Mientras los centroamericanos firmaban pactos para conseguir fueros en el Parlamento, Marulanda seguía la lucha

x James Petras - La Haine

Efraín Chury Iribarne entrevista a James Petras :: La reunión de la UNASUR no la puedo tomar en serio. Un presidente como Evo, que no puede pulverizar a un puñado de fascistas humillando a campesinos indígenas ¿está preparando la unidad de América Latina? Eso es una broma de mal gusto
Comentarios para Radio Centenario del sociólogo norteamericano, Prof. James Petras. Lunes 26 de mayo de 2008.

Efraín Chury Iribarne: ¿Cómo estas Petras? Te doy los buenos días.

Petras: Muy bien. Preparándome para marchas contra la guerra hoy con una organización que se llama Veteranos Contra la Guerra y que son un grupo de personas, todas han servido en el ejército, en Corea y en Indochina y ahora marchan contra la guerra. Ahora vamos a integrarnos en la marcha tradicional de los grupos militares del pasado pero con otras banderas, con otros eslóganes.

El otro asunto, tengo mucha tristeza por la muerte del gran revolucionario Manuel Marulanda.

Chury: Justamente hoy queríamos dedicarle parte de este espacio a que nos hicieras una semblanza y una reflexión con respecto a esta muerte.

Petras: En primera instancia tengo que decir con todo el conocimiento que tengo de los 40 años estudiando y conversando con diferentes expertos, con representantes de las FARC, con otros académicos, que Marulanda debe ser el más grande dirigente revolucionario - campesino en toda la historia de América Latina.

Para justificar eso tenemos que considerar lo que ha hecho Marulanda. Primero es autodidacta. De familia campesina, es una persona que empieza con 14 campesinos desplazados por el ejército y construye un ejército guerrillero de 20.000 efectivos con cientos de miles de milicianos, apoyantes y simpatizantes. Y sosteniendo una lucha de 44 años, más que todas las guerrillas del pasado, y sin perder las perspectivas de una transformación social.

Ningún revolucionario en América Latina tenía una relación tan íntima, tan estrecha, con los campesinos como Marulanda. Ni Fidel Castro, ni los Ortega, ni los guerrilleros de los '70, '80, han tenido este vínculo íntimo. Eso tiene que ver con el hecho que Marulanda tenía un estilo de vida, un lenguaje, un programa, una intransigencia en defensa del campo, que nunca hemos visto en la historia de América Latina.

Mientras los tupamaros fracasaban y eran derrotados, mientras los centroamericanos firmaban pactos para conseguir fueros en el Parlamento, Marulanda seguía la lucha. Rechazó las ofertas de fueros parlamentarios para sacrificarse por los campesinos.

Para él la cosa pasaba por otro lado. Primero, un acuerdo sobre cambios estructurales, reforma agraria, un purga de los militares masacradores, un programa nacional, de nacionalización, etc.; y recién después la construcción de un proceso político electoral. Pero dentro de la democratización del Estado, dentro de una transformación social.

Eso, ni Schafik Handal, ni los otros políticos en Salvador o Guatemala eran capaces de mantener. Hay que recordar que en esos 44 años, los Estados Unidos financiaron programas de terrorismo de 6.000 millones de dólares, lanzaron siete veces grandes ofensivas y 20 veces declararon que mataron a Marulanda. Y en todas las ofensivas dirigidas por el imperialismo fracasaron. Nunca hubo ni un caso de derrota, ni tomaran territorio en una forma permanente contra los guerrilleros. Es cierto que en algunos momentos hubo repliegues, hubo derrotas, pero no fueron derrotas estratégicas, sino tácticas.

Eso se debió en parte a la gran astucia, brillante, de Marulanda de saber cuándo avanzar y cuándo replegar. Cuándo lanzar acciones de gran tamaño y cuándo quedar en una lucha de pequeños núcleos descentralizados.

Fue el más grande estratega en toda la historia de América Latina en relación con un ejército bien disciplinado de 250.000 soldados, que no es un ejército decadente y corrupto como el de Batista, como el de Somoza. Ese es un ejército con más de 2.000 asesores norteamericanos, con las últimas tecnologías, y no pudieron capturar ni mucho menos derrotar al ejército de Marulanda.

Por eso digo que es el dirigente revolucionario más grande, más exitoso, de toda la historia de América Latina, eso incluye a Sandino, a Farabundo Martí y a los demás, que en un momento surgieron y actuaron como figuras históricas.

Quiero decir algo más: Para Marulanda lo importante era conversar, organizar, educar y aprender de los campesinos. Rechazó muchísimas entrevistas con grandes prestigiosos periodistas, prefirió el uno a uno en las aldeas del campo; por eso era exitoso en el interior de Colombia y casi desconocido en el exterior.

Tampoco era un "poster-boy", esos que se ponen en afiches, en las paredes, etc Era un hombre del campo, no era fotogénico o tal vez era fotogénico en una forma diferente, Humphry Bogart y no un Clark Gable, era un hombre que reflejaba su base social tanto física como social y políticamente.

Otra cosa que debemos decir es que mientras los grupos guerrilleros de América Latina buscaban conectarse con el campo casi todos fracasaron, pues venían de la ciudad, con grandes llamadas a los campesinos que en muchos casos los ignoraba.

En el caso de Marulanda es totalmente diferente, pues crece en el campo, vive en el campo, cultiva en el campo, dormía en hamaca y compartía pan y frijoles con los campesinos en su propio terreno. Nunca bajó a las ciudades dando conferencias de prensa, sacándose fotos con gritos ni manifiestos en el exterior, ni era una causa célebre en Londres, Nueva York o París, con esos intelectuales de salón, que siempre están presentes cuando creen que pueden sacar alguna publicidad.

No, Marulanda era una hombre de la Colombia profunda. Una Colombia que reconocía a Marulanda como uno de ellos. Al hablar de Colombia profunda, hablo de las grandes masas campesinas.

Es obvio que han sufrido algunos golpes últimamente pero es comprensible en las circunstancias del repliegue. Han bajado de 20.000 militantes a 12 mil o 15 mil ahora.

Para entender algunas de las circunstancias complicadas en este momento, debemos ver que Álvaro Uribe y los Estados Unidos, han desplazado 3 millones de campesinos que en su gran mayoría eran simpatizantes y vivían en territorios donde las FARC eran hegemónicas.

Entonces, primero hay 3 millones fuera, después tenemos la masacre de miles de aldeas, de pueblos y de comunidades. Segundo, tenemos también la falta de una fuente de logística de apoyo a las FARC. Tercero, tenemos el hecho de que los EEUU han instalado las últimas tecnologías de detección y han entregado docenas de helicópteros armados.

También tenemos el hecho de que no hay países fronterizos simpatizantes, como Vietnam tenía a China, a Rusia para alimentarlo con las últimas armas, cohetes, etc. Las FARC no tenían ningún apoyo externo y eso lo conozco a partir de conversaciones de alto nivel que he mantenido con los asesores de gobiernos en Venezuela, Ecuador, Brasil y Perú.

Las armas que tenían las FARC eran armas que ellos mismos fabricaron o compraron con dinero efectivo. A diferencia del Frente de Liberación Nacional en Vietnam que tenía un enorme apoyo logístico y armamentista para seguir su lucha. En cambio, las FARC continuaban su lucha a pesar de la ausencia total del apoyo de Cuba y de los otros países.

Yo sé que en Cuba no apoyaban a las FARC porque un altísimo funcionario –puedo decir Ministro- me hablaba de fuertes críticas -falsas- contra las FARC. La diplomacia en Cuba tiene mucho más interés, incluso Fidel Castro, en establecer relaciones con los países de centro izquierda de América Latina e incluso relaciones diplomáticas, económicas con el gobierno de Uribe.

Esos son hechos concretos y públicos.

Entonces tenemos que ver lo que es sostener y construir un ejército de 20.000 hombres, con cientos de miles de simpatizantes políticos y sociales, milicianos y organización del Partido Comunista clandestino, el Movimiento Boliviariano, frentes civiles; es un gran éxito que en ningún otro país, ningún movimiento en América Latina ha hecho. Y en circunstancias mucho más difícil porque ningún burgués nacional financió o apoyó a las FARC, como era el caso en Cuba o en Nicaragua. Allá tenían una base de lucha democrática progresista, pero en Colombia siempre tenía las banderas socialistas y era el grupo revolucionario mejor preparado en adaptar el marxismo-leninismo a las condiciones colombianas muy originales.

El pensamiento de Marulanda y sus prácticas fueron más creativas, como Ho Chi Minh en Vietnam y Mao Tse Tung en China, adaptando las ideas generales del marxismo a las condiciones particulares de un país dominado por el agro y los narcotraficantes.

Eso es muy importante tomar en cuenta, porque muchos dicen que era un gran revolucionario, un hombre sencillo, etc. Pero el hecho es que Marulanda es uno de los grandes creadores de estrategias revolucionarias en condiciones latinoamericanas. No hay un estratega en la historia de América Latina que pudiera enfrentar todo el peso del imperialismo norteamericano, como lo hizo él.

A pesar de todo el poder tecnológico, financiero y del ejército mercenario de 250.000 soldados colombianos, más 5.000 mercenarios; Marulanda pudo evitar la derrota y seguir construyendo ese gran ejército. Además, entrenado cuadros, integrando guerrillas, donde el 33% de los Comandantes son mujeres, indígenas, afro-colombianos, etc. Era el grupo guerrillero más pluralista, más consecuente en defensa del programa . No ves a las FARC viajando a hoteles de primera, de 5 estrellas como por ejemplo Tomás Borge, un decadente que viajaba solo si le ofrecen hoteles de 5 estrellas; en contraste con los Ortega, las FARC son muy honestas, con gran integridad, grande en el sentido de que lo que decían lo vivían.

No tenían ningún privilegio, sufrían los mosquitos, los bichos, las culebras, la malaria, como cualquier campesino. Y eso también es una de las razones por las que son tan queridos en su país.

Chury: Petras, muere Marulanda hay un antes y un después ¿Cuál es el después de las FARC?

Petras: Hay que ver. No hay duda que no hay un líder con la historia y trayectoria y el vínculo tan profundo que ha tenido Marulanda. Eso por un lado y hay que reconocerlo: ninguno de los Comandantes tiene la misma trayectoria.

Alfonso Cano era estudiante, aprendió mucho de Marulanda, venía de la Universidad, no era campesino de orígenes, no maneja tan profundamente las relaciones con el campo como Marulanda, pero casi nadie podría hacerlo.

Pero está en el movimiento hace 25 años, él ha construido organizaciones clandestinas civiles, era uno de los líderes formulando la ideología y espero que dentro de las tradiciones y en relación con los otros Comandantes, sea capaz de continuar la lucha y extender las grandes lecciones de Marulanda.

Hay que entender que Marulanda nunca apoyó el culto de personalidad, fue un hombre simple, siempre funcionaba con una dirección colectiva, los frentes que funcionaban eran bastante autónomos, con gran flexibilidad local. Tenía una gran tradición de enseñar, de formar, de educar a los cuadros, no eran simplemente fuerzas militares, sino que tenían clases políticas, clases contra el analfabetismo, etc.

