Werther Memorandum: 9-11: An American Reichstag Fire?

January 11, 2004

"The State is not force alone. It depends upon the credulity of man quite as much as upon his docility. Its aim is not merely to make him obey, but also to make him want to obey." — H. L. Mencken Minority Report: H. L. Mencken's Notebooks (New York: Knopf. 1956). p. 217.

Former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill has provided a significant corrective to the naive — or disingenuous — assertion that 9/11 was a catalyzing event which wrenched the Bush administration from its alleged intention to follow a "humble" foreign policy. Instead, there is an accumulating body of evidence that 9/11 was a suspiciously useful pretext (like the Reichstag fire) rather than a bolt from the blue that "changed everything."

Mr. O'Neill's comments dovetail symmetrically with Bob Woodward's stenographic rendition of a president who regarded the September 11 attacks as an "opportunity" to reorder the world rather than as a shock that befell a peaceful and somnolent republic.

In that light, the thesis of many observers like Joan Didion that the Bush administration is motivated by sincere if badly misguided evangelical zealotry needs to be demoted to the status of political camouflage. A better explanatory model is found in the corporate histories of Krupp and IG Farben. In this dark version, Osama bin Laden, the Frankenstein monster from Langley's test tube (as the record of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan bears out) plays the role of the eternal stooge: as poor Marinus van der Lubbe, wandering about the blackened shell of the Reichstag with matches in his hand.

American history is now following a trajectory described by the corporate ambitions of Halliburton, Bechtel, Unocal. Their political patrons — or servants, who now decide our collective fate, already had the emergency decree in their pockets. How convenient.

Werther

* Werther is the pen name of a defense analyst based in Northern Virginia.