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September
20, 2001
Bush's Holy War
The president
has secured a blank check to make war on "terrorism"
wherever he chooses to find it. In the process he may give the
engineers of last week's atrocities exactly what they wanted.
By Steve Perry
There's no telling how expansive the
first wave of U.S. military strikes will be when they arrive,
and no reason to conclude the government really knows yet either.
But every sign points toward enthusiasm for waging a war, or
wars, of impressive scale indeed. First note the implicit caveat
above: Whatever comes in the days or weeks ahead, we are already
promised that it is only the first wave, with much more to follow.
The other day defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld let fly with
the figure of up to 60 nations that might stand to feel the "full
wrath" of U.S. military might for harboring terrorists.
And yesterday the Bush administration christened its blank-check
offensive Operation Infinite Justice, marking what was surely
the first time in human history a war was named before an enemy
was named.
That moniker by itself ought
to give pause, but in the U.S. so far there is not even a whisper
of dissent from Bush and company's ambitious warmaking aims.
The government and media have done a first-rate job of ensuring
the American public has no idea what it may be in for if the
country chooses to wage a protracted war upon all its antagonists
of Islamic persuasion-and that, after all, is the mandate Bush
has sought with his repeated talk of guilt by association for
any nation that "supports or harbors" terrorists. He
wants license to wage an American Jihad.
And here at home he's got it,
for now anyway. In terms of public memory, Vietnam may as well
never have happened; its lessons concerning the peril of waging
guerrilla warfare on difficult terrain amid a largely hostile
populace are entirely forgotten now. What Americans see instead
is the succession of sleek, tidy push-button strikes that began
with the Gulf War and continued sporadically over the past decade.
I suspect most of them now look forward, at worst, to a more
prolonged version of same. They are certainly not prepared for
the kind of war the Bush administration will get by launching
a major incursion into Afghanistan and other states yet unspecified.
Start with Afghanistan itself
and presume the fighting will be contained there, as it almost
certainly will not. The administration has already suggested
that getting bin Laden would not be enough; it will have to wipe
out the Taliban government that has sponsored his presence. The
ruling Taliban, like the bin Laden-affiliated guerrilla cells
now based there, are a diffuse force. You can banish any thought
that a series of neat tactical air strikes will be enough to
do the trick. As the Los Angeles Times reported last Sunday,
"The goals the administration has set out 'will almost certainly
require an expeditionary force on the ground in Afghanistan,'
said L. Paul Bremer, a former State Department counter-terrorism
chief. 'It's going to be a hell of an operation.'"
A hell of a costly operation,
that is, as the Russians learned in the course of their decade-long
losing battle with the Afghans. Last week a Reuters dispatch
featured extensive remarks by Col. Yuri Shamanov, who spent five
years as a regimental commander there. "If the Americans
go to war," he said, "I pity these boys and their mothers
and sisters and brothers. It will be ten times worse than Vietnam.
Vietnam will be a picnic by comparison. Here they will get it
in the teeth. Oh. They will get it good. Rockets won't save you:
There's nothing out there to shoot at. Blast away years' worth
of ammo. The mountains will survive anything. The Afghans will
be ready to fight, no worse than they fought against us, and
they fought very well against us." The going will be made
considerably tougher by the abundance of Soviet land mines that
remain planted in Afghani soil. To date the mines have killed
tens of thousands of Afghani civilians and crippled 2 million
more. And some 10 million of the old Soviet mines still litter
the landscape-"in fields, on mountainsides, beside roads,
around the big cities, along irrigation ditches," according
to a Tuesday report by Robert Fisk in
The Independent.
"No infantry can march across this territory," he adds
flatly.
To compound matters, the U.S.
knows very little about present-day Afghanistan, having effectively
taken it off radar since the withdrawal of Russian forces in
1989 and the subsequent end of the Cold War. On Wednesday a UK
paper, The Telegraph, published an
excellent analysis of the morass awaiting U.S. armed forces there.
It pointed out that the U.S. government's "only major intelligence
source is satellite imagery, which cannot clearly differentiate
between Taliban and Arab fighters nor between fighters and civilians.
