A Need for Honest Answers
By Boris Kagarlitsky|
The famous address by British Prime Minister Tony Blair that won the support of the British parliament, by his own admission, did not contain sufficient evidence for a British or U.S. court. Most of it had absolutely nothing to do with the attacks on New York and Washington on Sept. 11, but merely described the prior and already well-known terrorist activities of Osama bin Laden. The official version of events leaves such a large number of unanswered questions that even Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a loyal ally of the United States in the Middle East, could not refrain from voicing certain doubts. Mubarak is himself a professional pilot and does not understand how terrorists with minimal flying skills could have steered the planes to their targets. The Russian General Boris Agapov, a well-known specialist on Afghanistan, cannot understand how bin Laden and the Taliban, with their primitive organization, could have executed such a large-scale act of terrorism; he believes that one of the more competent secret services must have had a hand in things. The German Berliner Zeitung and the Indian Mainstream asked how the terrorists could have implemented their plan without a single U.S. citizen as accomplice. And why is the United States so interested in bin Laden's money, while ignoring Saudi "charitable" foundations that sustain a number of extremist organizations. The list of such questions is almost endless and one merely has to explore U.S. Internet sites -- which today have come to resemble Soviet samizdat of the 1970s -- to find a lot of them. In any case, the extent to which perceptions of Sept. 11 differ inside the United States and outside of it is striking. U.S. citizens support the war because they hope that they can rid themselves of the nightmare that was unleashed on Sept. 11. For the rest of the world, the war is itself a nightmare and, moreover, one that has been imported from the United States. The commentators of serious newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times whisper in the ear of the Bush administration: Provide more evidence. However, if we are talking about evidence that is gathered retrospectively in order to corroborate a version of events already agreed upon, then it will convince very few people. Such evidence will appear convincing mainly to governments receiving handouts from the United States, and the larger the handouts the more convincing the evidence will seem. In demanding solidarity at all costs, the Bush administration is destabilizing its own friends and compelling them to go against the grain of the views of their own people. Having appointed bin Laden as the main culprit, the Bush administration has not only provoked doubts regarding the justification of its actions, but also made it more likely that other criminals will go unpunished. Only a full-scale and thorough investigation will make it possible to uncover all the culprits. If bin Laden was not behind the Sept. 11 attacks or played only a secondary role, then the current war against terrorism is providing other terrorist leaders with the opportunity to cover their tracks. A doctor who undertakes a surgical operation in spite of doubts about the diagnosis is acting amorally at the very least. For this very reason, politicians and doctors fear the retrospective revision of a diagnosis more than anyone. The fear of new terrorist acts compels the American public to accept any course of treatment offered by the government. However, there will most probably not be any more large-scale acts of terrorism. Not because the administration's measures have been effective, but simply because those who blew up the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 -- whoever they were -- have already achieved their goal, just as those who blew up apartment blocks in Moscow in 1999 accomplished theirs. Terrorism is a means of changing the balance of political forces through violence. Such a change has already taken place. And the current war against terrorism is no solution, but rather is aggravating the problem. Boris Kagarlitsky is a Moscow-based sociologist. |
