On July 25th 1990, the American ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, asked Saddam Hussein for an explanation for his military movements along the Kuwait border. Saddam reminded him of the situation: Iraq, ruined by the war with Iran, found itself unable to repay the 80 billion borrowed from Kuwait, which he believes, Iraq protected during the conflict. Furthermore, Iraq was accusing Kuwait of overproduction in the much-coveted oil industry, which was seen to weaken Iraq’s market competitiveness, and to demonstrate a non-compliance of certain drilling agreements. Finally, Saddam considered Kuwait as ipso facto Iraq, given its creation by the British Empire after the First World War. Glaspie indicated to Saddam that Washington took no position on the disagreements between Kuwait and Iraq, and that in general, her administration had “no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts”. She assured that regardless of Iraq-Kuwait relations, the United States had no intention “to start an economic war against Iraq”. Saddam, who had secretly recorded the discussion and later made it public, logically interpreted America’s promise of non-interference as a sort of “yellow light” on operations. On August 2nd, Iraq launched the invasion of Kuwait, taking military control of the country within two days. The Arab League sought to negotiate the withdrawal of Iraqi troops from Kuwait with a diplomatic compromise, but the administration of George H.W. Bush rejected all proposed plans. Instead, through the use of fake information, he convinced the Saudis that Saddam had plans to invade their country as well, and thereby led the Saudis to accept the stationing of U.S. troops on their soil. In January 1991, the U.S. operationalizes Desert Storm, dropping 940 000 bombs, including the experimental “combined effect munitions”, or “cluster bombs”, each of which containing 200 scattering sub-munitions supposed to explode after the initial detonation.



Emboldened by the first Gulf War, President George H. W. Bush envisioned himself as the prophet of the New World Order, in a famous speech to Congress on September 11th, 1990: he announced “an era in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony. […] A world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility of freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak”. The end of the Cold War and the perceived success of the first Gulf War worked together as rhetorical and ideological fodder for a shift towards American desire for global empire; it would be, for example, that very vision of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former National Security Advisor to President Carter and member of the Trilateral Commission. Brzezinski saw the world as The Grand Chessboard (the title of his memoirs, published in 1997). What interested him was the expansion of American imperial power into Eurasia, employing if necessary “maneuver and manipulation in order to prevent the emergence of a hostile coalition that could eventually seek to challenge America's primacy”. One perceived obstacle to uncontested expansionism is democracy, for “democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization”; and, “as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat”. This is the lesson of Pearl Harbor, Brzezinski says: “The public supported America's engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor”.



In 1996, at the beginning Clinton’s second term, a Republican think tank, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) would develop along the same lines of Brzezinski’s logic. Its founders, who adopted the label “neoconservatives”, intended to use the defeat of communism as means to consolidate American hegemony and in so doing, prevent the emergence of a rival system. Their stated goal is to “extend the current Pax Americana”, which entails “a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges”. In its September 2000 report entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses, PNAC anticipates that U.S. forces must become “able to rapidly deploy and win multiple simultaneous large-scale wars”. This requires a profound transformation, including a new military corps, the U.S. Space Forces, to control both space and cyberspace, and the development of “a new family of nuclear weapons designed to address new sets of military requirements”. Unfortunately, according to the authors of the report, “the process of transformation […] is likely to be a long one, absent of some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor”.There is, again, the reference to Pearl Harbor as a politically strategic event. Neither the members of PNAC nor Brzezinski can ignore that the Japanese attack on December 7th, 1941, which generated public support in favor of the war and led the Congress to grant President Roosevelt full military power, had been not only foreseen with precision, but deliberately provoked by Washington, while the command of the Hawaii military base had been deliberately kept in the dark. Twelve days before Pearl Harbor, the Defense Secretary Henry Stimson summarized in his diary a conversation with Roosevelt: “The question was ‘how should we maneuver [the Japanese] into firing the first shot”.



The mobilization of public opinion in favor of an imperial policy can only be accomplished through an enemy attack: in the absence of a real attack, words of a threat can do, with a good propaganda machine. It is here that the “clash of civilizations” thesis of Samuel Huntington makes its entrance and, given sufficient echo in the mainstream media, becomes the defining myth of the 21st century: before the New Order World comes the Clash of Civilizations. Huntington, who was an adviser to the State Department under Reagan and Bush, considered the relationship between civilizations on the Darwinian mode of “the survival of the fittest”. With that perspective in mind, he sought to provide America with a new enemy, given the decline of the Soviet threat: “Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power”. Soon the medieval term “crusade” will re-enter the official discourse.



