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October
3, 2001
Ariel
Dorfman:
America
the Wounded
Lennie
Brenner
Dr.
Watson in Afghanistan
Steve
Perry:
Ashcroft's
Scare Tactics
October
2, 2001
Patrick
Cockburn:
Inside
an Afghan Hospital
Richard
Manning:
A
Vietnam Vet on Patriotism
St. Clair/Cockburn:
Tarnished
Star,
Tom Ridge in Vietnam
October
1, 2001
Noam
Chomsky:
Memo
to Hitchens
Hizam
Bitar:
Refuting
Michael Kinsley
David Grenier:
The
Good, The Bad,
and the Ugly
Douglas
Valentine:
Homeland
Insecurity
Carl
Estabrook:
Stop Bush's Killing
Mahajan/Jensen:
Food,
Fear and War
Patrick
Cockburn:
Ready
to Strike
Cockburn/St.
Clair:
Things
Could Be Worse
Terry
Allen:
Early
Profit-taking and 9/11
September
29, 2001
Steve Perry:
The
Pentagon's Blueprint
Patrick
Cockburn:
When
Will the Missiles Fall?
September
28, 2001
Edward Said:
Backlash
and Backtrack
John Troyer:
When
Language Fails
Patrick
Cockburn:
In
Afghanistan, Waiting for the Real War to Start
Steve Breyman:
War,
Oil and Renewables
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October
8, 200
A War of Lies
By Rahul Mahajan and Robert
Jensen
A war that is supposed to help feed
the desperate people of Afghanistan will in fact help starve
them.
A war supposedly brought on
by Taliban intransigence was actually provoked by our own government.
A war that the majority of
the American people believe is about their grief, anger and
desire for revenge is really about the cold-blooded calculations
of a small elite seeking to extend its power.
And a war that is supposed
to make us safer has put us in far greater danger by increasing
the likelihood of further terrorist attacks.
Let's take those points in
order.
Our undeclared war on Afghanistan
is the culmination of a decade of U.S. aggression with a humanitarian
façade.
Once the natural sympathies
of the American people were touched by the plight of the long-suffering
Afghan people, public opinion swung toward helping them. In
response to this, the administration concocted the most shameless
and cynical cover story for military strikes in recent memory.
The idea, leaked last Thursday, went like this:
- The Afghan people are starving,
so we need to do food drops. (Never mind that all those experienced
in humanitarian aid programs are opposed to food drops because
they are dangerous and wasteful, and, most important, preclude
setting up the on-the-ground distribution networks necessary
to making aid effective.)
- We need to destroy the Taliban's
air defenses before doing food drops.
- The transport planes may be
endangered by the Stinger anti-aircraft missiles that the United
States supplied the mujaheddin in the 1980s when they were fighting
the Soviet Union, and some of which ended up in the Taliban's
hands.
- We have to destroy the Taliban's
air defense. Because so much of it is mobile, we have to bomb
all over.
The bombing will seriously
hinder existing aid efforts. The World Food Program operates
a bakery in Kabul on which thousands of families depend, as
well as many other programs. A number of United Nations organizations
have been mounting a major new coordinated humanitarian campaign.
These efforts were not endangered by the Taliban before, but
the chaos and violence created by this bombing -- combined with
a projected assault by the Northern Alliance -- will likely
force UN personnel to withdraw, with disastrous effects for
the Afghan people.
To add insult to injury, in
the first day the United States dropped only
37,500 packaged meals, far below the daily needs of even a single
large refugee camp. With 7.5 million people on the brink of
death and existing programs disrupted, this is a drop in the
bucket compared to the damage caused by this new war.
Those who starve or freeze
will not be the only innocents to die. It should finally be
clear to all that "surgical strikes" are a myth. In
the Gulf War, only 7 percent of the munitions used were "smart,"
and those missed the target roughly half the time. One of those
surgical strikes destroyed the Amiriyah bomb shelter, killing
somewhere from 400 to 1,500 women and children. In Operation
Infinite Reach, the 1998 attacks on Afghanistan, some of the
cruise missiles went astray and hit Pakistan. Military officials
have already admitted that not all of the ordnance being used
is "smart," and even the current generation of smart
weapons hit their target only 70 to 80 percent of the time.
