Terrorism events - Good Article...

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* Americans cannot ignore what their government does abroad *

 

Special report: Terrorism in the US

 

Seumas Milne

Thursday September 13, 2001

The Guardian

 

Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian

workers in New York and Washington, it has become painfully clear

that most Americans simply don't get it. From the president to

passersby on the streets, the message seems to be the same: this is

an inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy, which must be

answered with overwhelming force - just as soon as someone can

construct a credible account of who was actually responsible.

Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of

recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such

atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the

United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and

Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost

entirely absent. Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue

workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a

small minority might make the connection between what has been

visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large

parts of the world.

 

But make that connection they must, if such tragedies are not to be

repeated, potentially with even more devastating consequences. US

political leaders are doing their people no favours by reinforcing

popular ignorance with self-referential rhetoric. And the echoing

chorus of Tony Blair, whose determination to bind Britain ever closer

to US foreign policy ratchets up the threat to our own cities, will

only fuel anti-western sentiment. So will calls for the defence

of "civilisation", with its overtones of Samuel Huntington's

poisonous theories of post-cold war confrontation between the west

and Islam, heightening perceptions of racism and hypocrisy.

 

As Mahatma Gandhi famously remarked when asked his opinion of western

civilisation, it would be a good idea. Since George Bush's father

inaugurated his new world order a decade ago, the US, supported by

its British ally, bestrides the world like a colossus. Unconstrained

by any superpower rival or system of global governance, the US giant

has rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own

interest; ripped up a string of treaties it finds inconvenient; sent

troops to every corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan,

Yugoslavia and Iraq without troubling the United Nations; maintained

a string of murderous embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and

recklessly thrown its weight behind Israel's 34-year illegal military

occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada

rages.

 

If, as yesterday's Wall Street Journal insisted, the east coast

carnage was the fruit of the Clinton administration's Munich-like

appeasement of the Palestinians, the mind boggles as to what US

Republicans imagine to be a Churchillian response.

 

It is this record of unabashed national egotism and arrogance that

drives anti-Americanism among swaths of the world's population, for

whom there is little democracy in the current distribution of global

wealth and power. If it turns out that Tuesday's attacks were the

work of Osama bin Laden's supporters, the sense that the Americans

are once again reaping a dragons' teeth harvest they themselves sowed

will be overwhelming.

 

It was the Americans, after all, who poured resources into the 1980s

war against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, at a time when girls

could go to school and women to work. Bin Laden and his mojahedin

were armed and trained by the CIA and MI6, as Afghanistan was turned

into a wasteland and its communist leader Najibullah left hanging

from a Kabul lamp post with his genitals stuffed in his mouth.

 

But by then Bin Laden had turned against his American sponsors, while

US-sponsored Pakistani intelligence had spawned the grotesque Taliban

now protecting him. To punish its wayward Afghan offspring, the US

subsequently forced through a sanctions regime which has helped push

4m to the brink of starvation, according to the latest UN figures,

while Afghan refugees fan out across the world.

 

All this must doubtless seem remote to Americans desperately

searching the debris of what is expected to be the largest-ever

massacre on US soil - as must the killings of yet more Palestinians

in the West Bank yesterday, or even the 2m estimated to have died in

Congo's wars since the overthrow of the US-backed Mobutu

regime. "What could some political thing have to do with blowing up

office buildings during working hours?" one bewildered New Yorker

asked yesterday.

 

Already, the Bush administration is assembling an international

coalition for an Israeli-style war against terrorism, as if such

counter-productive acts of outrage had an existence separate from the

social conditions out of which they arise. But for every "terror

network" that is rooted out, another will emerge - until the

injustices and inequalities that produce them are addressed.