|
|
No one steers a jet into a skyscraper unless he feels he’s been seriously aggrieved.
That might seem obvious, but it somehow escaped President George W. Bush. His explanation for the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center: “America was targeted for attack because we are the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.”
Grownups know the opposite is true: America was targeted for attack because we’re regarded in certain parts of the world as bullies, and worse. Saying so in no way excuses the tragedies of Sept. 11 or diminishes the suffering of thousands of innocents — but it’s essential in preventing a recurrence.
Before getting pissed off, consider this: It won’t be Bush’s children dying in the Hindu Kush; it will be yours. You’re entitled to know why this country thinks we have to do it.
By the administration’s own count, the United States has alienated a lot of people. One insanely clever suicide bomber might be a fluke. But 19 taking over four planes is a virtual trend, part of a substantial movement.
Investigators have asserted suspects in as many as 55 countries could be involved in the massacre.
Now the United States is getting ready to do some killing. Everyone knows it. Almost everyone wants it.
In a world divided into nation-states, it has to be done. You can’t blow up 5,000 American civilians and get away with it.
But if we want to prevent more such attacks, our leaders should start considering what they’re doing to other people.
It takes one to know one
Bush is wrong about something else, according to Elizabeth Frierson, professor of Middle East history at the University of Cincinnati. Since the bombings Sept. 11, the president has been saying the United States is at war. In fact, the war has been going on for at least 20 years, Frierson says.
“The U.S. has been engaged — with its allies in the Middle East, Latin America and Asia — in a guerilla war for the past few decades,” she says. “The guerrilla war came home last week. This is the latest strike in a war that’s actually been going on for decades. We call it the Cold War and globalization.”
William Kammeraad-Campbell, a retired Miami University professor of political science, puts the equation more bluntly.
“When you piss off entire populations and nations, you’ve got trouble,” Kammeraad-Campbell says. “You piss on them long enough, and the hatred goes generations deep. We’ve got to stop doing what we’ve been doing.”
What we’ve been doing, according to both professors, is supporting governments and institutions that violate human rights in a manner grotesque enough to make someone want to hijack an airliner and smash it into the Pentagon.
“What is needed is a little simple moral imagination that just says, ‘If you don’t like being pissed on, think about how other people feel, too,’ ” Kammeraad-Campbell says. “A level of despair is reached, where people are willing to die to punish their tormentors.”
Frierson says that despair is understandable.
“There’s just such rage at local elites in the Middle East, and we support those local elites,” she says. “If you, Osama and I were having coffee, we would agree that Ruler X is a selfish despot, driving a Mercedes while 40 kilometers away is a village with no running water. We would disagree about what to do about it.”
In the Middle East, the United States has engaged in policies that created a core of resentment, according to Kammeraad-Campbell. A teacher at Miami University from 1970 to 1997, he was a consultant in the negotiations that led to the release of American hostages in Iran in 1980.
“We have supported the Phalange — the Chamouns and the Gemayels — in Lebanon,” Kammeraad-Campbell says. “We invaded Lebanon. Eisenhower walked the Marines up the beach while people were sunbathing. We have left spent uranium slugs all over Iraq, where kids are getting leukemia. We have bombed essential infrastructure. Of the 9,000 smart bombs we used, about 8,800 didn’t work. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, with our help, used anti-personnel cluster bombs. How old are those kids now?
“The most egregious example I know is the effort senators Dodd and Lieberman made in getting a turn-key Sikorski plant transferred to Turkey to build Blackhawks and to get the thing paid for by breaking Export-Import Bank practices, turning Blackhawk helicopters over to Turkey to blast the hell out of the Kurds. Then you ask why these people fire rockets into Israel.”
Or why they would hijack airplanes carrying innocent people and hurl them into skyscrapers housing innocent people?
Both Frierson and Kammeraad-Campbell cite U.S. support for another Middle East tyrant, the Shah of Iran, as a cause for anger against this country. Kammeraad-Campbell says the Shah’s brutality created “dying power” in Iran.