Entonces es muy probable que la lucha va a continuar a pesar de toda la propaganda y guerra sicológica tratando de mostrar una organización derrotada, desmoralizada, dividida, todas esas mentiras que se repiten hace más de 40 años.

Recuerdo en los años '70 cuando repetían lo mismo. Cuando los militares lanzaron el Plan Lazo, los diarios decían que no sólo habían destruido a las FARC sino que habían matado a Marulanda. Pero los campesinos, después de tantos anuncios del asesinato de Marulanda, descubrían que estaba vivo compartiendo comidas en las aldeas.

Entonces inventaban, imaginaban la leyenda de que Marulanda tenía la capacidad de convertirse en una lechuza, en un conejo, cuando estaba en un cerco y escapar el ejército.

Yo creo que esta leyenda, esta mitología del campo, no existe tanto con los líderes actuales. Pero tengo que decir que el peso de la leyenda de las prácticas de Marulanda deben quedar fuertes en la organización. Creo que en eso no hay ninguna chance de que vanyan a derrotarlos.

Es posible que pierdan terreno pero eso es parte de la estrategia de Marulanda, es sacrificar territorio para conservar los cuadros. Si no hay una gran ofensiva es porque la correlación de fuerzas en una coyuntura es desfavorable, pero siempre hay un reagrupamiento en condiciones tácticas que es lo que estamos viendo y no la guerra final de las FARC.

Yo lo sé porque hace pocos años entrevisté a varios militares norteamericanos que me decían que nunca se puede ganar esta guerra porque nadie puede controlar, destruir, o desarticular a las FARC. Lo mejor que podríamos hacer, decía el Coronel, es tratar de aislarlos de los grandes centros urbanos y desplazarlos hacia regiones menos importantes económicamente.

Chury: ¿Has seguido de cerca la reunión de la UNASUR?

Petras: Sí. Hemos mirado eso pero no lo puedo tomar en serio, porque están hablando de organizar los Estados Unidos de América del Sur mientras en Argentina el país esta totalmente polarizado entre el campo y la ciudad, entre la burguesía industrial del capital y los grandes agro exportadores y las fuerzas del interior.

¿Cómo se va unificar América Latina cuando Argentina esta tan polarizada y dividida?

Mientras el Sr. Morales está tomando un brindis con los Presidentes, sus propios seguidores, son golpeados y humillados en Sucre por la ultra derecha, que domina las calles y asalta con impunidad las bases de Morales y no le permiten inaugurar una feria.

Morales, frente al terrorismo de la derecha canceló una reunión, fíjate qué cobarde. Hizo lo que ningún Presidente en toda la historia de América Latina, cuando el fascismo está asaltando y poniendo literalmente a sus seguidores de rodillas en la vía pública, Evo Morales retira las tropas.

Es decir, un Presidente que no puede pulverizar a un puñado de fascistas humillando a campesinos indígenas ¿está preparando la unidad de América Latina? Eso es una broma de mal gusto.

Yo creo que lo mismo está pasando en Brasil, hay dos Brasil: El Brasil de los agro exportadores y el Brasil de los Sin Tierra, totalmente marginados de las enormes ganancias. Ahí, Colombia no quiere integrarse porque está entregada totalmente al imperio norteamericano. Estos casos que citamos son cosas muy graves.

Entonces, antes de hablar de unificar a América Latina deben surgir algunos gobiernos capaces de unificar los países, de integrar las grandes masas y la política de América Latina, borrar del mapa a los fascistas -como los de Bolivia, o la derecha que va a avanzando con 300.000 personas en la calle en Rosario, ayer- y crear la base para la unificación sólida, sobre una base de programa popular.

Chury: Llama la atención lo de Evo y pregunto: ¿por qué Evo tiene tanto apoyo de Chávez?

Petras: Porque es como Cuba y otros países, está tratando de evitar el aislamiento. Yo creo que más que un programa político es una causa diplomática.

Chávez necesita aliados en América Latina, para evitar la ofensiva y la agresión norteamericana, donde Estados Unidos tiene ya como aliados a la mayoría de los países de Centroamérica, tiene a Colombia en la frontera, tiene a Calderón en México y tiene a Alan García en Perú. Entonces, en esta pugna por evitar el cerco norteamericano, Chávez ha tomado posiciones más favorables de lo que merecen los gobiernos de Lula, de Evo Morales, etc.

Chury: Estamos en el final, te agradecemos muchísimo el esclarecimiento.

Petras: Bueno, antes de despedirme dime cómo ha repercutido en Uruguay la muerte de Marulanda. Sobre todo teniendo en cuenta que el hecho de que Marulanda murió en los brazos de su compañera y camarada, es otro hecho positivo al final de su vida, en el que niega otra vez la victoria de la derecha. Yo creo que eso es impresionante también. Después de 70 años de tratar de matarlo terminan derrotados otra vez, porque muere con su gente.

¿Qué piensa en Uruguay? entre la gente de izquierda, progresista, lo que sea en Uruguay?

Sandra Barón: Justamente cuando escuché que le preguntabas a Chury sobre las repercusiones aquí en Uruguay te quería comentar que aquí se reunió este fin de semana el Foro de San Pablo y el sábado cuando la muerte de Marulanda era simplemente un rumor, en el Foro de San Pablo -donde supuestamente se reúnen las organizaciones "de izquierda"- se criticaba la lucha armada. Es más, cualquiera pensaría que en otro momento hubiera explotado allí un homenaje, un recuerdo, o haber hablado de la historia de este líder indiscutible, de este guerrillero latinoamericano, el más antiguo del mundo; y sin embargo, eso no sucedió.

Sucedieron cosas como que Daniel Ortega que vino y entregó condecoraciones a Mujica [ex-lider tupamaro, ministro de agricultura], al hijo de Raúl Sendic [que traicionó los ideales de su padre], a todos los que tu conoces y están en el gobierno en este momento.

Y fue un poco esto, incluso César Gaviria, el colombiano, líder del Polo Democrático, criticó también la guerrilla, la lucha armada en Colombia. Así estuvieron las cosas aquí en Uruguay, esto explica un poco -no sé si tu alguna vez participaste de alguno de estos Foros en sus inicios- pero es en lo que se ha transformado hoy el Foro de San Pablo.

Petras: Por eso el Foro de San Pablo ha dejado de recibir atención de los pueblos. Frente al ejemplo consecuente de Marulanda ¿qué podemos decir de los oportunistas? Con sus lujosos departamentos, sentados en parlamentos imponentes, que cuando Bush habla contra los guerrilleros ellos se están haciendo caca en los pantalones por miedo a contradecirlo. Por eso huelen mal los parlamentarios de centro izquierda.

Extractado por La Haine

Why Vincent Bugliosi Wants to Prosecute George W. Bush for Murder

"Bush Has Gotten Away with Thousands of Murders"

Why Vincent Bugliosi Wants to Prosecute George W. Bush for Murder

By CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER

Former California prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi wants President Bush charged with murder.

Bugliosi – who in the early 1970s successfully prosecuted Charles Manson for the murder of Sharon Tate and six others – lays out his case against Bush in The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder(Perseus Books, 2008).

The book will hit book stores next week – Tuesday May 27, 2008.

"My motivation for writing this book is simple – to bring about justice," Bugliosi says in a video posted on the book's web site (prosecutionofbush.com).

"George Bush has gotten away with murder – thousands of murders," Bugliosi says. "And no one is doing anything about it. The American people can't let him do this."

Bugliosi wants one or more of the fifty state attorneys general or one of the nation's hundreds of district attorneys to step up and prosecute Bush for murder.

"I have set forth in my book the jurisdictional basis for the Attorney General in each of the fifty states – plus the hundreds upon hundreds of district attorneys in counties within the states – to prosecute George Bush for the murders of any soldier or soldiers from their state or county who were killed in Iraq fighting George Bush's war," Bugliosi says in the video on his web site.

"I don't think it is too unreasonable to believe that at least one prosecutor out there in America – maybe many more – will be courageous enough to say – this is the United States of America. And in America no one is above the law. George Bush has gotten away with murder. No one is doing anything about it. And maybe this book will change that."

Bugliosi argues that Bush misled the nation into a war that has killed more than 4,000 Americans.

At the center of Bugliosi's indictment of Bush is a October 7, 2002 speech to the nation in which Bush claims that Saddam Hussein was a great danger to this nation either by attacking us with his weapons of mass destruction, or giving these weapons to some terrorist group.

"And he said – the attack could happen on any given day – meaning the threat was imminent," Bugliosi says.

"The only problem for George Bush – and if he were prosecuted, there is no way he could get around this – is that on October 1, 2002, six days earlier, the CIA sent George Bush its 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, a classified top secret report. Page eight clearly and unequivocally says that Saddam Hussein was not an imminent threat to the security of this country. In fact, the report says that Hussein would only use whatever weapons of mass destruction he had against us if he feared that America was about to attack him."

"We know that Bush was telling millions upon millions of unsuspecting Americans exactly the opposite of what his own CIA was telling him," Bugliosi said. "We know that George Bush took this nation to war on a lie. Who is going to pay for all of this? Someone has to pay. And the person who has to pay obviously is directly responsible for all of the death horror and suffering. And that person is George W. Bush."

"The majority of the American people probably are going to find it difficult to accept that the President of the United States, the most powerful man on earth, would engage in conduct that smacks of such great criminality. You just don't expect something like this from an American president. However, I'm very confident that once they read the book, they will be overwhelmed by the evidence against Bush. They will be convinced that he is guilty of murder and should be prosecuted. In the book, I lay out the legal architecture for the case against Bush, all of the evidence of the guilt against Bush and the jurisdiction to prosecute him. I even set forth proposed cross-examination questions of him if he takes the witness stand at trial."

As a state prosecutor in Los Angeles, Bugliosi prosecuted Charles Manson and members of his "family" for the 1969 murders of Sharon Tate and six others.

Bugliosi says he lost only one of the 106 felony cases he tried as a prosecutor. He says he won 21 out of 21 murder cases.

He is the author of Helter Skelter – the best-selling book on the Manson trial.

Corporate Crime Reporter is published in Washington, D.C.

Provocations as Pretexts for Imperial War: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11 by James Petras

Wars in an imperialist democracy cannot simply be dictated by executive fiat, they require the consent of highly motivated masses who will make the human and material sacrifices.
. - 25.05.08

Imperialist leaders have to create a visible and highly charged emotional sense of injustice and righteousness to secure national cohesion and overcome the natural opposition to early death, destruction and disruption of civilian life and to the brutal regimentation that goes with submission to absolutist rule by the military.

The need to invent a cause is especially the case with imperialist countries because their national territory is not under threat. There is no visible occupation army oppressing the mass of the people in their everyday life. The 'enemy' does not disrupt everyday normal life – as forced conscription would and does. Under normal peaceful time, who would be willing to sacrifice their constitutional rights and their participation in civil society to subject themselves to martial rule that precludes the exercise of all their civil freedoms?

