A YEAR LATER, CHRONICLES PROVED RIGHT AGAIN [WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK]
Title: Message
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http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/News091102.html
September 11, 2002
A YEAR LATER, CHRONICLES PROVED RIGHT AGAIN
As you are force-fed, today and throughout this week, an unending sequence of
non-news, psycho-babble, and solemn musical interludes on your local NPR
station, while TV screens give you yet another video replay and yet another
talking head pontificating on the meaning of it all, we offer a shelter from
the proceedings. On this day of remembrance we'll refrain from commentary, and
merely repeat what we had to say in the first week after the event.
Only hours after the attack Thomas Fleming asked ("Terrorists Target
America") if anyone in Washington would wake up to the danger they have
created by humiliating Muslims in the Middle East and, simultaneously,
giving them easy access to the United States, where they are building their
mosques and agitating against any public expression of Christian faith:
Such a response is unlikely. What will our government do
in the weeks to come? . . . It is important to keep in mind that in America,
every disaster will be used as a pretext for more stupid
government programs. Despite the obvious fact that this kind of terrorist
attack, which we have been predicting, could not have
been stopped by the President's Missile Defense program, the Republicans will
certainly claim that American security interests demand
immediate funding. Predictably, Democratic leftists will blame the openness of
our society and call for more stringent controls on guns
and travel. This attack should cinch the argument for national identity cards
and strengthen the hand of those who don't think we have
enough police check points.
Two days after the attacks, on September 13, Srdja Trifkovic pointed out
("America's Black September") that already at the time of the first WTC,
attack in 1993, it had become obvious that radical Islam had a firm foothold
within the Muslim diaspora in the United Statesbut in the meantime the
demographic deluge of the followers of Islam had continued unabated:
Its adherents' murderous extremism, manifested on
September 11, should spell the end of another kind of extremism: the stubborn
insistence of the ruling establishment on treating each
and every newcomer as equally meltable in the pot. They let millions of people
into this country every year without seriously asking
them who they are and why they are here. The federal government's refusal to
implement a rational immigration policy costs lives. Its
refusal to accept that certain ethnic and cultural traits make some groups more
(or less) readily assimilable into America than others
has rendered our country incapable of considering reality. An obvious lesson of
September 11 is that it is necessary to curtail
immigration from the Islamic world, which fuels diasporas in both North America
and Europe that allow terrorists to remain anonymous and
untraceable.
Trifkovic also predicted that the Palestinians would be the chief and
immediate losers from the attacks' fallout, just as the public sympathy for the
Palestinians had been rising in the West:
As Arab teenagers are shot in the streets for throwing
stones, Israel has been losing the public relations battle. This is likely to
change. The impression that we are now in the same boat
with Israel is mistaken, but it will be promoted nevertheless . . . The peace
process will remain stalled, and ever more stringent
Israeli counter-measures will be approved. The need for a new American policy in
the Middle East will be blurred, at least temporarily . .
. The creative response to it is to avoid the perception of a permanent bias in
Middle Eastern affairs that breeds anti-Americanism and
Islamic fundamentalism. But above all it is necessary to rethink the U.S. policy
in the Middle East. American national interests in the
Middle East are primarily economic: It is vitally important to the United States
to have permanent access to secure and affordable sources
of energy. It is not vitally important to the U.S. whose flag flies over the
Dome on the Rock. We need a stable peace in the Middle
East that should be based on a scrupulously even-handed treatment of the
conflicting parties' claims and aspirations. The
desirability of any possible solution must be assessed from the point of clearly
defined American geopolitical, economic, and diplomatic
interests.
In addition, Trifkovic also predicted that the mind-boggling failure of the
U.S. "intelligence community" to anticipate and prevent the attacks would be
used by the proponents of further centralization of the power of the government:
Those proponents of perpetual war for perpetual peace will
demand expanded controls over the Internet, obligatory e-mail decoding
devices, and more satellites that monitor us from the
skies. But those attacks prove
Drain the Swamp and There Will Be No More Mosquitoes [WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK]
Title: Message HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --- Published on Monday, September 9, 2002 in the Guardian/UK Drain the Swamp and There Will Be No More MosquitoesBy attacking Iraq, the US will invite a new wave of terrorist attacks by Noam Chomsky September 11 shocked many Americans into an awareness that they had better pay much closer attention to what the US government does in the world and how it is perceived. Many issues have been opened for discussion that were not on the agenda before. That's all to the good. It is also the merest sanity, if we hope to reduce the likelihood of future atrocities. It may be comforting to pretend that our enemies "hate our freedoms," as President Bush stated, but it is hardly wise to ignore the real world, which conveys different lessons. The president is not the first to ask: "Why do they hate us?" In a staff discussion 44 years ago, President Eisenhower described "the campaign of hatred against us [in the Arab world], not by the governments but by the people". His National Security Council outlined the basic reasons: the US supports corrupt and oppressive governments and is "opposing political or economic progress" because of its interest in controlling the oil resources of the region. Post-September 11 surveys in the Arab world reveal that the same reasons hold today, compounded with resentment over specific policies. Strikingly, that is even true of privileged, western-oriented sectors in the region. To cite just one recent example: in the August 1 issue of Far Eastern Economic Review, the internationally recognized regional specialist Ahmed Rashid writes that in Pakistan "there is growing anger that US support is allowing [Musharraf's] military regime to delay the promise of democracy". Today we do ourselves few favors by choosing to believe that "they hate us" and "hate our freedoms". On the contrary, these are attitudes of people who like Americans and admire much about the US, including its freedoms. What they hate is official policies that deny them the freedoms to which they too aspire. For such reasons, the post-September 11 rantings of Osama bin Laden - for example, about US support for corrupt and brutal regimes, or about the US "invasion" of Saudi Arabia - have a certain resonance, even among those who despise and fear him. From resentment, anger and frustration, terrorist bands hope to draw support and recruits. We should also be aware that much of the world regards Washington as a terrorist regime. In recent years, the US has taken or backed actions in Colombia, Nicaragua, Panama, Sudan and Turkey, to name a few, that meet official US definitions of "terrorism" - that is, when Americans apply the term to enemies. In the most sober establishment journal, Foreign Affairs, Samuel Huntington wrote in 1999: "While the US regularly denounces various countries as 'rogue states,' in the eyes of many countries it is becoming the rogue superpower ... the single greatest external threat to their societies." Such perceptions are not changed by the fact that, on September 11, for the first time, a western country was subjected on home soil to a horrendous terrorist attack of a kind all too familiar to victims of western power. The attack goes far beyond what's sometimes called the "retail terror" of the IRA, FLN or Red Brigades. The September 11 terrorism elicited harsh condemnation throughout the world and an outpouring of sympathy for the innocent victims. But with qualifications. An international Gallup poll in late September found little support for "a military attack" by the US in Afghanistan. In Latin America, the region with the most experience of US intervention, support ranged from 2% in Mexico to 16% in Panama. The current "campaign of hatred" in the Arab world is, of course, also fueled by US policies toward Israel-Palestine and Iraq. The US has provided the crucial support for Israel's harsh military occupation, now in its 35th year. One way for the US to lessen Israeli-Palestinian tensions would be to stop refusing to join the long-standing international consensus that calls for recognition of the right of all states in the region to live in peace and security, including a Palestinian state in the currently occupied territories (perhaps with minor and mutual border adjustments). In Iraq, a decade of harsh sanctions under US pressure has strengthened Saddam Hussein while leading to the death of
