Frankenstein's monster strikes back
Sunday Star-Times, Sunday, September 23,
2001
By Frank Haden
My first thought, perhaps unworthy, was how
awful that it happened to New Yorkers, of all people.
I am not given to Mawkish exaggerations but after only a
few days on my first visit to the exhilarating, optimistic, bubbling capital of
the world I messaged a friend in New Zealand in a style that surprises me today:
"God is alive and living in New York".
I was straining for effect but no other words would do. I had spent every free moment wandering streets crowded with friendly city dwellers I had not known existed.
I found I could make eye contact with approaching pedestrians, something I'd never encountered before in a large city. When I stopped at crossings, I was surrounded by lighthearted people chattering to strangers. Including me.
Even the policemen were friendly, answering questions with their arms folded instead of dropping one hand towards their guns. Not only was I not mugged but when I was asked for money it was always politely and often accompanied by an entertaining tale of misfortune.
I had a banquet of geewhiz adventures. Drawn to the mid-evening sound of a good violinist playing a Bach sonata, I found a young man in a tuxedo with his instrument case open at his feet and a group of listeners.
Acknowledging the applause, he looked at his watch and picked up his belongings. He told me he was heading back to Carnegie Hall around the corner, where he was an underpaid third violin, making the most of the interval.
So I have a self-centered reason to join the mourning of the civilised world. But now the unimaginable hes happened, we have to think why. Americans understandably see the awful events in black and white, and think only in terms of striking back, ripping out the source of the evil at its roots. All eyes focus on Osama bin Laden, because he's done it before on a smaller scale.
Many in the West would feel satisfaction if even a tiny part of the United States arsenal was unleashed against what little is left of Afghanistan.
George W Bush would have international law on his side because it would be an act of anticipatory self-defence. And there's plenty of precedent. Ronald Reagan launched missiles at Libya without too much regard for the women and children after US intelligence reported Libyan involvement in a bomb attack that killed one American soldier in a German night-club. When George Bush learned of a foiled Iraqi attempt to assassinate him on a visit to Kuwait after the Gulf War, US warship sent missiles into Baghdad. And Bill Clinton ordered the cruise missile destruction of bin Laden's headquarters in Afghanistan in 1998 after the bombing of US embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi in which 12 Americans were killed.
Before they act this time, President Bush and his advisers need to think of the way the Arab world sees these things. They are no doubt asking themselves whether killing bin Laden and improving faulty intelligence and lax airline security will really be enough to ensure it doesn't happen again.
If they are wise, they will put themselves in the minds of their enemies to find out why so many could be found with the motivation to kill themselves and murder thousands of innocents who happened to be American.
Such a cool look at the global background will throw up a range of causes, of reasons, of warnings. Not excuses. The attacks were inexcusable far beyond the reach of such an inadequate word. But there have to be explanations. Name-calling is not enough. Branding the attackers cowards is understandable but misleading, because you need to be brave to face certain death.
The Americans must also ponder their support of Israel's one-sided war against the Palestinians and the part religion played in the New York attack.
Dangerous nonsense about life after death devalues life itself, making it easier to overcome the instinct to stay alive, especially when reinforced by promise that men who die in a just cause fly straight to Paradise.
Killing bin Laden isn't going to make this primitive nonsense go away. The Americans owe it to their dead to ponder how bin Laden, yesterday's darling of their foreign policy, became today's monster. They must remember how the CIA, with the US-sponsored Pakistani intelligence, Britain's MI6 and SAS, and French support experts armed bin Laden's terrorists, temporarily known as freedom fighters, to help get rid of the Russians. That war reduced Afghanistan to poverty and spawned the appalling Taliban.
It is hard not the think of Frankenstein's monster turning on its creator.
THE END
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