Who Are The Real Traitors?
by Richard Hill, Ph.D.
December 22, 2001

The minority of Americans opposed to the U.S. war in Afghanistan is increasingly being told by the warhawk majority that antiwar sentiment is tantamount to treason. One noteworthy example of this sort of foreboding accusation is being disseminated by the famous conservative pundit, David Horowitz, as was reported recently by Justin Raimondo. Horowitz's accusation follows a tradition long practiced in the history of all warlike nations.

Horowitz may therefore want his "treasonous" dissenting antiwar opponents to suffer the traditional penalty, imprisonment or death. Or he may want only to remind them that no principled person would want to be called a traitor, a betrayer of his own nation's vital interest. If that is the case, then it seems, upon consideration of that national interest, that it is the warhawks like Horowitz who have betrayed it.

If Horowitz and Bush were the real patriots, that would mean that their war and foreign policy are being prosecuted in the service of the American vital national interest. A traitor, on the other hand, would be fighting in the interest of some nation other than his own. In whose interest then is this war being fought? Determining the fundamental reason why this war is being fought may be aided by first determining when this war began.

Perhaps Horowitz would like to contend that this war is being fought fundamentally to punish the recent attacks on American soil. If so, would Horowitz then contend that the US was not at war with Al Qaeda before September 11? Judging from this warhawks' strident belligerence, it seems more likely that Horowitz would have to agree that the US was at war with Al Qaeda when it bombed the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, and when US cruise missiles bombed Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998, and when Al Qaeda bombed the two US embassies in Africa, the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, and the World Trade Center in 1998, 1996, and 1993, respectively.

Would Horowitz and the warhawks say that this war began, then, in 1993? It would be then, if they conveniently chose to date it from the first Al Qaeda attacks. But it seems that most Americans would agree that this war between the US military and the Arab insurgents actually began with an unmistakable and very big bang: the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Yet they would no doubt add that that war was fought to "defend" America's vital national interest.

They would say that despite the fact that the first Bush Administration always admitted that it fought that war, primarily and fundamentally, in order to secure European and Japanese access to Arabian oil. That was the "New World Order." That was the only justification that the US Government could ever offer, since the US itself is not and never has been economically dependent on Arabian oil. It is, rather, our European and Japanese "allies" who are. Every economic study has shown conclusively that the US military protection of Arabian oil never made economic sense from the perspective of American consumers. It has only ever made sense from the perspective of European and Japanese consumers.

So, it is obvious that the Europeans and Japanese are again the primary and fundamental beneficiaries of the current war, because it is similarly obvious to anyone with a memory that this current war is but a continuation of the war begun in 1991. That is also obvious to anyone who is able to hear the primary and fundamental demand of the enemy, Al Qaeda: a US military withdrawal from Saudi Arabia. Yet the second Bush Administration will not comply for the same reason the first would not: their primary allegiance to their European and Japanese "allies."

The Bushes and the Horowitzes therefore continue to demonstrate that they give their allegiance to European and Japanese interests over and above that of American interests. Their wars are forcing Americans to pay for Arabian oil in order to give it to Europeans and Japanese. They are forcing Americans to sacrifice their own national interests in order to protect the national interests of the US protectorates of Europe, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. It is to those nations that the Bushes and the Horowitzes have given their primary allegiance and loyalty, while they have betrayed any loyalty they may have had to American national interests. They are the real traitors to America and its national interest. And it is those who oppose them – and their foreign wars – who are the real American patriots.

Richard F. Hill is a Ph.D. in history from Georgetown University in Washington DC. His dissertation is his forthcoming book from Lynne Rienner Publishers, entitled Pearl Harbor Month: Why the US went to war with Germany. His other publications include a chapter on Vice President Hubert Humphrey in Vice Presidents of the United States, 1789-1993, ed. Mark O. Hatfield, (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office 1997).