The task of imperial rulers is to fabricate a world in which the enemy to be attacked (an emerging imperial power like Japan) is portrayed as an 'invader' or an 'aggressor' in the case of revolutionary movements (Korean and Indo-Chinese communists) engaged in a civil war against an imperial client ruler or a 'terrorist conspiracy' linked to an anti-imperialist, anti-colonial Islamic movements and secular states. Imperialist-democracies in the past did not need to consult or secure mass support for their expansionist wars; they relied on volunteer armies, mercenaries and colonial subjects led and directed by colonial officers. Only with the confluence of imperialism, electoral politics and total war did the need arise to secure not only consent, but also enthusiasm, to facilitate mass recruitment and obligatory conscription.

Since all US imperial wars are fought 'overseas' – far from any immediate threats, attacks or invasions - -US imperial rulers have the special task of making the 'causus bellicus' immediate, 'dramatic' and self-righteously 'defensive'.

To this end US Presidents have created circumstances, fabricated incidents and acted in complicity with their enemies, to incite the bellicose temperament of the masses in favor of war.

The pretext for wars are acts of provocation which set in motion a series of counter-moves by the enemy, which are then used to justify an imperial mass military mobilization leading to and legitimizing war.

State 'provocations' require uniform mass media complicity in the lead-up to open warfare: Namely the portrayal of the imperial country as a victim of its own over-trusting innocence and good intentions. All four major US imperial wars over the past 67 years resorted to a provocation, a pretext, and systematic, high intensity mass media propaganda to mobilize the masses for war. An army of academics, journalists, mass media pundits and experts 'soften up' the public in preparation for war through demonological writing and commentary: Each and every aspect of the forthcoming military target is described as totally evil – hence 'totalitarian' - in which even the most benign policy is linked to demonic ends of the regime.

Since the 'enemy to be' lacks any saving graces and worst, since the 'totalitarian state' controls everything and everybody, no process of internal reform or change is possible. Hence the defeat of 'total evil' can only take place through 'total war'. The targeted state and people must be destroyed in order to be redeemed. In a word, the imperial democracy must regiment and convert itself into a military juggernaut based on mass complicity with imperial war crimes. The war against 'totalitarianism' becomes the vehicle for total state control for an imperial war.

In the case of the US-Japanese war, the US-Korean war, the US-Indochinese war and the post-September 11 war against an independent secular nationalist regime (Iraq) and the Islamic Afghan republic, the Executive branch (with the uniform support of the mass media and congress) provoked a hostile response from its target and fabricated a pretext as a basis for mass mobilization for prolonged and bloody wars.

US-Japan War: Provocation and Pretext for War

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt set high standards for provoking and creating a pretext for undermining majoritarian anti-war sentiment, unifying and mobilizing the country for war. Robert Stinnett, in his brilliantly documented study, Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, demonstrates that Roosevelt provoked the war with Japan by deliberately following an eight-step program of harassment and embargo against Japan developed by Lt. Commander Arthur H. McCollum, head of the Far East desk of the Office of Naval Intelligence. He provides systematic documentation of US cables tracking the Japanese fleet to Pearl Harbor, clearly demonstrating that FDR knew in advance of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor following the Japanese fleet virtually every step of the way. Even more damaging, Stinnett reveals that Admiral H.E. Kimmel, in charge of the defense of Pearl Harbor, was systematically excluded from receiving critical intelligence reports on the approaching movements of the Japanese fleet, thus preventing the defense of the US base. The 'sneak' attack by the Japanese, which caused the death over three thousand American service men and the destruction of scores of ships and planes, successfully 'provoked' the war FDR had wanted. In the run-up to the Japanese attack, President Roosevelt ordered the implementation of Naval Intelligence's October 1940 memorandum, authored by McCollum, for eight specific measures, which amounted to acts of war including an economic embargo of Japan, the shipment of arms to Japan's adversaries, the prevention of Tokyo from securing strategic raw materials essential for its economy and the denial of port access, thus provoking a military confrontation. To overcome massive US opposition to war, Roosevelt needed a dramatic, destructive immoral act committed by Japan against a clearly 'defensive' US base to turn the pacifist US public into a cohesive, outraged, righteous war machine. Hence the Presidential decision to undermine the defense of Pearl Harbor by denying the Navy Commander in charge of its defense, Admiral Kimmel, essential intelligence about anticipated December 7, 1941 attack. The United States 'paid the price' with 2,923 Americans killed and 879 wounded, Admiral Kimmel was blamed and stood trial for dereliction of duty, but FDR got his war. The successful outcome of FDR's strategy led to a half-century of US imperial supremacy in the Asia-Pacific region. An unanticipated outcome, however, was the US and Japanese imperial defeats on the Chinese mainland and in North Korea by the victorious communist armies of national liberation.

Provocation and Pretext for the US War Against Korea

The incomplete conquest of Asia following the US defeat of Japanese imperialism, particularly the revolutionary upheavals in China, Korea and Indochina, posed a strategic challenge to US empire builders. Their massive financial and military aid to their Chinese clients failed to stem the victory of the anti-imperialist Red Armies. President Truman faced a profound dilemma – how to consolidate US imperial supremacy in the Pacific at a time of growing nationalist and communist upheavals when the vast majority of the war wearied soldiers and civilians were demanding demobilization and a return to civilian life and economy. Like Roosevelt in 1941, Truman needed to provoke a confrontation, one that could be dramatized as an offensive attack on the US (and its 'allies') and could serve as a pretext to overcome widespread opposition to another imperial war.

Truman and the Pacific military command led by General Douglas Mac Arthur chose the Korean peninsula as the site for detonating the war. Throughout the Japanese-Korean war, the Red guerrilla forces led the national liberation struggle against the Japanese Army and its Korean collaborators. Subsequent to the defeat of Japan, the national revolt developed into a social revolutionary struggle against Korean elite collaborators with the Japanese occupiers. As Bruce Cumings documents in his classic study, The Origins of the Korean War , the internal civil war preceded and defined the conflict prior to and after the US occupation and division of Korea into a 'North' and 'South'. The political advance of the mass national movement led by the anti-imperialist communists and the discredit of the US-backed Korean collaborators undermined Truman's efforts to arbitrarily divide the country 'geographically'. In the midst of this class-based civil war, Truman and Mac Arthur created a provocation: They intervened, establishing a US occupation army and military bases and arming the counter-revolutionary former Japanese collaborators. The US hostile presence in a 'sea' of anti-imperialist armies and civilian social movements inevitably led to the escalation of social conflict, in which the US-backed Korean clients were losing. As the Red Armies rapidly advanced from their strongholds in the north and joined with the mass revolutionary social movements in the South they encountered fierce repression and massacres of anti-imperialist civilians, workers and peasants, by the US armed collaborators. Facing defeat Truman declared that the civil war was really an 'invasion' by (north) Koreans against (south) Korea. Truman, like Roosevelt, was willing to sacrifice the US troops by putting them in the direct fire of the revolutionary armies in order to militarize and mobilize the US public in defense of imperial outposts in the southern Korean peninsula.

In the run-up to the US invasion of Korea, Truman, the US Congress and the mass media engaged in a massive propaganda campaign and purge of peace and anti-militarist organizations throughout US civil society. Tens of thousands of individuals lost their jobs, hundreds were jailed and hundreds of thousands were blacklisted. Trade unions and civic organizations were taken over by pro-war, pro-empire collaborators. Propaganda and purges facilitated the propagation of the danger of a new world war, in which democracy was threatened by expanding Communist totalitarianism. In reality, democracy was eroded to prepare for an imperial war to prop up a client regime and secure a military beachhead on the Asian continent.

The US invasion of Korea to prop up its tyrannical client was presented as a response to 'North' Korea invading 'South' Korea and threatening 'our' soldiers defending democracy. The heavy losses incurred by retreating US troops belied the claim of President Truman that the imperial war was merely a police action. By the end of the first year of the imperial war, public opinion turned against the war. Truman was seen as a deceptive warmonger. In 1952, the electorate elected Dwight Eisenhower on his promise to end the war. An armistice was agreed to in 1953. Truman's use of military provocation to detonate a conflict with the advancing Korean revolutionary armies and then using the pretext of US forces in danger to launch a war did not succeed in securing a complete victory: The war ended in a divided Korean nation. Truman left office disgraced and derided, and the US public turned anti-war for another decade.

The US Indochinese War: Johnson's Tonkin Pretext

The US invasion and war against Vietnam was a prolonged process, beginning in 1954 and continuing to the final defeat in 1975. From 1954 to 1960 the US sent military combat advisers to train the army of the corrupt, unpopular and failed collaborator regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem. With the election of President Kennedy, Washington escalated the number of military advisers, commandos (so called 'Green Berets') and the use of death squads (Plan Phoenix). Despite the intensification of the US involvement and its extensive role in directing military operations, Washington's surrogate 'South Vietnam' Army (ARNV) was losing the war to the South Vietnamese National Liberation Army (Viet Cong) and the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF), which clearly had the support of the overwhelming majority of the Vietnamese people.

Following the assassination of President Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson took over the Presidency and faced the imminent collapse of the US puppet regime and the defeat of its surrogate Vietnamese Army.

The US had two strategic objectives in launching the Vietnam Was: The first involved establishing a ring of client regimes and military bases from Korea, Japan, Philippines, Taiwan, Indochina, Pakistan, Northern Burma (via the KMT opium lords and Shan secessionists) and Tibet to encircle China, engage in cross border 'commando' attacks by surrogate military forces and block China's access to its natural markets. The second strategic objective in the US invasion and occupation of Vietnam was part of its general program to destroy powerful national liberation and anti-imperialists movements in Southeast Asia, particularly in Indochina, Indonesia, the Philippines. The purpose was to consolidate client regimes, which would provide military bases, de-nationalize and privatize their raw materials sectors and provide political and military support to US empire building. The conquest of Indochina was an essential part of US empire-building in Asia. Washington calculated that by defeating the strongest Southeast Asian anti-imperialist movement and country, neighboring countries (especially Laos and Cambodia) would fall easily.

Washington faced multiple problems. In the first place, given the collapse of the surrogate 'South Vietnam' regime and army, Washington would need to massively escalate its military presence, in effect substituting its ground forces for the failed puppet forces and extend and intensify its bombing throughout North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. In a word convert a limited covert war into a massive publicly declared war.

The second problem was the reticence of significant sectors of the US public, especially college students (and their middle and working class parents) facing conscription, who opposed the war. The scale and scope of military commitment envisioned as necessary to win the imperial war required a pretext, a justification.

The pretext had to be such as to present the US invading armies as responding to a sneak attack by an aggressor country (North Vietnam). President Johnson, the Secretary of Defense, the US Naval and Air Force Command, the National Security Agency, acted in concert. What was referred to as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident involved a fabricated account of a pair of attacks, on August 2 and 4, 1964 off the coast of North Vietnam by naval forces of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam against two US destroyers the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy. Using, as a pretext, the fabricated account of the 'attacks', the US Congress almost unanimously passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on August 7, 1964, which granted President Johnson full power to expand the invasion and occupation of Vietnam up to and beyond 500,000 US ground troops by 1966. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorized President Johnson to conduct military operations throughout Southeast Asia without a declaration of war and gave him the freedom 'to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of freedom.'

