Law with 567 votes for a special fund of 100 billion euros; on 18 March 2025 it exempted defence spending above one per cent of gross domestic product from the debt brake by 512 votes to 206.^[154] The NATO summit in The Hague resolved in the summer of 2025 on five per cent of gross domestic product by 2035.^[155] The German defence budget for 2026 stands at 108.2 billion euros, 21.7 billion more than the previous year, 2.5 per cent of economic output.^[156] The sentence about the Hindu Kush has been redeemed, only otherwise than its author meant it.

Counting the Dead

The Limit of Counting

Who gets counted and who does not is decided not by statistics but at the border between the we and the others. The 2,977 dead of 11 September have names, faces and an annual day of mourning; the dead of the war zones have a vague from-to range. The largest available figure comes from the Costs of War Project at Brown University. Stephanie Savell, who is responsible for the report, puts it cautiously:

“The total death toll in the post-9/11 war zones of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen could be at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting, though the precise mortality figure remains unknown.”^[157]

Two very unequal parts are contained in this figure. The direct dead, people who died through the violence of war, the project puts (conservatively) at 905,000 to 940,000. The underlying surveys count conservatively and as a rule record only what is confirmed by two or more independent sources.^[158] In the context of the “dirty wars” at issue here, an exceedingly demanding standard. The indirect dead, by contrast, are extrapolated:

“Applying this ratio to Costs of War’s calculation of 905,000 – 940,000 directly killed in the post-9/11 wars yields between 3,620,000 – 3,760,000 indirect deaths (3.6 – 3.8 million).”^[159]

The ratio comes from a survey by the Geneva Secretariat of 2008, which found a factor of between three and fifteen for conflicts since the early 1990s and proposed four as a conservative mean.^[160] Savell concedes that a universally valid factor does not exist. We also know that the wars of the willing “against terror” went hand in hand with sanctions, embargoes and shock therapy: variables that applied less to the wars of the early 1990s.

The IPPNW and its partner organisations estimated in Body Count in 2015 around one million dead in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan.^[161] For Iraq there are two household surveys which work differently from the event counts. The Lancet study of 2006 estimated by cluster sample: “We estimate that as of July, 2006, there have been 654 965 (392 979–942 636) excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war, which corresponds to 2·5% of the population in the study area.”^[162]

Setting one figure against another has a snag. In the end the reader calculates instead of comprehending. Part of the dead is therefore also what the dead do not represent: Costs of War records on this only that the number of the wounded and the sick is far higher than that of the dead.^[163] The burned, the blinded, those buried alive, amputees, those made radiation-sick by uranium munitions, and the children born with deformities in Fallujah, appear in no statistic. The 4.5 million are the lower bound of what is missing.

What Is Directly Attributable to the West

Narrower and therefore harder is the attribution to the West itself. Airwars examines air strikes one by one and assesses them by density of evidence; the balance of twenty years of US operations reads: “potentially as many as 48,308 civilians, have been likely killed by US strikes”.^[164] Azmat Khan obtained for the New York Times 1,311 internal Pentagon assessments of air strikes in Iraq and Syria. Not a single one of the documents handed over found any misconduct or disciplinary measure.^[165]

Counting is itself a political act. To journalists’ question about the casualties of Operation Anaconda (Afghanistan, 2002), General Tommy Franks answered at Bagram that they did not do body counts. That describes the practice of the whole war.^[166] On one’s own side the counting was precise. But even there the picture shifts as soon as one draws the category more widely; Thomas Suitt writes in Costs of War:

“This paper estimates 30,177 active duty personnel and veterans of the post 9/11 wars have died by suicide, significantly more than the 7,057 service members killed in post-9/11 war operations.”^[167]

Four times as many Americans, then, died of the war as in it.

All of this taken together: whoever adds up the dead of the five great war zones, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen, arrives at 905,000 to 940,000 directly killed and at 4.5 to 4.7 million once the consequences of the destruction are included; the number of the wounded has, outside the American armed forces with their 53,554 reports, never been established by anyone. The war against Iran is not contained in this sum. It has been running since February 2026; that it belongs in the same reckoning is the business of the last chapter.

Who Was It?

The Perpetrators and Their Reckoning

The authorship of 11 September has been settled. Al-Qaeda planned and carried out the attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed designed them, bin Laden authorised them and acknowledged them in October 2004. In the same message he disclosed what he promised himself from it.

“So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.”^[168]

He set out the sum:

“al-Qaida spent $500,000 on the event, while America, in the incident and its aftermath, lost – according to the lowest estimate – more than $500 billion.”^[169]

The counter-reckoning: after 11 September, whoever was prepared won. Preparation, however, is not authorship. The conspiracy literature does not attack the American justification for war at all: it disputes only that the occasion occurred. In doing so it tacitly concedes that a world power would have the right, after such an attack, to declare the globe a battlefield, and denies it that right merely in the concrete case, because it is lying. Anti-imperialism then becomes the demand for better legitimation.^[170]

Saudi Arabia

What, beyond that, would Riyadh have had from the attacks? The Kingdom lives off the fact that the American fleet secures the Gulf, and it lives badly with the fact that American troops stand on its soil and stir up its own pious opposition against the House of Saud. A war that leads America against Riyadh’s regional rivals and distracts its own population from the dynasty lies within this logic. Bin Laden himself wanted the opposite, namely the overthrow of that same dynasty. That both could work in the same direction is no contradiction but a description of a structure of opportunity.

The balance of the alliance comes out more unambiguously than the legal position. Upon the attacks followed arms purchases in the hundreds of billions, American backing for the war in Yemen from 2015, and finally the status Washington grants only to its closest partners: on 18 and 19 November 2025 Saudi Arabia was declared a Major Non-NATO Ally and a strategic defence agreement was signed, including an undertaking to supply F-35 fighter aircraft. Riyadh is nevertheless not a pure winner. The overthrow of Saddam delivered Iraq up to the Shia neighbour.

Israel

Benjamin Netanyahu, then out of office, was asked by the New York Times on the evening of 11 September about the consequences for relations with the USA and answered that it was very good; then he corrected himself, it was not very good, but it would generate immediate sympathy.^[171] Seven years later he said at Bar-Ilan University that one was profiting from one thing, the attack on the Twin Towers and the American fight in Iraq.^[172] The practical gain was the reinterpretation of the Second Intifada, which had been running since September 2000, as a front of the same war. What had previously been treated as a colonial conflict became a “terror problem”. The direction had already been mapped out by A Clean Break, a paper that a group around Richard Perle drew up in 1996 for Netanyahu’s first term:

“This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.”^[173]

Economically the balance is measurable. In the years of the terror war the Israeli security and arms industry grew into an export power, with the occupied territories as reference ground for drones, border installations and surveillance technology. In 2023 Israel exported arms worth around 13 billion dollars, in 2024 14.8 billion, in 2025 19.2 billion, the fifth record year in succession.^[174]

Who Pulls Whom?

Who pulls whom? John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt formulated the lobby thesis in 2006.

“no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially identical.”^[175]

On Iraq they wrote that the pressure had not been the only factor but was decisive, and added: “Some Americans believe that this was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim.”^[176] Chomsky contradicted this a few days later. The alliance had consolidated when Israel performed a service Washington needed.

