[Marxism] Imperalist Planners Agree with Our Analysis of "Terror War"

["M. Junaid Alam" <mjunaidalam@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I strongly urge all comrades interested in the present ideological aims
of US imperialism to take a careful look at pages 22-28 and 43-50, of
the following document issued to the Department of Defense by a Federal
Advisory Committee, titled, "Report of the Defense Science Board Task
Force on Strategic Communication." The document is available here:
http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/2004-09-Strategic_Communication.pdf

The Defense Science Board, which produced this report, is comprised of
the leaders of the military arm of US imperialism - "the chairmen of the
Army, Navy, Air Force, Policy, Ballistic Missile Defense Organization,
and Defense Intelligence Agency advisory committees", according to the
organization's website. Some of the document's contents briefly made
news in the mainstream press, 3 months after they were issued in
September 2004 .

But it deserves to be studied seriously because it is simply a stunning
treatise on how the actual war planners conceive of the terror war. For
it turns out that the intellectual and moral diarrhea of America
routinely swirled around in the toilet bowl that is Fox News and
similarly reactionary outlets is an absolute fraud and hoax: the real,
actual war planners do not believe any of the right-wing propaganda
themselves.

According to this document, they do not believe that Muslims hate
freedom; they do not believe this is a Cold War recast; they do not
believe Muslims want American liberation; they recognize the American
record of supporting puppet dictators; and they admit that in an open
information matrix, America has no credibility, and that that portion of
the Islamist narrative which points to US criminality in the Muslim
world is winning out. They also concede that US policy in
Israel-Palestine is the leading cause of Muslim resentment against the
United States, and that the war on Iraq has increased the risk of
terror, decreased US leverage on Europe, and eviscerated US credibility.

One part even reads, "Thus the critical problem in American public
diplomacy directed toward the Muslim World is not one of the
'dissemination of information,' or even one of crafting and delivering
the 'right' message. Rather it is a fundamental problem of credibility.
Simply, there is none..." (49)

The crucial admission, however, comes on page 44: "Therefore, in stark
contrast to the Cold War, the United States today is not seeking to
contain a threatening state/empire, but rather seeking to convert a
broad movement within Islamic civilization to accept the value structure
of Western Modernity - an agenda hidden within the official rubric of a
"War on Terrorism."

The essential contradiction of our times is that the "value structure of
Western modernity" is not as enlightened as these planners imagine.
That this "value structure" allows with ease the murder of 100,000 Iraqi
civilians through the violence of war in 2 years, or that of 1,00,000
more Iraqis through the violence of "peace" in 10 years, means that any
"conversion" is necessarily only going to turn the converted into
corpses to be lowered into coffins.

Equipped with this understanding, we must see through our moral, human
obligation to end this war and rip out at its root the ideological
apparatus behind it.


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