On August 5, 1964 Lyndon Johnson went on national television and radio announcing the launching of massive waves of 'retaliatory' bombing of North Vietnamese naval facilities (Operation Pierce Arrow). In 2005, official documents released from the Pentagon, the National Security Agency and other government departments have revealed that there was no Vietnamese attack. On the contrary, according to the US Naval Institute, a program of covert CIA attacks against North Vietnam had begun in 1961 and was taken over by the Pentagon in 1964. These maritime attacks on the North Vietnamese coast by ultra-fast Norwegian-made patrol boats (purchased by the US for the South Vietnamese puppet navy and under direct US naval coordination) were an integral part of the operation. Secretary of Defense McNamara admitted to Congress that US ships were involved in attacks on the North Vietnamese coast prior to the so-called Gulf of Tonkin Incident. So much for Johnson's claim of an 'unprovoked attack'. The key lie, however, was the claim that the USS Maddox 'retaliated' against an 'attacking' Vietnamese patrol boat. The Vietnamese patrol boats, according to NSA accounts released in 2005, were not even in the vicinity of the Maddox – they were at least 10,000 yards away and three rounds were first fired at them by the Maddox which then falsely claimed it subsequently suffered some damage from a single 14.5 mm machine gun bullet to its hull. The August 4 'Vietnamese attack' never happened. Captain John Herrick of the Turner Joy cabled that 'many reported contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful…No actual visual sightings (of North Vietnamese naval boats) by Maddox".

The consequences of the fabrication of the Tonkin Gulf incident and provocation was to justify an escalation of war that killed 4 million people in Indochina, maimed, displaced and injured millions more, in addition to killing 58,000 US service men and wounding a half-million more in this failed effort in military-driven empire-building. Elsewhere in Asia, the US empire builders consolidated their client collaborative rule: In Indonesia, which had one of the largest open Communist Party in the world, a CIA designed military coup, backed by Johnson in 1966 and led by General Suharto, murdered over one million trade unionists, peasants, progressive intellectuals, school teachers and 'communists' (and their family members).

What is striking about the US declaration of war in Vietnam is that the latter did not respond to the US-directed maritime provocations that served as a pretext for war. As a result Washington had to fabricate a Vietnamese response and then use it as the pretext for war.

The idea of fabricating military threats (the Gulf of Tonkin Incident) and then using them as pretext for the US-Vietnam war was repeated in the case of the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact Bush Administration policy makers, who launched the Afghan and Iraq wars, tried to prevent the publication of a report by the top Navy commander in which he recounted how the NSA distorted the intelligence reports regarding the Tonkin incident to serve the Johnson Administration's ardent desire for a pretext to war.
Provocation and Pretext: 9/11 and the Afghan-Iraq Invasions

In 2001, the vast majority of the US public was concerned over domestic matters – the downturn in the economy, corporate corruption (Enron, World Com etc..), the bursting of the 'dot-com' bubble and avoiding any new military confrontation in the Middle East. There was no sense that the US had any interest in going to war for Israel, nor launching a new war against Iraq, especially an Iraq, which had been defeated and humiliated a decade earlier and was subject to brutal economic sanctions. The US oil companies were negotiating new agreements with the Gulf States and looked forward to, with some hope, a stable, peaceful Middle East, marred by Israel's savaging the Palestinians and threatening its adversaries. In the Presidential election of 2000, George W, Bush was elected despite losing the popular vote – in large part because of electoral chicanery (with the complicity of the Supreme Court) denying the vote to blacks in Florida. Bush's bellicose rhetoric and emphasis on 'national security' resonated mainly with his Zionist advisers and the pro-Israeli lobby – otherwise, for the majority of Americans, it fell on deaf ears. The gap between the Middle East War plans of his principle Zionist appointees in the Pentagon, the Vice President's office and the National Security Council and the general US public's concern with domestic issues was striking. No amount of Zionist authored position papers, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim rhetoric and theatrics, emanating from Israel and its US based spokespeople, were making any significant impact on the US public. There was widespread disbelief that there was an imminent threat to US security through a catastrophic terrorist attack –which is defined as an attack using chemical, biological or nuclear weapons of mass destruction. The US public believed that Israel's Middle East wars and their unconditional US lobbyists promotion for direct US involvement were not part of their lives nor in the country's interest.

The key challenge for the militarists in the Bush Administration was how to bring the US public around to support the new Middle East war agenda, in the absence of any visible, credible and immediate threat from any sovereign Middle Eastern country.

The Zionists were well placed in all the key government positions to launch a worldwide offensive war. They had clear ideas of the countries to target (Middle East adversaries of Israel). They had defined the ideology ("the war on terror", "preventive defense"). They projected a sequence of wars. They linked their Middle East war strategy to a global military offensive against all governments, movements and leaders who opposed US military-driven empire building. What they needed was to coordinate the elite into actually facilitating a 'catastrophic terrorist incident' that could trigger the implementation of their publicly stated and defended new world war.

The key to the success of the operation was to encourage terrorists and to facilitate calculated and systematic 'neglect' – to deliberately marginalize intelligence agents and agency reports that identified the terrorists, their plans and methods. In the subsequent investigatory hearings, it was necessary to foster the image of 'neglect', bureaucratic ineptness and security failures in order to cover up Administration complicity in the terrorists' success. An absolutely essential element in mobilizing massive and unquestioning support for the launching of a world war of conquest and destruction centered in Muslim and Arab countries and people was a 'catastrophic event' that could be linked to the latter.

After the initial shock of 9/11 and the mass media propaganda blitz saturating every household, questions began to be raised by critics about the run-up to the event, especially when reports began to circulate from domestic and overseas intelligence agencies that US policy makers were clearly informed of preparations for a terrorist attack. After many months of sustained public pressure, President Bush finally named an investigatory commission on 9/11, headed by former politicians and government officials. Philip Zelikow, an academic and former government official and prominent advocate of 'preventative defense' (the offensive war policies promoted by the Zionist militants in the government) was named executive director to conduct and write the official '9-11 Commission Report'. Zelikow was privy to the need for a pretext, like 9/11, for launching the permanent global warfare, which he had advocated. With a prescience, which could only come from an insider to the fabrication leading to war, he had written: "Like Pearl Harbor, this event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States (sic) might respond with draconian measures, scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects and use of deadly force (torture)", (see Catastrophic Terrorism – Tackling the New Dangers , co-authored by Philip Zelikow and published by Foreign Affairs in 1998).

Zelikow directed the commission report, which exonerated the administration of any knowledge and complicity in 9/11, but convinced few Americans outside of the mass media and Congress. Polls conducted in the summer of 2003 on the findings of the Commission proceedings and its conclusions found that a majority of the American public expressed a high level of distrust and rejection – especially among New Yorkers. The general public suspected Government complicity, especially when it was revealed that Zelikow conferred with key figures under investigation, Vice President Cheney and Presidential 'Guru' Karl Rove. In response to skeptical citizens, Zelikow went on an insane rage, calling the sceptics 'pathogens' or germs whose 'infection' needed to be contained. With language reminiscent of a Hitlerian Social Darwinist diatribe, he referred to criticisms of the Commission cover up as 'a bacteria (that) can sicken the larger body (of public opinion)'. Clearly Zelikow's pseudoscientific rant reflects the fear and loathing he feels for those who implicated him with a militarist regime, which fabricated a pretext for a catastrophic war for Zelikow's favorite state – Israel.

Throughout the 1990's the US and Israeli military-driven empire building took on an added virulence: Israel dispossessed Palestinians and extended its colonial settlements. Bush, Senior invaded Iraq and systematically destroyed Iraqi's military and civil economic infrastructure and fomented an ethnically cleansed Kurdish client state in the north. Like his predecessor Ronald Reagan, President George H.W. Bush, Senior backed anti-communist Islamic irregulars in their conquest of Afghanistan via their 'holy wars' against a leftist secular nationalist regime.. At the same time Bush, Senior attempted to 'balance' military empire building with expanding the US economic empire, by not occupying Iraq and unsuccessfully trying to restrain Israeli colonial settlements in the West Bank.

With the rise of Clinton, all restraints on military-driven empire building were thrown over: Clinton provoked a major Balkan war, viciously bombing and dismembering Yugoslavia, periodically bombing Iraq and extending and expanding US military bases in the Gulf States. He bombed the largest pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, invaded Somalia and intensified a criminal economic boycott of Iraq leading to the death of an estimated 500,000 children. Within the Clinton regime, several liberal pro-Israel Zionists joined the military-driven empire builders in the key policy making positions. Israeli military expansion and repression reached new heights as US-financed colonial Jewish settlers and heavily armed Israeli military forces slaughtered unarmed Palestinian teenagers protesting the Israeli presence in the Occupied Territories during the First Intifada. In other words, Washington extended its military penetration and occupation deeper into Arab countries and societies, discrediting and weakening the hold of its client puppet regimes over their people.

The US ended military support for the armed Islamic anti-communists in Afghanistan once they had served US policy goals by destroying the Soviet backed secular regime (slaughtering thousands of school teachers in the process). As a consequence of US-financing, there was a vast, loose network of well-trained Islamic fighters available for combat against other target regimes. Many were flown by the Clinton regime into Bosnia where Islamic fighters fought a surrogate separatist war against the secular and socialist central government of Yugoslavia. Others were funded to destabilize Iran and Iraq. They were seen in Washington as shock troops for future US military conquests. Nevertheless Clinton's imperial coalition of Israeli colonialists, armed Islamic mercenary fighters, Kurdish and Chechen separatists broke up as Washington and Israel advanced toward war and conquest of Arab and Muslim states and the US spread its military presence in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Gulf States.

Military-driven empire building against existing nation-states was not an easy sell to the US public or to the market-driven empire builders of Western Europe and Japan and the newly emerging market-driven empire builders of China and Russia. Washington needed to create conditions for a major provocation, which would overcome or weaken the resistance and opposition of rival economic empire builders. More particularly, Washington needed a 'catastrophic event' to 'turn around' domestic public opinion, which had opposed the first Gulf War and subsequently supported the rapid withdrawal of US troops from Iraq in 1990.

The events, which took place on September 11, 2001, served the purpose of American and Israeli military-driven empire builders. The destruction of the World Trade Center buildings and the deaths of nearly 3,000 civilians, served as a pretext for a series of colonial wars, colonial occupations, and global terrorist activities, and secured the unanimous support of the US Congress and triggered an intense global mass media propaganda campaign for war.
The Politics of Military Provocations

Ten years of starving 23 million Iraqi Arabs under the Clinton regime's economic boycott, interspersed with intense bombing was a major provocation to Arab communities and citizens around the world. Supporting Israel's systematic dispossession of Palestinians from their lands, interspersed with encroachment on the Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem was a major provocation, which detonated scores of suicide bomb attacks in retaliation. The construction and operation of US military bases in Saudi Arabia, home of the Islamic holy city of Mecca, was a provocation to millions of believers and practicing Muslims. The US and Israeli attack and occupation of southern Lebanon and the killing of 17,000 Lebanese and Palestinians were a provocation to Arabs.