“Israel performed a huge service to the US-Saudis-Energy corporations by smashing secular Arab nationalism, which threatened to divert resources to domestic needs.”^[177]

Where the lobby prevails, it coincides with what the strategy demands anyway. Israel is a junior partner and a regional base, not a helmsman. Robert Kurz has described the same connection from the other side: Israel cannot be put on trial, “because in fact it owes its founding as much as its continued existence and military safeguarding to Western oil imperialism”.^[178]

And Washington promised Riyadh the F-35 without making normalisation with Israel a condition, against the declared resistance of the Israeli government. The counter-test decides the question of method. Pakistan also profited, promoted overnight from sanctioned nuclear state to principal ally, and so did Iran, for which the USA removed its two most dangerous neighbours within two years. When hostile states appear on the same list of winners, the list is no good as proof. There is no perpetrator behind the perpetrators, but a structure of opportunity under American hegemony, in which nineteen men with box cutters set in motion an order that had long known where it wanted to go.

Let us assume for once that Fahd ibn Abd al-Aziz, Ehud Barak and whoever else stood behind this attack. What difference does that make? As has been set out at length, the imperialist campaign of the “willing” under the leadership of the United States was an entirely rational one and, for the purposes of American hegemony, unavoidable anyway. To fix upon the idea that an intelligence calculation stood behind the attacks serves, on the one hand, the formation of national consensus (as sketched in the introduction). On the other hand, though, this is also a fundamentally bourgeois horizon of analysis, which regards war not as a logical part of capitalist competition but as an avoidable act of malice for the benefit of a few string-pullers. That this is false is shown by the fact that an event like 11 September was (as set out in detail) wished for by the American war bureaucracy years beforehand, in order to legitimise the war they had to wage. It is thus completely irrelevant, for the war and the purpose it pursued (the consolidation of US hegemony in the region), whether Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s band was supported by Saudi or Israeli means. If one identifies Riyadh, Tel Aviv or Washington itself as the guilty party, one denies the American nation (together with its willing) self-determination over its own plunder raid. One arrives at the conclusion that the otherwise good American nation was steered by evil third parties onto a path it never wanted to take, but took for two decades with great success.

Rational for Whom?

From the bourgeois point of view the war counts as a failure. The Taliban govern Kabul, Iraq is Iran’s most important partner, Libya has no state. Measured against the declared aims, that is correct. But what fails is always only an intention, and the intention at issue here is seldom the one that was asserted. The question therefore runs: for whom did this pay off?

The Arms Industry’s Reckoning

The figures are available. The arms analyst William Hartung has compiled them for Costs of War.

“Since the start of the war in Afghanistan, Pentagon spending has totaled over $14 trillion, one-third to one-half of which went to defense contractors.”^[179]

Procurement and development alone accounted for 4.4 trillion dollars.^[180] KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton until 2007, received in one decade at least 39.5 billion dollars in federal contracts relating to Iraq.^[181] A market analyst commented on one of Halliburton’s quarterly results with a sentence recorded by Naomi Klein: “Iraq was better than expected.”^[182]

The American defence budget for 2026 stands at 838.7 billion dollars in appropriated funds; the authorisation in the defence act amounts to 890.6 billion, and the Pentagon’s request exceeded, for the first time, the trillion mark once the nuclear programmes and the funds from the reconciliation procedure are included.^[183] John Bellamy Foster described in 2005 what had changed since 2001: “What has changed is the nakedness with which this is being promoted, and the unlimited, planetary extent of U.S. ambitions.”^[184]

The Dispute over the Explanation

For the continuing appropriation of assets outside normal commodity circulation, David Harvey has coined the concept of accumulation by dispossession; it procures a profitable use for over-accumulated capital by releasing values at little or no cost.^[185] He himself warns against applying it too hastily:

“It would be hard to make sense of the Vietnam War or the invasion of Iraq, for example, solely in terms of the immediate requirements of capital accumulation.”^[186]

Harvey therefore distinguishes the territorial from the capitalist logic of power, which can contradict one another. Alex Callinicos, against this, holds fast to an interlocking: “the competitive struggle among what Marx in the Grundrisse called ‘many capitals’ now assumes two forms, economic and geopolitical”.^[187]

Robert Kurz warns in the same direction against the monocausal explanation:

“It would, however, be mistaken to derive the wars of world order and world-police interventions since the end of the bipolar constellation directly and one-dimensionally from this energy-political interest.”^[188]

Why oil nevertheless remains the hard core he likewise records: “the fossil energy carriers, with petroleum at their head, form the fuel of the capitalist world machine”.^[189]

One does not have to decide between these positions in order to see the common pattern of Iraq, Libya and Syria. What was struck were states with a nationalised raw-materials economy, without nuclear weapons and without the alliance guarantee of a great power. In each case the existing state apparatus was smashed rather than taken over. Upon the smashing followed not a new regime but a condition in which no actor was strong enough to formulate a policy of its own against Washington. The addressee of this message was never the region alone: with a war in the middle of the world economy the pre-eminent power destroys business conditions and requires partners and competitors alike to subordinate their economic competition to its own need for security.^[190] Control of the oil tap, the patrols on the sea routes and the currency in which both are settled determine the conditions under which Europe and East Asia produce.

It is precisely at these imperial levers that the other “blowback” now takes hold, the one forming in the deepening and widening of the BRICS. By increasingly deploying the aforementioned control over the dollar and the world economy as a weapon against every unwelcome sovereignty, Washington positively forced the emerging economies and raw-material producers to insure themselves against this potential for blackmail. If states without great-power protection can fall prey to being smashed at any moment, the creation of alternative centres of power becomes a sheer question of survival. The push towards de-dollarisation, the settlement of energy transactions in national currencies and the building of financial architectures beyond Western control are the direct counter-reaction to an order in which the USA has ruthlessly subordinated economic competition to its own security dictate. The wars on terror were meant to demonstrate the will to subjugate; what they have brought forth is the organised exit from dollar-centred hegemony.

The Competitor Who Did Not Pay

In the years in which Washington was ordering the region militarily, the balance of forces for whose sake it was being ordered shifted. In 2001 China’s economic output amounted to 12.8 per cent of the American; in 2024 it was 64.7 per cent; adjusted for purchasing power it overtook the American in 2016 and stood at 130 per cent in 2024.^[191] The Chinese share of world industrial value added rose from 8.5 per cent in 2004 to 30 per cent in 2021, while the American fell from 21.9 to 15.5 per cent.^[192] And in Iraq, whose production the war of 2003 first got going again at all, Chinese corporations are today involved in fields from which, according to the Middle East Institute, more than half of Iraqi production comes; PetroChina took over the operation of West Qurna-1 at the end of 2023, after ExxonMobil sold its shares to the state-owned Basra Oil Company.^[193] The United States has expended eight trillion dollars to produce the conditions under which all importers buy — and the largest importer paid nothing for the production.^[194]

To that extent this is not “blowback” either, but mode of operation. The war secured access, not property: whoever controls the tap controls the conditions, not the commodity. As long as Beijing submits to the conditions, the arrangement works for Washington; as soon as it no longer does, the power of disposal over its supply is the American means of pressure. That is why the Strait of Hormuz is treated in Washington as a question of China policy and no longer as a question of oil supply: 84 per cent of the crude oil that passed through the strait in 2024 went to Asia.^[195]

The National Defense Strategy Commission recorded in 2018 what two decades of counter-insurgency had done to the American armed forces:

“Because of our recent focus on counter-terrorism and counterinsurgency, and because our enemies have developed new ways of defeating U.S. forces, America is losing its advantage in key warfighting areas … Many of the skills necessary to plan for and conduct military operations against capable adversaries — especially China and Russia — have atrophied.”^[196]

The same commission names as a second cause “extended operations in the greater Middle East”.^[197] A year earlier the Department of Defense had drawn the consequence in a sentence that ends the quarter-century this text deals with: “Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security.”^[198]

That its own entanglement in the Middle East benefits its competitor is not merely a conjecture of Western commentators. The congressional commission on relations with China traced in 2021 how Chinese strategists see the situation, and quotes Shi Yinhong, adviser to the State Council: “Washington’s deeper involvement in the Middle East is favorable to Beijing, reducing Washington’s ability to place focused attention and pressure on China.”^[199] On 27 March 2021 Beijing and Tehran signed a cooperation treaty laid out over twenty-five years; its text has to this day not been published, and the four hundred billion dollars in circulation stem from a leaked draft which that same American commission considers “highly unrealistic”.^[200]

Russia has used the opportunity more directly. On 30 September 2015 the Russian air force began its operations in Syria — according to RAND’s study Russia’s “first modern expeditionary air war” — and thereby rescued a regime whose overthrow Washington had been pursuing since 2011.^[201] The apparatus that had been built to secure the world order has, within its own area of responsibility, made a rival into an actor again.

