Making Enemies

Prologue
In this city, beautiful women are ghosts. They pass by quickly, instantly lost to you for the rest of time. The loneliness is easier if you end the heartbreak before it really takes hold: force the thought into a corner and suffocate the fucking thing.
Wander up the road alone, head down and fading fast. Another unconscious body caught in an ebbing tide, brutal and ugly but still alive. What the hell, this is war after all.

Long walk off a short cliff
It's hard to believe Michael Meacher can have changed all that much since he was a member of the government. He was never really one of them, one of the real players chosen by Blair to help with the righteous and urgent task of digging our collective grave.

No, a wealthy man who sued a newspaper for calling him middle-class is not really the stuff of inner-circle leadership. Someone capable of that pointless act has to be innocent of the vicious animal instincts of a politician who goes ALL the way. Instead it suggests a man dealing with abstract intellectual argument, someone who doesn’t really have a handle on the media consequences of his actions. A PR fool; a very rare thing in Westminster and Whitehall.

But Meacher was close enough to get a seat at the big table, Anthony Blair's choice for environment minister: Meacher was closer to the center than most full-time pro politicians get even in drunken dreams. He had made it.

Back then he was a well-dressed 60-something-year-old with a keen interesting most things. Graying hair, glasses, a wine-drinkers nose.
And an unusual reputation for integrity. Criticism was generally fond and not really personal in the shiv-to-the-ribs sense.

Mainly he was seen as too of intellect. Not quite amenable enough to the greasy compromises of real politics, the small betrayals that allow this place to limp, humpbacked and grimacing, through another day. He was too abstract, wanting too often the politically impractical.

Today he is the same well-dressed 60-something-year-old with a keen interest in most things. Graying hair, glasses. The same disregard for real politick.

But two things are different now. More blood vessels have burst across that nose and the skin beneath his eyes.

And politically, he is teetering on the brink of the deep pit reserved for the damned, a pack of vengeful trolls promising to pull out his heart unless he jumps right in. Stuck between two devils and a thousand deep-cold seas.

If only he had suffocated that thought, the one that led him to this shit position! Aborted the hateful thing before it grew strength, before it picked up its own momentum, question leading to question, further into the labyrinth. Stop at the entrance, for the love of God!

The sign is clear and shrieks in neon letters ‘abandon hope all passing through this cursed door’.

Meacher, fool, goes for a peek and then wanders in. Graying hair, glasses. Too of intellect. Somehow blind to how this will play in papers worldwide as it spreads as fire across those newswires.

I mean; people dived out of windows for christsakes, substituting living hell for certain death because it was faster, less painful.

I mean; hundreds of police and fire fighters ran into those collapsing buildings that fine September morning, only to come out months later after millions of tonnes of concrete and steel had finally been moved from on top of their incinerated remains.

I mean; it happened on the TV, a plane smashes into a tower of the World Trade Centre in New York. And then another one hits the second tower. Close to three thousand people murdered.

In the mainstream world there are no doubts, not really. It soon turns out the attacks were the work of terrorists bent on destroying freedom and civilisation. Such attacks on the most powerful country in the world, its only superpower, could not go unavenged. Gloves would be pulled off.

And so it came, the terrorist leaders were in Afghanistan. Afghanistan was attacked, an evil regime replaced, the world a better place for it. A blow for the forces of good against the forces of the devil, Amen.

Then another war, this time in Iraq. Bad men bound up in terrorism, part of an axis of evil, weapons of mass destruction. Mustard Gas, VX. Thousands of innocent, civilised people less than an hour from horrible lingering deaths, burned lungs, coughing blood, bodies in spasm. Ballistic missiles, insanity, real-and-present dangers. Must be dealt with before another attack is launched on the civilised world. People on our side die but the battle for freedom continues and, etc etc.

I mean; almost 3,000 people died on that day in September 2001. Each one an unwitting, innocent - and above all, American - hero who must not be defamed.

It's a simple horror story for our times, something to remind us of frail morality. Something we can all be scared of. A daily dose of fear and a simple equation even a fool can understand; no room for gray. With good and against evil, with us or against us. Friend or foe.

But not everyone accepted this; the free thinkers, the conspiracy theorists, those who sometimes get bored with paddling in the shallows and go for a plunge in the dark depths.

People started asking questions about things which don't seem to add up: about how three hijacked planes can go missing for so long in US airspace, the most protected airspace in the world; about how unarmed, incompetent amateur pilots can fly these planes into a major landmark and the Pentagon, heart of the US defence establishment; about how US intelligence services knew something like this was possible but utterly failed to do anything to stop it.