Ruled by pusillanimous Arab regimes, servile to US interests, impotent to respond toward Israeli brutality against Palestinians, Arabs and devout Muslim citizens were constantly pushed by the Bush and especially Clinton regime to respond to their continued provocations. Against the vast disproportion in fire-power between the advanced weaponry of the US and Israeli occupation forces (the Apache helicopter gun ships, the 5,000 pound bombs, the killer drones, the armored carriers, the cluster bombs, Napalm and missiles) the secular Arab and Islamic resistance had only light weaponry consisting of automatic rifles, rocket propelled grenades, short-range and inaccurate Katusha missiles and machine guns. The only weapon they possessed in abundance to retaliate was the suicidal 'human bombs'.

Up to 9/11, US imperial wars against Arab and Islamic populations were carried out in the targeted and occupied lands where the great mass of Arab people lived, worked and enjoyed shared lives. In other words, all (and for Israel most) of the destructive effects of their wars (the killings, home and neighborhood destruction and kinship losses) were products of US and Israeli offensive wars, seemingly immune to retaliatory action on their own territory.

September 11, 2001 was the first successful large-scale Arab-Islamic offensive attack on US territory in this prolonged, one-sided war. The precise timing of 9/11 coincides with the highly visible takeover of US Middle East war policy by extremist Zionists in the top positions of the Pentagon, the White House and National Security Council and their dominance of Congressional Middle East policies. Arab and Islamic anti-imperialists were convinced that military-driven empire builders were readying for a frontal assault on all the remaining centers of opposition to Zionism in the Middle East, i.e. Iraq, Iran, Syria, Southern Lebanon, the West Bank, Gaza, as well as in Afghanistan in South Asia and Sudan and Somalia in North-East Africa.

This offensive war scenario had been already spelled out by the American Zionist policy elite headed by Richard Pearl for the Israeli Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies in a policy document, entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. This was prepared in 1996 for far-right Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu prior to his taking office.

On September 28, 2000, despite the warnings of many observers, the infamous author of the massacre of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, General Ariel Sharon profaned the Al Aqsa Mosque with his huge military entourage – a deliberate religious provocation that guaranteed Sharon's election as Prime Minister from the far right Likud Party. This led to the Second Intifada and the savage response of the Israelis. Washington's total support of Sharon merely reinforced the worldwide belief among Arabs that the 'Zionist Solution' of massive ethnic purges was on Washington's agenda.

The pivotal group linking US military-driven empire builders with their counterparts in Israel was the major influential Zionist public policy group promoting what they dubbed the 'Project for a New American Century" (PNAC). In 1998 they set out a detailed military-driven road map to US world domination (the so-called 'Project for a New American Century'), which just happened to focus on the Middle East and just happened to coincide exactly with Tel Aviv's vision of a US-Israel dominated Middle East. In 2000 the PNAC Zionist ideologues published a strategy paper 'Rebuilding America's Defenses', which laid down the exact guidelines which incoming Zionist policy makers in the top spheres of the Pentagon and White House would follow. PNAC directives included establishing forward military bases in the Middle East, increasing military spending from 3% to 4% of GNP, a military attack to overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and military confrontation with Iran using the pretext of the threats of 'weapons of mass destruction'.

The PNAC agenda could not advance without a catastrophic 'Pearl Harbor' type of event, as US military-driven empire builders, Israelis and US Zionist policy makers recognized early on. The deliberate refusal by the White House and its subordinate 16 intelligence agencies and the Justice Department to follow up precise reports of terrorist entry, training, financing and action plans was a case of deliberate 'negligence': The purpose was to allow the attack to take place and then to immediately launch the biggest wave of military invasions and state terrorist activities since the end of the Indochina War.

Israel, which had identified and kept close surveillance of the terrorists, insured that the action would proceed without any interruption. During the 9/11 attacks, its agents even had the presumption to video and photograph the exploding towers, while dancing in wild celebration, anticipating Washington's move toward Israel's militarist Middle East strategy.
Military-Driven Empire Building: The Zionist Connection

Militaristic empire building preceded the rise to power of the Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC) in the George W. Bush Administration. The pursuit of it after 9/11 was a joint effort between the ZPC and long-standing US militarists, like Rumsfeld and Cheney. The provocations against Arabs and Muslims leading up to the attacks were induced by both the US and Israel. The current implementation of the militarist strategy toward Iran is another joint effort of Zionist and US militarists.

What the Zionists did provide, which the US militarists lacked, was an organized mass-based lobby with financing, propagandists and political backing for the war. The principle government ideologues, media 'experts', spokespeople, academics, speechwriters and advisers for the war were largely drawn from the ranks of US Zionism. The most prejudicial aspects of the Zionist role was in the implementation of war policy, namely the systematic destruction and dismantling of the Iraqi state. Zionist policymakers promoted the US military occupation and supported a massive US military build-up in the region for sequential wars against Iran, Syria and other adversaries of Israeli expansion.

In pursuit of military –driven empire building in accord with Israel's own version, the Zionist militarists in the US government exceeded their pre-9/11 expectations, raising military spending from 3% of GNP in 2000 to 6% in2008, growing at a rate of 13% per year during their ascendancy from 2001-2008. As a result they raised the US budget deficit to over $10 trillion dollars by 2010, double the 1997 deficit, and driving the US economy and its economic empire toward bankruptcy.

The Zionist American policy makers were blind to the dire economic consequences for US overseas economic interests because their main strategic consideration was whether US policy enhanced Israel's military dominance in the Middle East. The cost (in blood and treasure) of using the US to militarily destroy Israel's adversaries was of no concern.

To pursue the Zionist-US military-driven imperial project of a New Order in the Middle East, Washington needed to mobilize the entire population for a series of sequential wars against the anti-imperialist, anti-Israeli countries of the Middle East and beyond. To target the multitude of Israeli adversaries, American Zionists invented the notion of a 'Global War on Terrorism'. The existing climate of national and international opinion was decidedly hostile to the idea of fighting sequential wars, let alone blindly following zealous Zionist extremists. Sacrificing American lives for Israeli power and the Zionist fantasy of a US-Israeli 'Co-Prosperity Sphere' dominating the Middle East could not win public backing in the US, let alone in the rest of the world.

Top policymakers, especially the Zionist elite, nurtured the notion of a fabricated pretext – an event which would shock the US public and Congress into a fearful, irrational and bellicose mood, willing to sacrifice lives and democratic freedoms. To rally the US public behind a military-driven imperial project of invasion and occupation in the Middle East required 'another Pearl Harbor'.
The Terror Bombing: White House and Zionist Complicity

Every level of the US government was aware that Arab extremists were planning a spectacular armed attack in the United States. The FBI and the CIA had their names and addresses; the President's National Security Adviser Condeleeza Rice publicly admitted that the Executive branch knew that a terrorist hijacking would occur…only they had expected, she claimed, a 'traditional hijacking' and not the use of 'airliners as missiles'. The Attorney General John Ashcroft was acutely aware and refused to fly on commercial airliners. Scores of Israeli spies were living blocks away from some of the hijackers in Florida, informing headquarters on their movements. Overseas intelligence agencies, notably in Germany, Russia, Israel and Egypt claimed to have provided information to their US counterparts on the 'terrorist plot'. The President's office, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the FBI allowed the attackers to prepare their plans, secure funding, proceed to the airports, board the planes and carry out their attacks…all carrying US visas (mostly issued in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia – once a prominent site for processing Arabs to fight in Afghanistan) and with 'pilots' who were US-trained. As soon as the terrorists took control of the flights, the Air Force was notified of the hijacking but top leaders 'inexplicably' delayed moves to intercept the planes allowing the attackers to reach their objectives…the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The military-driven empire builders and their Zionist allies immediately seized the pretext of a single military retaliatory attack by non-state terrorists to launch a worldwide military offensive against a laundry list of sovereign nations. Within 24 hours, ultra-Zionist Senator Joseph Lieberman, in a prepared speech, called for the US to attack 'Iran, Iraq and Syria' without any proof that any of these nations, all full members of the United Nations, were behind the hijackings. President Bush declared a 'Global War on Terror' (GWOT) and launched the invasion of Afghanistan and approved a program of extraterritorial, extrajudicial assassinations, kidnappings and torture throughout the world. Clearly the Administration put into operation a war strategy, publicly advocated and prepared by Zionist ideologues long before 9/11. The President secured nearly unanimous support from Congress for the first Patriot Act, suspending fundamental democratic freedoms at home. He demanded that US client-states and allies implement their own versions of authoritarian anti-terrorist laws to persecute, prosecute and jail any and all opponents of US and Israeli empire building in the Middle East and elsewhere. In other words, September 11, 2001 became the pretext for a virulent and sustained effort to create a new world order centered on a US military-driven empire and a Middle East built around Israeli supremacy.

Provocations and Pretexts: the Israeli-US War Against Iran

The long, unending, costly and losing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan undermined international and national support for the Zionist-promoted New American Century project. US militarists and their advisers and ideologues needed to create a new pretext for the US plans to subdue the Middle East and especially to attack Iran. They turned their propaganda campaign on Iran's legal non-military nuclear energy program and fabricated evidence of Iran's direct military involvement in supporting the Iraqi resistance to US occupation. Without proof they claimed Iran had supplied the weapons, which bombed the American 'Green Zone' in Baghdad. The Israeli lobby argued that Iranian training and weapons had been instrumental in defeating the American-backed Iraqi mercenaries in the major southern city of Basra. Top Zionists in the Treasury Department have organized a worldwide economic boycott against Iran. Israel has secured the support of top Democrat and Republican Congressional leaders for a military attack on Iran. But is Iran's existence a sufficient pretext or will a 'catastrophic' incident be necessary?

Conclusion: Provocations and Imperial Wars: 'Behind every imperial war there is a Great Lie'

One of the most important political implications of our discussion of the US government's resort to provocations and deception to launch imperial wars is that the vast majority of the American people are opposed to overseas wars. Government lies at the service of military interventions are necessary to undermine the American public's preference for a foreign policy based on respect for self-determination of nations. The second implication however is that the peaceful sentiments of the majority can be quickly overturned by the political elite through deception and provocations amplified and dramatized through their constant repetition through the unified voice of the mass media. In other words, peaceful American citizens can be transformed into irrational chauvinist militarists through the 'propaganda of the deed' where executive authority disguises its own acts of imperial attacks as 'defensive' and its opponent's retaliation as unprovoked aggression against a 'peace loving' United States.

All of the executive provocations and deceptions are formulated by a Presidential elite but willingly executed by a chain of command involving anywhere from dozens to hundreds of operatives, most of whom knowingly participate in deceiving the public, but rarely ever unmask the illegal project either out of fear, loyalty or blind obedience.