The currency, too, for whose sake all this was co-regulated, has lost (though less than is readily claimed). The dollar share of disclosed currency reserves fell from 72 per cent in 2001 to 58 per cent in 2024. The Federal Reserve, however, adds two things that must be quoted along with it: the dollar is thereby roughly back at its share of 1995, and since 2022 nothing has moved — the sanctions against Russia have triggered no reallocation.^[202] And a Saudi oil sale settled in renminbi has to this day not been publicly documented in a single case; what is documented are conversations about it.^[203]

Measured against its declared aims, the terror war has failed. Against an undeclared one, the prevention of regional alternatives, it has not. The objection “failed” hits the justification of the war, not its function. But a price was paid as well. The dollar share of reserves is falling, the relationship with Riyadh is no longer that of 2001, and the world’s most important production site lies in East Asia.

What Remains

The Legacy Abroad

The first legacy of the American terror wars (wink) is the Islamic State. It arose out of a dissolved army, out of confessional administration and out of camps in which hundreds of thousands sat. It was useful into the bargain. With its rise the terror war acquired a new object from 2014 on, and Washington a reason to return to the Iraq it had had to vacate in 2011, and to operate openly in Syria for the first time. That is the property of a machinery that co-produces its own object.

At least 38 million people have been displaced by these wars, according to the conservative estimate of the Costs of War Project.^[204] A portion of these people reached Europe, and Europe answered with the build-up of a border regime that includes agreements with Turkey and with Libyan militias. The war produced the refugees; the border processes them. Politically the process is worked over a second time: out of the arrival of the displaced comes a national state of emergency, and by way of the emergency a population can be sworn to the idea that its situation depends on borders rather than on the relation in which it sells its labour power. The wars of the West thus supply, in the end, the material for the legitimation of conditions at home as well.

The Legacy at Home

At home what remained was the rebuilding of the states. The authorisation for the use of force of 14 September 2001 is still in force today. In December 2025 Congress repealed the authorisations of 1991 and 2002, the first withdrawal of a war power since 1971; the one from 2001, under which most operations run, was left untouched. Disclosure was prosecuted. Chelsea Manning spent seven years in prison, Julian Assange seven years in an embassy and five in Belmarsh before signing a plea agreement in 2024. The label “terror” meanwhile became a universal tool. On 20 February 2025 the American State Department designated eight Latin American cartels and gangs as foreign terrorist organisations, among them Tren de Aragua and the Sinaloa cartel; on 24 November 2025 the (supposed) Venezuelan Cartel de los Soles followed, which Washington attributes to the Maduro government.^[205] With that, a drug problem became a ground for war. On 20 November 2025 it was the turn of four European groups, among them “Antifa Ost”, that investigative construct whose defendants had been convicted in Dresden in 2023 of membership in a criminal — expressly not a terrorist — association; the German government declined to comment on the designation. And at home a presidential executive order of 25 September 2025 named as common features of the violent conduct described in it: “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity”.^[206]

A concept drawn as widely as that no longer needs a justification. It is a procedure by which any opponent can be treated like an enemy in war.

On this we recommend the article we published by The Southern Leftist, “The New Red Scare”: “Palmer 1919. McCarthy 1950. 2026: a memorandum without a face. How Washington declares its own opposition a foreign network.”

From the Axis of Evil to Caracas

The Lesson of the Axis of Evil

In January 2002 Bush named three states as the axis of evil: Iraq, Iran, North Korea. Iraq had no nuclear weapons and was attacked a year later. North Korea built some and was not attacked. Libya gave up its programme and lost its regime. The lesson that three decades of non-proliferation policy have taught was intended by no government and has been understood by every one.

Iran as the Winner

The state that got the most out of the terror war fired not a shot. Washington removed the Taliban in 2001 and Saddam Hussein in 2003, both mortal enemies of Tehran. Into the vacuum that arose moved forces Iran had been building up since the 1980s: the Badr Organisation, founded by the Revolutionary Guards in Iranian exile in 1982/83, today provides at least ten of the brigades of the Iraqi Popular Mobilisation Forces, which parliament made a component of the armed forces on 26 November 2016 by 208 votes.^[207] In the ten months to January 2025 alone, Iran exported non-oil goods worth ten billion dollars to Iraq.^[208] The most official balance sheet comes from the other side. The two-volume study of the Iraq war by the US Army War College, commissioned in 2013 by General Ray Odierno, closes with a sentence that disposes of every German debate about success and failure: “At the time of this project’s completion in 2018, an emboldened and expansionist Iran appears to be the only victor.”^[209]

On this winner the world power has been cutting its teeth since February 2026. On 28 February the United States, together with Israel, began a war of aggression against Iran; Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed on the first day. The casualty figures are disputed and range, depending on the count and the area, from a few thousand to over fifteen thousand. A ceasefire brokered in April held into July, then the fighting resumed; in September 2026 the war continues. On 3 June 2026 the House of Representatives passed, by 215 votes to 208, a resolution under the War Powers Act, which without a two-thirds majority remained without consequence. The last front of the terror war is thus directed against the state that this war made great.

We recommend at this point our articles “The War against Iran” and, once again, “The Party of God: A History of Hezbollah”.

Caracas, January 2026

The pattern reaches beyond the region. On the night of 3 January 2026, American special forces carried out an operation in Caracas in which more than 150 military aircraft were involved. Trump announced the result.

“The United States of America has successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country.”^[210]

Maduro is on trial in New York for alleged “narco-terrorism”; the proceedings are set for June 2027. The country with the world’s largest proven oil reserves has since been led by a transitional government accountable to the United States in every respect (see our article “Venezuela: 100 Days a Vassal State”). The legal basis was not the war authorisation of 2001 but an indictment from 2020 and the designation of a supposed cartel as a terrorist organisation. The apparatus that made the seizure possible is the one the terror war built.

At Ground Zero the names of the 2,977 dead are read out every 11 September. It takes about four hours. For the dead of the war zones that followed upon those four hours there is no list, and there will be none; their number is an extrapolation with a factor over which statisticians quarrel. What is read out in those four hours is the occasion. What remains uncounted is the war that was planned anyway. To read out the names of the most conservative count of the dead of the American terror wars would, at the same speed, take around two and a half months.

For the Western subject there remains the zero hour in which it learned that its freedom makes enemies for itself. But even this insight does not last forever – the war against Iran is the most unpopular in American history.^[211]

Quotations from foreign-language sources stand in the original unless noted otherwise; quotations from German sources have been translated by Kritikpunkt. For titles whose available digital edition contains no printed page numbers, the page of the digital edition is given (PDF p.).

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Sources

^[1] Jean Baudrillard, Der Geist des Terrorismus, ed. by Peter Engelmann, translated from the French by Peter Engelmann, Michaela Ott and Markus Sedlaczek, Vienna: Passagen 2002, p. 31. The French first printing appeared as “L’esprit du terrorisme” in Le Monde of 2/3 November 2001.

