ZGram - 10/18/2002 - "Osama Bin Who?"

irimland@zundelsite.org irimland@zundelsite.org
Fri, 18 Oct 2002 19:06:36 -0700


ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

10/18/2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

The essay below  was written a little more than two weeks after the 
attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  We know a great 
deal more today than we did then - and against what we have since 
learned and may guess, this essay gives us a good reason to reflect:

[START]

The algebra of infinite justice

As the US prepares to wage a new kind of war, Arundhati Roy 
challenges the instinct for vengeance

Arundhati Roy
Guardian

Saturday September 29, 2001


In the aftermath of the unconscionable September 11 suicide attacks 
on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre, an American newscaster 
said: "Good and evil rarely manifest themselves as clearly as they 
did last Tuesday. People who we don't know massacred people who we 
do. And they did so with contemptuous glee." Then he broke down and 
wept.

Here's the rub: America is at war against people it doesn't know, 
because they don't appear much on TV. Before it has properly 
identified or even begun to comprehend the nature of its enemy, the 
US government has, in a rush of publicity and embarrassing rhetoric, 
cobbled together an "international coalition against terror", 
mobilised its army, its air force, its navy and its media, and 
committed them to battle.

The trouble is that once Amer ica goes off to war, it can't very well 
return without having fought one. If it doesn't find its enemy, for 
the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture 
one. Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and a 
justification of its own, and we'll lose sight of why it's being 
fought in the first place.

What we're witnessing here is the spectacle of the world's most 
powerful country reaching reflexively, angrily, for an old instinct 
to fight a new kind of war. Suddenly, when it comes to defending 
itself, America's streamlined warships, cruise missiles and F-16 jets 
look like obsolete, lumbering things. As deterrence, its arsenal of 
nuclear bombs is no longer worth its weight in scrap. Box-cutters, 
penknives, and cold anger are the weapons with which the wars of the 
new century will be waged. Anger is the lock pick. It slips through 
customs unnoticed. Doesn't show up in baggage checks.

Who is America fighting? On September 20, the FBI said that it had 
doubts about the identities of some of the hijackers. On the same day 
President George Bush said, "We know exactly who these people are and 
which governments are supporting them." It sounds as though the 
president knows something that the FBI and the American public don't.

In his September 20 address to the US Congress, President Bush called 
the enemies of America "enemies of freedom". "Americans are asking, 
'Why do they hate us?' " he said. "They hate our freedoms - our 
freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and 
assemble and disagree with each other." People are being asked to 
make two leaps of faith here. First, to assume that The Enemy is who 
the US government says it is, even though it has no substantial 
evidence to support that claim. And second, to assume that The 
Enemy's motives are what the US government says they are, and there's 
nothing to support that either.

=46or strategic, military and economic reasons, it is vital for the US 
government to persuade its public that their commitment to freedom 
and democracy and the American Way of Life is under attack. In the 
current atmosphere of grief, outrage and anger, it's an easy notion 
to peddle. However, if that were true, it's reasonable to wonder why 
the symbols of America's economic and military dominance - the World 
Trade Centre and the Pentagon - were chosen as the targets of the 
attacks. Why not the Statue of Liberty? Could it be that the stygian 
anger that led to the attacks has its taproot not in American freedom 
and democracy, but in the US government's record of commitment and 
support to exactly the opposite things - to military and economic 
terrorism, insurgency, military dictatorship, religious bigotry and 
unimaginable genocide (outside America)? It must be hard for ordinary 
Americans, so recently bereaved, to look up at the world with their 
eyes full of tears and encounter what might appear to them to be 
indifference. It isn't indifference. It's just augury. An absence of 
surprise. The tired wisdom of knowing that what goes around 
eventually comes around. American people ought to know that it is not 
them but their government's policies that are so hated. They can't 
possibly doubt that they themselves, their extraordinary musicians, 
their writers, their actors, their spectacular sportsmen and their 
cinema, are universally welcomed. All of us have been moved by the 
courage and grace shown by firefighters, rescue workers and ordinary 
office staff in the days since the attacks.

America's grief at what happened has been immense and immensely 
public. It would be grotesque to expect it to calibrate or modulate 
its anguish. However, it will be a pity if, instead of using this as 
an opportunity to try to understand why September 11 happened, 
Americans use it as an opportunity to usurp the whole world's sorrow 
to mourn and avenge only their own. Because then it falls to the rest 
of us to ask the hard questions and say the harsh things. And for our 
pains, for our bad timing, we will be disliked, ignored and perhaps 
eventually silenced.