The notion, put forward by upholders of the 'integrity' of the war policy, that given such a large number of participants, 'someone' would have 'leaked' the deception, the systematic provocations and the manipulation of the public, has been demonstrated to be false. At the time of the 'provocation' and the declaration of 'war' when Congress unanimously approved 'Presidential Authority' to use force, few if any writers or journalists have ever raised serious questions: Executives operating under the mantle of 'defending a peaceful country' from 'unprovoked treacherous enemies' have always secured the complicity or silence of peacetime critics who choose to bury their reservations and investigations in a time of 'threats to national security.' Few academics, writers or journalists are willing to risk their professional standing, when all the mass media editors and owners, political leaders and their own professional cohorts froth over 'standing united with our President in times of unparalleled mortal threat to the nation – as happened in 1941, 1950, 1964 and 2001.

With the exception of World War Two, each of the subsequent wars led to profound civilian political disillusion and even rejection of the fabrications that initially justified the war. Popular disenchantment with war led to a temporary rejection of militarism…until the next 'unprovoked' attack and call to arms. Even in the case of the Second World War there was massive civilian outrage against a large standing army and even large-scale military demonstrations at the end of the war, demanding the GI's return to civilian life. The demobilization occurred despite Government efforts to consolidate a new empire based on occupation of countries in Europe and Asia in the wake of Germany and Japan's defeat.

The underlying structural reality, which has driven American Presidents to fabricate pretexts for wars, is informed by a military-driven conception of empire. Why did Roosevelt not answer the Japanese imperial economic challenge by increasing the US economic capacity to compete and produce more efficiently instead of supporting a provocative boycott called by the decaying European colonial powers in Asia? Was it the case that, under capitalism, a depression-ridden, stagnant economy and idle work force could only be mobilized by the state for a military confrontation?

In the case of the US-Korean War, could not the most powerful post-World War US economy look toward exercising influence via investments with a poor, semi-agrarian, devastated, but unified, Korea, as it was able to do in Germany, Japan and elsewhere after the war?

Twenty years after spending hundreds of billions of dollars and suffering 500,000 dead and wounded to conquer Indochina, European, Asian and US capital entered Vietnam peacefully on the invitation of its government, hastening its integration into the world capitalist market via investments and trade.

It is clear that Plato's not-so 'noble lie', as practiced by America's Imperial Presidents, to deceive their citizens for 'higher purposes' has led to the use of bloody and cruel means to achieve grotesque and ignoble ends.

The repetition of fabricated pretexts to engage in imperial wars is embedded in the dual structure of the US political system, a military-driven empire and a broad-based electorate. To pursue the former it is essential to deceive the latter. Deception is facilitated by the control of mass media whose war propaganda enters every home, office and classroom with the same centrally determined message. The mass media undermine what remains of alternative information flowing from primary and secondary opinion leaders in the communities and erode personal values and ethics. While military-driven empire building has resulted in the killing of millions and the displacement of tens of millions, market-driven empire building imposes its own levy in terms of massive exploitation of labor, land and livelihoods.

As has been the case in the past, when the lies of empire wear thin, public disenchantment sets in, and the repeated cries of 'new threats' fail to mobilize opinion. As the continued loss of life and the socio-economic costs erodes the conditions of everyday life, mass media propaganda loses its effectiveness and political opportunities appear. As after WWII, Korea, Indochina and today with Iraq and Afghanistan, a window of political opportunity opens. Mass majorities demand changes in policy, perhaps in structures and certainly an end to the war. Possibilities open for public debate over the imperial system, which constantly reverts to wars and lies and provocations that justify them.
Epilogue

Our telegraphic survey of imperial policy-making refutes the conventional and commonplace notion that the decision making process leading up to war is open, public and carried out in accordance with the constitutional rules of a democracy. On the contrary, as is commonplace in many spheres of political, economic, social and cultural life, but especially in questions of war and peace, the key decisions are taken by a small Presidential elite behind closed doors, out of sight and without consultation and in violation of constitutional provisions. The process of provoking conflict in pursuit of military goals is never raised before the electorate. There are never investigations by independent investigatory committees.

The closed nature of the decision making process does not detract from the fact that these decisions were 'public' in that they were taken by elected and non-elected public officials in public institutions and directly affected the public. The problem is that the public was kept in the dark about the larger imperial interests that were at stake and the deception that would induce them to blindly submit to the decisions for war. Defenders of the political system are unwilling to confront the authoritarian procedures, the elite fabrications and the unstated imperial goals. Apologists of the military-driven empire builders resort to irrational and pejorative labeling of the critics and skeptics as 'conspiracy theorists'. For the most part, prestigious academics conform closely to the rhetoric and fabricated claims of the executors of imperial policy.

Everywhere and at all times groups, organizations and leaders meet in closed meetings, before going 'public'. A minority of policymakers or advocates meet, debate and outline procedures and devise tactics to secure decisions at the 'official' meeting. This common practice takes place when any vital decisions are to be taken whether it is at local school boards or in White House meetings. To label the account of small groups of public officials meeting and taking vital decisions in 'closed' public meetings (where agendas, procedures and decisions are made prior to formal 'open' public meetings) as 'conspiracy theorizing' is to deny the normal way in which politics operate. In a word, the 'conspiracy' labelers are either ignorant of the most elementary procedures of politics or they are conscious of their role in covering up the abuses of power of today's state terror merchants.

Professor Zelikow – Where do we go from here?

The key figure in and around the Bush Administration who actively promoted a 'new Pearl Harbor' and was at least in part responsible for the policy of complicity with the 9/11 terrorists was Philip Zelikow. Zelikow, a prominent Israel-Firster, is a government academic, whose expertise was in the nebulous area of 'catastrophic terrorism' – events which enabled US political leaders to concentrate executive powers and violate constitutional freedoms in pursuit of offensive imperial wars and in developing the 'public myth'. Philip Shenon's book, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation pinpoints Zelikow's strategic role in the Bush Administration in the lead up to 9/11, the period of 'complicit neglect', in its aftermath, the offensive global war period, and in the government's cover-up of its complicity in the terror attack.

Prior to 9/11 Zelikow provided a'blueprint' for the process of an executive seizing extreme power for global warfare. He outlined a sequence in which a 'catastrophic terrorist event' could facilitate the absolute concentration of power, followed by the launching of offensive wars for Israel (as he publicly admitted). In the run-up to 9/11 and the multiple wars, he served as a member of National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice's National Security Council transition team (2000-2001), which had intimate knowledge of terrorist plans to seize US commercial flights, as Rice herself publicly admitted ('conventional hijackings' was her term). Zelikow was instrumental in demoting and disabling the counter-terrorism expert Richard Clark from the National Security Council, the one agency tracking the terrorist operation. Between 2001-2003, Zelikow was a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. This was the agency, which had failed to follow-up and failed to pursue the key intelligence reports identifying terrorist plans. Zelikow, after playing a major role in undermining intelligence efforts to prevent the terrorist attack, became the principle author of the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States, which prescribed Bush's policy of military invasion of Iraq and targeted Syria, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and other independent Arab and Muslim countries and political entities. Zelikow's 'National Security Strategy' paper was the most influential directive shaping the global state terrorist policies of the Bush regime. It also brought US war policies in the closest alignment with the regional military aspirations of the Israeli state since the founding of Israel. Indeed, this was why the former Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu stated at Bar Ilan University that the 9/11 attack and the US invasion of Iraq were 'good for Israel' (see Haaretz, April 16, 2008).

Finally Zelikow, as Bush's personal appointee as the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, coordinated the cover-up of the Administration policy of complicity in 9/11 with the Vice President's office. While Zelikow is not considered an academic heavyweight, his ubiquitous role in the design, execution and cover-up of the world-shattering events surrounding 9/11 and its aftermath mark him as one of the most dangerous and destructive political 'influentials' in the shaping and launching of Washington's past, present and future catastrophic wars.

Petras' forthcoming book, Zionism and US Militarism, is due from Clarity Press, Atlanta, in August 2008.

May 2008

Homage to Manuel Marulanda by James Petras

Pedro Antonio Marin, better know as Manuel Marulanda and 'Tiro Fijo (Sure Shot)', was the leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-Peoples Army (FARC-EP). He was without a doubt the greatest revolutionary peasant leader in the history of the Americas.
. 05.26.2008

Over a period of 60 years he organized peasant movements, rural communities and, when all legal democratic channels were effectively (and brutally) closed, he built the most powerful sustained guerrilla army and supporting underground militias in Latin America. The FARC at its peak between 1999-2005 numbered nearly 20,000 fighters, several hundred thousand peasant-activists, hundreds of village and urban militia units. Even today despite the regime's forced displacement of 3 million peasants resulting from scorched earth policies and scores of massacres, the FARC has between 10,000-15,000 guerrillas in its numerous 'fronts distributed throughout the country.

What make Marulanda's achievements so significant are his organizational abilities, strategic acuity and his intransigent and principled programmatic positions consisting of support of popular demands. Marulanda, more than any other guerrilla leader, had unmatched rapport with the rural poor, the landless, the subsistence cultivators and the rural refugees over three generations.

Beginning in 1964 with two-dozen peasants fleeing villages devastated by a US directed military offensive Marulanda methodically built a revolutionary guerrilla army without either foreign financial or material contributions. Marulanda, more than any other guerrilla leader, was a great rural political teacher. Marulanda's superb organizing skills were honed on the basis of his intimate ties with peasants – he grew up in a poor peasant family, lived among them cultivating and organizing, and spoke their language addressing their most basic daily needs and future hopes. Conceptually and through daily trial and error, Marulanda worked out a series of strategic political –military operations based on his brilliant understanding of the geographic and human terrain. Between 1964 to his recent death, Marulanda defeated or evaded at least seven major military offensives financed by over $7 billion dollars in US military aid, involving thousands of US 'Green Berets', Special Forces, mercenaries, over 250,000 Colombians Armed Forces and 35,000 member paramilitary death squads.

Unlike Cuba or Nicarangua, Marulanda built an organized mass base and trained a largely rural leadership; he openly declared his socialist program and never received political or material support from so-called 'progressive capitalists'. Colombia's armed forces were a formidable, highly trained and disciplined repressive apparatus, bolstered by murderous death squads, unlike Batista's and Somoza's corrupt and rapacious gangsters, who plundered and retreated under pressure. Marulanda, unlike many better-known 'poster-boy' guerrillas, was a virtual unknown among the elegant leftist editors in London, the nostalgic Parisian sixty-eighters and the New York Socialist scholars. Marulanda spent his time exclusively in 'Colombia profunda', the deep Colombia, preferring to converse and teach peasants and learn their grievances, rather than giving interviews to adventure-seeking Western journalists. Instead of writing grandiloquent 'manifestos' and striking photogenic poses, he preferred the steady, unromantic but eminently effective grass roots pedagogy of the disinherited. Marulanda traveled from virtually inaccessible valleys to mountain ranges, from jungles to plains, organizing, fighting…recruiting and training new leaders. He eschewed tripping off to 'World Forums' or following the route of international leftist tourists. He never visited a foreign capital and, it is said, never set foot in the nation's capital, Bogota. But he had a vast and profound knowledge of the demands of the Afro-Colombians of the Coast, the Indio-Colombians of the mountains and jungles, the land claims of millions of displaced peasants, the names and addresses of abusive landlords who brutalized and raped peasants and their kin.

