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MER WEEKEND READING:
CHANGING PARTNERS IN AN ORWELLIAN DANCE OF DEATH
By Sue Williams
[Sydney Morning Herald, Australia, 30 September 2001]:
What goes around comes around, the Americans say. They and their allies,
including feisty little Australia, are marching into battle, to be confronted
by weapons they sold to the Taliban when the Muslim maddos were on our side
against the damned Russkies.
But that was then and this is now. On our side, along with God - that's our
God, not theirs - are the remains of the Afghan resistance, with their
Russian Kalashnikovs. But that was before the Cold War ended and all our
enemies became our friends again.
It's a scenario that would've made George Orwell weep. In 1984, Oceania
(that's Britain, North America, South Africa and Australia, funnily enough)
joins with Eurasia to fight Eastasia. Or is it the other way around? It's an
ever-changing dance of death. War is peace. Ignorance is strength.
And all in a book written way back in 1948 in which Big Brother was a
fantastic creation even scarier than the look-at-me TV antics of 12 losers in
search of a winner.
I realise it may be sacrilegious these days not to want to kill all the
ragheads in the Middle East and spit on their womenfolk in Lakemba. And it
may have been un-Australian, or un-American, when seeing TV footage of
Palestinians celebrating the World Trade Center horror, to have asked why the
US engenders so much hatred, rather than simply cheering an arsenal into the
Persian Gulf.
For that's a question that requires some thought, particularly when most
Americans believe the rest of the world admires or envies them. They really
need to get out more.
Of course, no amount of hatred could ever justify flying passenger planes
into busy office buildings.
Many Arab Muslims hate America because it has continually bolstered Israel's
invasion of Palestine and the subsequent suppression of its people. The
US-sponsored Saddam Hussein then imposed sanctions which have starved many
thousands to death, and was instrumental in the Taliban's rise to power, a
regime that perpetrates the most extreme version of Islamic fundamentalism in
a gross corruption of one of the world's great religions.
Jews, Muslims and Christians share the same God and, ironically, Islam is one
of the few faiths which recognises other beliefs. The Koran refers to Jesus
as one of the great prophets.
Jesus, on the other hand, said: "Those who are not with me are against me."
Just like George Bush did.
Anyway, Dubya seems to have got the message. In dire need of friends in Arab
countries, he has finally told the Israelis to pull their heads in. Or else!
Magically, they and the Palestinians are now talking peace.
You can't blame him for wanting to avenge the deaths of so many. And you can
hardly criticise him for wanting to make sure nothing like the World Trade
Center slaughter happens again.
But there are questions that need answers. Such as, why has it taken so long
to bring Israel to heel? And wasn't earlier action against the Taliban
justified by their cruel subjugation of Afghanistan's women, who aren't
allowed to work, get an education or even seek medical help and can be beaten
to death if they accidentally reveal so much as a wrist?
And this one's for you, Mr Howard: if those who aren't with us are against
us, how come the refugees on the Tampa, who were fleeing Afghanistan, seem to
be the enemy too?
What goes around comes around, all right. Wait until the war begins in
earnest, then see how many Afghans are headed this way.
WAS IT REALLY WORTH IT, MS. ALBRIGHT?
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.
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