America is expected therefore to rely on intelligence provided
by Afghanistan's neighbors and other allies such as Britain which
will take time to collate and evaluate. The key to obtaining
intelligence on Taliban and bin Laden troop movements and their
whereabouts is the degree to which Pakistan's Inter-Services
Intelligence, which has been the principal backer of the Taliban,
will cooperate with the CIA."
Shift your gaze beyond the
borders of Afghanistan and the prospective troubles begin multiplying
at a dizzying rate. Tactically speaking Pakistan is the linchpin
of any sustained U.S. incursion into Afghanistan, the only practical
base of operations for getting at Taliban and bin Laden strongholds
in the east. And while American officials would like to soft-pedal
the point, Pakistan's continued cooperation is far from assured.
The Musharraf government's current capitulation to U.S. demands
is a precarious one, purchased with a good deal of arm-twisting
and at the cost of enormous civil unrest inside Pakistan's borders.
Until last week, remember, Pakistan was the Taliban's principal
ally in the region, and there are a great many people in Pakistan-including
high officials in the military and the intelligence service-who
would rather it stayed that way. Musharraf might survive a short
U.S. presence in Pakistan but his chances grow dimmer the longer
it lasts, particularly if the Taliban makes good on its pledge
to start lobbing missiles across the border at its former ally.
The upshot is that the U.S. could pretty quickly find itself
under siege not only by the Afghans but in Pakistan as well.
And if the Pakistani government falls into the hands of a regime
that would like to join the war against the U.S., it will have
nuclear weapons at its disposal.
The internal divisions of Pakistan
are mirrored in countries all round the region, where the rise
of so-called "Islamic fundamentalists" has changed
the picture considerably since Gulf War days. Presently U.S.-friendly
regimes in states such as Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates,
and Egypt will find themselves under increasing internal strain
in the event of a protracted tussle in Afghanistan. If the war
is carried into Iraq as well, an eventuality that many in the
U.S. and Israeli governments are slavering over, it will drive
the Saudis out of Bush's big tent and-well, you get the picture.
At minimum anti-American sentiments will rise to a new pitch
throughout the Middle East, and bring untold masses of fresh
recruits to the guerrilla cells overseen by people like Osama
bin Laden.
In fact the best-case scenario
is that this is all it will do, for the present at least;
the worst case is that it will topple more U.S. client regimes
and bring us one step closer to all-out war with more enemies
than we can count. It is indicative of the current climate in
the United States that the only voice raising such a possibility
is the old nativist and right-wing culture warrior Pat Buchanan,
who was quoted yesterday in Sam Smith's Progressive Review. "What
took place last Tuesday was an atrocity," he said. "What
is coming may qualify as tragedy. For the mass murder of our
citizens has filled this country with a terrible resolve that
could lead it to plunge headlong into an all-out war against
despised Arab and Islamic regimes that turns into a war of civilizations,
with the United States almost alone."
Almost alone? This is exactly
the opposite of the picture the Bush administration and the major
media wish to present, in which practically the whole world stands
against the depredations of a dastardly few. But Buchanan's view
is closer to the truth of the matter. This is essentially America's
war, unless or until other countries in the West are visited
with similar attacks. It's been no trick to elicit expressions
of outrage and fellow-feeling from the NATO membership and elsewhere,
but even among European nations only Tony Blair's Britain seems
particularly determined to follow the U.S. very far down the
path of conflagration; most of the others have indicated that
there will be limits to the degree of support and assistance
the U.S. can expect, and in a major war those limits would only
grow more strained with the passing of time and the piling up
of costs and casualties.
How much of this comes to pass
is largely up to the Bush gang and how many Wanted Dead or Alive
notices it decides to post around the world. Today's New York
Times contains a
revealing account of the divisions within the administration,
which center on a Colin Powell faction that wants to proceed
slowly and define its targets modestly, at least for starters,
and a claque arrayed around deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz
that would like to include Iraq and Lebanon in its first strikes.
But so far, to judge from the sum of its public posturing, the
administration seems inclined to give the perpetrators of last
Tuesday's attacks exactly what they must have wanted: American
involvement in a long and bloody war of attrition that, after
a certain point, it will not be possible to win or to extricate
ourselves from. CP
Steve Perry writes frequently for CounterPunch
and is a contributor to the excellent cursor.org
website, which offers incisive coverage of the current crisis.
He lives in Minneapolis, MN.
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