Throughout the 1960's, 70's and 80's numerous guerrilla movements raised arms, fought with greater or lesser capacity and disappeared – killed, surrended (some even turned collaborator) or became immersed in electoral wheeling and dealing. Few in number, they fought in the name of non-existent 'peoples armies'; most were intellectuals who were more familiar with European narratives than the micro-history and popular culture and legends of the people they tried to organize. They were isolated, encircled and obliterated, perhaps leaving a well-publicized legacy of exemplary sacrifice, but changing nothing on the ground.

In contrast, Marulanda took the best punches thrown by the counter-insurgency Presidents in Bogota and Washington and returned them in spades. For every village that was razed, Marulanda recruited dozens of angry and destitute peasant fighters and patiently trained them to be cadres and commanders. More than any guerrilla army, the FARC became an army of the whole people: one-third of the commanders were women, over seventy percent were peasants although intellectuals and professionals joined and were trained by movement-led cadres. Marulanda was revered for his singularly simple life style: he shared the drenching rain under plastic canopies. He was deeply respected by millions of peasants, but he never in any way cultivated a personality cult-figure: He was too irreverent and modest, preferring to delegate important tasks to a collective leadership, with a good deal of regional autonomy and tactical flexibility. He accepted a diversity of views on tactics, even when he profoundly disagreed. In the early 1980's, many cadre and leaders decided to try the electoral route, signed a 'peace agreement' with the Colombian President, formed an electoral party – the Patriotic Union – and successfully elected numerous mayors and representatives. They even gained a substantial vote in Presidential elections. Marulanda did not publicly oppose the accord but he did not lay down his arms and 'go down from the mountains to the city'. Much better than the professionals and trade unionists who ran for office, Marulanda understood the profoundly authoritarian and brutal character of the oligarchy and its politicians. He clearly knew that Colombia's rulers would never accept any land reform just because a 'few illiterate peasants voted them out of office.' By 1987 over 5,000 members of the Patriotic Union had been slaughtered by the oligarchy's death squads, including three presidential candidates, a dozen elected congressmen and women and scores of mayors and city councilors. Those who survived fled to the jungles and rejoined the armed struggle or fled into exile.

Marulanda was a master in evading many encirclement and annihilation campaigns, especially those designed by the best and the brightest from the US Fort Bragg Special Forces counter-insurgency center and the School of the Americas. By the end of the 1990's the FARC had extended its control to over half the country and was blocking highways and attacking military bases only 40 miles from the capital. Severely weakened, the then President Pastrana finally agreed to serious peace negotiations in which the FARC demanded a de-militarized zone and an agenda that included basic structural changes in the state, economy and society.

Unlike the Central American guerrillas who traded arms for elected office, Marulanda insisted on land redistribution, dismantling of the death squads and dismissal of Colombian generals involved in massacres, a mixed economy largely based on public ownership of strategic economic sectors and large-scale funding for peasants to develop alternative crops to coca, prior to laying down arms.

In Washington President Clinton was hysterical and at first opposed the peace negotiations – especially the reform agenda as well as the open public debates and forums widely attended by Colombian civil society and organized by the FARC in the de-militarized zone. Marulanda's embrace of democratic debate, demilitarization and structural changes puts the lie to the charge by Western and Latin American social democrats and center-left academics that he was a 'militarist'. Washington probed to see if they could repeat the Central American peace process – co-opt the FARC leaders with the promise of electoral office and privilege in exchange for selling out the peasants and poor Colombians. At the same time Clinton, with bi-partisan support, pushed through a massive $2 billion dollar appropriation bill to fund the biggest and bloodiest counter-insurgency program since the war in Indochina, dubbed 'Plan Colombia'. Abruptly ending the peace process, President Pastrana rushed troops into the demilitarized zone to capture the FARC secretariat, but Marulanda and his comrades were long gone.

Between 2002 to the present the FARC alternated from offensive attacks and defensive retreats – mostly the latter since 2006. With an unprecedented degree of US financing and advanced technological support, the newly elected narco-partner and death squad organizer, President Alvaro Uribe took charge of a scorched earth policy to savage the Colombian countryside. Between his election in 2002 and re-election in 2006, over 15,000 peasants, trade unionists, human rights workers, journalists and other critics were murdered. Entire regions of the countryside were emptied – like the US Operation Phoenix in Viet Nam, farmland was poisoned by toxic herbicides. Over 250,000 armed forces and their partners in the paramilitary death squads decimated vast stretches of the Colombian countryside where the FARC exercised hegemony. Scores of US-supplied helicopter gun-ships blasted the jungles in vast search and destroy missions – (which had nothing to do with coca production or the shipment of cocaine to the United States). By destroying all popular opposition and organizations throughout the countryside and displacing millions Uribe was able to push the FARC back toward more defensible remote regions. Marulanda, as in the past, adopted a strategy of defensive tactical retreat, giving up territory in order to safeguard the guerrillas' capacity to fight another day.

Unlike other guerrilla movements, the FARC did not receive any material support form the outside: Fidel Castro publicly repudiated armed struggle and looked to diplomatic and trade ties with center-left administrations and even better relations with the brutal Uribe. After 2001, the Bush White House labeled the FARC a 'terrorist organization' putting pressure on Ecuador and Venezuela to tighten cross-border movements of the FARC in search of supply chains. The 'center-left' in Colombia was totally divided between those who gave 'critical support' to Uribe's total war against the FARC and those who ineffectively protested the repression.

It is hard to imagine any guerrilla movement surviving under conditions of massive US financed counter-insurgency, quarter million US-armed soldiers, millions displaced from its mass base and a psychopathic President allied directly to a 35,000 member chain-saw death squads. However Marulanda, cool and determined, directed the tactical retreat; the idea of negotiating a capitulation never entered his mind nor that of the FARC secretariat.

The FARC does not have contiguous frontiers with a supporting country like Vietnam had with China; nor the arms supply from a USSR, nor the international mass support of Western solidarity groups like the Sandinistas. We live in times where supporting peasant-led national liberation movements is not 'fashionable', where recognizing the genius of peasant revolutionary leaders who build and sustain authentic mass peoples armies is taboo in the pretentious, loquacious and impotent World Social Formus – which 'world' routinely excludes peasant militants and for whom 'social' means the perpetual exchange of e-mails between foundations funded by NGO.

It is in this hardly auspicious environment facing US and Colombian Presidents intent on pyrrhic victories, that we can appreciate the political genius and personal integrity of Latin America's greatest peasant revolutionary, Manuel Marulanda. His death will not generate posters or tee shirts for middle class college students, but he will live forever in the hearts and minds of millions of peasants in Colombia. He will be remembered forever as 'Tiro Fijo': the legend who was killed a dozen times and yet returned to the villages to share their simple lives. The only leader who was truly 'one of them', the one who confronted the Yankee military and mercenary machine for a half-century and was never captured or defeated.

He defied them all - those in their mansions, presidential palaces, military bases, torture chambers, and bourgeois editorial offices: He died at after 60 years of struggle of natural causes in the arms of his beloved peasant comrades.

Tiro Fijo presente!

Homenaje a Manuel Marulanda por James Petras

Rebelión

Traducido para Cubadebate, Rebelión y Tlaxcala por Manuel Talens.
Dibujo de José Mercader.



Pedro Antonio Marín Marín, más conocido como Manuel Marulanda Vélez y "Tirofijo", era el líder máximo de las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC). Fue, sin duda alguna, el campesino revolucionario más grande de la historia del continente americano. Durante sesenta años organizó movimientos campesinos y comunidades rurales y, cuando todas las vías democráticas legales se le cerraron de forma brutal, creó el ejército guerrillero más poderoso de América Latina y las milicias clandestinas que lo sustentaban. En su época de mayor apogeo, entre 1999 y 2005, las FARC contaban con casi 20.000 combatientes, varios cientos de miles de campesinos activistas y cientos de unidades de milicias comunales y urbanas. Incluso hoy, a pesar del desplazamiento forzoso de tres millones de campesinos como resultado de las políticas de tierra quemada y las masacres del gobierno, las FARC tienen entre 10.000 y 15.000 guerrilleros en sus numerosos frentes distribuidos por todo el país.

Lo que hace tan importantes los logros de Marulanda son sus habilidades organizativas, su agudeza estratégica y sus intransigentes posiciones programáticas, basadas en el apoyo a las exigencias populares. Más que cualquier otro líder guerrillero, Marulanda, tenía una compenetración sin par con los pobres de las zonas campesinas, los sin tierra, los cultivadores indigentes y los refugiados rurales durante tres generaciones.

Tras empezar en 1964 con dos docenas de campesinos que habían huido de pueblos devastados por una ofensiva militar dirigida por USA, Marulanda construyó metódicamente un ejército guerrillero revolucionario sin contribuciones económicas o materiales extranjeras. Más que cualquier otro líder guerrillero, Marulanda fue un gran maestro político rural. Las extraordinarias dotes organizativas de Marulanda se fueron refinando a través de su íntima vinculación con el campesinado. Como había crecido en una familia de campesinos pobres, vivió entre ellos cultivando y organizándolos: hablaba su mismo lenguaje, se ocupaba de sus necesidades diarias más básicas y de sus esperanzas de futuro. De manera conceptual, pero también a través de la experiencia cotidiana, Marulanda realizó una serie de operaciones políticas y militares estratégicas basadas en su brillante conocimiento del terreno geográfico y humano. Desde 1964 hasta su muerte, Marulanda derrotó o eludió al menos siete importantes ofensivas militares financiadas con más de siete mil millones de dólares de ayuda militar usamericana, que incluía miles de "boinas verdes", cuerpos especiales, mercenarios, más de 250.000 militares colombianos y 35.000 paramilitares integrados en escuadrones de la muerte.

A diferencia de Cuba o Nicarangua, Marulanda construyó una base masiva organizada y entrenó una dirigencia en gran parte rural; declaró abiertamente su programa socialista y nunca recibió apoyo político o material de los denominados "capitalistas progresistas". A diferencia de los corruptos y codiciosos gánsteres de Batista y Somoza, que saqueaban y se retiraban bajo presión, el ejército de Colombia era un formidable aparato represor, altamente entrenado y disciplinado, reforzado además por homicidas escuadrones de la muerte. A diferencia de otros muchos famosos guerrilleros "de afiche", Marulanda fue un auténtico desconocido entre los elegantes editores izquierdistas de Londres, los nostálgicos sesentaiochistas parisinos y los socialistas eruditos de Nueva York. Marulanda pasó su tiempo exclusivamente en la "Colombia profunda"; prefería conversar y enseñar a los campesinos y enterarse de sus quejas a conceder entrevistas a periodistas occidentales ávidos de aventura. En lugar de escribir manifiestos grandilocuentes y adoptar poses fotogénicas prefería la pedagogía popular de los desheredados, estable y poco romántica pero sumamente eficaz. Marulanda viajó desde valles prácticamente inaccesibles a cordilleras, desde selvas a llanuras, siempre organizando, luchando... reclutando y entrenando a nuevos líderes. Evitó presentarse en los "foros de debate del mundo" o seguir la ruta de los turistas izquierdistas internacionales. Nunca visitó una capital extranjera y cuentan que jamás puso los pies en Bogotá, la capital de la nación. Pero tenía un amplio y profundo conocimiento de las exigencias de los afrocolombianos costeños; de los indiocolombianos de las montañas y la selva; de las ansias de tierra de millones de campesinos desplazados; de los nombres y direcciones de los terratenientes maltratadores que brutalizaban y violaban a los campesinos y a sus familiares.

