Needed: a new U.S. foreign policy; If we really want to prevent
another 9/11 or 7/7, forget Homeland Security. Let's uncouple from the Saudis,
says JOHN MacARTHUR
JOHN MacARTHUR 18 July 2005
The Globe and Mail
A13
My first thought when I heard the news of the bombings in London was of George Bush's childish dare of “bring 'em on” to Arabs and assorted Muslims outraged by the American-British invasion of Iraq.
Well, it looks as though al-Qaeda has brought it on rather closer to home than Baghdad's Green Zone and there's no escaping the link between Boy George's 1001 Arabian fantasies and the bloody mess on the London Underground. I wonder how Tony Blair feels about the Anglo-American “special relationship” now that his neo-imperial capital has been shaken, literally at its core, by people mainly angry at the U.S.A.
The British Prime Minister seems a bright man, if a deeply cynical one, and I suspect that underneath the TV bluster about “resolve,” “resilience” and “stoicism,” he is reconsidering his commitment to the self-defeating policies of the current administration in Washington. If he isn't, he's a fool. Since the Madrid bombing, the Spanish government is doing very nicely out of Iraq, able to concentrate its efforts more constructively on rounding up the killers who committed the crime, instead of safeguarding “democracy” in Baghdad. Mr. Blair's first statements after the London bombings wisely didn't mention any resolve to keep British troops in Iraq (his spokesman later said only that it was “naive” to connect the Iraq war and the suicide bombers).
Then again, Mr. Bush's British sidekick has never been keen on moral reflection or honest self-examination. Long before the Downing Street memo surfaced, a French diplomat told me that between Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush, he found Mr. Blair the more odious, since the British leader knew that Mr. Bush was going to war no matter what the UN said — yet he insisted, for cosmetic purposes, on dragging the world through the charade of Security Council “consultation” up to the very last minute. Mr. Blair lied (more articulately than Mr. Bush), about Saddam Hussein's weapons arsenal before the invasion, and he could very well continue lying to justify the mad project of re-colonizing the Middle East.
But that doesn't mean the people of the United Kingdom and the U.S. need to go along, or that Britain can't act independently from Uncle Sam. During the 1950s and 60s, the “special relationship” went only so far: In 1956, president Dwight Eisenhower halted the British/French attempt to reacquire the Suez Canal and, in the 1960s, prime minister Harold Wilson refused to participate in America's Vietnam debacle. Mr. Wilson, in particular, was responding to public pressure, from within his own Labour Party, as well as an aroused citizenry convinced that Vietnam was a doomed and irrational enterprise. We can only hope that the British people, dumbed down about history like their American cousins, may yet recover their sanity (as might the Americans, perhaps led by a potential Republican dissident like Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.)
In any event, even assuming a return to rational analysis, the hard question remains: What is the U.S. to do about al-Qaeda and its offshoots? Three years ago, intelligent people argued that an invasion of Iraq was the greatest gift the Western powers could possibly bestow on Osama bin Laden. They have been proven right.
The one-time CIA asset needs recruits willing to die for his ultimate ambition — that of seizing the Muslim holy land from America's corrupt client, the Saudi royal family. What better advertisement for martyrdom than regularly televised scenes of the American army flattening houses and killing innocent civilians in the name of secular democracy? The godless Soviets learned that the hard way when Mr. bin Laden was their adversary in Afghanistan.
Of course, freeing Iraq from American rule is just as much a pretext for Mr. bin Laden as Saddam's imaginary atomic bomb program was for Mr. Bush. I doubt that the wealthy nightclubber-turned-religious-fanatic cares a whit for the suffering peoples living under the boot of U.S. occupation.
But Mr. Blair is simpleminded if he really believes his own statement that “The purpose of terrorism is just that, to terrorize people . . .” Mr. bin Laden, like other terrorists before him (the Mau Mau insurgents in Kenya; the Palestine Liberation Organization; the Irish Republican Army) has political objectives; his are part nationalist, part pan-Arab and part religious. Criminal though he is, he cannot be dismissed as a mere practitioner of mayhem for the sake of mayhem.
Thus, the first move the U.S. should make is the easiest one: a complete military withdrawal from Iraq. We did it in Vietnam, we survived — and today Conoco Phillips is drilling oil in the South China Sea with the blessing of the Communist Vietnamese government.
The second move is harder: disengaging from Saudi Arabia, its oil leverage and its double-dealing support of radical Islamists (through myriad front groups) that hurts Israel as much as it hurts the U.S. I once asked Alon Pinkas, then Israel's consul-general in New York, why his country didn't loudly and publicly denounce the Saudis for the subsidies they pay to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. He looked at me in astonishment. Such a thing simply could not be done, given the Gordian knot that binds the Saudi royals, Washington and the Bush family. (Left- and right-wing critics of Israel take note: the Saudi lobby usually trumps the Israel lobby.)
Distancing ourselves from Saudi Arabia would require a revolution in reduced energy consumption, but it's a price most Americans would gladly pay if they thought it would save lives. And wouldn't a truly independent Iraq (or Kurdistan, if the colonial construct called Iraq dissolves after a civil war) be delighted to sell us all the replacement oil we need? If an Islamic revolution topples the Saudi monarchy, so be it. The Wahhabi mullahs of Mecca don't want Mr. bin Laden as their head of state and they would be just as happy to sell us oil as the Iranians would be if we stopped interfering in their domestic politics.
In short, we don't need more homeland security so much as we need a new foreign policy.
But there's a third thing to do that might deflate the bin Laden mystique and reduce the glamour of terrorism for angry young Muslims.
We must capture and then try Mr. bin Laden for 9/11, in open court and on world-wide television. As a matter of simple justice and good politics, this country and the Islamic world need to see the Robed One cut down to size and subjected to the rule of law.
And assuming Mr. bin Laden is convicted, we must not grant him the favour of a death sentence. Let's follow the French example with Carlos the Jackal, former poster boy of international terrorism, now a comic figure reduced to making absurd declarations from his jail cell.
Easier said than done? No one outside the Bush inner circle knows the precise cost of the Iraq war and occupation, but it's safe to say that at least $150-billion (U.S.) of the $204-billion already appropriated has been spent on the Potemkin village called the Iraqi nation. Do we really think that with a concerted effort by our best intelligence agents, special forces units and bankers — combined with political pressure on Pakistan's two-faced dictator — we can't arrest Mr. bin Laden, who is likely hiding in Waziristan, the untamed part of Pakistan on the border with Afghanistan?
In 1994, the French apparently bribed the Sudanese government to turn over Carlos in Khartoum (where Mr. bin Laden, by curious coincidence, was also in residence). After the carnage of 9/11 and 7/7, we can afford to pay a premium in U.S. dollars and British Sterling — that is unless Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair prefer Mr. bin Laden at large.
John R. MacArthur is the publisher of Harper's Magazine.
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