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September 21, 2001
Bush's Wars
By Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St Clair
It would not have been hard to improve
on President George Bush's normal listless speaking style and,
faced with the great challenge of his speech to the joint session
of Congress on Thursday night, the President managed the task
capably enough. Reduced to its essentials, the speech was a
declaration of lawlessness, with the concept of "justice"
being reduced to that of the freedom to shoot the other guy on
whatever terms America may find convenient. How else are to interpret
the much quoted line that "whether we bring our enemies
to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done."
This is the language of terrorism.
"Every nation in every
region now has a decision to make," Bush declared. "Either
you are with us or you are with the terrorists." Thus has
the founding charter of the United Nations been finally discarded,
even as a fig leaf, and the founding charter of NATO been reduced
to a line from a western.
In terms of substance Bush
has committed America and its allies to the overthrow of the
Afghan Taleban, with occupation of Afghanistan apparently part
of the schedule. Here at CounterPunch we have no affection for
the Taleban, any more than we have nothing but revulsion for
the dreadful terrorist acts of September 11. But Bush and advisers
seem to be embarking on a course of folly that will not strike
down, may even bolster the Taleban, and that could indeed lead
to a coup in Pakistan, installing in power army officers deeply
complicit with the Taleban and also in possession of nuclear
weapons.
Bush pronounces the forthcoming
war as one between freedom and fear, with God most definitely
on America's side. We are now witnessing the opening volleys
of an assault on constitutional freedoms in this country by a
government in which opposition has been effectively been suspended.
More than once, on Thursday night, we heard gleeful use of the
ominous phrase, "there is no opposition". As Bush talked
about unified national purpose, the news cameras lingered on
Rep Barbara Lee of Berkley, everlastingly to her credit the only
member of Congress to vote against authorization of open-ended
retaliation. Aside from Lee, there were few independent voices
in Congress. Among them was the Texas libertarian Republican,
Ron Paul who told his colleagues, "Demanding domestic security
in times of war invites carelessness in preserving civil liberties
and the right of privacy. Frequently the people are only too
anxious for their freedoms to be sacrificed on the altar of authoritarianism
thought to be necessary to remain safe and secure."
We now have the prospect of
a new cabinet officer, supervising the new minted Office of Homeland
Security (OHS), to be headed by the governor of Pennsylvania,
Tom Ridge, a man known to death penalty opponents as the official
who has been leading the lynch mob again st Mumia abu Jamal and
to anti-globalization protesters as the man who supervised the
violent suppression of civil rights at the Republican National
Convention in Philadelphia last July.
Want a foretaste of the kind
of actions Ridge is likely to feel will enhance homeland security?
Last July Philadelphia saw coordinated law enforcement involving
FBI, local and state police, with covert surveillance, infiltration
and disruption of legitimate groups, snooping on email, phonetaps.
Protest leaders were arrested early on, under absurd pretexts
and in the case of John Sellers (Ruckus Society) and Kate Sorensen
(Act Up) held on million-dollar bail. Jailed protesters were
brutally handled, denied access to medical care and attorneys.
When all was over, the courts threw out 95 per cent of the charges
brought against protesters by the Philadelphia police. Ridge
presided over an utterly disgraceful and violent denial of freedoms
of assembly, free speech and due process. The only comfort we
can is that the FBI, CIA, FEMA, Pentagon and Coast Guard will
see the Office of Homeland Security as a bureaucratic threat
and move swiftly to neutralize it. We have no doubt that these
seasoned bureaucratic fighters will soon be leaking information
discreditable to Ridge.
Of greater concern is Attorney
General John Ashcroft's agenda, now being rushed to Congress.
There are three components to what has been described as "the
mother of all anti-terrorism bills". Immigration; wiretapping
and domestic intelligence surveillance; search and seizure. The
bill sought by Ashcroft vests virtually unlimited authority in
the US Attorney General to target non-citizens with arrest, indefinite
incarceration and deportation. The arrests can be made on the
basis of secret evidence with little or no opportunity for meaningful
judicial review. As the ACLU points out, the upgraded sanctions
could mean that if a legal immigrant had in the 1980s contributed
to Mandela's African National Congress, which could be grounds
for deportation today.
