|
October 27, 2001
David Krieger
Nukes on
the Loose
Edward
Said
A
Vision to Lift the Spririt
October 26, 2001
CounterPunch
Wire
Genocide
Scholar Gagged
Over Comments on the
Bombing of Afghanistan
Rahul
Mahajan
Poisoning
the Well
Sen. Russ Feingold
Why I Opposed
the
Anti-Terrorism Bill
John Troyer
Put
the War to a Vote
Norman Madarasz
What It
Means to be
Against the War
Patrick
Cockburn
Northern
Alliance Attacks
US Bombing Strategy
Richard Lloyd Parry
Terrible Images
of a "Just" War
October 25, 2001
Ghassan
Andoni
Raid
on Bethlehem
N.D. Jayaprakash
From
Hiroshima to NYC
Evan Schultz
Memo
to Ashcroft:
Read Marbury
The Sunshine
Project
Assault
on the BioWeapons
Convention
Sarah
Turner
Cashing
In on Patriotism
Latin American Colloquium
on Systemology
The Meridia Manifesto
Noam Chomsky
The
New War on Terror
October 24, 2001
Michael Colby
Radioactive
Mail?
Lori Allen
Life
in an Occupied Land
During Wartime
Peter
Swire
New
Anti-Terrorism Bill
Poses Old Risks
Irina
Malenko
A
Non-Western Voice
David
Vest
Welcome
to Web Hell
Patrick Cockburn
Battle
of Mazar Gets Nasty
October 23, 2001
Steve
Perry
Anthrax,
Cipro and the Bailout of Bayer
Carl Estabrook
Just War
or
The Rule of Lawlessness?
Patrick
Cockburn
Errant
Bombs at Bagram
George
Monbiot
War
and Oil
Robert
Jensen
Crushing
Academic Dissent
October 22, 2001
Hamit
Dardagan
The
New Newspeak
Tom Turnipseed
War
on the Poor
Patrick Cockburn
Killing
Mullah Omar's Child
David
Vest
The
War on Women
Shepherd
Bliss
Advice
from a Vietnam Vet
Hani Shukrallah
Capital
Strikes Back
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
INSIDE
EXCLUSIVE
TO
COUNTERPUNCH
SUBSCRIBERS
Published Oct. 3, 2001
8-Page Special
Issue
Aftermath
Diary
Ashcroft's Onslaught
on Civil Liberties
Ridge Long Groomed
for Cheney's Job
Those CIA Killing
Bids Never Stopped
The Not-So-Great
Mayor Giuliani
Crop Duster
Ban
Will Save Lives
Madeleine Albright's
Deadly Legacy
How the Bin
Laden Women
Fled Bel Air
Tom Ridge's
Vietnam
Same as Kerrey's?
A CounterPunch
Journey
to Ramallah
A Word About
God
Nostradamus
Jam-maker
Search
CounterPunch
Read Whiteout and Find Out
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 New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
Responses to 9/11:
Chomsky, Russell Banks,
Zinn, and Alice Walker
A Free ebook from
Seven Stories Press
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
October 27,
2001
The left is getting itself tied up in knots about
the Just War and the propriety of bombing Afghanistan. I suspect
some are intimidated by laptop bombardiers and kindred bullyboys
handing out white feathers and snarling about "collaborators"
and being "soft on fascism." A recent issue of The
Nation carried earnest efforts by Richard Falk and an editorial
writer to mark out "the relevant frameworks of moral, legal
and religious restraint" to be applied to the lethal business
of attacking Afghans. I felt sorry for Falk as he clambered through
his moral obstacle course. This business of trying to define
a just war against Afghanistan is what C. Wright Mills used to
call crackpot realism.
War, as the United States has been fighting
it in Iraq and Yugoslavia, consists mostly of bombing, intended
to terrify the population and destroy the fabric of tolerable
social existence. Here's how a couple of Pentagon briefers described
the infliction of terror, as reported by Jonathan Landay of the
San Jose Mercury News on October 17: "'If you're on the
ground and get hit with a bomb from a B-52 it's over,' the officer
said. 'But if you're there and you hear an AC-130 coming, with
its Gatling gun going, the experience can be even more frightening.'"
Marine Corps Lieut. Gen. Gregory Newbold provided further context:
"The psychological effect was intended to convince the Taliban
leadership that they have made an error and their calculus some
day will be in their interests to see that."
Those AC-130s were over Kabul. What else
can the consequence be but to terrify and kill civilians, whose
anguish may or may not impinge upon the "calculus"
of the Taliban leaders? Remember, too, that bombs mostly miss
their targets. Colonel John Warden, who planned the air campaign
in Iraq said afterwards that dropping dumb bombs "is like
shooting skeet. 499 out of 500 pellets may miss the target, but
that's irrelevant." There will always be shattered hospitals
and wrecked old folks' homes, just as there will always be Defense
Department flacks saying that the destruction "cannot be
independently verified" or that the hospital or old folks'
home were actually sanctuaries for enemy forces, for "command
and control."
