“Does anyone doubt that 10,000 bin Ladens have been created by the events of the past two and a half years? If they do, they have their head in the sand.”
George Galloway; British Parliament, 7-7-05
America has never been involved in a war more clearly immoral than Iraq. From the phony pretext of weapons of mass destruction to the sadistic treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the conflict has been a sickening chronicle of butchery and deception. Now, the victims of that massive crime are striking back in London and Madrid while the Bush press-corps regurgitates the same stale theories about radicals and Islam.
What baloney. Baghdad has morphed into an assembly-line for extremists, churning out enough fanatics to produce 1,000 London-type bombings. This is the real effect of Bush’s war. The people who were killed in the London subway died for the crimes of their government, not because some young Muslim studied under a fiery cleric in South Leeds. The bloodshed is as much Bush and Blair’s responsibility as if they had detonated the bombs themselves.
Those who’ve watched the developments in Iraq know that the situation has steadily deteriorated. Rumsfeld’s storm troopers, The Wolf Brigade, now roam the country freely, killing and maiming as they see fit; spreading terror to every corner of the Sunni heartland. At the same time, the military-juggernaut is lurching from city to city, destroying everything in its path. Falluja, Sammarra, Ramadi, Karbala, Heet, Qaim; everywhere the story is the same; the cities are pounded mercilessly, beyond the view of America’s embedded media, while the people are denied water, food, electricity and vital medical supplies. The crusade to crush the resistance is reducing more and more Sunni cities to rubble and their people to destitution.
This is Rumsfeld’s remedy for resistance. This is Bush’s “Liberation”. Take a good look.
The people in London are the lucky ones. If they’d been in Iraq (after the explosions) the passers-by would have been cut-down by snipers on top of surrounding buildings. Their ambulances would have been fired on as they tried to remove the dead and wounded. Their hospitals would have been bombed and occupied by foreign soldiers. They would have been deprived of even the most basic medical supplies to keep them alive. How can anyone compare the bombings in London to the all-encompassing campaign of terror in Iraq?
The victims of the London bombings deserve our sympathy, just as surely as the cut-throats in Washington and 10 Downing Street deserve our contempt. MP George Galloway summarized the feelings of many of us when he said, “Members of Parliament find it easy to feel empathy with people killed in explosions by razor-sharp red-hot steel and splintering flying glass when they are in London, but they can blank out of their mind entirely the fact that a person killed in exactly the same way in Falluja died exactly the same death.”
There’s a straight line between Falluja and the London subway; just as there is a straight line between the gulag at Abu Ghraib and the terror attacks that Americans can expect to face in the near future.
For America, the prospect of London-type bombings is a mathematical certainty.
American newspapers are all breathlessly circulating their theory of “suicide bombers” in headlines across the nation.
Why not? It fits nicely with the racist ideology that underscores Bush’s war on terror.
Washington knows that its support would disappear in a flash if they failed to conjure up the requisite racial stereotypes that feed the public rage. And, no one is better at demonizing and fear-mongering than the Bush administration.
Listen to Bush’s comments following the London attack:
“And the contrast couldn’t be clearer between the intentions of those who care deeply about human rights, and those who kill, those who’ve got such evil in their hearts that they will take the lives of innocent folks.”
What rubbish; Bush’s empty pieties and moral pretensions will never atone for the ocean of blood he’s spilled in Iraq. And, his “war-poodle”, Blair, is not much better.
“It is important,” Blair opined, “that those engaged in terrorism realize that our determination to defend our way of life is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction to innocent people in a desire to impose extremism on the world.”
“Our way of life”? Is that what we are defending; or the blatant misuse of military force to subjugate an entire nation and steal its resources?
No one is fooled by Bush-Blair’s facile rhetoric. Bin Laden doesn’t care a whit about “our freedoms”; his message has been consistent throughout; “Get out of our countries, stop training our brutal secret police, stop propping up our corrupt regimes, and stop stealing our resources.” When the imperialism stops, so, too, will the terrorism.
We know the root of terrorism now; the secret has been divulged. Robert Pape has done an exhaustive study that provides scientifically-researched answers to all the critical questions surrounding suicide bombers. His findings are more important to antiwar activists than the contents of the Downing Street memo.
Why? Because his research proves beyond a doubt that suicide bombing is the predictable upshot of occupation. As social scientist Scott Atran said, “Most jihadists have no history of religious education prior to becoming ‘born again’ radical Islamists, and many are well-educated, middle class and married. Most would-be suicide bomberssay they act to restore dignity to their communities — real or virtual — marginalized by globalization and humiliated by military occupation.”
This counters Bush’s claim that terrorists “hate our freedoms”, and contradicts the propaganda from the mainstream media. Every columnist from Tom Friedman (who calls the bombers a “jihadist death-cult”) to Christopher Hitchens (who coined the phrase “Islamo-fascism”) has fed the illusion that terrorism emerges either from an irrational hatred of the West or from religious zealotry. Neither is true. These theories have only confused the public and prolonged a conflict that serves the exclusive interests of elites.
Pape’s article in the New York Times, “Al Qaida’a Smart Bombs” 7-9-05, dispels many of the fantasies about terrorism and uncovered the underlying reason for the current rash of attacks; Occupation. The driving force behind terrorism, Pape says, is “to compel the United States and its Western allies to withdraw combat forces from the Arabian Peninsula and other Muslim countries”.
Pape’s findings have exposed the vile fraud that fuels Bush’s orgy of carnage and pointed the way out of the war on terror. With a clear-eyed approach to terrorism we can cut-through the demagoguery and derail the Bush strategy for perennial war.
MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He can be reached at: fergiewhitney@msn.com