^[2] “L’esprit du terrorisme”, Le Monde, 2/3 November 2001. The renderings of this sentence in circulation differ from one another in wording; the translation is therefore our own. In the original: “On cherche après coup à lui imposer n’importe quel sens, à lui trouver n’importe quelle interprétation. Mais il n’y en a pas, et c’est la radicalité du spectacle, la brutalité du spectacle qui seule est originale et irréductible.”

^[3] “L’esprit du terrorisme”, Le Monde, 2/3 November 2001; book edition Paris: Galilée 2002. The German edition renders the sentence as “Nur symbolische Gewalt vermag Singularität zu schaffen” (p. 31).

^[4] Gerhard Schröder, government statement, German Bundestag, 186. sitting, 12 September 2001, plenary record 14/186, p. 18293.

^[5] Gerhard Schröder, government statement, German Bundestag, 187. sitting, 19 September 2001, plenary record 14/187, p. 18302.

^[6] George W. Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, 20 September 2001, White House Archives.

^[7] Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim. Islam, the USA, and the Global War Against Terror, New Delhi 2005, p. 15.

^[8] Ibid., p. 11.

^[9] George W. Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, 20 September 2001, White House Archives.

^[10] President Roosevelt to the Lend-Lease Administrator (Stettinius), Washington, February 18, 1943, in: Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), Diplomatic Papers, 1943, vol. IV: The Near East and Africa, Washington, D.C. 1964, doc. 893, p. 859 (Aktenzeichen 890F.24/32).

^[11] Gordon P. Merriam (head of the Division of Near Eastern Affairs), Draft Memorandum to President Truman, early August 1945, not sent; enclosure to: Memorandum by the Under Secretary of State (Acheson) to the Secretary of State, Washington, October 9, 1945, in: FRUS, Diplomatic Papers, 1945, vol. VIII: The Near East and Africa, Washington, D.C. 1969, doc. 20, p. 45.

^[12] Ibid., n. 27 zu doc. 20.

^[13] Ibid., p. 46.

^[14] Memorandum of Conversation Between the King of Saudi Arabia (Abdul Aziz Al Saud) and President Roosevelt, February 14, 1945, Aboard the U.S.S. “Quincy”, in: FRUS 1945, vol. VIII, doc. 2, pp. 2–3. The record was drawn up by Colonel William A. Eddy and the Saudi deputy foreign minister Yusuf Yassin.

^[15] CIA, History Staff, The Battle for Iran, author’s name redacted, undated, section III.A (“The Genesis of TPAJAX”), declassified 21 June 2011, p. 26 of the declassified version; National Security Archive, Electronic Briefing Book no. 435, published 19 August 2013.

^[16] FRUS 1952–1954, Iran, 1951–1954 (nachgereichter Band, ed. by James C. Van Hook, 2017), Vorwort.

^[17] Telegramm des Botschafters Aldrich, London, 1 April 1954, 20 Uhr, in: FRUS 1952–1954, vol. X, doc. 449.

^[18] Dwight D. Eisenhower, Radio and Television Report to the American People on the Developments in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, 31 October 1956, in: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1956, Washington, D.C. 1958.

^[19] On the oil embargo see the chapter structure of FRUS 1955–1957, vol. XVI (Suez Crisis, July 26–December 31, 1956); on the currency assistance, James M. Boughton, “Northwest of Suez: The 1956 Crisis and the IMF”, in: IMF Staff Papers 49 (2002), no. 1. For linking the credit to the ceasefire Boughton relies on Harold Macmillan’s memoirs; an American primary document for it is not available.

^[20] On the constitutional position, Memorandum From Waggoner to Rockwell, January 17, 1958, in: FRUS 1958–1960, vol. XI: Lebanon and Jordan, doc. 3, p. 5 f.; according to doc. 3, Chamoun’s term ended on 22 September 1958. On the Lebanese assent to the doctrine, the joint communiqué of the Richards mission of 16 March 1957, reported in FRUS XI, doc. 16, p. 25 f. Dulles himself represented the exclusivity differently at different times: on 14 July 1958 he called Lebanon, before the congressional leadership, “the one country that joined the Middle East resolution” (FRUS XI, doc. 127, p. 221), whereas in April he spoke of states “which, like Lebanon, expressed satisfaction with the Resolution” (doc. 16, p. 26).

^[21] Telegram From the Embassy in Lebanon to the Department of State, Beirut, May 13, 1958, 2 p.m., FRUS 1958–1960, vol. XI, doc. 27, p. 42; the American reply Telegram 4271 to Beirut, May 13, 1958, 9:23 p.m., ibid., doc. 31 (the online edition gives no page marks for this document; the range lies between p. 48 and p. 51). On 14 May the embassy reported that Chamoun now hoped to be able to do without an intervention, ibid., doc. 32, p. 51 f.

^[22] On the time of day and the perpetrators, FRUS 1958–1960, vol. XI, doc. 121, n. 2, p. 207, together with the report of the military attaché in Baghdad of 14 July 1958, 9.05 a.m. local time, in: FRUS 1958–1960, vol. XII: Near East Region; Iraq; Iran; Arabian Peninsula, doc. 109 (Editorial Note), p. 307. On the execution of Nuri as-Said, the telegram of Ambassador Gallman, Baghdad, 15 July 1958, 7 p.m., ibid., doc. 116, p. 318 f. The fate of King Faisal II was still unknown in Washington on 14 and 15 July; at this point the American records document only the uncertainty.

^[23] “The American Landing in Lebanon”, in: U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 88 (1962), no. 10: nearly 15,000 men, of them 8,000 army and around 6,000 marines. The first landing took place on 15 July 1958, the last formations left Lebanon on 25 October 1958.

^[24] Memorandum of a Conference With the President, White House, July 14, 1958, 10:50 a.m., FRUS 1958–1960, vol. XI, doc. 124, p. 211–215, hier p. 212 und 214.

^[25] Ibid., p. 214.

^[26] Telephone Conversation Between President Eisenhower and Prime Minister Macmillan, July 14, 1958, FRUS 1958–1960, vol. XI, doc. 131, p. 232.

^[27] Memorandum of a Conversation, White House, Washington, May 13, 1958, 5:50 p.m., in: FRUS 1958–1960, vol. XI: Lebanon and Jordan, doc. 30, p. 46.

^[28] Memorandum of a Conference With the President, White House, July 14, 1958, 2:35 p.m., FRUS 1958–1960, vol. XI, doc. 127, p. 221. The third category is the authority under Section 2 of the act of 1957.

^[29] On Chehab’s election, FRUS 1958–1960, vol. XI, doc. 244, n. 2, p. 415; on the swearing-in, ibid., doc. 328 (Editorial Note), p. 575; on the completion of the withdrawal, ibid., doc. 357 (Editorial Note), p. 614 f. For the finding of the observer group UNOGIL no separate source is available at this point; it is therefore reproduced by report only.

^[30] Memorandum From Acting Secretary of State Dillon to President Eisenhower, May 22, 1959, FRUS 1958–1960, vol. XII, doc. 66, p. 224; on the renaming of 21 August 1959, ibid., doc. 73, n. 1, p. 235. The transfer of the seat to Ankara is not documented in the papers cited here.

^[31] Memorandum of a Conversation Between the President and the Vice President (Nixon), White House, Washington, July 15, 1958, 9 a.m., in: FRUS 1958–1960, vol. XI, doc. 139, p. 244.

^[32] Ibid., p. 244.

^[33] National Security Council Report NSC 5801/1, Long-Range U.S. Policy Toward the Near East, Washington, 24 January 1958, Ziffer 2, in: FRUS 1958–1960, vol. XII: Near East Region; Iraq; Iran; Arabian Peninsula, doc. 5, p. 18.

