>It is important to hit the economy (of the United States), which is the >base of its military power...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/middle_east/newsid_1729000/1729882.stm It is not clear from the URL above which the BBC says is a transcript of bin Laden's latest tape why there are dots. Has anyone got a URL for the full transcript? The threat is credible, although bin Laden's idealist ideology may blunt the impact. He shows no signs of realising that the spectacular theatre of Sept 11 sticks in the minds of people in the islamic world too and overwhelms his precise counterpropaganda about the number of milligrams of explosive in the attack on the US embassies in East Africa, and the number of kilograms that the US has used on not so precise guided bombs. The threat of economic warfare is credible because this is how the IRA forced the British government to the negotiating table. The fact has not been publicised for obvious reasons, but my evidence is a) the choice of the obscure Baltic Exchange for a massive bomb attack is only explicable from the fact that the Baltic Exchange featured prominently on an economics module of the Open University courses that Repblican prisoners pursued while in detention in British jails. b) in the months before the British government under John Major took the decisive step to call for direct negotiations, the IRA terrorist activities concentrated on bomb warnings, with only a proportion of bomb placements, at major rail termini and road junctions in London and other big cities, thereby stopping millions of people working for the day. This coupled with the threat to London's position as the international financial centre in the Western European time zone, I think makes it virtually certain that the heads of British Finance Capital told Major to negotiate. Bin Laden wants something more theatrical and apocalyptic, and the thought of negotiating with Bush is probably as repugnant to him as is is to GWB. But the seeds of the threat have been placed in his call. It is like disseminating a virus into the internet. Just as the easiest form of warfare in the rural parts of the former Yugoslavia was against civilian populations, so the easiest form of warfare on urban countries is economic. Bush and Rumsfeld would be wise to start negotiating as quietly and as rapidly as possible with everyone short of bin Laden himself. Otherwise accepting the challenge of being the world's policeman will be a hard role for even the US to carry out. Much as the US wants to have its cake and eat it - to be world policeman but only in its interests, it badly needs a strengthened global governance. Why bin Laden gestures only with his right hand is less important for the analysts of the latest tape, who are studiously not commenting on the economic threat, and are trying to dismiss it all as propaganda. Progressives should try to get the agenda back from excitatory terrorism to issues of practical peace and justice in the world, and for a global governance that serves the working people of the world explicitly and not the objectified interests of abstract global finance capital. Instead of more money on armaments, the Bush adminstration should support a global development fund of trillions a year to develop the economy of the whole world on democratic and ecologically responsible principles. It would be cheap at the price. Ask the financiers of the City of London. Especially as much of it could be in the form of Special Drawing Rights. Build the World Economy! Chris Burford London
