[iwar] [fc:Robert.Fisk:.Bush.is.walking.into.a.trap]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-09-17 07:12:57
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001 07:12:57 -0700 (PDT)
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Subject: [iwar] [fc:Robert.Fisk:.Bush.is.walking.into.a.trap]
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[font face="Times New Roman, Times">[a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=94254" eudora="autourl">http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=94254[/a>[br>[br>
17 September 2001 10:11 GMT+1[br>[br>
[/font>[font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5>Robert Fisk: Bush is
walking into a trap[br>[br>
[/font>[font face="Times New Roman, Times">16 September 2001, The
Independent[br>[br>
Retaliation is a trap. In a world that was supposed to have learnt that
the rule of law comes above revenge, President Bush appears to be heading
for the very disaster that Osama bin Laden has laid down for him. Let us
have no doubts about what happened in New York and Washington last week.
It was a crime against humanity. We cannot understand America’s need to
retaliate unless we accept this bleak, awesome fact. But this crime was
perpetrated – it becomes ever clearer – to provoke the United States into
just the blind, arrogant punch that the US military is
preparing.[br>[br>
Mr bin Laden – every day his culpability becomes more apparent – has
described to me how he wishes to overthrow the pro-American regime of the
Middle East, starting with Saudi Arabia and moving on to Egypt, Jordan
and the other Gulf states. In an Arab world sunk in corruption and
dictatorships – most of them supported by the West – the only act that
might bring Muslims to strike at their own leaders would be a brutal,
indiscriminate assault by the United States. Mr bin Laden is
unsophisticated in foreign affairs, but a close student of the art and
horror of war. He knew how to fight the Russians who stayed on in
Afghanistan, a Russian monster that revenged itself upon its
ill-educated, courageous antagonists until, faced with war without end,
the entire Soviet Union began to fall apart.[br>[br>
The Chechens learnt this lesson. And the man responsible for so much of
the bloodbath in Chechnya – the career KGB man whose army is raping and
murdering the insurgent Sunni Muslim population of Chechnya – is now
being signed up by Mr Bush for his “war against people”. Vladimir Putin
must surely have a sense of humour to appreciate the cruel ironies that
have now come to pass, though I doubt if he will let Mr Bush know what
happens when you start a war of retaliation; your army – like the Russian
forces in Chechnya – becomes locked into battle with an enemy that
appears ever more ruthless, ever more evil.[br>[br>
But the Americans need look no further than Ariel Sharon’s futile war
with the Palestinians to understand the folly of retaliation. In Lebanon,
it was always the same. A Hizbollah guerrilla would kill an Israeli
occupation soldier, and the Israelis would fire back in retaliation at a
village in which a civilian would die. The Hizbollah would retaliate with
a Katyusha missile attack over the Israeli border, and the Israelis would
retaliate again with a bombardment of southern Lebanon. In the end, the
Hizbollah – the “centre of world terror” according to Mr Sharon – drove
the Israelis out of Lebanon.[br>[br>
In Israel/Palestine, it is the same story. An Israeli soldier shoots a
Palestinian stone-thrower. The Palestinians retaliate by killing a
settler. The Israelis then retaliate by sending a murder squad to kill a
Palestinian gunman. The Palestinians retaliate by sending a suicide
bomber into a pizzeria. The Israelis then retaliate by sending F-16s to
bomb a Palestinian police station. Retaliation leads to retaliation and
more retaliation. War without end.[br>[br>
And while Mr Bush – and perhaps Mr Blair – prepare their forces, they
explain so meretriciously that this is a war for “democracy and liberty”,
that it is about men who are “attacking civilisation”. “America was
targeted for attack,” Mr Bush informed us on Friday, “because we are the
brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.” But this is
not why America was attacked. If this was an Arab-Muslim apocalypse, then
it is intimately associated with events in the Middle East and with
America’s stewardship of the area. Arabs, it might be added, would rather
like some of that democracy and liberty and freedom that Mr Bush has been
telling them about. Instead, they get a president who wins 98 per cent in
the elections (Washington’s friend, Mr Mubarak) or a Palestinian police
force, trained by the CIA, that tortures and sometimes kills its people
in prison. The Syrians would also like a little of that democracy. So
would the Saudis. But their effete princes are all friends of America –
in many cases, educated at US universities.[br>[br>
I will always remember how President Clinton announced that Saddam
Hussein – another of our grotesque inventions – must be overthrown so
that the people of Iraq could choose their own leaders. But if that
happened, it would be the first time in Middle Eastern history that Arabs
have been permitted to do so. No, it is “our” democracy and “our” liberty
and freedom that Mr Bush and Mr Blair are talking about, our Western
sanctuary that is under attack, not the vast place of terror and
injustice that the Middle East has become.[br>[br>
Let me illustrate what I mean. Nineteen years ago today, the greatest act
of terrorism – using Israel’s own definition of that much misused word –
in modern Middle Eastern history began. Does anyone remember the
anniversary in the West? How many readers of this article will remember