^[34] Ibid., Ziffer 16, p. 24.

^[35] United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 of 22 November 1967. The resolution is framed as “affirms” and names the “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict” as a principle of a peace settlement, not as a demand.

^[36] Jeremy M. Sharp, U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel, Congressional Research Service, report RL33222, version of 2 January 2008, table 6 (“U.S. Assistance to Israel, FY1949–FY1996”), p. CRS-19. The jump in fiscal year 1974 rests on the Emergency Security Assistance Act of 1973 (P.L. 93-199); it is not a steady trend but a consequence of war.

^[37] Richard Nixon, television interview of 1 July 1970. The quotation begins in mid-sentence; it is preceded by the condition “once that balance of power is upset”. Source: reproduced in an editors’ note in: FRUS 1969–1976, vol. XXIII: Arab-Israeli Dispute, 1969–1972. Full text in: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard Nixon, 1970, pp. 543–559.

^[38] Options paper of the National Security Council, early 1970, in: FRUS 1969–1976, vol. XXIII, p. 305. The expression “strategic asset” does not occur in this volume.

^[39] National Security Decision Memorandum 92, U.S. Policy Toward the Persian Gulf, Washington, 7 November 1970, signed Henry A. Kissinger, para. 1; Nixon Presidential Library, NSDM 092; printed in FRUS 1969–1976, vol. XXIV, doc. 91. The current expression “twin pillars doctrine” does not occur in the document.

^[40] U.S. Military Sales to Iran. A Staff Report to the Subcommittee on Foreign Assistance of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, 94. Kongress, 2. Sitzungsperiode, Committee Print, Juli 1976, Summary and Findings, p. vii.

^[41] Ibid., p. vii und p. 42.

^[42] U.S. General Accounting Office, The U.S.-Saudi Arabian Joint Commission on Economic Cooperation, Bericht ID-79-7, 22 March 1979.

^[43] CIA Research Study, Iraq under Baath Rule, 1968–1976, PR 76 100701, November 1976, printed in: FRUS 1969–1976, vol. XXVII, doc. 317. The sentence stands there as a statement about the year 1963; the same study expressly records in its “Principal Judgments” that Iraq pursued an independent, non-aligned foreign policy.

^[44] On the treaty, Memorandum From the Executive Secretary of the Department of State (Eliot) to Kissinger, April 13, 1972, in: FRUS 1969–1976, vol. E-4, doc. 305. On the nationalisation, CIA, Intelligence Memorandum ER IM 72-92, Some Implications of Iraq’s Oil Nationalization, June 1972, ibid., doc. 311. What was nationalised on 1 June 1972 was the IPC’s northern business; the Basrah Petroleum Company followed in stages in 1973 and 1975.

^[45] USAID, U.S. Overseas Loans and Grants, Obligations and Loan Authorizations (Greenbook), version of 9 August 2022, own summation of fiscal years 1958 to 1974. The series records aid, not cash sales; the Iranian and Saudi arms purchases ran predominantly through Foreign Military Sales and are not contained in it.

^[46] U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, The Iranian Hostage Crisis (Short History). The page documents the date, the actors and the number of hostages; it does not mention the Shah’s departure on 16 January 1979.

^[47] U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan and the U.S. Response, 1978–1980. The account on this page runs 24 and 27 December together; the storming of the Tajbeg Palace and the killing of Hafizullah Amin took place on 27 December. For the occupation of the Great Mosque in Mecca no reliable official casualty figures are available; they are therefore not given here.

^[48] Jimmy Carter, The State of the Union Address Delivered Before a Joint Session of the Congress, 23 January 1980, in: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Jimmy Carter, 1980–81, vol. I.

^[49] Bacevich, America’s War, PDF p. 46.

^[50] Harold Brown, Report of Secretary of Defense Harold Brown to the Congress on the FY 1981 Budget, FY 1982 Authorization Request and FY 1981–1985 Defense Programs, 29 January 1980, p. 26.

^[51] Zur Aufstellung der Task Force: Memorandum From Secretary of Defense Brown to President Carter, in: FRUS 1977–1980, vol. XVIII: Middle East Region; Arabian Peninsula, doc. 48 (“It will be commanded by Major General … Paul X. Kelley, USMC, and will be established at MacDill Air Force Base by March 1, 1980”). Zur Umwandlung: Department of the Army Historical Summary, Fiscal Year 1983, Kap. 2, U.S. Army Center of Military History.

^[52] Steve Coll, Ghost Wars. The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, New York 2004, PDF p. 67.

^[53] Zbigniew Brzezinski, interview with Vincent Jauvert, Le Nouvel Observateur, issue of 15–21 January 1998 (no. 1732; the issue number could be documented only at second hand). Original: “Regretter quoi ? Cette opération secrète était une excellente idée. Elle a eu pour effet d’attirer les Russes dans le piège afghan et vous voulez que je le regrette ?” Translation by Kritikpunkt.

^[54] Coll, Ghost Wars, PDF p. 82.

^[55] Ibid.

^[56] Ibid.

^[57] Ibid., PDF p. 89 und 186.

^[58] Ibid., PDF p. 84.

^[59] Third-grade mathematics textbook, produced by the University of Nebraska at Omaha with USAID funds (running from September 1986 to June 1994), quoted from Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, p. 137. On 23 March 2002 the Washington Post put the USAID funds for the programme at 51 million dollars.

^[60] Coll, Ghost Wars, PDF p. 167.

^[61] Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, p. 177.

^[62] Chalmers Johnson, Blowback. The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, 2. Auflage, New York 2004, PDF p. 11.

^[63] Ibid., PDF p. 12.

^[64] U.S. Department of State, “De-designation of Iraq as Supporter of International Terrorism”, 27 February 1982; National Security Archive, Electronic Briefing Book No. 82, document 13. The document establishes the fact and the date of the removal; it expressly states that the decision had “no implications for U.S. policy toward the Iran-Iraq war”. Placing it within the American purpose against Iran is the author’s.

^[65] U.S. General Accounting Office, Iraq’s Participation in the Commodity Credit Corporation’s GSM-102/103 Export Credit Guarantee Programs, T-NSIAD-91-13, 14 March 1991.

^[66] U.S. Embassy London an Department of State, Telegramm LONDON 27572, “Rumsfeld Mission: December 20 Meeting with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein”, 21 December 1983, Abs. 15; National Security Archive, EBB 82, Dokument 31.

^[67] “Wanzen, Flöhe, Perser, Israelis”, Der Spiegel 16/1992, 12 April 1992.

^[68] National Security Archive, EBB 82, Dokumente 24 (1 November 1983) und 25 (21 November 1983).

^[69] Declaration of Howard Teicher under penalty of perjury, U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida, case no. 93-241-CR-HIGHSMITH, 31 January 1995; National Security Archive, EBB 82, document 61. The declaration expressly names Egypt as the third state; it lists Israel as a supplier to other recipients, not to Iraq.

^[70] George Bush, Address to the Nation Announcing the Deployment of United States Armed Forces to Saudi Arabia, 8 August 1990, in: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George Bush, 1990, vol. II.

^[71] Report of the Assessment of the Khobar Towers Bombing (Downing Assessment Task Force), 30 August 1996. Die Angabe wird bestätigt durch Alfred B. Prados, Iraq Crisis: U.S. and Allied Forces, Congressional Research Service, Bericht 98-120, 2 September 1998, Tabelle 1 (5.000 bis 6.000 Soldaten in Saudi-Arabien).

^[72] George Bush, Letter to Congressional Leaders Reporting on Iraq’s Compliance With United Nations Security Council Resolutions, 19 January 1993, in: Public Papers of the Presidents: George Bush, 1992–93, vol. II, p. 2269. Security Council Resolution 688 of 5 April 1991, named there, mentions neither no-fly zones nor any authorisation to use force.