The world will probably never know what motivated those particular 
hijackers who flew planes into those particular American buildings. 
They were not glory boys. They left no suicide notes, no political 
messages; no organisation has claimed credit for the attacks. All we 
know is that their belief in what they were doing outstripped the 
natural human instinct for survival, or any desire to be remembered. 
It's almost as though they could not scale down the enormity of their 
rage to anything smaller than their deeds. And what they did has 
blown a hole in the world as we knew it. In the absence of 
information, politicians, political commentators and writers (like 
myself) will invest the act with their own politics, with their own 
interpretations. This speculation, this analysis of the political 
climate in which the attacks took place, can only be a good thing.

But war is looming large. Whatever remains to be said must be said 
quickly. Before America places itself at the helm of the 
"international coalition against terror", before it invites (and 
coerces) countries to actively participate in its almost godlike 
mission - called Operation Infinite Justice until it was pointed out 
that this could be seen as an insult to Muslims, who believe that 
only Allah can mete out infinite justice, and was renamed Operation 
Enduring Freedom- it would help if some small clarifications are 
made. For example, Infinite Justice/Enduring Freedom for whom? Is 
this America's war against terror in America or against terror in 
general? What exactly is being avenged here? Is it the tragic loss of 
almost 7,000 lives, the gutting of five million square feet of office 
space in Manhattan, the destruction of a section of the Pentagon, the 
loss of several hundreds of thousands of jobs, the bankruptcy of some 
airline companies and the dip in the New York Stock Exchange? Or is 
it more than that? In 1996, Madeleine Albright, then the US secretary 
of state, was asked on national television what she felt about the 
fact that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of US economic 
sanctions. She replied that it was "a very hard choice", but that, 
all things considered, "we think the price is worth it". Albright 
never lost her job for saying this. She continued to travel the world 
representing the views and aspirations of the US government. More 
pertinently, the sanctions against Iraq remain in place. Children 
continue to die.

So here we have it. The equivocating distinction between civilisation 
and savagery, between the "massacre of innocent people" or, if you 
like, "a clash of civilisations" and "collateral damage". The 
sophistry and fastidious algebra of infinite justice. How many dead 
Iraqis will it take to make the world a better place? How many dead 
Afghans for every dead American? How many dead women and children for 
every dead man? How many dead mojahedin for each dead investment 
banker? As we watch mesmerised, Operation Enduring Freedom unfolds on 
TV monitors across the world. A coalition of the world's superpowers 
is closing in on Afghanistan, one of the poorest, most ravaged, 
war-torn countries in the world, whose ruling Taliban government is 
sheltering Osama bin Laden, the man being held responsible for the 
September 11 attacks.

The only thing in Afghanistan that could possibly count as collateral 
value is its citizenry. (Among them, half a million maimed 
orphans.There are accounts of hobbling stampedes that occur when 
artificial limbs are airdropped into remote, inaccessible villages.) 
Afghanistan's economy is in a shambles. In fact, the problem for an 
invading army is that Afghanistan has no conventional coordinates or 
signposts to plot on a military map - no big cities, no highways, no 
industrial complexes, no water treatment plants. Farms have been 
turned into mass graves. The countryside is littered with land mines 
- 10 million is the most recent estimate. The American army would 
first have to clear the mines and build roads in order to take its 
soldiers in.

=46earing an attack from America, one million citizens have fled from 
their homes and arrived at the border between Pakistan and 
Afghanistan. The UN estimates that there are eight million Afghan 
citizens who need emergency aid. As supplies run out - food and aid 
agencies have been asked to leave - the BBC reports that one of the 
worst humanitarian disasters of recent times has begun to unfold. 
Witness the infinite justice of the new century. Civilians starving 
to death while they're waiting to be killed.

In America there has been rough talk of "bombing Afghanistan back to 
the stone age". Someone please break the news that Afghanistan is 
already there. And if it's any consolation, America played no small 
part in helping it on its way. The American people may be a little 
fuzzy about where exactly Afghanistan is (we hear reports that 
there's a run on maps of the country), but the US government and 
Afghanistan are old friends.

In 1979, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA and 
Pakistan's ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) launched the largest 
covert operation in the history of the CIA. Their purpose was to 
harness the energy of Afghan resistance to the Soviets and expand it 
into a holy war, an Islamic jihad, which would turn Muslim countries 
within the Soviet Union against the communist regime and eventually 
destabilise it. When it began, it was meant to be the Soviet Union's 
Vietnam. It turned out to be much more than that. Over the years, 
through the ISI, the CIA funded and recruited almost 100,000 radical 
mojahedin from 40 Islamic countries as soldiers for America's proxy 
war. The rank and file of the mojahedin were unaware that their jihad 
was actually being fought on behalf of Uncle Sam. (The irony is that 
America was equally unaware that it was financing a future war 
against itself.)

In 1989, after being bloodied by 10 years of relentless conflict, the 
Russians withdrew, leaving behind a civilisation reduced to rubble.

