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CounterPunch
September
19, 2002
Who Cares for
Human Rights?
Remember, It's a Just War
by
Ilija Trojanow and Ranjit Hoskote
The events of September 11, 2001, have been widely
described as a tragedy, and so they were, for the victims and
their families. But, as we all know, one person's tragedy can
be another person's windfall. The greatest beneficiary of these
attacks, and of the perception of national threat they produced,
is the military-industrial establishment that dominates the USA,
and by extension, the world. It is ironic that the Pentagon,
a key target of the operation, has since risen to a position
of unchallenged global supremacy, an achievement signalled shortly
after September 11, when the most gargantuan defence budget in
history was rushed through legislation without occasioning even
a ripple of dissent.
Since then, no one in the US establishment
has challenged the view that the best way to deal with terrorists
is to out-gun, out-bomb, and out-massacre them--along with any
non-combatants who happen to get in the way. And the few voices
that were heard after the attacks, which drew attention to the
underlying conditions of oppression and injustice that breed
terrorism, have been quickly sidelined and silenced.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that
the American government and mainstream media have spent the last
year working spin-offs from the perceived threat. Right after
September 11, there were doomsday prophecies of further terrorist
attacks, followed by the mass hysteria over the anthrax letters.
The former never materialised; the latter were traced back to
US Army biological warfare facilities, which, by the way, have
never been visited by UN inspectors.
The interested parties will surely do
all that is necessary to ensure that the American public continues
to feel besieged and under threat. The public discussion concerning
the future of the WTC site in New York, for instance, reveals
a strong impulse towards building a memorial shrine to the feeling
of injustice, the sense of having been wronged. As is customary
with patriotic monuments, which serve to declare one's own innocence
and essential virtue, while emphasising the irrationality and
essential evil of the enemy: they foreground a combination of
martyrdom, triumphalism, and ritualised grief.
Interestingly and not so paradoxically,
the Pentagon, although it has grown exponentially in power, has
become completely invisible in the patriotic iconography of the
September 11 events. As the headquarters of the US Army, the
Pentagon cannot afford exposure in the dramatic and by-now globally
televised demonstration of American vulnerability. Instead, it
is the civilian target, the World Trade Center, which has been
fixed as the iconic reminder of the attacks. The twin towers,
ablaze and collapsing, are a contemporary version of the burning
ships keeling over in Pearl Harbor: they symbolise the American
identity, the self-image of a people always ready to do good
in the world, but who are often misunderstood, and once in an
epic while, subjected to treacherous attack.
But the global scenario today is light-years
away from that of 1941. In the aftermath of September 11, the
US has programmatically swept aside the model of equity among
nations. US unilateralism becomes more entrenched with every
successive operation. The bombing of Afghanistan was justified,
however thinly, by invoking Article 51 of the UN Charter and
UN Security Council Resolution 1373: the US deliberately misread
both as authorising nation-states to launch military action in
self-defence against international terrorism. But this year,
the US establishment has skipped even that flimsy and dubious
sanction in proposing an invasion of Iraq: high US officials
have repeatedly declared that they can and will attack Iraq simply
because they wish to do so.
This unilateralism is in line with a
corresponding strategy of withdrawal, by which the US has stepped
back from most of the mutual obligations that commit it to collaboration
with other nations. It has reneged on the SALT and START agreements
that it signed with the erstwhile USSR and continued with the
CIS successor states, and which mandate the signatories to limit
their ballistic-missile capabilities. The US has also failed
to ratify all the major treaties of recent years, including the
Kyoto Agreement. In May, it withdrew from the proposed International
Criminal Court; Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned his
NATO partners against contemplating any future action against
US defence personnel, proclaiming that his country "will
regard as illegitimate any attempt by the court, or state parties
to the treaty, to assert the ICC's jurisdiction over American
citizens."
And in the international groupings of
which it continues to be a member, the US plays the bully. This
April, it ousted the director general of the UN Organisation
for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons, Jose Bustani, who refused,
as he testified, "to take orders from the US delegation".
