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November 6, 2001
Evan Ravitz
Stop the War
Through
Direct Democracy
Steve
Perry
Hunger
in Afghanistan
November 5, 2001
Patrick Cockburn
Living
in the Minefields
David Price
Terror
and Indigenous People
November 3, 2001
Declan McCullagh
Nancy Oden Interview
Daniel
Wolff
The
Memphis Blues Again
Mark Weisbrot
War on Civilians
Dave Marsh
How
the RIAA (and the FBI)
Cheat Musicians
Robert Jensen
Speaking
Out Against
War on Campus
November 2, 2001
CounterPunch
Wire
Green
Party Leader Detained at Maine Airport; Prevented from Boarding
Any Plane
Alexander Cockburn
FBI Eyes
Torture
November 1, 2001
Dean Baker
Dying
for Patents
Sami Amarah
US Attempts
to Recruit
Russian Vets of Afghan War
Molly Secours
Where
Are the Voices of Reason? Let the Women
Be Heard
William Blum
Unleashing the
CIA
October 31, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
Terrorize
the Poor,
Subsidize the Rich
Chris Clarke
Thank God
for Berkeley
Steve
Perry
The
Silent Genocide
October 30, 2001
Rep. Ron Paul
War on Terror
Bad as War on Drugs
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Flying
Blind:
The Predator's Problem
Ali Abunimah
Dear Colin
Powell
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Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
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Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
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November
12, 2001
Instead of Terror
By C.G. Estabrook
Last week in this space I argued that the US should
have employed the resources of international
law to pursue the perpetrators of the September 11 horrors
-- rightly termed by Noam Chomsky "probably the most devastating
instant human toll of any crime in history, outside of war."
This week I want to consider what the US should do to prevent
the recurrence of such atrocities. "Killing all the terrorists"
is not a viable option, as they say in Washington, where they
say they're trying to do just that. Commenting last week on an
Afghan village where Human Rights Watch says the US killed civilians,
the usual unidentified Pentagon official said, "The people
there are dead because we wanted them dead" -- they sympathized
with the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
But the killing simply provides more
recruits from those outraged at what the US has done. Shortly
after September 11 the WALL STREET JOURNAL ran articles about
the attitudes of the sort of people who read the WALL STREET
JOURNAL in the Middle East -- bankers, lawyers, bureaucrats --
people who abhor terrorism and despise the (CIA-founded) terror-networks
to which Osama bin Laden belongs. These people in great numbers
have objections to US policy similar to those the terrorists
say they hold -- objections that are rarely mentioned in US media
accounts of September 11.
The objections are clear, and at the
extreme of rage, humiliation, or derangement, they produce terror
and suicide bombings. It is the fault of our ideological institutions
-- the media and the universities -- that Americans are largely
unaware of them. There are principally three: (1) US support
for corrupt family dictatorships across Arabia; (2) US sanctions
on Iraq, which have killed a million people, half of them children;
and (3) US support for Israel's murderous occupation of Palestine.
The last, despite years of blood, is
the easiest to solve: Israel, the largest recipient by far of
US money, must be forced to obey international law. The US must
reverse its policy and stop the billions of dollars it sends
to Israel each year, unless the Israelis withdraw their army
and their settlers from the territories that they occupy illegally.
The US attacked Iraq with overwhelming
force a decade ago on the (relatively specious) charge that it
had violated a Security Council resolution. But Israel is in
its thirty-fifth year of violating Security Council resolutions
and has killed tens of thousands of people in the process. It
stands condemned for its brutal occupation by the rest of the
world. Its economy depends on the vast payments from the US,
which has made it a mercenary Sparta, prostituting itself to
guard "our" oil in the Middle East.
The second objection also has an obvious
remedy: end the lethal US sanctions on Iraq. Americans are properly
appalled by thousands of children dying every month as a result
of our actions, but successive administrations prate that Saddam
Hussein is not using what resources he has to relieve the suffering
of his people. Even if that's so, why should we help him suppress
his own people -- particularly when he strengthens his own regime
by effectively blaming their misery on our sanctions?
Saddam Hussein is of course a thug --
a thug whom, as is so frequently the case, the CIA supported
in his major crimes, including the "gassing of his own people,"
which US officials frequently mention. But, far from "not
finishing the job," US policy after the Gulf War was to
keep him in power, even sacrificing the people who rose against
him after the war: the US government preferred Saddam to the
threat of "domestic radicalism" in Iraq.
Finally, the first objection is the most
difficult, because it involves the cornerstone of US foreign
policy, the control of world energy resources (as much to control
our commercial rivals as to use the resources ourselves). The
real enemy to US business interests (hence to the US government)
in the Middle East is that "domestic radicalism" --
the dangerous idea that the resources of the region should be
used for the people of the region and not for US business. The
US means of control has been the traditional colonial instrument
of "compradors" -- local rulers who will work for the
colonial power rather than for their own people. A withdrawal
of support from US agents in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf
-- now, even a withdrawal of US troops -- would threaten these
regimes with the just demands of their own people. It would
necessitate a restructuring of Middle East government and economy,
but nothing less is required.
A correspondent writes, "Since our
leaders and commentators have assured us that past Middle East
policy has no bearing on the recent disasters, there is clearly
no reason not to in the interests of decency, good politics,
and international law let Palestine become an independent state
and end the grossly lethal Iraqi sanctions. If, on the other
hand, these leaders and commentators have just been kidding us,
and the sanctions and the Palestine did have some relationship
to the fact that the World Trade Center towers are no longer
standing, than resolving the aforementioned matters seem at least
as important as subsidizing the defense industry by bombing and
starving Afghan peasants." Only a roused and aware US populace
can force our government to begin to end the massive injustice
that the US sponsors in the Middle East. CP
Carl Estabrook
teaches at the University of Illinois and is the host of News
From Neptune, a weekly radio show on politics and the media.
He writes a regular column for CounterPunch.
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