How many bombing campaigns do we have
to go through in a decade to recognize all the usual landmarks?
What's unusual about the latest onslaught is that it is being
leveled at a country where, on numerous estimates from reputable
organizations, around 7.5 million people were, before September
11, at risk of starving to death. On September 16 the New York
Times' Islamabad correspondent, John Burns, reported that the
United States "demanded elimination of truck convoys that
provide much of the food and other supplies to Afghanistan's
civilian population." In early October the UN's World Food
Program was able to resume shipments at a lower level, then the
bombing began and everything stopped once more, amid fierce outcry
from relief agencies that the United States was placing millions
at risk, with winter just around the corner.
On October 15 the UN's special rapporteur,
Jean Ziegler, said in Geneva that the food airdrops by the same
military force dropping bombs undermined the credibility of humanitarian
aid. "As special rapporteur I must condemn with the last
ounce of energy this operation called snowdropping [the air drops
of food packagers]; it is totally catastrophic for humanitarian
aid." Oxfam reckons that before September 11, 400,000 were
on the edge of starvation ("acute food insecurity"),
5.5 million "extremely vulnerable" and the balance
of the overall 7.5 million at great risk. Once it starts snowing,
500,000 will be cut off from the food convoys that should, were
it not for the bombing, have been getting them provisions for
the winter.
So, by the time Falk was inscribing the
protocols of what a just war might be, the United States was
already engineering civilian deaths on an immense scale. Not,
to be sure, the ghastly instant entombment of September 11, what
Noam Chomsky has called "the most devastating instant human
toll of any crime in history, outside of war," but death
on the installment plan: malnutrition, infant mortality, disease,
premature death for the old and so on. The numbers will climb
and climb, and there won't be any "independent verification"
such as the Pentagon demands.
Let's not be pettifogging and dwell on
the point that nothing resembling proof of bin Laden's responsibility
for the September 11 attack has yet been put forward either by
the United States nor its subordinate in Downing St. Disregarding
the fact that the Bush administration now seems to be substituting
Mullah Omar and the Arch Devil (thus perhaps somehow trying to
make all out war on Afghanistan more explicable). Let's accept
the so far unproven charge that the supreme strategist of the
September 11 terror is Osama bin Laden. He's the Enemy. So what
have been this Enemy's objectives? He desires the widest possible
war; to kill Americans on American soil; to destroy the symbols
of US military power; to engage the United States in a holy war.
The first two objectives the Enemy could accomplish by themselves;
the third required the cooperation of the United States. Bush
fell into the trap and Falk, The Nation and some on the left
have jumped in after him.
There can be no "limited war with
limited objectives" when the bombing sets matches to tinder
from Pakistan and Kashmir to Ramallah, Bethlehem, Jerusalem.
"Limited war" is a far less realistic prospect than
to regard September 11 as a crime, to pursue its perpetrators
to justice in an international court, using all relevant police
and intelligence agencies here and abroad.
The left should be for peace, which in
no way means ignoring the demands of either side. Bin Laden calls
for: an end to sanctions on Iraq; US troops out of Saudi Arabia;
justice for Palestinians. The left says Aye to those, though
we want a two-state solution, whereas bin Laden wants to drive
Jews along with secular and Christian Palestinians into the sea.
The US government calls for a dismantling of the Terror Network,
and the left says aye to that too. Of course we oppose networks
of people who wage war on civilians.
So we're pretty close to supporting demands
on both sides, but we know these demands are not going to be
achieved by war. What is this war about? On Bush's side it's
about the defense of the American Empire; on the other, an attempt
to challenge that Empire in the name of theocratic fundamentalist
Islam. On that issue the left is against both sides. We don't
want anyone to kill or die in the name of the American Empire,
for the "war on terror" to be cashed in blood in Colombia
or anywhere else, or for anyone to kill or die in the name of
Islamic fundamentalism. Go to the UN, proceed on the basis that
September 11 was a crime. Bring the perpetrators to justice by
legal means.
A final word about "rationalizing":
After the Columbine school killings, people called for more security
in schools. They also asked big questions: How could we have
raised such children? Was it distance parenting, violence in
culture, bullying? If you asked such questions, no one confused
explanation with justification. No one charged you with being
soft on teen killers.
Leave the final word to Seth Bardacke
who remarked to his father Frank, the afternoon of September
11, "I guess now we know that bombing civilians is wrong."
Doug Lummis, a friend of the Bardackes
and of mine, then wrote in his widely-read column in a Japanese
newspaper, "The son of an American Jewish friend of mine
in a telephone call to his father said I guess this proves bombing
civilians is wrong. Of course there are countless people around
the world who don't need such proof. Nevertheless, I find the
statement extraordinary in its simple wisdom. It doesn't use
the crimes of the past (the countless civilians who have been
killed by US bombs) to lighten the criminality of the New York
and Washington attacks. Rather it suggests that fully grasping
the total criminality and horror of those attacks can be used
to grasp the equal criminality and horror of similar acts in
rhe past. This understanding can provide a solid ground for opposing
all similar acts (including state terrorism) in the future."
CP
|