In the game of which Huntington wrote the rules, only physical force matters: “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do”. At the dawn of the 21st century, the means of such violence were ready for such a new global paradigm, as was recognized by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in their Joint Vision 2020 booklet published May 30th, 2000; there they state the necessity of “transforming the joint force for the 21st Century to achieve full spectrum dominance”, this last phrase being defined as “the ability of U.S. forces […] to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the full range of military operations”.



With the election of George W. Bush (son of George H. W. Bush) in 2000, two dozens PNAC neoconservatives were placed in key positions of foreign policy. The only thing missing was a “new Pearl Harbor” to allow the full capacity of their power to be mobilized. The attacks of September 11th, 2001, were exactly what the PNAC was waiting for. Before September 11th, the PNAC report requested an annual defense budget of 95 billion dollars; since the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. spends 400 billion per year, as much as the rest of the world combined, while continuing to provide half of the weapons of the world market. In the bewildered eyes of the American public, September 11th validated the “clash of civilizations” paradigm, and neoconservative doctrine by inference.



Two hours after the towers collapsed, the president of the National Commission on Terrorism, Lewis Paul Bremer, appeared on NBC, calm and assured, explaining: “Bin Laden was involved in the first attack on the WTC which had as its intention doing exactly what happened here, which is the collapse of those towers. He certainly has to be a prime suspect. But there are others in the Middle East, and there are at least two States, Iran and Iraq, which should at least remain on the list as essential suspects”. In this carefully calibrated speech, Bremer constructed a narrative not only around a history of the event, recalling the 1993 attacks against the World Trade Center, but specifically around the future of the American people, in announcing two major wars that the Americans are now told to expect. When the reporter from NBC drew a predictable parallel between the recent attack and Pearl Harbor, Bremer confirmed: “It is the day that will change our lives. It is the day when the war that the terrorists declared on the US [...] has been brought home to the U.S.”. In 2003, Bremer would be promoted council to the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the body that would govern occupied Iraq. Under his leadership, 9 billion disappeared in fraud, corruption and embezzlement, according to a report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, Stuart Bowen, published January 30th, 2005.



In the days that followed, the President’s speeches (written by the neoconservative David Frum), would characterize the terrorist attack as the trigger for a world war of a new type, one fought against an invisible enemy scattered throughout the Middle East. First and foremost, vengeance must come against both bin Laden and anyone with whom he found sympathy or shelter: “We will make no distinction between those who committed these acts and those who harbor them” (September 11). Second, the war is extended to the world: “Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated” (September 20). Seven states were declared “Rogue States” for their support to global terrorism: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Cuba and North Korea (September 16). Third, any country that does not support Washington will be treated as an enemy: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” (September 20). It was a sentiment that would provide a pretext for an inexhaustible aggression in any Muslim country. In a few days, the American people were led into a war against terrorism, then to a war against global terrorism, then a global war against terrorism, finally finding themselves in a world war against the Muslim world, since all Muslim countries house radical Islamists, and must therefore be considered terroristic “Rogue States”. In this new war, the term “civilian” does not apply, just as “terrorists” will not be treated as soldiers. During October 2001, the Minister of Justice John Ashcroft (who shares with George Bush the nickname “Blues Brothers”, for their common sense of being “on a mission from God”), put forward for vote his USA PATRIOT Act (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act) that created the status of “illegal combatant” – a category that denied prisoners of war the rights established under the Geneva convention.



With the WTC rubble still burning, a second event reinforced the terror of the American people and led them to uncritically stand behind their government. On September 18th and October 9th, four letters contaminated with anthrax were mailed, first to Florida and then New York and Washington, addressed to journalists and two Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy (curiously, two senators who were opposed to the USA PATRIOT Act). The letters were written in such a way as to clearly identify the author as Muslim: “You cannot stop us. We have this anthrax. You die now. Are you afraid? Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great”. Twenty-two people were infected and five died. Panic set in. The mail system was blocked with the inspection of billions of letters. For the first time in its history, Congress closed its doors. America had its collective mind riveted to the nightmare of biological warfare, while politicians and journalists speculated on the guilt of bin Laden or Saddam Hussein.



Prior to the sending of the contaminated letters, the FBI received an anonymous letter accusing a professor Ayaad Assaad, an American of Egyptian origin, to be a bio-terrorist filled with hatred towards the United States. It was determined that the strains of anthrax were electrostatically treated for better dispersion, the product of sophisticated technology, and came from the military laboratory in Utah where Assaad worked. On October 3rd 2001, the FBI arrested and interrogated Assad, but quickly found him innocent. The FBI did not, however, pursue its investigation when it was revealed that laboratory surveillance cameras captured Lieutenant Colonel Philip Zack, recently discharged, breaking into the storage location without permission.