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FOREIGN REACTIONS
TO BUSH’S SPEECH
by Srdja Trifkovic
Throughout the Western world
initial expressions of solidarity and support are now increasingly mixed with
three buts: that the President does not have a blank check from his friends and
allies for unilateral action, that he needs to come up with tangible proof of
bin Laden’s culpability before he strikes, and--more fundamentally--that he does
not have a coherent strategy because key questions about the causes of terrorism
remain unasked and therefore unanswered.
Anthony Sampson (International Herald Tribune,
September 24) wonders about the terrorists’ real motives. “What did Osama bin
Laden--or whoever was the mastermind--really hope to achieve by destroying the
World Trade Center?” he asks, and warns that our sense of outrage must not
prevent us realizing that he had planned this act not as an end in itself but as
part of a broader strategy against his enemy. He must also have known that it
would precipitate an angry response from Americans, and a clamor for
reprisals:
Indeed, this was surely his
next objective: to provoke a display of American military might across the
world. And so far his plan has worked well . . . [D]estitute people across the
developing world who have felt humiliated and impoverished by the relentless
domination of the West . . . will see the thousands of dead victims in
Manhattan as unimportant compared to the millions who have been killed, maimed
or uprooted in countries devastated by wars for which they blame Americans.
And for many Arabs, Africans and Asians who have been made to feel that they
are hopeless, incompetent and marginal, the demolition of the twin towers with
such lethal efficiency must inevitably bring some sense of pride: That they
have at last achieved something that no westerner thought they were capable
of, and which compels the world to take note of them. Westerners have so far
been unable to look beyond the immediate atrocity and provocation, to think
more carefully about the root causes of the terrorism. We in the West may be
too busy portraying the terrorists as cowards and fanatics to realize that we
are up against a religious movement which operates at a deeper level than
hijacks and mass murder; and which is more likely to be stimulated than
intimidated by the arrival of western warships in the
Gulf.
France unsurprisingly leads the
skeptics in Europe. On September 24 Gerard Dupuy wrote in France’s daily
Liberation that the desire of Washington to garner the broadest possible
alliance clashes with its disinclination to reveal its game
plan:
Hence reactions in Europe and
in the Gulf have been similar: a general agreement to provide military
cooperation against ‘clear objectives’ but no blind solidarity. Once again,
Europe’s lack of unity has become apparent: Great Britain is once more
Washington’s companion in arms, contrasting with the rest of the continent’s
cautious attitude . . . Since September 11, Washington is divided between the
reeling of cashing in on this enormous outpouring of international solidarity
and building a wide-scale coalition, and the desire to act independently. This
dichotomy is putting America’s allies to the test.
On the same day Pierre
Rousselin took a dim view of the sentiment in the Arab world in the leading
French conservative daily Le Figaro:
Eleven years ago, Bush senior
was able to rally the support of the Arab world because he promised to put all
his efforts into the peace process after Kuwait’s liberation [which] led to
the Madrid conference and the Olso accords . . . America’s allies in the
region put their trust in Bush senior. Today they feel they were misled and do
not trust Bush junior.
What is the
alternative? Part of the problem, according to Mike Hume (“Why don’t we just hold an anger management
workshop?” the Times of
London, September 24) is that many of the arguments offered against Bush’s
unfocused belligerency are as incoherent as his war talk. His policy is “gesture
militarism” designed to show that something is being done, but his critics are
indulging in dubious gestures of their own:
Common
criticisms have been aimed, not so much at Washington’s interventionist
foreign policy, but at America’s alleged lack of respect for other people and
failure to empathise with their feelings. At Friday’s biggest "Stop the war"
meeting in London, one speaker proposed teaching people about our "common
vulnerability, the universality of loss and pain". Another said the West
should go to Muslims in Afghanistan and say ‘we’re offering you kindness, love
instead of hostility’. If international conflict is to be reinterpreted in the
language of inter-personal therapy, presumably the solution will be to send
Americans on an anger management course and put the socially excluded of
Afghanistan or Iraq on an at-risk register. Above all, these sentiments appear
to express people’s sense of their own powerlessness today, and their fear of
anybody doing anything decisive. That state of mind seemed well reflected on
Saturday’s CND protest in Whitehall, where people complained that a war
between Bush and the Taleban would be ‘one fundamentalism against another’,
and the organisers asked that there be no banners, no slogans, no
politics--just everybody dressed in black for an incoherent post-Diana-style
display of emotional solidarity. Far from offering a positive alternative,
that message of powerlessness and passivity can only encourage even greater
feelings of insecurity in the world.