“These people were just so desperate they’d rather confront the son of a bitch and bring him down if they could, but they’d just as soon die if they couldn’t,” he says.
After natural disasters strike, we can only wonder why a hurricane selected this island, why an earthquake chose that city. In disasters caused by humans, the reason can sometimes be easy to find.
But we have to start by putting aside Bush’s vapid analysis. This country is, in fact, the symbol of democracy and freedom, but that’s not the reason for these attacks. The symbol, unfortunately, hasn’t always been reality.
“This symbol of democracy and freedom murdered between 8,000 and 12,000 in the barrios in Panama when they went after Noriega, this drug lord we had propped up,” Kammeraad-Campbell says. “We trained him at the School of the Americas and at the Inter-American Police Academy in Panama City. The CIA used him, then all of a sudden we turned against him and decided we had to bring him to justice.”
The enemy of my enemy is my enemy, too
The first time a George Bush sat in the White House, we went to war with Saddam Hussein, dictator of Iraq, after having spent years arming him.
“We’ve allied ourselves with people like Saddam,” Frierson says. “He was killing his own people for years, but we didn’t protest as long as he was fighting Iran.”
Ten years later, with another George Bush in the White House, we’re threatening war against another one of our one-time allies, a hero of the Afghan war against the Soviet Union, Osama bin Laden.
“With Saudi money, we were training cadres for cannon fodder, including Osama bin Laden, to hurl themselves against the Soviets,” Kammeraad-Campbell says. “The Taliban are our people. We trained the mujahedin in Afghanistan. We turned Stinger missiles over to them. We gave them up-links.”
In May, the Bush administration awarded $43 million in humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, ruled by the Taliban he now threatens to attack for harboring bin Laden.
In its fight against communism, the United States backed regimes such as Saddam’s and guerillas such as the mujahedin in Afghanistan.
“We wanted to break up the Soviet Union, an effort we won, but we still don’t know the consequences,” Frierson says.
One consequence, however, is becoming increasingly clear: The United States created a monster.
“This thing is spreading far and wide,” Kammeraad-Campbell says. “We trained hundreds of thousands of people to fight the Soviets. The guns fire both ways.”
By undermining the Soviet Union, the U.S. seriously destabilized control over weapons of mass destruction, according to Kammeraad-Campbell. Nuclear material is missing from former Soviet facilities in Kazakhstan and former Soviet biological warfare scientists are marketing their services.
“It’s bled all over the place, in part because the lunatic Reagan Administration was determined to spend the Soviet Union into oblivion,” Kammeraad-Campbell says. “I would rather have had the Soviet Union a crumbling empire, acting along realistic premises — trying to collapse with dignity but controlling resources since secularized into the hands of terrorists.”
After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the United States funded rebel groups with such single-minded anti-Communism that it effectively trained the very people now waging holy war against us. The Afghan freedom fighters — whom we now call “terrorists” — found a ready source of weapons in the U.S. ally Pakistan.
“Per capita, Pakistan has the world’s largest concentration of world-class machinists,” Kammeraad-Campbell says. “Lots of little huts have generators and turn out Kalashnikovs (rifles). After the war (against the Soviets), they went retail.”
Although some have compared the attacks in New York and Washington to the attack on Pearl Harbor, Kammeraad-Campbell says the United States should have seen this one coming. The government has been willfully negligent, he says.
“The whole idea that this is a surprise is just nonsense,” he says. “In terms of soft spots, we have — in opposition to security experts — built airports next to major metropolitan areas. Five miles from Amarillo Airport is the Pentax facility, with plutonium triggers in above-ground bunkers. There are just so many targets.”
Frierson, however, says shock is understandable. We never expected to experience what other countries have.
