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CounterPunch
November
8, 2002
Bush's "Clean
Shot" at War
by ROBERT FISK
"A clean
shot" was The Washington Post's
revolting description of the murder of the al-Qa'ida leaders
in Yemen by a US "Predator" unmanned aircraft. With
groveling approval, the US press used Israel's own mendacious
description of such murders as a "targeted killing"--and
shame on the BBC for parroting the same words on Wednesday. How
about a little journalistic freedom here? Like asking why this
important al-Qa'ida leader could not have been arrested. Or tried
before an open court. Or, at the least, taken to Guantanamo Bay
for interrogation.
Instead, the Americans release a clutch
of Guantanamo "suspects", one of whom--having been
held for 11 months in solitary confinement--turns out to be around
100 years old and so senile that he can't string a sentence together.
And this is the "war on terror"?
But a "clean shot" is what
President Bush appears to want to take at the United Nations.
First, he wants to force it to adopt a resolution about  which the Security Council has the
gravest reservations. Then he warns that he might destroy the
UN's integrity by ignoring it altogether. In other words, he
wants to destroy the UN. Does George Bush realize that the United
States was the prime creator of this institution, just as it
was of the League of Nations under President Woodrow Wilson?
"Targeted killing"--courtesy
of the Bush administration--is now what the Israeli prime minister
Ariel Sharon can call "legitimate warfare". And Vladimir
Putin, too. Now the Russians--I kid thee not, as Captain Queeg
said in the Caine Mutiny--are talking about "targeted killing"
in their renewed war on Chechnya. After the disastrous "rescue"
of the Moscow theatre hostages by the so-called "elite"
Russian Alpha Special forces (beware, oh reader, any rescue by
"elite" forces, should you be taken hostage), Putin
is supported by Bush and Tony Blair in his renewed onslaught
against the broken Muslim people of Chechnya.
I'm a cynical critic of the US media,
but last month Newsweek ran a brave and brilliant and terrifying
report on the Chechen war. In a deeply moving account of Russian
cruelty in Chechnya, it recounted a Russian army raid on an unprotected
Muslim village. Russian soldiers broke into a civilian home and
shot all inside. One of the victims was a Chechen girl. As she
lay dying of her wounds, a Russian soldier began to rape her.
"Hurry up Kolya," his friend shouted, "while she's
still warm."
Now, I have a question. If you or I was
that girl's husband or lover or brother or father, would we not
be prepared to take hostages in a Moscow theatre? Even if this
meant--as it did--that, asphyxiated by Russian gas, we would
be executed with a bullet in the head, as the Chechen women hostage-takers
were? But no matter. The "war on terror" means that
Kolya and the boys will be back in action soon, courtesy of Messrs
Putin, Bush and Blair.
Let me quote that very brave Israeli,
Mordechai Vanunu, the man who tried to warn the West of Israel's
massive nuclear war technology, imprisoned for 12 years of solitary
confinement--and betrayed, so it appears, by one Robert Maxwell.
In a poem he wrote in confinement, Vanunu said: "I am the
clerk, the technician, the mechanic, the driver. They said, Do
this, do that, don't look left or right, don't read the text.
Don't look at the whole machine. You are only responsible for
this one bolt, this one rubber stamp."
Kolya would have understood that. So
would the US Air Force officer "flying" the drone which
murdered the al-Qa'ida men in Yemen. So would the Israeli pilot
who bombed an apartment block in Gaza, killing nine small children
as well as well as his Hamas target, an "operation"--that
was the description, for God's sake--which Ariel Sharon described
as "a great success".
These days, we all believe in "clean
shots". I wish that George Bush could read history. Not
just Britain's colonial history, in which we contrived to use
gas against the recalcitrant Kurds of Iraq in the 1930s. Not
just his own country's support for Saddam Hussein throughout
his war with Iran. The Iranians once produced a devastating book
of colored photographs of the gas blisters sustained by their
soldiers in that war. I looked at them again this week. If you
were these men, you would want to die. They all did. I wish someone
could remind George Bush of the words of Lawrence of Arabia,
that "making war or rebellion is messy, like eating soup
off a knife."
And I suppose I would like Americans
to remember the arrogance of colonial power. Here, for example,
is the last French executioner in Algeria during the 1956-62
war of independence, Fernand Meysonnier, boasting only last month
of his prowess at the guillotine. "You must never give the
guy the time to think. Because if you do he starts moving his
head around and that's when you have the mess-ups. The blade
comes through his jaw, and you have to use a butcher's knife
to finish it off. It is an exorbitant power--to kill one's fellow
man." So perished the brave Muslims of the Algerian fight
for freedom.
No, I hope we will not commit war crimes
in Iraq--there will be plenty of them for us to watch--but I
would like to think that the United Nations can restrain George
Bush and Vladimir Putin and, I suppose, Tony Blair. But one thing
is sure. Kolya will be with them.
Robert Fisk
writes for the Independent. He is the author of
Pity the Nation: the Abduction of Lebanon, recently published
by Nation Books.
Yesterday's
Features
Bruce Jackson
Don't
Mourn, Bake!
Anthony Gancarski
Jeb
Bush: Left-Liberal?
William Evan
A Diplomatic
Strategy
How Carter and Castro Could Avert War on Iraq
William A. Cook
Blinded
by the Right
Pierre Tristam
Hypocrisy
at Camp Delta
Mayor Walid Hamad
Settlers
and Trash
Matt Siegfried
Questions
of War
Alexander Cockburn and
Jeffrey St. Clair
Nosedive:
the Democrats the Day After
New
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to Subscribers:
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in the Tunnels;
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- Ashcroft's Gays: the War on Free Speech;
- Saddam's Amnesty: Could It Happen Here?
- Criminalizing Dissent: a history and preview;
- Iraq 1987: When the Going Was Good;
- Egypt in Turmoil: an Anthropologist's Account;
- Green and Grounded: Profiled at the Gate.
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October 26
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