Again, in July, the US forced UN Human Rights Commissioner Mary
Robinson to resign, for her vocal criticism of US human-rights
violations during the 'war against terror'.
No nation in the world has signalled
its support for the US plan to attack Iraq. For one, there is
not a shred of evidence that Saddam Hussein has managed to re-stock
his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, in the teeth of a
drastic international embargo that prevents even pediatric medicines
from entering his country. For another, the Iraqi ruler has been
notably quiescent. There were many occasions during his long
reign when he could have been deposed on humanitarian grounds--such
as when he used poison gas against Iranian troops and Kurdish
rebels. But then, in those palmy days, he was the US establishment's
trusted point man against Khomeini's Islamic Revolution, not
the leader of a 'rogue state'.
In the post-September 11 world order,
the US propaganda machine no longer deems it necessary to convince
the world of the validity of American actions. For, after all:
"When Caesar says 'Do this', it is perform'd." And
so, with or without the support of its allies, the US will move
towards brutally establishing its control over the second largest
oil reserve in the world. Already, through their man in Kabul,
the former oil-company executive Hamid Karzai, US political interests
have highjacked the fragile democratic process embodied by the
Loya Jirga, re-empowering the warlords at the cost of progressive
civil-society groups, so as to lock their hold on the Central
Asian oil pipelines.
The God-fearing George W. Bush has not
deigned, so far, to offer any moral justification for US military
aggression. To find a philosophical basis for it, we turn to
the statement, "What We Are Fighting For", signed by
a group of 60 US intellectuals and widely publicised this February.
The signatories include reigning gurus and media pundits like
Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama and Michael Walzer. Defining
'radical Islam' as the global enemy and summarily dealing with
concepts like pacifism, realism and holy war, they establish
the universal moral principle of a 'just war', arguing for a
limited and specific use of military aggression when all other
means have been exhausted. One of the pillars of morality is
the principle of commensurate justice. Attacking a group of German
intellectuals who have criticised their position, the US intellectuals
offer specious acrobatics instead: "It is moral blindness
to compare the unintentional killing of civilians in a war that
is morally justified, and in which it is every soldier's aim
to minimise civilian casualties, with the premeditated murder
of civilians in an office building by terrorists whose prime
aim is to maximise the number of civilian casualties."
Evidently, this grotesque nonsense is
the best that the intellectual elite of the Free World can come
up with, to justify the slaughter of Afghans. Perhaps the Afghans
gathered at an open-air wedding celebration in Kakarak on July
1 should have been working quietly in office buildings; they
might then have qualified as legitimate civilians in the eyes
of Huntington, Fukuyama, Walzer and their fellow luminaries.
Instead, they suffered a two-hour US Air Force bombardment. A
UN team investigating this casualty of the 'just war' reported
that 80 people had been killed and 200 injured in this maniacal
attack. Later, US ground forces bound the women's hands (standard
practice, apparently) and denied the injured medical treatment
for several hours, while 'sanitising' the site by removing shrapnel
and other image-damaging evidence.
The only justification offered for the
bombing of Afghanistan was the capture of the alleged perpetrators
of September 11. That aim has not been achieved. The act of killing
nearly 10,000 people, fighters and civilians, only so as to fail
to capture a few CIA acolytes-turned-terrorist masterminds, hardly
meets the criterion of commensurate justice. Instead, it is evidence
of an extraordinary cynicism, and testifies to the horrifying
US penchant for unleashing Beelzebub to drive out the Devil.
Ilija Trojanow
is a German novelist, and Special Correspondent for the Suddeutsche
Zeitung, and currently lives in Bombay (India).
Ranjit Hoskote
is an Indian cultural theorist. He is also Assistant Editor,
The Hindu, Bombay (India).
They can be reached at: ranjithoskote@hotmail.com
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September
18, 2002
Rep. Cynthia
McKinney
Goodbye
to All That
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Cancerous
Air
Born Under a Bad Sky
Ben Tripp
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Peggy Thomson
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