Robert Parry: Overselling Terror

This illuminating piece by Robert Parry exposes George W. Bush as he has used the weapon of mass destruction called FEAR against the American people, to force our country down his path of radical authoritarianism.


FDR's wise words are as true today as they were in 1933:






Overselling Terror

By Robert Parry
June 9, 2006


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But the recent developments in Iraq (the killing of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi) and Canada (the arrest of 17 suspects in an alleged terror plot) have obscured other new evidence that points toward a very different reality: that the Islamic terror threat was never as severe as Bush made it out to be after the 9/11 attacks and that it has been fading ever since.
While Bush has sought to frighten the American people with apocalyptic visions of Islamic terrorists establishing an empire that “spans from Spain to Indonesia,” the new intelligence data actually reveals al-Qaeda as a largely dissipated force that now exists more as an inspiration to violence than as an organized movement.


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Despite the Bush administration’s longstanding efforts to make Zarqawi the terrifying poster boy of the Iraqi insurgency, U.S. intelligence knew that Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda contingent of foreign fighters represented only a small percentage of the armed resistance to U.S. and allied forces in Iraq.
Most intelligence assessments put the size of this foreign jihadist force at only a few thousand fighters, or around 5 percent of the overall Iraqi insurgency.
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Also, suggesting that the international threat from Islamic terrorists was less severe than Bush let on was the historical fact that Muslim nations succeeded, again and again, in suppressing radical movements as long as Western powers stayed out of the way.


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But the bottom line to all these cases was that the radicals were defeated, explaining why so many of al-Qaeda’s leaders are exiles. Osama bin-Laden is a Saudi; Zawahiri is an Egyptian; Zarqawi was a Jordanian. In the late 1990s, bin-Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders were even banished from the Sudan, forcing them to flee to remote Afghanistan.
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In that Oct. 6, 2005, speech, Bush asserted that Muslim extremists intended to use Iraq as a base to “establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia” and thus would isolate and strategically defeat the United States.
The disparity between the intelligence data about al-Qaeda’s weaknesses and Bush’s claims about the group’s extraordinary prowess suggests that Bush is still exaggerating the threat posed by his Islamic enemies, much as he hyped allegations of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to justify invading Iraq in March 2003.


Just as he roused American fears with images of “mushroom clouds” from hypothetical Iraqi nuclear bombs, Bush now appears to be presenting an off-the-charts worst-case scenario about the threat from Islamic extremism.
In that same speech, Bush likened al-Qaeda leaders to historic tyrants, such as Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, suggesting that anyone opposed to the Iraq War was inviting slaughter on a massive scale.
But there are few indications that al-Qaeda’s leaders – believed to be holed up in the mountains along the Pakistani-Afghan border – represent that level of threat.
Instead, Bush’s intent appears to be to use a never-ending hyped-up threat of Islamic terrorism as the organizing principle for a new authoritarian form of government in the United States. By keeping Americans scared, he and his advisers believe they can exert virtually unlimited power inside the United States without significant opposition.


Bush’s strategy also might have a circular quality to it. As long as he cites the threat of Islamic terrorism, he can maintain enough political support to keep U.S. troops in Iraq and continue the operation of the Guantanamo Bay prison.
That, in turn, will keep young Muslims riled up and thus increase the likelihood of sporadic violence in the months ahead. That will further stoke the fears inside the United States and let Bush consolidate his authoritarian powers even more.
So, the ultimate danger from al-Qaeda and any home-grown spin-offs may not be from the violence that they can inflict but from their status as the bogeymen who can scare the American people into surrendering the democratic Republic envisioned by the Founders.