Crawling from the Wreckage (42 page)

Until recently, the greater conspiracy theory was largely confined to the Arab world, where many people are in complete denial about any Arab involvement in the atrocity. Few Americans took that version seriously, but many wondered whether the intelligence lapses had really been accidental. If you believe that they weren’t, then you have bought into the lesser conspiracy theory.

Even this more modest conspiracy theory, in which the U.S. government learned of Osama bin Laden’s intentions but decided not to stop him, requires the complicity of some very senior people. If the information got into the system, then the people who would have
known about it included the heads of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (George Tenet and Louis Freeh), the national security adviser (Condoleezza Rice), the secretaries of defence and state (Don Rumsfeld and Colin Powell), plus Vice-President Cheney and perhaps President Bush.

Getting away with it also would have required the permanent silence (or silencing) of at least a dozen lower- and mid-level intelligence analysts in Washington. Intelligence like this only gains credibility within the system when there are multiple sources confirming it, so the people who saw the raw intelligence, collated it and passed it up the line would know that the senior people had received it. And the senior people would know that they knew.

I don’t believe in the lesser conspiracy theory because I don’t think that Tenet, Rice, Powell and others would have deliberately allowed thousands of Americans to be killed like that. I don’t believe even Dick Cheney would have done that. And I note that there has been no inexplicable wave of sudden deaths among junior intelligence analysts in Washington.

I do believe, however, that 9/11 served the purposes of the neoconservatives. They were already pressing to attack Iraq as part of a larger plan, dating back to the late 1990s, to relaunch
Pax Americana
and reestablish American hegemony in the twenty-first century world. I agree that they were adroit in seizing on 9/11 as a way of enlisting popular support for their project. But that’s all.

As for the greater conspiracy theory, of which the movie
Loose Change
is the most prominent manifestation, it is just plain loony. Yet more and more people are falling for it in the West, where it was once the exclusive domain of people with counter-rotating eyeballs and poor personal hygiene. You cannot overstate the impact of a well-made film.

Loose Change
confidently asserts that the twin towers were brought down by carefully placed demolition charges, not by the fires ignited by the planes that hit them; that the Pentagon was struck by a cruise missile and not by a plane at all; and that the fourth “hijacked” plane, Flight 93, did not crash in a field in Pennsylvania but landed at Cleveland airport, where the passengers were taken into a National Aeronatics and Space Administration building and never seen again.

What about all the calls that the passengers on Flight 93 made on their phones? Their voices were cloned by the Los Alamos laboratories
and the calls to their relatives were faked. The
FBI
was in on it, the
CIA
was in on it, the U.S. Air Force was in on it (except, of course, those personnel who were killed at the Pentagon), and the North American Aerospace Defense Command was in on it (but they kept the Canadians in the organization out of the loop).

The security companies guarding the World Trade Center were in on it, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani was in on it, the Federal Aviation Administration was in on it,
NASA
was in on it, and the Pentagon was in on it. At least ten thousand people were in on it. They had to be, or it couldn’t have worked. And, more than five years later, not one of them has talked.

Nobody has got drunk and spilled their guts. Nobody has told their spouse, who then blabbed. Not one of these ten thousand guilty people has yielded to the temptation for instant fame and great wealth if only they blow the whistle on the greatest conspiracy in history. Even the Mafia code of silence is nothing compared to this.

In normal times you wouldn’t waste breath arguing with people who fall for this kind of rubbish, but the makers of
Loose Change
claim that their film has already been seen by more than one hundred million people, and looking at my incoming email I believe them. This is a real problem, because by linking their fantasies about 9/11 to the Bush administration’s deliberate deception of the American people in order to gain support for the invasion of Iraq, the filmmakers bring discredit on the truth and the nonsense alike.

You almost wonder if they are secretly working for the Bush administration.

I didn’t put the next piece in the China section of this book because it’s not really about China, and I didn’t put it in the “colonies” section because there isn’t one: almost all the world’s other colonies already have their independence. So it ends up in “Miscellany,” but that doesn’t mean that it’s a minor issue
.

All the world’s other colonial empires have had to let their colonies go, including the Soviet empire. Can the Chinese empire hold on to its colonies? That remains to be seen
.

“The incidents in China are, simply put, a genocide. There’s no point in interpreting this otherwise,” said Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdoğan last Friday. He was talking about the deaths of at least 184 people in the recent street violence in Xinjiang (also spelled Sinkiang), the huge province that occupies the northwestern corner of China.

A majority of Xinjiang’s people are Uighurs. They are Muslims who speak a language closely related to Turkish, so Erdoğan’s comments were bound to appeal to his audience in Turkey. The Chinese government, predictably, condemned his charges as “irresponsible and groundless.” The Chinese government was right—but also terribly wrong.

It wasn’t a genocide. The deaths of 184 people, for whatever reason, do not constitute a genocide. Moreover, as Erdoğan was claiming that there had been a genocide against the Uighurs, but three-quarters of the people killed in the riots were Han Chinese. “Genocide” is a word that should only be used very precisely, and Erdoğan owes Beijing an apology.

There is no doubt that this violence started as an Uighur attack on Chinese immigrants. However, Beijing owes the Uighurs more than just an apology, for it is Chinese policy that drove them to such desperate measures.

The Chinese authorities genuinely believe that the development they have brought to Xinjiang has been for the Uighurs’ own good, even if it has also brought huge numbers of Han Chinese immigrants to the province. But they are certainly not unhappy to see this frontier province, which was 90 percent Uighur and Muslim sixty years ago, become a place where most of the people are instinctively loyal Han Chinese.