Contrary to U.S. propaganda,
civilian targets are always on the list. There are already reports
that Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, was targeted for
assassination, and the Defense Ministry in Kabul -- surely no
more military a target than the Pentagon -- and located in the
middle of the city, has been destroyed.
This is standard U.S. practice.
In the Gulf War, virtually every power station in Iraq was destroyed,
with untold effects on civilians. A correspondent for al-Jazeera
TV reported that power went out in Kabul when the bombing started,
although it was restored in some places within hours. Targeting
of any pitiful remnants of civilian infrastructure in Afghanistan
would be consistent with past U.S. policy.
George Bush said we are not
at war with the Afghan people -- just as we
were not at war with the Iraqi people or the Serbian people.
The hundreds
of thousands of Afghans who fled the cities knew better.
Military analysts suggest that
the timing of the strikes had to do with the weather. Another
possible interpretation is that the Taliban's recently-expressed
willingness to negotiate posed too great a danger that peace
might break out. The Orwellian use of the term "diplomacy"
to describe the consistent U.S. policy of no negotiations --
accept our peremptory demands or else -- helps to mask the fact
that the administration always intended to launch this war.
The same tactic was used against
Serbia; at the Rambouillet negotiations in March 1999, demands
were pitched just high enough that the Serbian government could
not go along.
In this case, the Taliban's
offer to detain bin Laden and try him before an Islamic court,
while unacceptable, was a serious initial negotiating position
and would have merited a serious counteroffer -- unless one had
already decided to go to war.
The administration has many
reasons for this war.
- The policy of imperial credibility,
carried to such destructive extremes in Vietnam. In perhaps
the last five years of direct U.S. involvement there, the goal
was not to "win," but to inflict such a price on Vietnam
that other nations would not think of crossing the United States.
- The oil and natural gas of
central Asia, the next Middle East. Afghanistan's location between
the Caspian basin and huge markets in Japan, China and the Indian
subcontinent gives it critical importance. A U.S-controlled
client state in Afghanistan, presumably under the exiled octogenarian
former king, Zahir Shah, would give U.S. corporations great
leverage over those resources. Just as in the Middle East, the
United States does not seek to own all those resources, but
it wants to dictate the manner in which the wells and pipelines
are developed and used.
- The potential to push a radical
right-wing domestic agenda. War makes it easier to expand police
powers, restrict civil liberties, and increase the military
budget.
This war is about the extension
of U.S. power. It has little to do with bringing the terrorists
to justice, or with vengeance. Judging from initial polls, the
war has been popular as the administration trades on people's
desire for revenge -- but we should hardly confuse the emotional
reaction of the public with the motivation of the administration.
Governments do not feel emotions.
This war will not make us more
secure. For weeks, many in the antiwar movement -- and some
careful commentators in more mainstream circles -- have been
saying that military action was playing into the hands of Osama
bin Laden, who may have been hoping for such an attack to spark
the flames of anti-American feeling in the Muslim world. Bin
Laden's pre-taped speech, broadcast on al-Jazeera television
after the bombing started, vindicates that analysis.
"Either you are with us
or you are with the terrorists," Bush said on Sept. 20.
Bin Laden's appeal to the ummah, the whole Islamic world, echoed
this logic: "The world is divided into two sides -- the
side of faith and the side of infidelity."
The American jihad may yet
be matched by a widely expanded Islamic one, something unlikely
had we not bombed. Remember, we have seen only the opening shots
of what many officials are calling a long-term, multi-front
war in which the secretary of defense has told us there will
be no "silver bullet." The administration has clearly
been preparing the American people to accept an extended conflict.
Bin Laden's world is Bush's,
in some strangely distorted mirror. A world divided as they
seem to want would have no place in it for those of us who want
peace with justice.
All is not yet lost. The first
step is for us to send a message, not just to our government
but to the whole world, saying, "This action done in our
name was not done by our will. We are against the killing of
innocents anywhere in the world."
The next step is for us to
build a movement that can change our government's barbaric and
self-destructive policy.
If we don't act now to build
a new world, we may just be left with no world.
Rahul Mahajan serves on the National Board of Peace
Action. Robert Jensen is a professor of journalism at
the University of Texas. Both are members of the Nowar
Collective. They can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu
or rahul@tao.ca
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