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Congress should investigate how much the Bush "oil junta" knew in advance about Sept. 11. This and other bombshells from American literature's leading provocateur.
Apr 24, 2002 | If Gore Vidal had not existed, some deity with an instinct for the elegant, the perverse and the unclassifiable would have had to invent him. In the jumbled playroom of American lit, he is the malevolent jack-in-the-box. Attributes: prolific novelist, elegant memoirist, moneymaking screenwriter, roundhouse-throwing essayist, relentless critic of the American empire, and left-wing provocateur with a taste for slightly crankish conspiracy theories. Also: onetime sexual shark, failed politician, and boisterous denouncer of religion, Mom and apple pie.
Vidal is a patrician with a cause, who recounts his remarkable life in his lovely, unexpectedly touching memoir, "Palimpsest." He is related to Jacqueline Kennedy and Albert Gore Jr. and has known everybody from Tennessee Williams to Eleanor Roosevelt to Hillary Clinton to Jack Kerouac -- whom he flipped onto his stomach in the Chelsea Hotel on Aug. 23, 1953, an episode that Kerouac writes shamefacedly about in "The Subterraneans." But Vidal is singularly unimpressed by the Great Ones of the World: He appears to have filed his silver spoon into a stiletto when still in swaddling clothes. A quasi-expat, he has spent much of his life in Rome and Ravello, on perhaps the world's most beautiful coastline, returning inexplicably every year to Los Angeles -- perhaps to gather some American fragments to pack into one of those literary cluster bombs he hurls at Uncle Sam (whom he regards as increasingly evil) every few years.
He has just tossed the latest of these tomes, "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Came to Be So Hated," into the marketplace. More of a firecracker than a grenade, this little volume is a bit of a retread, cobbled together to catch the Osama moment: Most of the essays in it were previously published in Vanity Fair and "The Last Empire," Vidal's most recent collection of essays. Several of them deal with Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, whom Vidal began corresponding with after McVeigh read one of the pieces collected here. Vidal, whose idiosyncratic left-wing populism can go so far that it forms a complete circle, like the Chesire Cat's smile, and becomes virtually indistinguishable from far-right hatred of "big government," shared McVeigh's outrage over the Waco episode and his belief that it was a logical consequence of federal tyranny.
The first essay, "Sept. 11, 2001 (A Tuesday)," was originally turned down for publication by the Nation, where Vidal has published for many years, apparently because its tone was deemed too flippant. It was published in Italian, became a bestseller and was translated into a dozen languages. "With both bin Laden and McVeigh, I thought it useful to describe the various provocations on our side that drove them to such terrible acts," Vidal writes in his introduction.
Unfortunately, what Vidal serves up in "Sept. 11" is pretty thin, familiar gruel -- given spice only by the hint that he might be saying we got what was coming to us, a virtually unpublishable sentiment even now. So why did Osama do it? After rehearsing a few well-known facts about the Saudi renegade's life and motivation, Vidal concludes that he is our Saladin -- the Muslim warrior king who turned back the Christian crusaders. Vidal does not go into it, but the thing that most exercised bin Laden -- the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia -- is also an example of the kind of "imperial" reach that Vidal rails against. The "provocation" is America's "national security state," in which we maintain ourselves in a state of perpetual war for perpetual peace (the expression is the historian Charles Beard's). For Vidal, blows will always be struck against an empire.
He goes on to denounce Bush's draconian response to the attack as well as Clinton's landmark anti-terrorism legislation, which he regards as a cure that is worse than the disease. "[T]he physical damage Osama and friends can do us -- terrible as it has been thus far -- is as nothing as to what he is doing to our liberties. Once alienated, an 'unalienable right' is apt to be forever lost, in which case we are no longer the last best hope of earth but merely a seedy imperial state whose citizens are kept in line by SWAT teams and whose way of death, not life, is universally imitated." He calls for a police-U.N. reaction to the attacks, not war. And he concludes with a long list of American military actions since World War II, from Grenada to Panama to Haiti to Kosovo to Somalia. "In these several hundred wars against Communism, terrorism, drugs, or sometimes nothing much, between Pearl Harbor and Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, we tended to strike the first blow," Vidal concludes his essay. "But then we're the good guys, right? Right."
Reading Vidal on politics, as this essay reminds us, is a whale-like enterprise: You take in great mouthfuls of seawater, but there are tasty plankton there too, if you're good at straining. Vidal is given to hyperbole, gross generalizations, dubious hobby-horses (FDR knew in advance about Pearl Harbor) and, at times, paranoia that recalls the fruitier rhetoric of the '60s. But his critique of American imperialism is legitimate, laudable and all too rare. His small-r republican rantings against the government and his Mencken-like skewerings of various booboisies may grate at times, but the American literary landscape would be more boring without them.
Vidal spoke to Salon from his home in Los Angeles.