Members of the international
coalition which the United States is building for a global struggle against
terrorism are increasingly demanding specific evidence that Osama bin Laden
was the mastermind behind the terrorist attacks of September 11,” Australia’s
Sydney Morning Herald asserted on September 25, but “so far, evidence has been
frustratingly elusive, despite the largest investigation in US history, with
strong co-operation from authorities in France, Britain, Germany and
beyond.
Of particular interest is the
reaction of the “moderate” opinion in the Islamic world, whose support is
crucial to any planned response from Washington. The London-based Arab daily
Al Hayat, close to the Saudi establishment, noted on September 23 that the
absence of Israel from Bush’s emerging coalition reflects an embarrassing aspect
of U.S. administration policy:
Whether this was an American
decision not to irritate the feelings of the Arab and Islamic countries, or a
prearranged ploy, nevertheless the result is that it serves Israeli interests,
and that the coalition will do what Israel cannot do alone… If the war were in
fact against terror and its roots, with no distinctions, then Israel would be
classified number one on the list of terrorist countries.
In the United Arab Emirates,
Sharjah-based Al-Khaleej opined on September 22 that “the American
accusations lack until now proof and evidence”:
Bush’s speech to Congress
yesterday reveals something truly dangerous: He has committed all the military
and economic potential of his country to an ‘unprecedented long-term war’ and
threatened to bring all the necessary war weapons to crush the network of
world terrorism.... This has a
different meaning for Americans than for others. According to America, it
includes nations, peoples and individuals, some of whom practice terrorism
while others exercise their natural right to self-defense… It is undoubtedly
not a war against one man, called Usama bin Ladin, but an American war which
(the U.S.) wants the world to launch under its flag, to make the world more
like itself by force, under the slogan of combating terrorism.
In Pakistan the
Urdu-language daily Ummat editorialized on September
24:
If the United States is still
adamant that the World Trade Center incident was carried out by Usama Bin
Laden, despite his lack of resources, then it should also admit that it would
be folly to attack Afghanistan. The loss and damage caused to the civil
population and Muslims of Afghanistan and Pakistan will create a wave of
resentment against the United States in the Islamic world. The result will be
that no city or citizen of the United States would then be safe.
The top-circulation Karachi
daily Jang had a similar warning on the same
day:
Keeping in view the
catastrophic outcome of a possible military action [in Afghanistan] the U.S.
attitude could not be termed as farsighted and prudent. The U.S. has been
admittedly hurt, and it has the capability and strength to punish its
opponents; but depending entirely on one’s might is not wise all the
times.
An editorial in second-largest,
Urdu-language Nawa-e-Waqt asked on September 24,
What benefit will we get by
providing bases to America? Our foreign debt, from which we want to be free,
will stand where it is now. By saying no we will not be described as those who
sold the nation, and done that at a price so cheap. Pakistan should at least
match the courage Saudi Arabia has demonstrated by refusing to give air bases
to America for its attack on Afghanistan.... We should not stick to a decision that
is wrong and contrary to our national interest.
An editorial in the moderate
Pakistani daily News (September 24), which is considered pro-Western,
reflected the dilemma of the ruling establishment in
Islamabad:
It is doubtful that the U.S.
will open the cornucopia of plenty for Pakistan as participation in the
anti-terrorism coalition is mandatory, not voluntary… The United States, which
is preparing to undertake political and strategic engineering in Afghanistan,
has a poor record of clearing up the debris after completing its task. This
should not be allowed to happen and Islamabad must extract an assurance that
there will be no pieces left to be picked up.
In Malaysia the
government-controlled daily Berita Harian said in an op-ed on Sept.
24:
While there is sympathy for
the tragic event, there is no reason why the United States cannot be reminded
of its arrogance towards the rest of the world… America should realize that
its main job is not to attack Afghanistan or capture Usama ‘dead or alive’ but
to investigate thoroughly and correctly which parties are truly responsible
for the attacks. If the superpower has a long list of enemies, it shouldn’t
dismiss the possibility that it could be someone else using the Arab people as
scapegoats. These people care only to make the United States hate Islam and
destroy Muslim countries. This would be the biggest conspiracy in the
world.
Two days
earlier the same Malaysian paper asserted that “it has been revealed that 4,000 Jews
who worked at the WTC were safe” because they never appeared at work on that
fateful day:
So the question arises, what
is the truth behind these Jews’ absence from work that day? Further
strengthening the report is a newspaper article from Israel that reveals that
the Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was not allowed to travel to New York City by
the country’s intelligence services. Did Israel know of these attacks
beforehand? Maybe the Arab terrorists were used without them realizing that
name of Islam would be blackened? America needs to define the target, be it
Usama bin Ladin or terrorists from the al-Qaeda group, there needs to be
concrete proof.
Copyright 2001, www.ChroniclesMagazine.org
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