More importantly, they lack the cultural imagination to see that this process will be profoundly alienating for the Uighurs. It may sound preposterous, but most of the men who rule China simply could not come up with an answer to the question “Why don’t they want to be Chinese?” So if there are anti-Chinese riots in Xinjiang, it must be “outside agitators stirring up our Uighurs.”

That is how Beijing explained the riots to itself and to the nation. As Xinjiang’s Communist governor, Nur Bekri, said in a televised address: exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer “had phone conversations with
people in China on July 5 in order to incite [the violence].” Beijing explained the even bloodier anti-Chinese riots in Tibet in March of last year in exactly the same way, except that that time the outside agitator was the Dalai Lama.

What’s more, most Chinese believe it. They have been taught that Xinjiang and Tibet have been an integral part of their country since time immemorial. They also believe the Uighurs and Tibetans who live in those places are (or should be) profoundly grateful for the development and prosperity that have come to their provinces as a result of their membership in the Chinese nation.

The gulf of incomprehension is reminiscent of the gap between the Russian and non-Russian inhabitants of the former Soviet Union before it collapsed in 1991. Almost all Russians believed that the non-Russians were (or should be) grateful for all that had been done for them, and even resented the fact that they got more investment per capita than the Russians themselves. As for the non-Russians, they took their independence as soon as they could.

The truth is that the Chinese empire first took effective control of Tibet and Xinjiang in the same period when the Russian empire was conquering the other Central Asian countries. Whatever vague claims to “suzerainty” Beijing can dredge up from the more distant past, they do not convince the Uighurs and the Tibetans themselves, who would cut loose from China instantly if they got the chance.

It’s called decolonization, and China is the last holdout. The only way it can ensure a different final outcome to that of the other empires is to swamp the local people with Han Chinese immigrants—and that, oddly enough, is the principal result of its “development” policies. The development creates an economy that the local people are not qualified to work in, and Chinese immigrants come in to fill those jobs instead.

The Tibetan Autonomous Region still has a large Tibetan majority, but in Xinjiang the Uighurs are already down to 45 percent of the population, while the Han Chinese are up to 40 percent. The Uighurs feel that their country is disappearing in front of their eyes, and they are right. So they attack innocent Chinese immigrants, which is shameful but all too understandable. Chinese mobs attack them back, which is equally shameful and equally understandable.

It is already ugly, and it’s probably going to get a good deal uglier. The repression needed to hold down Xinjiang and Tibet may lead to increased repression in China in general, and it will almost certainly lead to more violence in the colonies.

And finally … a piece about the left-right conflict
.

At last the tide has turned. After centuries of huge advances by the rightists, those who drive on the left finally have a victory to celebrate. On September 7, Samoa will stop driving on the right and start driving on the left. Naturally, those who oppose the change are predicting disaster.

“So we just wake up one morning and pull out of our driveways onto the other side of the road, do we?” says Tole’afoa Solomona Toa’iloa, who heads People Against Switching Sides. “Cars are going to crash, people are going to die, not to mention the huge expense to our small country.”

But Prime Minister Tuila’epa Aiono Sailele Malielegaoi is not impressed: “All this talk about accidents is just stupid. The 7th and the 8th are holidays to help people get used to it, and after that they’ll be driving more carefully than ever because it will be so different.” All the nearby islands, except American Samoa, drive left, he points out, and it’s cheaper to import cars from Australia, New Zealand and Japan (which drive on the left) than from the United States.

It’s much ado about nothing; I switch back and forth several dozen times a year. My work takes me to both sides of the road, and my family connections divide right down the middle: Canada right, Britain left, France right, South Africa left, and Argentina both (left until 1946, right since then). If the steering wheel is on the left side of the car, you drive on the right side of the road, and vice versa. A monkey could do it.

Nevertheless, this is a big deal: the first time any country has switched sides since Burma swung right in 1970 (which made very little sense, since most of the countries around it drive on the left, but General Ne Win’s soothsayer told him to do it). And
nobody
has switched from right to left in living memory.

The rightists won because the United States drives on the right, and the year of victory was 1946. That was when the U.S. embassy in Beijing threw a party to celebrate the Nationalist Chinese government’s decision that China would drive on the right. (Previously most of northern China had driven right, while southern China drove left.) In the same year, the project for a Pan-American Highway persuaded the last left-driving holdouts among the Latin American countries to switch.

Only one-third of the world’s 6.7 billion people live in countries that still drive left. That is not likely to change much now, for once you start building high-speed, controlled-access highways, all the concrete you have poured locks you into your existing choice.

How did we end up split like this? There is plenty of historical evidence for both sides. Deeply rutted tracks on one side of an old road from a quarry used in Roman times in England, and shallower ruts on the other side, support the hypothesis that the Romans drove on the left, for example—but the evidence from other Roman roads in Turkey suggests the opposite.

The real answer, probably, is that there was so little long-distance road traffic that you didn’t need uniformity. Some bits of the empire drove left and other parts right, and nobody cared.

Indeed, the same situation still pertained in nineteenth-century Europe. Both Spain and Italy, for example, had a patchwork quilt of local rules. However, most places that had been conquered by Napoleon drove right, while those that had escaped French occupation mostly drove left (Britain, Russia, Portugal, Sweden, the Austro-Hungarian Empire).

It’s all over in Europe now. The Bolsheviks took Russia to the right after the First World War (on the roads, at least). Mussolini made all the Italians drive right, and the Spaniards and Portuguese changed over in the 1920s. Hitler forced the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia) to drive right in the late 1930s, and Sweden and Iceland finally switched in the late 1960s.

And then there’s Canada. Part of it (Quebec west to the Rockies) used to belong to the French Empire, while the rest (the Maritimes in the east and British Columbia in the west) was British more or less from the start. So the central provinces drove on the right, while the extremities drove on the left.