^[73] Gregory Ball, Air Force Historical Support Division, fact sheet 1998 – Operation Desert Fox. The attack lasted from 16 to 19 December 1998. This fact sheet does not document the establishment of the southern no-fly zone on 26 August 1992; for that see n. 72.

^[74] House of Commons Library, Research Paper 99/13, Iraq: “Desert Fox” and Policy Developments, 10 February 1999, p. 18, on the withdrawal of 11 November 1998 on American recommendation; on the second withdrawal of 16 December 1998 on the instruction of the UNSCOM chairman Richard Butler, the Security Council meeting report, UN press release SC/6611, 16 December 1998; there the instruction appears in the statement of the Iraqi representative and in the letter of the IAEA Director General, not as a finding of the Council.

^[75] CBS, 60 Minutes, segment “Punishing Saddam” by Lesley Stahl, first broadcast 12 May 1996. No authorised transcript is publicly available; the versions in circulation differ in individual words, which is why only the uncontested core sentence is reproduced verbatim here. Albright was at that time ambassador to the United Nations; she did not become Secretary of State until January 1997.

^[76] Usama bin Muhammad bin Ladin, Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places, 23 August 1996, Hindu Kush; English translation by the Committee for the Defence of Legitimate Rights, London. The Arabic text was disseminated in August 1996 through the London exile newspaper Al Quds al-Arabi; an individual translator is not established.

^[77] Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders. World Islamic Front Statement, 23 February 1998, standard English translation, documented by the Federation of American Scientists, Intelligence Resource Program; no translator is given there. Signed by Usama bin Ladin, Aiman az-Zawahiri, Abu Yasir Rifai Ahmad Taha, Mir Hamzah and Fazlur Rahman.

^[78] Ibid. The figure of over a million Iraqi dead named there is not supported by any survey.

^[79] Osama bin Laden, Videobotschaft vom 29 October 2004, Volltranskript, Al Jazeera, 1 November 2004.

^[80] Ibid.

^[81] Ibid.

^[82] U.S. Department of Defense, News Transcript, “Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz Interview with Sam Tannenhaus, Vanity Fair”, 9 May 2003.

^[83] Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment”, in: Foreign Affairs 70 (1990/91), Nr. 1 (America and the World), p. 23–33, hier p. 23.

^[84] WTO, “Who we are” and “China — Member information”; on the growth rate, WTO, press release Press/200 of 30 November 2000.

^[85] U.S. Energy Information Administration, International Energy Statistics (world consumption) and Monthly Energy Review, table 3.1 (US net imports and consumption); share calculated by the author.

^[86] The White House, A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement, Washington, D.C., Februar 1996, p. 26.

^[87] Ibid., p. 30, Abschnitt “Providing for Energy Security”.

^[88] U.S. Department of Defense, Office of International Security Affairs, United States Security Strategy for the East Asia-Pacific Region, Washington, D.C., Februar 1995 (sog. Nye-Report).

^[89] Thomas L. Friedman, “A Manifesto for the Fast World”, in: The New York Times Magazine, 28 March 1999. The full text was not freely accessible; the wording follows the consistently concurring transmission. A slightly divergent version appears in The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999).

^[90] SIPRI, Military Expenditure Database, April 2025 edition, own calculation on the basis of constant 2023 prices. On the basis of current prices and exchange rates the American share over the same period lies between 35 and 43 per cent.

^[91] Draft Defense Planning Guidance FY 1994–1999, enclosure to the memorandum of Dale A. Vesser of 18 February 1992, section I.B “Defense Strategy Objectives”; National Security Archive, EBB 245, document 3, PDF p. 3.

^[92] Ibid.

^[93] Greg Muttitt, Fuel on the Fire. Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq, London 2012, PDF p. 55. Muttitt ascribes the formal approval of the final version in May 1992 to Cheney; for this process the National Security Archive names Colin Powell and Paul Wolfowitz and assigns to Cheney the public version of January 1993.

^[94] Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard. American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, New York 1997, p. xiv.

^[95] Ibid., p. 35 und p. 211.

^[96] Thomas Donnelly u. a., Rebuilding America’s Defenses. Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century, Project for the New American Century, September 2000, p. 51.

^[97] Dick Cheney, speech to the Institute of Petroleum, London, autumn 1999 (full text published 2004). In the original there are commas at the dashes.

^[98] PFC Energy, zitiert nach The Washington Post, 2 August 2005.

^[99] U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, press release 2004-116, 24 August 2004. The figures are in barrels of oil equivalent; “2002 annual report” means the Form 20-F for the year 2002.

^[100] Paul O’Neill, interview, CBS 60 Minutes, broadcast of 11 January 2004. The CBS transcript places a comma after “conviction” at this point.

^[101] Ibid. The two sentences did not follow one another directly in the interview; they therefore stand separately.

^[102] Donald Rumsfeld, second sitting of the National Security Council, 1 February 2001, handed down by Paul O’Neill in Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty, New York 2004; here quoted from Muttitt, Fuel on the Fire, PDF p. 60. In the original the sentence continues: “It would change everything in the region and beyond it.”

^[103] Jane Mayer, “Contract Sport”, The New Yorker, 16 February 2004; hier zitiert nach Muttitt, Fuel on the Fire, PDF p. 60.

^[104] Joel Roberts, “Plans For Iraq Attack Began On 9/11”, CBS News, 4 September 2002. The report ascribes the notes to staff who were with Rumsfeld in the National Military Command Center.

^[105] Wesley Clark, interview with Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, 2 March 2007. There Clark reproduces the oral account of a general on the Joint Staff; by his own account he did not read the paper itself (“Well, don’t show it to me”).

^[106] The beginning of the war against Iran in February 2026 is not documented by this hearing; on that see the last chapter. On the designation of Netanyahu: Dan Burton (chairman), opening remarks, in: Conflict with Iraq: An Israeli Perspective, Hearing before the Committee on Government Reform, House of Representatives, 107th Congress, 2nd Session, 12 September 2002, Serial No. 107-139, p. 1.

^[107] Conflict with Iraq: An Israeli Perspective, Hearing before the Committee on Government Reform, House of Representatives, 107th Congress, 2nd Session, 12 September 2002, Serial No. 107-139, p. 56.

^[108] Ibid., p. 51.

^[109] U.S. Department of Defense, News Transcript, “Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz Interview with Sam Tannenhaus, Vanity Fair”, 9/10 May 2003; the sentence fell in the second sitting on 10 May. It breaks off here before the qualification “but –”.

^[110] U.S. Department of the Treasury, Treasury International Capital System, Major Foreign Holders of Treasury Securities, Dezember 2025.

^[111] “Bush rejects Taliban offer to hand Bin Laden over”, The Guardian, 14 October 2001.

^[112] “Exchange With Reporters on Returning From Camp David, Maryland”, 14 October 2001, in: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George W. Bush 2001, Book II, p. 1238.

^[113] Ibid.

^[114] David Vine / Patterson Deppen / Leah Bolger, Drawdown. Improving U.S. and Global Security Through Military Base Closures Abroad, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, 20 September 2021. The details on Karshi-Khanabad and Manas do not rest on this report.

^[115] Anand Gopal, No Good Men Among the Living. America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes, New York 2014, PDF p. 120.

^[116] Ibid.

^[117] Ibid., PDF p. 212.

^[118] Douglas Lute, SIGAR interview of 20 February 2015, quoted from Craig Whitlock, “At War With the Truth”, The Washington Post, 9 December 2019. The quotation documents the lack of understanding of the country, not the statement about the liberation of women as a retrospectively supplied ground for war.