Let's start with your new book, "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated." One of the main themes in your work is the perniciousness of what you call the American empire. And you argue that Osama bin Laden was motivated in large part not because he was evil incarnate, as George W. Bush claimed, but out of a very specific and historically based hatred for that empire. So my first question is, what is it about America in particular, whether you call it a superpower or an empire, that inspires hatred, not just with bin Laden, but among others? Do you think that we're more hated than other empires in the past have been?
Well, I don't know that we are unique in the fact that we do inspire a good deal of hatred around the world because of the way we throw ourselves about. But the whole story in Afghanistan is not about Osama and his religious views, although they have some bearing, but is about a great coup on the part of the United States to grab all of the oil and natural gas of central Asia. And that is what we set out to do. Mr. Bush Sr. secured the Persian Gulf oil, which is Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, the Emirates, and so on. But far larger than the Persian Gulf is the Caspian Sea oil, and Uzbekistan, and all the other -stans that used to be part of the Soviet Union. We have been deliberately encircling that section of the world -- which is why we were in Vietnam.
We asked "Where's Osama?" because we always have to personalize everything. Everything is always one evil man, and if we get him, we've ended the drug trade. Remember Noriega? If we got him, that was the end of the drug trade. Well, we got him, and it didn't end.
So with Osama, we say, we will get revenge for the horrible thing he did -- if he did it. Now there is considerable doubt -- he certainly was in on it, and he helped finance what happened on 9/11, but it could well have been somebody else. What we have been looking for is a trigger. We had already planned to go into Afghanistan in October of '01. We have been desperately trying to put in a pipeline that runs through Afghanistan, Pakistan, down to Karachi and the Indian Ocean. The Taliban were just too scatterbrained and too crazy to deal with any longer, although we dealt with them for a long time.
And so we went in there to try and stabilize the place in order for Unocal to build a pipeline. So all of this is about oil. For once we really are doing something practical and not trying to wipe out evil, a task too large even for a Bush.
But, even assuming that the Bush administration was hungering for oil in the region, wouldn't you agree that the U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan was appropriate and necessary after the major attack we suffered on Sept. 11? Are you saying that oil was more of a concern than terrorism?
Well, the giveaway was, when Tommy Franks, the commanding general of our forces there, arrived in Afghanistan, people kept asking, "Where is Osama bin Laden?" And he said, well, it would be nice if we found Osama bin Laden, but that's not really why we're here. And suddenly, it was put on a back burner, and we've sort of forgotten about it, because other things have taken its place. In other words, that was never the simple motivation. However, for P.R. purposes, we have always -- this is where I got off on Noriega -- we must always personify, preferably as "evil," one single person.
We did that with Timothy McVeigh. McVeigh was part of a much larger plot which the FBI refused to investigate, just as Congress has refused to find out. Ordinarily we'd have hearings. You'd think that after being hit as we were in New York, there would be hearings immediately, as there were after Pearl Harbor, an investigation into why we spend $30 billion a year on intelligence and we didn't know about what was obviously a plot that took about four years, they now estimate, to get those planes on target to destroy our buildings and people. We would have an investigation. There is none.
And Bush went to Daschle and said, no, no, we can't have one now. I don't know what reasons he gave, but they haven't had one. Well, any sane country is going to investigate, particularly with such a vast and proud military as we've got, why it took 90 minutes before the planes were in the air, our fighters. An ordinary hijacking, they would be up there in about five minutes, in any part of the U.S. But it took 90 minutes before they were in the air. Something is going on.
Are you contending that it's possible that there was American foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks?
Of course there was. I love it that we like to pose as stupid and incompetent rather than as perhaps canny and up to no good. Maybe it's easier to sell incompetence out there to the people. But I don't think taxpayers who pay as much money as we do are terribly pleased that the FBI and the CIA knew nothing at all of this, and didn't get cracking on it, and that Congress then doesn't investigate why they didn't. Any sane normal country, like the U.S. of 50 years ago, would investigate. We would find out immediately what went wrong.
Everybody knew that Roosevelt had considerable foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor. And they also knew, Washington knew, that a strike was coming, and [Gen. Walter C.] Short and [Admiral Husband E.] Kimmel, the two commanders in Hawaii, were not warned, but a lot of other people were. Same thing happened this time.
So, as with your argument about FDR's alleged foreknowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack, your argument would be that the Bush administration knew in advance of the Sept. 11 attack and planned to use it as a pretext to go into Afghanistan?
You have said it. I didn't say it. I think it's a possibility. I would rather the Congress found out for me; that's what we pay them for.
But it sounds like you believe that to be the case.
I don't know that I believe it. It seems to be more likely than we were just in a state of paralysis and knew nothing.
Although when one looks at the dubious recent history of the FBI and the CIA, and their lamentable track record in all kinds of things, perhaps it isn't that surprising that incompetence alone could be the answer for their failure to detect this plot.
I like your optimism.
