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December 20, 2001
Miriam Rozen
Foundation
Without Representation?
Kenneth
Roth
A
Letter to Rumsfeld on
Military Tribunals
William Blum
Casualties:
Theirs and Ours
December 19, 2001
Marjorie
Cohn
Don't
Pre-Judge John Walker
Sam Bahour
Palestine
and You
December 18, 2001
Shahid
Alam
Clash
of Civilizations?
Carl Estabrook
Who
Opposes This War?
December 17, 2001
Edward
Said
Mahfouz
and the Cruelty
of Memory
December 16, 2001
Amira Howeidy
Dangerous By
Definition?
Bahour
and Dahan
Zinni's
Doomed Mission
December 15, 2001
John Isaacs
Bush's 12
Lumps of Coal
for Christmas
Dana Cook
The
Execution of bin Laden
Yusuf Agha
Tale of the
Tape:
Osama Gump?
December 14, 2001
Don Atapattu
A Conversation with
Norman
Finkelstein
December 13, 2001
Trojanow and Hoskote:
Nonsense
Mantras of Our Times
Dr. A.
Tajudeen
Afghanistan
and Zaire
Michael Williams
Prohibit
Prohibition
December 12, 2001
Jack McCarthy
Hitchens,
Walker
and Osama's Tape
Laura W. Murphy
Ashcroft's
Jihad
Shahid
Alam
Race
and Visibility
December 11, 2001
Joshua Orton
University
of Wisconsin
Won't Aid FBI Interviews
Philip
Farruggio
Cleansing
the Nation's Soul
Robert Fisk
Why I Was
Beaten
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
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War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
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How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
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December 20,
2001
The First Victim in
the War on Terror
By John Chuckman
It takes a good deal of time to realize the full
impact of any large and sudden change in foreign policy, and
this is especially true of the kind of sudden, violent interventions
often undertaken by the United States since the end of World
War ll.
In the case of Mr. Nixon's secret bombing
of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, it took the best part of
a decade for results to unfold: a beautiful, peaceful country
was reduced to despair and savagery by bombing, a coup, invasions,
and a politically-motivated holocaust.
The men responsible for destabilizing
Cambodia in the name of expedient policy were not only ten thousand
miles removed from the misery they created, they were soon gone
from office, busying themselves with memoirs justifying their
deeds to others also ten thousand miles removed. In all cases,
the stench never quite reached their nostrils.
The most important antecedent of the
War against Terror was another expedient, violent policy - the
recruitment, training, and supply of Islamic fighters for a proxy
war against the Soviet Union during the 1980s. Once America's
immediate goal had been met in that war - that is, inflicting
maximum damage on the Soviet Union - the mess created in achieving
it was of no interest. Just as was the case in Cambodia. And
just as was the case in many lesser American interventions from
Chile to El Salvador.
Part of the behavior exhibited in these
examples is a direct extension from American domestic life -
enjoy your beer and toss the can for someone else to pick up.
Only in foreign affairs, it's other people's lives being tossed.
The impact of intervention in Afghanistan
during the 1980s has only been realized more than a decade after
the Soviet Union ceased to exist. The Afghan people have experienced
more than a decade of anarchy, tribal warfare, and the Taliban's
coming to power as a result (Despite the Taliban's obvious shortcomings
as a government, they came to power to end the violence that
Americans, after arming everyone to the teeth, couldn't be bothered
about, and they did succeed at least in cleaning up America's
carelessly tossed trash).
The War against Terror itself will have
many unforeseen results. This very fact was one of the soundest
arguments against proceeding in the fashion that Mr. Bush has
done, without ever attempting to use diplomacy or international
institutions to bring to justice those responsible for terrible
acts. Now, with the fairly rapid collapse of the Taliban, the
Bush people are having a difficult time controlling a tendency
to smirk, but the savage work of B-52s does seem an odd thing
to smirk about.
The first clearly discernable victims
of carpet-bombing Afghanistan and overthrowing its government
(other than dead and starving Afghan peasants, streams of refugees,
murdered prisoners of war, and a new bunch of thugs in power
- none of which appear to be of great concern to Americans or
their government) are the Palestinians.
Mr. Bush's actions in Afghanistan have
made it almost impossible for him to resist the bloody-minded
Mr. Sharon. After all, Bush's approach to terror originating
out of Afghanistan is the Israeli model: you destroy things and
kill people even if their only connection with an attack is shared
geography.
The absurdity of the policy is made clear
by analogy. Imagine the American government bombing the city
of Buffalo, New York, because that is where Timothy McVeigh grew
up. Or bulldozing the homes of his relatives.
The futility of the policy is obvious
from Israel's decades-long experiment on unwilling subjects.
She has succeeded only in raising new generations of bitter enemies
- groups like Hamas or Islamic Jihad, more fanatical than the
PLO, are in large part creatures of Israeli policy.
Despite extremely harsh practices, Israel
has never succeeded in silencing such opposition groups in territories
she herself occupied. Despite a lifetime's experience in brutality,
Mr. Sharon is not able to stop desperate young men from committing
kamikaze acts in the heart of Israel. Yet we have Mr. Sharon's
demand that Mr. Arafat, with his pitiful resources and unstable
political environment, do so as a pre-condition even for talking.
At the same time, Mr. Sharon labels Mr. Arafat "irrelevant,"
proceeds with a policy of serial assassination in the West Bank,
and blows up the tiny bit of infrastructure that gives Arafat's
government any sense of authority.
This is plainly irrational, yet Mr. Bush
is in no position to say so. Mr. Sharon has very pointedly made
the comparison between the two situations, Bush bombing Afghanistan
and Sharon bombing the West Bank and Gaza. Of course, there are
many differences in the two situations, starting with the fact
that the Palestinians live under conditions that most Americans
would never tolerate without making full use of Second-Amendment
rights. But the differences are too complex to explain to a broad
political audience, while the gross parallels are obvious to
everyone - facts which work in Mr. Sharon's favor.
In the long term, Mr. Sharon's approach
is hopeless, but hopeless policies can do a lot of damage in
the meantime. The Palestinians are not going to disappear or
become, as so many of Israel's leaders have wished them to be,
absorbed by Jordan. Israel with her policy of settlements in
the West Bank has always talked of having "facts on the
ground," but there are no more convincing facts on the ground
than a few million people with a high birth rate.
And a few million people living with
no hope, right next to a few million people who regard them darkly
only as something to contain while themselves living in considerable
comfort, is by definition a volatile and dangerous situation.
Israel controls this situation, just as South Africa did in very
similar circumstances (even more so, since the Palestinians are
a minority rather than a great majority). It seems almost sarcasm
to write or speak, as most of our press does, of two "partners"
in a "peace process" and how one of them, the Palestinians,
has utterly failed its responsibilities.
A viable Palestinian state with generous
Israeli assistance for its economic success is the only intelligible
concept of peace. But it seems impossible that the statesmanship
required can ever come from a man with as much blood on his hands
as Mr. Sharon, or from his nemesis, the Nixonesque Mr. Netanyahu
who waits grinning darkly in the wings. And it seems equally
impossible that Mr. Bush, purring with satisfaction over the
immediate results of his nasty work in Afghanistan, can rise
to what is required of an American president with any pretensions
to genuine leadership in the world.
John Chuckman
is a columnist for YellowTimes.
His last story for CounterPunch was High-Tech Puritanism.
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