There's an irony here. As the
writer John Mecklin has recently pointed out in the San Francisco
Weekly, among the first investors in Arbusto Energy, George W.
Bush's early adventure in the oil business, was James Bath, a
Texas airplane broker. According to Mecklin, Bass invested $50,000
in Arbusto (the word for bush in Spanish), said sum coming from
Saudi investors including the bin Laden family. If true, this
means that theoretically Bush could be subject to sanction as
benefiting indirectly from terror.
Ashcroft is seeking expanded
wiretapping power, plus enhanced ability to snoop on e-sites.
The bill seeks roving wiretap ability, meaning that the police
could tap any phone used by their target, no matter to whom that
phone might belong. In Ashcroft's line of fire is the "probable
cause" standard, governing warrants to snoop. Ashcroft's
bill also seeks to vastly widen law enforcement's ability to
conduct secret searches. As the ACLU emphasizes, "this bill
would extend the authority of the government to request 'secret
searches' in every criminal offense." As usual, emergency
is used as the pretext for a far wider assault on basic constitutional
rights.
The president's speech came
at the end of a week of ferocious war mongering. The predictable
eye-for-an-eye frenzy built up its usual lethal head of steam
with predictable rapidity. The outstanding question is: how many
eyes for an eye. Count 6,500 dead in the Trade Towers, the four
hijacked planes and the Pentagon. How many dead does this require
in Kabul, or Baghdad or elsewhere in the hinterlands of terrorist
Islam?
The only quick way to achieve
killing on this scale would be with a substantial nuclear device
on a city. Given this requirement, we may applaud the restraint
of Thomas Woodrow in the Washington Times on September 14, though
his moderation is salted with the pusillanimous phrase "at
a bare minimum". Woodrow recommends that "at a bare
minimum, tactical nuclear capabilities should be used against
the bin Laden camps in the desert of Afghanistan. To do less
would be rightly seen by the poisoned minds that orchestrated
these attacks as cowardice on the part of the United States and
the current administration."
Absent dropping a Big One,
how can the necessary revenge be exacted? Cruise missiles, used
by Bill Clinton as a way of expressing his displeasure at Sudan,
may be useful for destroying pharmaceutical factories, hospitals,
even defense ministries, but the body counts are not robust.
But who or what is there to bomb in Afghanistan? The Russians
have already done their best. A pathetically poor country in
the first place, Afghanistan is only marginally ahead of Mali,
in terms of available infrastructure to destroy, with far more
challenging terrain.
A land invasion in force, a
blitzkrieg sparing nothing and no one? Afghanistan is famously
the graveyard of punitive missions embarked upon by the Great
Powers, as the British discovered in the nineteenth century and
the Soviets in the 1980s. The mere mounting an expeditionary
force would take would be a difficult, possibly protracted business,
landing the United States in a prodigious number of diplomatic
difficulties, given the mutual antagonisms and stresses of adjacent
or nearby states such as Pakistan, India, Russia's dependency
Tadzikistan, China.
One familiar way extricating
oneself from confrontation an unsuitable foe is to substitute
a more satisfactory one. Though it is highly likely that Iran
was the sponsor of the downing of Panam Flight 103, in revenge
for the downing of the Iranian Airbus by the US carrier Vincennes
(whose crew was subsequently decorated for its conduct in shooting
down a planeload of civilians) the US preferred to identify Qaddafi's
Libya as the culprit, as a more easily negotiable target for
revenge. Already there's a lobby, the most conspicuous of whom
is former CIA chief James Woolsey, pressing Iraq's case as possible
sponsor or co-sponsor of the World Trade Center attacks. So sanctions
against Iraq could be strengthened, its cities bombed and perhaps
even another invasion attempted.
Obviously aware of the difficulties
of surrounding speedy, adequately bloody retribution, Bush's
entourage have been talking in Mao-like terms about "protracted
war", or a "war in the shadows". The purely nominal
ban against US Government-sponsored assassination (there have
been numerous CIA-backed against Castro since the mid-1970s ban,
if you believer the Cubans) will be lifted, as will the supposed
inhibition against the CIA hiring unsavory characters, meaning
drug smugglers, many of them also trained in the flying schools
of southern Florida.