it? I will take a tiny risk and say that no other British newspaper –
certainly no American newspaper – will today recall the fact that on 16
September 1982, Israel’s Phalangist militia allies started their
three-day orgy of rape and knifing and murder in the Palestinian refugee
camps of Sabra and Shatila that cost 1,800 lives. It followed an Israeli
invasion of Lebanon – designed to drive the PLO out of the country and
given the green light by the then US Secretary of State, Alexander Haig –
which cost the lives of 17,500 Lebanese and Palestinians, almost all of
them civilians. That’s probably three times the death toll in the World
Trade Centre. Yet I do not remember any vigils or memorial services or
candle-lighting in America or the West for the innocent dead of Lebanon;
I don’t recall any stirring speeches about democracy or liberty. In fact,
my memory is that the United States spent most of the bloody months of
July and August 1982 calling for “restraint”. No, Israel is not to blame
for what happened last week. The culprits were Arabs, not Israelis. But
America’s failure to act with honour in the Middle East, its promiscuous
sale of missiles to those who use them against civilians, its blithe
disregard for the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi children under
sanctions of which Washington is the principal supporter – all these are
intimately related to the society that produced the Arabs who plunged
America into an apocalypse of fire last week.[br>[br>
America’s name is literally stamped on to the missiles fired by Israel
into Palestinian buildings in Gaza and the West Bank. Only four weeks
ago, I identified one of them as an AGM 114-D air-to-ground rocket made
by Boeing and Lockheed-Martin at their factory in – of all places –
Florida, the state where some of the suiciders trained to fly.[br>[br>
It was fired from an Apache helicopter (made in America, of course)
during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, when hundreds of cluster
bombs were dropped in civilian areas of Beruit by the Israelis in
contravention of undertakings given to the United States. Most of the
bombs had US Naval markings and America then suspended a shipment of
fighter bombers to Israel – for less than two months.[br>[br>
The same type of missile – this time an AGM 114-C made inGeorgia – was
fired by the Israelis into the back of an ambulance near the Lebanese
village of Mansori, killing two women and four children. I collected the
pieces of the missile, including its computer coding plate, flew to
Georgia and presented them to the manufacturers at the Boeing factory.
And what did the developer of the missile say to me when I showed him
photographs of the children his missile had killed? “Whatever you do,” he
told me, “don’t quote me as saying anything critical of the policies of
Israel.”[br>[br>
I’m sure the father of those children, who was driving the ambulance,
will have been appalled by last week’s events, but I don’t suppose, given
the fate of his own wife – one of the women killed – that he was in a
mood to send condolences to anyone. All these facts, of course, must be
forgotten now.[br>[br>
Every effort will be made in the coming days to switch off the “why”
question and concentrate on the who, what and how. CNN and most of the
world’s media have already obeyed this essential new war rule. I’ve
already seen what happens when this rule is broken. When The Independent
published my article on the connection between Middle Eastern injustice
and the New York holocaust, the BBC’s 24-hour news channel produced an
American commentator who remarked that “Robert Fisk has won the prize for
bad taste”. When I raised the same point on an Irish radio talk show, the
other guest, a Harvard lawyer, denounced me as a bigot, a liar, a
“dangerous man” and – of course – potentially anti-Semitic. The Irish
pulled the plug on him.[br>[br>
No wonder we have to refer to the terrorists as “mindless”. For if we did
not, we would have to explain what went on in those minds. But this
attempt to censor the realities of the war that has already begun must
not be permitted to continue. Look at the logic. Secretary of State Colin
Powell was insisting on Friday that his message to the Taliban is simple:
they have to take responsibility for sheltering Mr bin Laden. “You cannot
separate your activities from the activities of the perpetrators,” he
warned. But the Americans absolutely refuse to associate their own
response to their predicament with their activities in the Middle East.
We are supposed to hold our tongues, even when Ariel Sharon – a man whose
name will always be associated with the massacre at Sabra and Shatila –
announces that Israel also wishes to join the battle against “world
terror”.[br>[br>
No wonder the Palestinians are fearful. In the past four days, 23
Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank and Gaza, an astonishing
figure that would have been front-page news had America not been blitzed.
If Israel signs up for the new conflict, then the Palestinians – by
fighting the Israelis – will, by extension, become part of the “world
terror” against which Mr Bush is supposedly going to war. Not for nothing
did Mr Sharon claim that Yasser Arafat had connections with Osama bin
Laden.[br>
I repeat: what happened in New York was a crime against humanity. And
that means policemen, arrests, justice, a whole new international court
at The Hague if necessary. Not cruise missiles and “precision” bombs and
Muslim lives lost in revenge for Western lives. But the trap has been
sprung. Mr Bush – perhaps we, too – are now walking into it.
[/font>

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