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September 25,
2001
Was
It Really Worth It, 
Mrs. Albright?
THE PRICE
By Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Once a war criminal, once a US senator,
now president of the New School, Bob Kerrey joined CNN's Paula
Zahn as for commentary Monday morning. Zahn made chaste reference
to Kerrey's expertise in military affairs. This plunges us straight
into the fierce debate about how much of a historical context
one is permitted to give the September 11 attacks.
Lest there be any doubt about
this, by the way, maybe we should register our own view that
these were crimes against humanity. But we also think it's very
necessary to set them in a full historical perspective, not least
because one hears, often enough, questions like, "What are
we to tell our children?" or "Why does everyone hate
us?" being answered in a carefully circumscribed fashion.
Take Nat Hentoff, in a recent
column in the Village Voice: "'How can I explain this horror
to them?' Jessica asks. 'How can I explain how people can do
this?' What I'd say to my grandchildren is that there are people
everywhere in this world who identify themselves totally with
a system of belief--whether political, religious, a poisonous
fusion of both, or some other overwhelming transcendence that
has become their very reason for being. These vigilantes of faith
have unequivocally answered the question of Duke Ellington's
song 'What Am I Here For?'
"Such people can be of
any faith, color, and class. Palestinian suicide-bombers; the
self-exhilarating murderous fringe of the Weather Underground
here in the "revolutionary" 1960s; John Brown, the
abolitionist executioner; and the self-betraying pro-lifers who
urge the killing of--and sometimes actually assassinate--doctors
who perform abortions. How can our American government--and how
can we protect ourselves against such 'holy' fanatics?"
Surely Hentoff's grandkids
deserve a little more than sneers about the Weather People and
the Sixties by way of explanation of what prompted those Muslim
kamikazes to their terrible deeds. After all, around the time
the Weather folk blew themselves (and only themselves) up in
that house on Eleventh St in the Village, the United States government,
in the name of freedom's war on evil, was incinerating Vietnamese
peasants with napalm and shooting them in their huts or in ditches.
In Kerrey's unit the techniques included throat-slitting as well
as shooting.
Mention of Vietnam or any other
of the United States' less alluring zones of engagement with
the enemies of freedom makes Christopher Hitchens seethe with
fury, at a level of moral reproof almost surpassing his venom
against Clinton the molester of women and bombardier of Khartoum.
In a Bomb the Bastards outburst in the latest Nation he takes
a swipe at the "masochistic e-mail traffic that might start
circulating from the Chomsky-Zinn-Finkelstein quarter" and
decrees that "Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost
is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell
and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content."
We can safely say that the
word "loose" is a purely formal device, and what Hitchens
means here is that any and all talk about homeward-bound chickens
is out of bounds, part of all the things we are not allowed to
talk about. In times of crisis, by the way, it's often liberals
who are quickest to set rules about what we should say and how
we should say it. "This nation is now at war," proclaimed
Peter Beinart, editor in chief of the New Republic, " and
in such an environment, domestic political dissent is immoral
without a prior statement of national solidarity, a choosing
of sides."
We're in total solidarity against
the fanatic terror that doomed just short of 7,000 ordinary people
that Tuesday morning, and we're against the religious and political
precepts of those who were reverently described only a few short
years ago in our newspapers and in presidential proclamations
as the Afghan or Saudi "freedom fighters. But at what point
is a fracture in national solidarity permitted by Commissar Beinert?
When the B-52s lay waste Afghans some slum on the edge of Kandahar
on the supposition that bin Laden was there? Or when Attorney
General Ashcroft moves to end all inhibitions on electronic snooping
or warrantless arrests?
What moved those kamikaze Muslims
to embark, some many months ago on the training that they knew
would culminate in their deaths as well of those (they must have
hoped) of thousands upon thousands of innocent people? Was it
the Koran plus a tape from Osama bin Laden? The dream of a world
in which all men wear untrimmed beards and women have to stay
at home or go outside only when enveloped in blue tents? I doubt
it. If I had to cite what steeled their resolve the list would
surely include the exchange on CBS in 1996 between Madeleine
Albright and then US ambassador to the United Nations and Lesley
Stahl. Albright was maintaining that sanctions had yielded important
concessions from Saddam Hussein.