^[119] Record of a meeting at the British Foreign Office, 6 November 2002, quoted from Muttitt, Fuel on the Fire, PDF p. 34.

^[120] Muttitt, Fuel on the Fire, PDF p. 55.

^[121] The inference is the author’s; it rests on the quotation in the preceding note.

^[122] Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, FEDS Note, “The International Role of the U.S. Dollar – 2025 Edition”, 18 July 2025.

^[123] CNN/Reuters, 30 October 2000; United Nations Office of the Iraq Programme, Weekly Update, 14 November 2000.

^[124] Naomi Klein, Die Schock-Strategie. Der Aufstieg des Katastrophen-Kapitalismus, Frankfurt am Main 2007, PDF p. 17.

^[125] Ibid., PDF p. 559.

^[126] U.S. Geological Survey, Minerals Yearbook: Iraq 2009. Die Anteile lauten dort: Rumaila BP 66,67 / CNPC 33,33; West Qurna-1 ExxonMobil 80 / Shell 20; West Qurna-2 Lukoil 85 / Statoil 15; Halfaya CNPC 50 / Petronas 25 / Total 25.

^[127] “Iraq signs key oil deal”, Al Jazeera, 8 October 2009.

^[128] David Enders, “Camp Bucca: Iraq’s Guantánamo Bay”, The Nation, 8 October 2008 (around 96,000 officially interned, a further 100,000 or so briefly detained, some 18,000 prisoners at Camp Bucca in August 2008); RFE/RL, 17 September 2009. That Muhammad al-Jolani, today al-Sharaa, was also held there is not documented by these reports; the statement rests on later reporting.

^[129] Michael Weiss / Hassan Hassan, “Everything We Knew About This ISIS Mastermind Was Wrong”, The Daily Beast, 15 April 2016.

^[130] Joshua Eaton, “U.S. Military Now Says ISIS Leader Was Held in Notorious Abu Ghraib Prison”, The Intercept, 25 August 2016. The article documents the details on al-Baghdadi; Abu Ali al-Anbari does not appear in it.

^[131] Patrice Taddonio, “How U.S. Prisons in Iraq Became ‘Jihadi Universities’ for ISIS”, PBS Frontline, 17 May 2016. The formulation comes from the editors’ headline, not from any of the interlocutors quoted there.

^[132] Andrew Thompson / Jeremi Suri, “How America Helped ISIS”, The New York Times, 2 October 2014.

^[133] Luke N. Condra / Jacob N. Shapiro, “Who Takes the Blame? The Strategic Effects of Collateral Damage”, in: American Journal of Political Science 56 (2012), no. 1, pp. 167–187, here the abstract on the article’s opening page. The article evaluates geocoded violence data from 2004 to 2009.

^[134] Bruce R. Pirnie / Edward O’Connell, Counterinsurgency in Iraq (2003–2006), RAND Counterinsurgency Study vol. 2, MG-595/3-OSD, Santa Monica 2008, p. 47.

^[135] House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, Libya: Examination of intervention and collapse and the UK’s future policy options, Third Report of Session 2016–17, HC 119, 14 September 2016, Summary, p. 3.

^[136] Ibid.

^[137] “African refugees bought, sold and murdered in Libya”, Al Jazeera, 29 November 2017.

^[138] Defense Intelligence Agency, Information Report, Not Finally Evaluated Intelligence, Date of Information 30 July 2012, freigegeben am 10 April 2015 in Judicial Watch v. DOD and State, Freigabeseite 291.

^[139] Statements by a Pentagon spokesman and a spokesman for the anti-IS coalition of 16 January 2018 to the media; the Turkish operation “Olive Branch” began on 20 January 2018.

^[140] Donald Trump, zitiert bei CNBC, 10 October 2019.

^[141] Mazloum Abdi, “If We Have to Choose Between Compromise and Genocide, We Will Choose Our People”, Foreign Policy, 13 October 2019.

^[142] Agreement between the Syrian Democratic Forces and the transitional government in Damascus, 10 March 2025, eight-point text.

^[143] “Kurdish-led SDF announces dissolution after merging with Syria’s military”, Al Jazeera, 25 August 2026.

^[144] Tom Barrack, US special envoy for Syria, statement of 20 January 2026, reported by Al Jazeera, 20 January 2026.

^[145] “Joint Training Consultancy Memorandum of Understanding”, Turkey and Syria, 13 August 2025, reported by Middle East Eye.

^[146] “Syrian president makes 1st Visa card payment as sanctions removed”, Daily Sabah, 27 August 2026. The video was published by Syria TV.

^[147] Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars. The World Is a Battlefield, New York 2013, PDF p. 161.

^[148] Dick Cheney, NBC Meet the Press, 16 September 2001 (transcript at the American Presidency Project); the reference in Scahill, Dirty Wars, PDF p. 44.

^[149] German Bundestag, printed paper 20/14500, final report of the commission of inquiry “Lessons from Afghanistan for Germany’s future networked engagement”, 27 January 2025, p. 4.

^[150] Ibid.

^[151] German Bundestag, Drucksache 20/10400, Zwischenbericht der Enquete-Kommission, 19 February 2024.

^[152] Gerhard Schröder, election campaign launch in Hanover, 5 August 2002, quoted from Michael Hedstück / Gunther Hellmann, “‘Wir machen einen deutschen Weg.’ Irak-Abenteuer, das transatlantische Verhältnis und die Risiken der Methode Schröder für die deutsche Außenpolitik”, in: Bernd W. Kubbig (ed.), Brandherd Irak. US-Hegemonieanspruch, die UNO und die Rolle Europas, Frankfurt am Main / New York 2003, pp. 224–234. The formula was first used in a television interview at the beginning of August; in Hanover Schröder repeated the refusal of “adventures”.

^[153] Ibid. (EMNID für n-tv, August 2002; ZDF-Politbarometer, September 2002).

^[154] German Bundestag, votes of 3 June 2022 and of 18 March 2025.

^[155] NATO, Gipfelerklärung von Den Haag, Juni 2025.

^[156] German Bundestag, heute im bundestag, on the 2026 defence budget.

^[157] Stephanie Savell, How Death Outlives War. The Reverberating Impact of the Post-9/11 Wars on Human Health, Costs of War Project, Watson Institute, Brown University, Mai 2023, p. 2.

^[158] Savell, How Death Outlives War, p. 11 and n. 48. The range combines Neta C. Crawford / Catherine Lutz, Human Cost of Post-9/11 Wars: Direct War Deaths in Major War Zones, Costs of War Project, 1 September 2021 (897,000 to 929,000 there), with Crawford’s update of 15 March 2023.

^[159] Savell, How Death Outlives War, p. 11.

^[160] Ibid., p. 9.

^[161] IPPNW / PSR / PGS, Body Count. Casualty Figures after 10 Years of the “War on Terror”. Iraq – Afghanistan – Pakistan, 1. internationale Ausgabe, Washington/Berlin/Ottawa, März 2015, Executive Summary.

^[162] Gilbert Burnham / Riyadh Lafta / Shannon Doocy / Les Roberts, “Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey”, in: The Lancet 368 (9545), issue of 21 October 2006 (online in advance on 12 October 2006), p. 1421.

^[163] Costs of War Project, Übersichtsseite “Human” in der Rubrik “Costs”.

^[164] Imogen Piper / Joe Dyke, “Tens of thousands of civilians likely killed by US in ‘Forever Wars’”, Airwars, 6 September 2021.

^[165] Azmat Khan, “Hidden Pentagon Records Reveal Patterns of Failure in Deadly Airstrikes”, The New York Times, 18 December 2021.

