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September
24, 2001
The Fate of Reagan's
Freedom Fighters
By Jack McCarthy
One of my earliest recollections of
Ronald Reagan's "freedom fighters," much admired by
many in the U.S. press in the early years of Jihad against the
secular government of the time, was the hell Alexander Cockburn
caught from libs and rads alike for a few critical (now arguably
prophetic) sentences he wrote in his old Village Voice Press
Clips column.
Cockburn wrote that Reagan's
freedom fighters were in fact a barbarous, atavistic crew who
wanted to return Afghanistan back to medieval days.
Talk about the chickens coming
home to roost! Coming home to bomb would be more accurate.
The dirty little secret of
Day of Infamy 2--and all but taboo as far as discussion goes
in the media-- is that the U.S. was viciously attacked by Ronald
Reagan's freedom fighters with our own airplanes!
This helps explain why the
U.S. Government has personalized the issue in the form of the
Taliban's "guest" Osama bin Laden: "Master terror
mind of the world" indeed.
The fact is the U.S. has been
attacked by the Government of Afghanistan and not for the first
time. The bombing of the Cole, the embassy bombing in Kenya and
the Khobar towers bombing all took U.S. lives.
But only now after Reagan's
freedom fighters attacked the U.S. mainland has the U.S. all
but conceded that its the Government of Afghanistan behind Bin
laden and the infamous "network" that is trained and
armed in that country. Only is the U.S. government committed
to removing that government, most likely by any means necessary.
According to a little reported
article in the British "Guardian" for Sept 21, that
paper has seen "Diplomatic cables" outlining the plan
for the removal of the Taliban government, replacing it with
an "interim administration under United Nations auspices."
Even more shocking, according
to the "Guardian" the U.S. plan is to pressure the
so-called "Northern Alliance" opposition to get behind
a U.S. plan to reinstall 86-yr-old monarch King Zahir Shah.
There's been lots of blather(see
Roger Rosenblatt in the current issue of "Newsweek")
by U.S. big thinkers that the shocking events of Sept 11 have
brought about the "end of irony."
Au contraire.
If one can't find irony in
the fact that the U.S. suffered its first domestic military attack
at the hands of Ronald Reagan's "freedom fighters"
one just isn't trying.
And speaking of irony, writing
in the current issue of the magazine, "Washington Report
on Middle East Affairs," former U.S congress from Illinois
Paul Findley (writing before the attack of September 11 took
place) points out that George W Bush may owe his victory against
Al Gore not to Ralph Nader or butterfly ballots, but the U.S.
Muslim vote.
For the first time the U.S.
Muslim lobby endorsed a Republican, George W Bush. Bush won 78
percent of the U.S. Muslim nationwide--and by a similar margin
in Florida.
Now George W Bush recklessly
and foolishly talks of a "crusade" (bin Laden's "Fatwah"
declaration on the U.S. by the way specifically mentions "crusaders").
The only thing certain at this
point is that the attack of September 11th proved beyond a reasonable
doubt that both "irony" and "history" were
still with us. CP
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