The war in the shadows will
be definition be shadowy (hence poor provender for the appetite
for revenge), at least until some CIA-backed revenge bombing
surfaces into public view like the attempted bombing of Sheikh
Fadlallah outside a Beirut mosque, sponsored by CIA chief William
Casey, which missed the Sheikh but which killed nearly a hundred
bystanders, including many children.
On the morning of September
11 Judge Henry Wood was trying, of all things, an American airline
crash damage case in Federal District court in Little Rock, Arkansas.
In the wake of the attacks there were orders to close the courthouse.
All obeyed, except Judge Wood, aged 83, who insisted that jury
and lawyers and attendants remain in place. Turning down a plea
for mistrial by the defendant, Wood said, "This looks like
an intelligent jury to me and I didn't want the judicial system
interrupted by a terrorist act, no matter how horrible."
Wood's was the proper reaction.
America could do with more of what used to be called the Roman
virtues. A monstrous thing happened in New York, but should this
be a cause for a change in national consciousness? Is America
so frail? People talk of the trauma of another Pearl Harbor,
but truth to say, the trauma in the aftermath of the Day of Infamy
in 1941 was far in excess of what the circumstances warranted,
and assiduously fanned by the government for reasons of state.
Ask the Japanese Americans who were interned.
Why, for that matter, ground
all air traffic and semi-paralyze the economy, with further interminable
and useless inconveniences promised travelers in the months and
possibly years to come? Could any terrorist have hoped not only
to bring down the Trade Center towers but also destroy the airline
industry? It would have been far better to ask passengers to
form popular defense committees on every plane, bring their own
food and drink, keep alert for trouble and look after themselves.
A properly vigilant democracy of the air. Remember, even if there
were no x-ray machines, no searches, no passenger checks, it
would still be far more dangerous to drive to the airport than
to get on a plane.
Martyrdom is hard to beat.
In the first few centuries after Christ the Romans tried it against
the Christians, whose martyrdoms were almost entirely sacrificial
of themselves, not of others. The lust for heaven of a Muslim
intent on suicidal martyrdom was surely never so eloquent as
that of St Ignatius in the second century who, under sentence
of death, doomed to the Roman amphitheater and a hungry lion,
wrote in his Epistle to the Romans, "I bid all men know
that of my own free will I die for God, unless ye should hinder
me. . . Let me be given to the wild beasts, for through them
I can attain unto God. I am God's wheat, and I am ground by the
wild beasts that I may be found the pure bread of Christ. Entice
the wild beasts that they may become my sepulchre. . . Come fire
and cross and grapplings with wild beasts, wrenching of bones,
hacking of limbs, crushings of my whole body; only be it mine
to attain unto Jesus Christ."
Eventually haughty imperial
Rome made its accommodation with Christians, just as Christians
amid the furies and martyrdoms and proscriptions of the Reformation,
made accommodations with each other. What sort of accommodation
should America make right now? How about one with the history
of the past hundred years, in an effort to improve the moral
world climate of the next hundred years? We use the word accommodation
in the sense of an effort to get to grips with history, as inflicted
by the powerful upon the weak. We have been miserably failed
by our national media here, as Jude Wanniski, political economist
and agitator of conventional thinking, remarked in the course
of a well-merited attack on "bipartisanship", which
almost always means obdurate determination to pursue a course
of collective folly without debate: "It is because of this
bipartisanship that our press corps has become blind to the evil
acts we commit as a nation."
America has great enemies circling
the campfires and threatening the public good. They were rampant
the day before the September 11 attacks, with the prospect of
deflation, sated world markets, idled capacity, shrinking social
services. Is ranting about Kabul and throwing money at the Pentagon
going to solve those national emergencies?
There is no compelling reason
to accept that bin Laden is the Master Terror Mind of the World.
On some fairly persuasive accounts, his resources have dwindled,
both in terms of money and equipment. He lives in a cave without
phone or fax or email, hungrily devouring long outdated editions
of newspapers brought by visitors. He may an inspirational force
to the terrorist cadres, but we strongly doubt that he is the
hands-on master of terror portrayed by the Administration, manipulating
world financial markets.
A great nation does not respond
to a single hour of terrible mayhem in two cities by hog-tying
itself with new repressive laws and abuses of constitutional
freedoms, like Gulliver doing the work of the Lilliputians and
lashing himself to the ground with a thousand cords. CP
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