^[166] General Tommy Franks on 18 March 2002 at Bagram Air Base, reported by Edward Epstein, “Success in Afghan war hard to gauge”, San Francisco Chronicle, 23 March 2002. Franks there speaks of counting enemy dead.

^[167] Thomas Howard Suitt III, High Suicide Rates among United States Service Members and Veterans of the Post-9/11 Wars, Costs of War Project, Watson Institute, Brown University, 21 June 2021, p. 1.

^[168] Osama bin Laden, Videobotschaft vom 29 October 2004, Volltranskript, Al Jazeera, 1 November 2004.

^[169] Ibid.

^[170] GegenStandpunkt, “Der inszenierte Terrorismus” – Abweichende und offizielle Meinungen zu “nine/eleven”, in: GegenStandpunkt 4-03 (2003).

^[171] James Bennet, “A DAY OF TERROR: THE ISRAELIS; Spilled Blood Is Seen as Bond That Draws 2 Nations Closer”, The New York Times, 12 September 2001. The article lies behind a paywall and could not be checked against the original; the statement is quoted verbatim with this reference in several book publications.

^[172] Ma’ariv, April 2008, reproduced in Blake Hounshell, “Quotable: Netanyahu says Israel benefitted from 9/11”, Foreign Policy, 16 April 2008. There the enumeration runs “the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq”.

^[173] Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, 1996, Abschnitt “Moving to a Traditional Balance of Power Strategy”.

^[174] Israeli Ministry of Defense, announcement of 6 February 2026 (19.2 billion dollars for 2025); for 2024 the announcement of June 2025, for 2023 the announcement of June 2024.

^[175] John Mearsheimer / Stephen Walt, “The Israel Lobby”, London Review of Books 28:6, 23 March 2006.

^[176] Ibid.

^[177] Noam Chomsky, “The Israel Lobby?”, ZNet, 28 March 2006.

^[178] Robert Kurz, Weltordnungskrieg. Das Ende der Souveränität und die Wandlungen des Imperialismus im Zeitalter der Globalisierung, Bad Honnef 2003, p. 128. The sentence stands there within an argument with the anti-Zionist left; Kurz disputes that any judgement about Israel can be derived from Israel’s dependence.

^[179] William D. Hartung, Profits of War. Corporate Beneficiaries of the Post-9/11 Pentagon Spending Surge, Center for International Policy / Costs of War Project, 13 September 2021, p. 1.

^[180] Ibid., p. 4.

^[181] Auswertung der Financial Times, 19 March 2013.

^[182] Klein, Die Schock-Strategie, introduction, PDF p. 26 (English edition The Shock Doctrine, p. 14). Klein there quotes a market analyst from Steve Quinn, “Halliburton’s 3Q Earnings Hit $611M”, Associated Press, 22 October 2006.

^[183] Congressional Research Service, IN12641, on the authorisation in the NDAA for fiscal year 2026; Senate Committee on Appropriations, summary of the FY 2026 defense appropriations act.

^[184] John Bellamy Foster, “Naked Imperialism”, in: Monthly Review 57:4, September 2005.

^[185] Harvey, The New Imperialism, Kapitel 4 (“Accumulation by Dispossession”), PDF p. 173.

^[186] Ibid., erstes Kapitel, PDF p. 43.

^[187] Alex Callinicos, “Imperialism and global political economy”, in: International Socialism 2:108, Herbst 2005.

^[188] Kurz, Weltordnungskrieg, Bad Honnef 2003, p. 111.

^[189] Ibid., p. 110.

^[190] GegenStandpunkt, “Amerikas Kreuzzug gegen den Terror – 2. Etappe: Der Irak-Krieg. Die Gleichschaltung der Welt zersetzt den ‘freien Westen’”, in: GegenStandpunkt 1-03 (2003).

^[191] IMF, World Economic Outlook Database, series NGDPD and PPPGDP. The date of the purchasing-power-adjusted overtaking is frequently given as 2014; that follows the data position of the October 2014 edition and has been superseded by later revisions.

^[192] World Bank, World Development Indicators, indicator NV.IND.MANF.CD, own calculation. For China the series begins in 2004.

^[193] John Calabrese, “Beijing to Baghdad: China’s growing role in Iraq’s energy sector”, Middle East Institute, 7 June 2023. What is meant are fields in which Chinese companies are operators or participating partners; Iraqi service contracts transfer no ownership. On the takeover of West Qurna-1, U.S. Energy Information Administration, Country Analysis Brief: Iraq, 14 July 2025, p. 5.

^[194] Neta C. Crawford, The U.S. Budgetary Costs of the Post-9/11 Wars, Costs of War Project, 1 September 2021. Of the roughly eight trillion dollars, some 5.8 trillion are funds spent or requested; around 2.2 trillion are the estimated future care costs for veterans through 2050.

^[195] U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Amid regional conflict, the Strait of Hormuz remains critical oil chokepoint”, Today in Energy, 16 June 2025.

^[196] National Defense Strategy Commission, Providing for the Common Defense. The Assessment and Recommendations of the National Defense Strategy Commission, Washington, D.C., November 2018, p. vii.

^[197] Ibid., p. xi. The report names the phrase as a cause of the decline in readiness, alongside budgetary uncertainty.

^[198] U.S. Department of Defense, Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America, Washington, D.C., 19 January 2018, p. 1. The full strategy is classified; what was published is the summary.

^[199] Will Green / Taylore Roth, China-Iran Relations: A Limited but Enduring Strategic Partnership, U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, Staff Research Report, 28 June 2021, p. 6. The report gives the view of the staff, not that of the commission.

^[200] Ibid., p. 6 and the note there. What the report calls “highly unrealistic” is the reported investment pledge of four hundred billion dollars, because actual Chinese investment in Iran over fifteen years amounted to around 27 billion dollars in total. It gives no date of signature.

^[201] Michael Simpson et al., Road to Damascus. The Russian Air Campaign in Syria, 2015 to 2018, RAND Corporation RR-A1170-1, Santa Monica 2022. Russian formations had previously been stationed in Bosnia and Kosovo; the deployment in Syria was the first major combat operation outside the post-Soviet space since Afghanistan.

^[202] Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, “The International Role of the U.S. Dollar — 2025 Edition”, FEDS Notes, 18 July 2025.

^[203] S&P Global, “Saudi-China ties and renminbi-based oil trade”, 20 August 2024. The report documents conversations about settlement in renminbi and Saudi reticence; it names no conclusion.

^[204] David Vine et al., Creating Refugees: Displacement Caused by the United States’ Post-9/11 Wars, Costs of War Project, updated version of 19 August 2021.

^[205] Federal Register, doc. 2025-02873 of 20 February 2025; doc. 2025-20750 of 24 November 2025.

^[206] National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence”, Weißes Haus, 25 September 2025.

^[207] Michael Knights / Crispin Smith / Hamdi Malik, “Profile: Badr Organization”, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2 September 2021; on the parliamentary resolution of 26 November 2016 (208 of 327 deputies), Al Jazeera, 26 November 2016.

^[208] Iranian customs administration IRICA for the period 20 March 2024 to 19 January 2025, reproduced in the Tehran Times.

^[209] Joel D. Rayburn / Frank K. Sobchak (eds.), The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, 2 vols., U.S. Army War College Press, Carlisle 2019, concluding chapter; here quoted from the reproduction in Army Times, 18 January 2019. No page reference is given, because the full text could not be consulted.

^[210] Donald Trump, Truth Social, 3 January 2026 (extract). On the scope and course of the operation, the briefing by Chief of Staff Dan Caine of 3 January 2026.

^[211] Stephen Semler, “The Iran war is the most unpopular major conflict in US history”, Responsible Statecraft, 26 June 2026.