“We saw 800,000 people killed in Rwanda,” she says. “We saw mass graves in Bosnia. But this is supposed to be the safe haven for the survivors of Rwanda and Bosnia. Even though we’ve been involved in local oppression throughout much of the world, it’s still an extreme shock to have this happen on home soil.”
What awaits U.S. troops if they attack Afghanistan will be equally shocking, according to Frierson. The country’s fierce resistance to invaders is legendary. It was Afghanistan, after all, that proved the Soviet Union could be beaten — and, more than a century earlier, proved the British Empire could be beaten.
“No one’s ever won a war in Afghanistan,” Frierson says. “Ask the British. Ask the Russians. It’s mountainous terrain. All sides fight until all but one falls down dead.”
Even Pakistan’s cooperation with the United States isn’t an unfettered gift, according to Kammeraad-Campbell.
“The army in Pakistan is split between Islamic populists and professional fighters, so if we go in through Pakistan, Pakistan is going to collapse,” he says.
Pakistan, like its enemy India, has nuclear bombs.
‘It’s safe here’
If, as the adage holds, truth is the first casualty of war, tolerance is the second. Isolated reports of attacks on Arab Americans and vandalism at mosques began as the flames in Manhattan still burned. But to our credit, we’re not having pogroms nor ethnic cleansing nor — this time — detainment camps, unlike after Pearl Harbor.
The Islamic Center of Cincinnati received harassing phone calls, and a man was arrested. But the significant phenomenon was what happened afterward, according to Karen Dabdoub, administrator of the center in West Chester.
“We have received some threatening calls and a few harassing calls,” she says. “But I’ve had over 100 calls from the good people of Cincinnati offering their support and their prayers, some people even crying. It just tears you apart. They’re upset that this is happening. I sit here and the phone doesn’t stop.
“There are lots of things happening elsewhere, but they aren’t happening here. We’ve had some nasty calls, but nobody is being hurt. A lot of mosques closed today. We did not. We held Friday prayer as usual.”
Well, sort of. A West Chester Police officer was at the center Tuesday through Friday, providing security at its primary school following the threats.
Frierson says anti-Muslim harassment has been reported at some universities.
“I’m worried about my Muslim students who will be reporting to class Thursday,” she says.
Arab Americans have an acute reason to oppose terrorism in the United States, according to Frierson.
“It strikes at the very heart of a sense of security for, say, a young Pakistani family that despises the way Islam in Pakistan is perverted for political expediency,” she says. “They came here to be safe, and one of their greatest securities is separation between church and state. That’s one reason we have seven million Muslims in the United States — because they’re safe here.”
Of course, no one is really safe here now.
“The big sigh of relief is the big blast in the World Trade Center didn’t come with chemical, biological or radiological agents,” Kammeraad-Campbell says. “We have had a demonstration that we can be had. This is America. Think of what is going on in American businesses overseas.”
If the United States takes on a guerilla army on its own turf, the terror in Manhattan — civilians slaughtered by the thousands — could be replayed in villages and towns in Afghanistan, Frierson says.
“My fear is that we wage anti-guerilla warfare with too many collateral casualties,” she says. “If we wage war, we have to wage it honorably and compassionately. In guerilla war, you take refuge in the local population. My fear is our retaliation will provide more victims and more recruits.”
Bush has played his Texas background to the hilt, even calling bin Laden for a shootout in front of the saloon.
“There’s an old poster out West that says, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive,’ ” the leader of the free world said.
But that kind of bravado, if unchecked, will only lead us back to Sept. 11, according to Kammeraad-Campbell.
“We should reconfigure our foreign policy to emphasize equity and decency,” he says. “If we are really going to deal with people like bin Laden — and I use his name more as a rubric than a target — we have got to do major, dramatic things to change our image and winnow the pool of potential recruits to his cause. We haven’t had the leadership. It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference whether we have Democrats or Republicans. They have not given the American people decent foreign policy. They fuck up, and then everything is focused on crisis management.” ©
This article appears in Sep 19-25, 2001.