Durante las décadas de los sesenta, los setenta y los ochenta, numerosos movimientos guerrilleros se levantaron en armas, lucharon con mayor o menor capacidad y, luego, desaparecieron asesinados, derrotados (algunos incluso se convirtieron en colaboradores) o se integraron en los partos y repartos electorales. Poco numerosos, luchaban en nombre de inexistentes "ejércitos populares"; la mayoría eran intelectuales, más familiarizados con los discursos europeos que con la microhistoria, la cultura popular y las leyendas de los pueblos a los que trataban de organizar. Fueron aislados, rodeados y arrasados; dejaron quizá una herencia bien publicitada de sacrificio ejemplar, pero no cambiaron nada sobre el terreno.

Por el contrario, Marulanda encajó los mejores golpes de los presidentes contrainsurgentes de Washington y Bogotá y se los devolvió al cien por cien. Por cada pueblo arrasado, Marulanda reclutó a docenas de campesinos luchadores, enfurecidos y desamparados, y los entrenó con suma paciencia para que fuesen cuadros y comandantes. Más que cualquier ejército guerrillero, las FARC llegaron a ser un ejército de todo el pueblo: un tercio de los comandantes eran mujeres, más del setenta por ciento eran campesinos, si bien se les asociaron intelectuales y profesionales, que fueron entrenados por cuadros del movimiento. Marulanda fue un hombre venerado por su estilo de vida excepcionalmente sencillo: compartió la lluvia torrencial bajo cubiertas de plástico. Millones de campesinos lo respetaban profundamente, pero nunca practicó el culto a la personalidad: era demasiado irreverente y modesto, prefería delegar las tareas importantes a una dirigencia colectiva, con mucha autonomía regional y flexibilidad táctica. Aceptó un amplio abanico de opiniones sobre tácticas, incluso si discrepaba profundamente de ellas. A principios de los ochenta, muchos cuadros y líderes decidieron probar la vía electoral, firmaron un "acuerdo de paz" con el presidente colombiano, crearon un partido –la Unión Patriótica– e hicieron elegir a numerosos alcaldes y diputados. Incluso obtuvieron cuantiosos votos en las elecciones presidenciales. Marulanda no se opuso públicamente al acuerdo, pero no abandonó las armas ni "bajó desde las montañas a la ciudad". Mucho más lúcido que los profesionales y los sindicalistas que se postulaban en las elecciones, Marulanda comprendía al carácter extremadamente autoritario y brutal de la oligarquía y sus políticos. Sabía que los gobernantes de Colombia no aceptarían nunca una reforma agraria justa sólo porque unos "pocos campesinos analfabetos los derrotasen en las urnas". En 1987, más de 5.000 miembros de la Unión Patriótica habían sido asesinados por los escuadrones de la muerte de la oligarquía, entre ellos tres candidatos a la presidencia, una docena de congresistas y mujeres y alcaldes y concejales. Los supervivientes huyeron a la selva y se reincorporaron a la lucha armada o se marcharon al exilio.

Marulanda era un maestro a la hora de romper los cercos y evitar las campañas de aniquilación, sobre todo las que diseñaron los mejores y más brillantes estrategas del centro de contrainsurgencia de los Cuerpos Especiales del US Fort Bragg y de la Escuela de las Américas. A finales de los noventa, las FARC habían ampliado su control a más de la mitad del país y bloqueaban autopistas y atacaban bases militares situadas a sólo 65 kilómetros de la capital. Muy debilitado, el entonces presidente Pastrana terminó por aceptar negociaciones serias de paz, en las que las FARC exigieron una zona desmilitarizada y un programa que incluía cambios estructurales básicos en el Estado, la economía y la sociedad.

A diferencia de las guerrillas centroamericanas, que cambiaron las armas por cargos electorales, antes de deponer las suyas Marulanda insistió en la redistribución de la tierra, en el desmantelamiento de los escuadrones de la muerte y en la destitución de los generales colombianos implicados en las masacres, en una economía mixta basada en buena medida en la nacionalización de los sectores económicos estratégicos y en la financiación a gran escala de los campesinos para el desarrollo de cosechas alternativas a la coca.

En Washington, el presidente Clinton asistía histérico a aquel espectáculo y se opuso a las negociaciones de paz, en especial al programa de reformas, así como a los debates públicos abiertos y a los foros de debate organizados por las FARC en la zona desmilitarizada, a los que asistía numerosa la sociedad civil colombiana. La aceptación por parte de Marulanda del debate democrático, la desmilitarización y los cambios estructurales desenmascara la mentira de los socialdemócratas occidentales y latinoamericanos y de los universitarios de centroizquierda, que lo acusaron de "militarista". Washington trató de repetir el proceso de paz centroamericano engatusando a los jefes de FARC con la promesa de cargos electorales y privilegios a cambio de que vendiesen a los campesinos y a los colombianos pobres. Al mismo tiempo Clinton, con el apoyo de los dos partidos del Congreso, hizo aprobar un proyecto de ley de apropiación de dos mil millones de dólares para financiar el mayor y más sangriento programa de contrainsurgencia desde la guerra de Indochina, denominado "Plan Colombia". El presidente Pastrana dio por terminado de forma abrupta el proceso de paz y envió soldados a la zona desmilitarizada para que capturasen a la cúpula de las FARC, pero cuando éstos llegaron, Marulanda y sus compañeros ya se habían ido de allí.

Desde el 2002 hasta ahora, las FARC han alternado los ataques ofensivos y las retiradas defensivas, en especial desde finales de 2006. Con una financiación sin precedentes y un apoyo tecnológico ultramoderno de USA, el nuevo presidente Álvaro Uribe –socio de narcotraficantes y organizador de escuadrones de la muerte– adoptó una política de tierra quemada para ensañarse con el campo colombiano. Entre su elección en 2002 y su reelección en 2006, más de 15.000 campesinos, sindicalistas, trabajadores de derechos humanos, periodistas y otros críticos fueron asesinados. Regiones enteras del campo fueron vaciadas: de la misma manera que en la Operación Phoenix usamericana en Vietnam, se contaminó la tierra de cultivo con herbicidas tóxicos. Más de 250.000 soldados y sus compinches paramilitares de los escuadrones de la muerte diezmaron amplias zonas del campo colombiano controladas por las FARC. Helicópteros proporcionados por Washington bombardearon la selva en misiones de búsqueda y destrucción (que no tenían nada que ver con la producción de coca o con el envío de cocaína a USA). Al destruir toda la oposición popular y las organizaciones campesinas y al desplazar a millones de colombianos, Uribe logró empujar a las FARC hacia regiones más remotas. Al igual que había hecho en el pasado, Marulanda asumió una estrategia de retirada táctica defensiva, abandonando territorio para proteger la capacidad de lucha de los guerrilleros en el futuro.

A diferencia de otros movimientos guerrilleros, las FARC no recibieron ningún apoyo material del exterior: Fidel Castro repudió públicamente la lucha armada y buscó lazos diplomáticos y comerciales con gobiernos de centroizquierda e incluso mejores relaciones con el brutal Uribe. Después de 2001, la Casa Blanca de Bush etiquetó a las FARC de "organización terrorista", presionando a Ecuador y Venezuela para que restringiesen los movimientos fronterizos de las FARC en busca de abastecimientos. El "centroderecha" de Colombia se dividió entre los que prestaban un "apoyo crítico" a la guerra total de Uribe contra las FARC y los que protestaban infructuosamente contra la represión.

Es difícil imaginar que un movimiento guerrillero pueda sobrevivir frente a una financiación tan masiva de la contrainsurgencia, un cuarto de millón de soldados armados por el imperio, millones de desplazados de sus tierras y un presidente psicópata vinculado directamente con una cadena de 35.000 miembros de escuadrones de la muerte. Sin embargo, sereno y resuelto, Marulanda dirigió la retirada táctica; la idea de negociar una capitulación nunca se le pasó por la mente, ni a él ni a la cúpula de las FARC.

Las FARC no tienen frontera contigua con un país que lo apoye, como Vietnam la tenía con China; tampoco goza, como Vietnam, del suministro de armas de la URSS ni del apoyo masivo internacional de los grupos occidentales de solidaridad, como los sadinistas. Vivimos en una época en la que apoyar a los movimientos campesinos de liberación nacional no está "de moda"; en la que reconocer que el genio de líderes campesinos revolucionarios que construyen y mantienen la auténtica masa de los ejércitos populares es tabú en los pretenciosos, locuaces e impotentes Foros Sociales Mundiales, cuyo "mundo" excluye regularmente a los campesinos militantes y para los que "social" significa el constante intercambio de mensajes electrónicos entre fundaciones financiadas por ONG.

Es en este ambiente tan poco prometedor frente a las pírricas victorias de los presidentes de USA y Colombia donde podemos apreciar el genio político y la integridad personal de Manuel Marulanda, el más grande campesino revolucionario de América Latina. Su muerte no generará afiches o camisetas para estudiantes universitarios de clase media, pero vivirá eternamente en los corazones y las mentes de millones de campesinos de Colombia. Se le recordará siempre como "Tirofijo", un ser de leyenda al que mataron una docena de veces y, a pesar de ello, regresó a los pueblos para compartir con los campesinos sus vidas sencillas. Tirofijo fue el único líder que era realmente "uno de ellos", que durante medio siglo se enfrentó al aparato militar y mercenario yanqui y nunca fue capturado o derrotado.

Los desafió a todos en sus mansiones, sus palacios presidenciales, sus bases militares, sus cámaras de tortura y sus burguesas salas de redacción. Murió de muerte natural, después de sesenta años de lucha, en los brazos de sus queridos compañeros campesinos.

¡Tirofijo, presente!



El sociólogo James Petras nació en Boston el 17 de enero de 1937, de padres griegos, originarios de la isla de Lesbos. Ha publicado más de sesenta libros de economía política y, en el terreno de la ficción, cuatro colecciones de cuentos.


El escritor y traductor español Manuel Talens es miembro de Cubadebate , Rebelión y Tlaxcala , la red de traductores por la diversidad lingüística. En mayo de 2008 ha aparecido su libro de ensayos Cuba en el corazón.

Esta traducción se puede reproducir libremente a condición de respetar su integridad y mencionar al autor, al traductor y la fuente.