Civil war in Afghanistan raged on. The jihad spread to Chechnya, 
Kosovo and eventually to Kashmir. The CIA continued to pour in money 
and military equipment, but the overheads had become immense, and 
more money was needed. The mojahedin ordered farmers to plant opium 
as a "revolutionary tax". The ISI set up hundreds of heroin 
laboratories across Afghanistan. Within two years of the CIA's 
arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland had become the biggest 
producer of heroin in the world, and the single biggest source of the 
heroin on American streets. The annual profits, said to be between 
$100bn and $200bn, were ploughed back into training and arming 
militants.

In 1995, the Taliban - then a marginal sect of dangerous, hardline 
fundamentalists - fought its way to power in Afghanistan. It was 
funded by the ISI, that old cohort of the CIA, and supported by many 
political parties in Pakistan. The Taliban unleashed a regime of 
terror. Its first victims were its own people, particularly women. It 
closed down girls' schools, dismissed women from government jobs, and 
enforced sharia laws under which women deemed to be "immoral" are 
stoned to death, and widows guilty of being adulterous are buried 
alive. Given the Taliban government's human rights track record, it 
seems unlikely that it will in any way be intimidated or swerved from 
its purpose by the prospect of war, or the threat to the lives of its 
civilians.

After all that has happened, can there be anything more ironic than 
Russia and America joining hands to re-destroy Afghanistan? The 
question is, can you destroy destruction? Dropping more bombs on 
Afghanistan will only shuffle the rubble, scramble some old graves 
and disturb the dead.

The desolate landscape of Afghanistan was the burial ground of Soviet 
communism and the springboard of a unipolar world dominated by 
America. It made the space for neocapitalism and corporate 
globalisation, again dominated by America. And now Afghanistan is 
poised to become the graveyard for the unlikely soldiers who fought 
and won this war for America.

And what of America's trusted ally? Pakistan too has suffered 
enormously. The US government has not been shy of supporting military 
dictators who have blocked the idea of democracy from taking root in 
the country. Before the CIA arrived, there was a small rural market 
for opium in Pakistan. Between 1979 and 1985, the number of heroin 
addicts grew from zero to one-and-a-half million. Even before 
September 11, there were three million Afghan refugees living in 
tented camps along the border. Pakistan's economy is crumbling. 
Sectarian violence, globalisation's structural adjustment programmes 
and drug lords are tearing the country to pieces. Set up to fight the 
Soviets, the terrorist training centres and madrasahs, sown like 
dragon's teeth across the country, produced fundamentalists with 
tremendous popular appeal within Pakistan itself. The Taliban, which 
the Pakistan government has sup ported, funded and propped up for 
years, has material and strategic alliances with Pakistan's own 
political parties.

Now the US government is asking (asking?) Pakistan to garotte the pet 
it has hand-reared in its backyard for so many years. President 
Musharraf, having pledged his support to the US, could well find he 
has something resembling civil war on his hands.

India, thanks in part to its geography, and in part to the vision of 
its former leaders, has so far been fortunate enough to be left out 
of this Great Game. Had it been drawn in, it's more than likely that 
our democracy, such as it is, would not have survived. Today, as some 
of us watch in horror, the Indian government is furiously gyrating 
its hips, begging the US to set up its base in India rather than 
Pakistan. Having had this ringside view of Pakistan's sordid fate, it 
isn't just odd, it's unthinkable, that India should want to do this. 
Any third world country with a fragile economy and a complex social 
base should know by now that to invite a superpower such as America 
in (whether it says it's staying or just passing through) would be 
like inviting a brick to drop through your windscreen.

Operation Enduring Freedom is ostensibly being fought to uphold the 
American Way of Life. It'll probably end up undermining it 
completely. It will spawn more anger and more terror across the 
world. For ordinary people in America, it will mean lives lived in a 
climate of sickening uncertainty: will my child be safe in school? 
Will there be nerve gas in the subway? A bomb in the cinema hall? 
Will my love come home tonight? There have been warnings about the 
possibility of biological warfare - smallpox, bubonic plague, anthrax 
- the deadly payload of innocuous crop-duster aircraft. Being picked 
off a few at a time may end up being worse than being annihilated all 
at once by a nuclear bomb.

The US government, and no doubt governments all over the world, will 
use the climate of war as an excuse to curtail civil liberties, deny 
free speech, lay off workers, harass ethnic and religious minorities, 
cut back on public spending and divert huge amounts of money to the 
defence industry. To what purpose? President Bush can no more "rid 
the world of evil-doers" than he can stock it with saints. It's 
absurd for the US government to even toy with the notion that it can 
stamp out terrorism with more violence and oppression. Terrorism is 
the symptom, not the disease. Terrorism has no country. It's 
transnational, as global an enterprise as Coke or Pepsi or Nike. At 
the first sign of trouble, terrorists can pull up stakes and move 
their "factories" from country to country in search of a better deal. 
Just like the multi-nationals.