And there are more, smaller, technical arguments about US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld talking of a missile, not a plane, hitting the Pentagon, about plane timetables and CCTV footage, about a dead ‘terrorist’ pilot being alive and well and working on an airline in the Middle East, about intact passports being quickly found at the scene of all that utter devastation.

Most of this stuff was reported in the media; the same mainstream media derided by so many of these free-thinkers, conspiracy theorists and deep-water swimmers as too complacent and compliant to the interests of the Right People. Michael Meacher’s problem is that he is one of those deep-divers. He read this stuff in the news. He read too much. It's something he does, keeping things that interest him in a big archive, painstakingly catalogued and filed.

So he knew of a document called Rebuilding America's Defences, written in September 2000 by a group calling itself Project for the New American Century.

Sinister name, wide-reaching sinister vision and powerful people; a toxic mix. Behind the document; Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush and others.

It contains references to a ‘worldwide command and control system’ to see off threats from dangerous regimes (Syria, N Korea, Iran). It contains comments about 'A new and catastrophic event like a new Pearl Harbour’ as likely to speed up plans for continued and increased US dominance.

And Meacher knew there are questions to ask about unchecked visa applications to the US. He knew a 1999 US intel report spoke of al-Qaida suicide bombers crashing a plane full of high explosives into American targets.

He knew no fighter planes were scrambled for intercept from the base closest to the Washington, with those that did get up missing intercepts with the doomed airliners by a matter of minutes. He knew ex-Federal crime prosecutor John Loftus had said it was impossible for the CIA or FBI to claim it was incompetence which allowed the attackers to hit their targets.

And as an environment minister he knew about supply and demand of oil and gas supplies.

So this respectable, mainstream politician starts putting various bits-and-pieces together and decides there is something being widely ignored in all of this: a clear and proud US plan for global supremacy coupled with a devastating incident that 'changes the world' and provides the direct justification for a blank-cheque, open-ended 'war on terror'.

Justification for attacks on Afghanistan, Iraq. Justification for Bush to talk repeatedly of “a new kind of war” of “not waiting for further attacks on our citizens. We are striking our enemies before they can strike us again”.

September 11 2001 “offered an extremely convenient pretext” to put US domination plans “into action”, Meacher decided. In an article which appeared in the Guardian newspaper on Saturday, September 6, he wrote of events surrounding the attacks of two years earlier as a 'political smokescreen'.

He stated: “The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the 'global war on terror' has all the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda - the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project.”

Meacher is not a conspiracy theorist. He is inclined to believe it was a monumental fuck-up that led to the attackers success. But he likes tidiness and would prefer to see the i's dotted and the t's crossed. He wants to see further investigation, even if only to end fears of conspiracy.

He also accepted the overwhelming likelihood such investigation will never occur. In the absence of that, he just wanted to say what he thought the evidence showed; that Sept 11 is being used as a convenient justification for various US policies which actually do not relate to the event itself.

Many others have said the same thing; it is not a new argument. What was new about is that this time it was coming from the pen of a man who used to be in government, a man who voted FOR the war in Iraq and who still thinks that war is morally justified because Saddam Hussein was a corrupt mass-murderer who best understood violence and HAD to be dealt with using armored brigades and aircraft carrier groups.

Meacher was respected. From the Big table. A success story, although one fallen to the fringes of the game having resigned from the government and facing the potential, easy insignificance of the backbenches. But then he decided to make his unease public.

That day, if you believe many people in Westminster, Meacher put a gun to the head of his credible political career and pulled the trigger twice. Then one more time, just to make sure it was dead.

The man himself didn't really know what reaction there had been. He realized after the article was published that it could undermine his work on opposing GM crops by damaging his mainstream credibility.

That article was his long walk off a short cliff. It was his failure to understand that for your own grim survival in this war, it can be better to not to ask too many questions about the wrong things. Thoughts may enter your head, but some of them need to be annihilated quickly. Choked in a dark alley, for your own comfort and convenience.

Right or wrong, Michael Meacher will now forever be known in t he world media as the man who said America 'deliberately allowed' Sept 11 to happen, even though he didn't say that.

But this is war, so who cares a damn about details, right?

Epilogue
None of this takes us any further forward. No revelations in these words. What was the goddamned point? More time wasted, nothing proved except that the easiest thing is to do what's expected of you; eat shit and smile. Everyone knows that anyway.