Stahl: "We have heard
that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children
than died in Hiroshima. And you know, is the price worth it?"
Albright: "I think this
is a very hard choice, but the price we think the price
is worth it."
They read that exchange in
the Middle East. It was infamous all over the Arab world. I'll
bet the September 11 kamikazes knew it well enough, just as they
could tell you the crimes wrought against the Palestinians. So
would it be unfair today to take Madeleine Albright down to the
ruins of the Trade Towers, remind her of that exchange, and point
out that the price turned out also to include that awful mortuary.
Was that price worth it too, Mrs. Albright?
Mere nit-picking among the
ruins and the dust of the 6,500? I don't think so. America has
led a charmed life amid its wars on people. The wars mostly didn't
come home and the press made as sure as it could that folks including
the ordinary workers in the Trade Towers weren't really up to
speed on what was been wrought in Freedom's name. In freedom's
name America made sure that any possibility of secular democratic
reform in the Middle East was shut off. Mount a coup against
Mossadegh in the mid-1950s, as the CIA did and you end up with
the Ayatollah Khomeini 25 years later. Mount a coup against Kassim
in Iraq, as the CIA did, and you get the Agency's man, Saddam
Hussein.
What about Afghanistan? In
April of 1978 an indigenous populist coup overthrew the government
of Mohammed Daoud, who had formed an alliance with the man the
US had installed in Iran, Reza Pahlevi, aka the Shah. The new
Afghan government was led by Noor Mohammed Taraki, and the Taraki
administration embarked, albeit with a good deal of urban intellectual
arrogance on land reform, hence an attack on the opium-growing
feudal estates. Taraki went to the UN where he managed to raise
loans for crop substitution for the poppy fields.
Taraki also tried to bear down
on opium production in the border areas held by fundamentalists,
since the latter were using opium revenues to finance attacks
on Afghanistan's central government, which they regarded as an
unwholesome incarnation of modernity that allowed women to go
to school and outlawed arranged marriages and the bride price.
Accounts began to appear in the western press along the lines
of this from the Washington Post, to the effect that the mujahiddeen
liked to "torture their victims by first cutting off their
noses, ears and genitals, then removing one slice of skin after
another."
At that time the mujahiddeen
was not only getting money from the CIA but from Libya's Moammar
Q'addaffi who sent them $250,000. In the summer of 1979 the US
State Department produced a memo making it clear how the US government
saw the stakes, no matter how modern minded Taraki might be or
how feudal the Muj. It's another passage Nat might read to the
grandkids: "The United States' larger interest would be
served by the demise of the Taraki-Amin regime, despite whatever
set backs this might mean for future social and economic reforms
in Afghanistan. The overthrow of the DRA [Democratic Republic
of Afghanistan] would show the rest of the world, particularly
the Third World, that the Soviets' view of the socialist course
of history being inevitable is not accurate."
Taraki was killed by Afghan
army officers in September 1979. Hafizullah Amin, educated in
the US, took over and began meeting regularly with US embassy
officials at a time when the US was arming Islamic rebels in
Pakistan. Fearing a fundamentalist, US-backed regime in Afghanistan,
the Soviets invaded in force in December 1979. The stage was
set for Dan Rather to array himself in flowing burnous and head
for the Hindu Kush to proclaim the glories of the Muj in their
fight against the Soviet jackboot. Maybe I missed it, but has
Dan offered any reflections on that phase of his reportorial
career?
Well, the typists and messenger
boys and back-office staffs throughout the Trade Center didn't
know that history. There's a lot of other relevant history they
probably didn't know but which those men on the attack planes
did. How could those people in the Towers have known, when US
political and journalistic culture is a conspiracy to perpetuate
their ignorance? Those people on the Towers were innocent portions
of the price that Albright insisted, in just one of its applications,
as being worth it. It would honor their memory to insist that
in future our press offers a better accounting of how America's
wars for Freedom are fought and what the actual price might include.
CP
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