The Times Square plot strangely resembles the “underwear” bomber attempt over Detroit last December 25. Both “masterminds” had upper-class backgrounds in their home countries. NYC terrorist Shahzad’s father was Vice Air Marshal in Pakistan, where the military rules. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, of Christmas infamy, is the son of Nigeria’s leading banker. Neither was seriously injured. Both sang like canaries when apprehended, fingering U.S. foes, the Pakistani Taliban and Yemen’s Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula, respectively, as their backers. Both prompted U.S. military action and a media blitz. Thus, the possibility that Washington somehow aided their efforts arises.
A Century of U.S. Invasions
While PLP completely opposes terrorism as a working-class weapon, there are millions across the world who justifiably hate U.S. imperialism. Historically, the U.S. ruling class has fabricated numerous false attacks in order to justify its wars:
• In 1876, to break the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty giving the Black Hills (Dakotas) to the Sioux tribe, President Ulysses Grant demanded non-treaty tribes return to the reservation late in the year, before they would have time to hunt enough buffalo to survive the winter. This became an excuse to attack the Sioux and seize the Black Hills, massacring thousands.
• On February 15, 1898, the battleship U.S.S. Maine blew up in Cuba’s Havana harbor, giving U.S. rulers an excuse to declare war on Spain and seize its colonies in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. When a reporter sent to Cuba told his boss, Press lord William Randolph Hearst, that he could not manufacture a story painting Spain as the culprit, Hearst famously wired back, “You supply the story, I’ll supply the war!”
• In a 1933 speech, Major-General Smedley Butler, a 33-year Marine Corps veteran, declared: “I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle-man for Big Business….I was a racketeer…for capitalism…
“I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street….I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912….I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
• In August 1964, looking for an excuse to escalate the war in Vietnam, the U.S. government reported “attacks” on two U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. President Lyndon Johnson then labeled North Vietnam an “aggressor” and Congress passed the infamous “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution,” giving Johnson a blank check to escalate the war. In reality, both U.S. ships were launching commando raids on North Vietnam. Years later, the government admitted the “attack” was complete fiction.
• On April 28, 1965, President Johnson invaded the Dominican Republic with 23,000 troops to crush an attempt by the constitutionally-elected Juan Bosch government to regain power. A U.S.-backed right-wing military junta had overthrown Bosch. Johnson claimed he was “protecting U.S. strategic and economic interests.”
• In October 1983, the Reagan Administration claimed Grenada, a small Caribbean republic, was “building an airport” large enough for Soviet planes to use to attack the U.S. mainland, and that U.S. medical students at St. George’s Medical School in Grenada were “in danger.” The U.S. then invaded, overthrew and imprisoned the government, and seized the island. The claims were later exposed as completely false.
• On December 20, 1989, President George H. W. Bush sent 27,000 troops and over 300 military aircraft to invade Panama, supposedly to “safeguard U.S. lives, defend ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ and combat drug trafficking.” The troops shot into residential buildings, killing over 3,000 civilians, later buried in mass graves. Actually, for years Bush had been a friend of Panamanian dictator Noriega who once had been on the U.S. government payroll. The real reason for the invasion was the increasing influence of Japanese banks using Panama as a financial launching pad for investments in Latin America, long regarded as a U.S. domain.
• On July 25, 1990, U.S. ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie told Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that the U.S. had “no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.” With this “O.K.,” on August 2 Saddam invaded Kuwait. The U.S. quickly used this as an excuse to send over a half-million troops to the oil-rich Middle East, establishing huge permanent bases in the region.
• In March, 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq, claiming it had “weapons of mass destruction,” (WMDs) though United Nations inspectors had insisted this was untrue. In 2005, the British press published a document from the office of the British Prime Minister proving the U.S. was using the WMD allegations as an excuse to invade Iraq. No WMDs were ever found.