Terrorism as a phenomenon may never go away. But if it is to be 
contained, the first step is for America to at least acknowledge that 
it shares the planet with other nations, with other human beings who, 
even if they are not on TV, have loves and griefs and stories and 
songs and sorrows and, for heaven's sake, rights. Instead, when 
Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, was asked what he would 
call a victory in America's new war, he said that if he could 
convince the world that Americans must be allowed to continue with 
their way of life, he would consider it a victory.

The September 11 attacks were a monstrous calling card from a world 
gone horribly wrong. The message may have been written by Bin Laden 
(who knows?) and delivered by his couriers, but it could well have 
been signed by the ghosts of the victims of America's old wars. The 
millions killed in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, the 17,500 killed 
when Israel - backed by the US - invaded Lebanon in 1982, the 200,000 
Iraqis killed in Operation Desert Storm, the thousands of 
Palestinians who have died fighting Israel's occupation of the West 
Bank. And the millions who died, in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Haiti, 
Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Panama, at the 
hands of all the terrorists, dictators and genocidists whom the 
American government supported, trained, bankrolled and supplied with 
arms. And this is far from being a comprehensive list.

=46or a country involved in so much warfare and conflict, the American 
people have been extremely fortunate. The strikes on September 11 
were only the second on American soil in over a century. The first 
was Pearl Harbour. The reprisal for this took a long route, but ended 
with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This time the world waits with bated 
breath for the horrors to come.

Someone recently said that if Osama bin Laden didn't exist, America 
would have had to invent him. But, in a way, America did invent him. 
He was among the jihadis who moved to Afghanistan in 1979 when the 
CIA commenced its operations there. Bin Laden has the distinction of 
being created by the CIA and wanted by the FBI. In the course of a 
fortnight he has been promoted from suspect to prime suspect and 
then, despite the lack of any real evidence, straight up the charts 
to being "wanted dead or alive".

=46rom all accounts, it will be impossible to produce evidence (of the 
sort that would stand scrutiny in a court of law) to link Bin Laden 
to the September 11 attacks. So far, it appears that the most 
incriminating piece of evidence against him is the fact that he has 
not condemned them.

=46rom what is known about the location of Bin Laden and the living 
conditions in which he operates, it's entirely possible that he did 
not personally plan and carry out the attacks - that he is the 
inspirational figure, "the CEO of the holding company". The Taliban's 
response to US demands for the extradition of Bin Laden has been 
uncharacteristically reasonable: produce the evidence, then we'll 
hand him over. President Bush's response is that the demand is 
"non-negotiable".

(While talks are on for the extradition of CEOs - can India put in a 
side request for the extradition of Warren Anderson of the US? He was 
the chairman of Union Carbide, responsible for the Bhopal gas leak 
that killed 16,000 people in 1984. We have collated the necessary 
evidence. It's all in the files. Could we have him, please?)

But who is Osama bin Laden really? Let me rephrase that. What is 
Osama bin Laden? He's America's family secret. He is the American 
president's dark doppelgänger. The savage twin of all that 
purports to be beautiful and civilised. He has been sculpted from the 
spare rib of a world laid to waste by America's foreign policy: its 
gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of 
"full-spectrum dominance", its chilling disregard for non-American 
lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic 
and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has 
munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of 
locusts. Its marauding multinationals who are taking over the air we 
breathe, the ground we stand on, the water we drink, the thoughts we 
think. Now that the family secret has been spilled, the twins are 
blurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable. 
Their guns, bombs, money and drugs have been going around in the loop 
for a while. (The Stinger missiles that will greet US helicopters 
were supplied by the CIA. The heroin used by America's drug addicts 
comes from Afghanistan. The Bush administration recently gave 
Afghanistan a $43m subsidy for a "war on drugs"....)

Now Bush and Bin Laden have even begun to borrow each other's 
rhetoric. Each refers to the other as "the head of the snake". Both 
invoke God and use the loose millenarian currency of good and evil as 
their terms of reference. Both are engaged in unequivocal political 
crimes. Both are dangerously armed - one with the nuclear arsenal of 
the obscenely powerful, the other with the incandescent, destructive 
power of the utterly hopeless. The fireball and the ice pick. The 
bludgeon and the axe. The important thing to keep in mind is that 
neither is an acceptable alternative to the other.

President Bush's ultimatum to the people of the world - "If you're 
not with us, you're against us" - is a piece of presumptuous 
arrogance. It's not a choice that people want to, need to, or should 
have to make.

=A9 Arundhati Roy 2001

[END]

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(Source:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4266289,00.html )