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News :: Miscellaneous |
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THE REACTION |
Current rating: 0 |
by Sam Smith, The Progressive Review
(No verified email address) |
12 Sep 2001
Modified: 24 Oct 2001 |
Do we blindly strike out at the most convenient targets?
Or do we actually begin to deal with the root of the problem and arrive at a solution, as Sam Smith suggests? |
THROUGHOUT THE DAY came contrasting images of Americans. The indefatigably courageous rescue workers - turned gray and white by pulverized matter - pressing on despite reports, in the case of the firefighters, of a 50% casualty rate. The innocent survivors resourcefully joining hands to follow the one flashlight out of a building or using a cell phone to locate themselves under the rubble. The Washington officials noisily locking the barn door too late and creating a new crisis (of the sort they could understand): a massive traffic jam. The glamorous anchors and TV correspondents, children of Pleasantville II, suddenly discovering that news can be real.
And too often during the day there were the incompetent, mendacious, and terminally hubristic voices of an American elite who had helped create a country so hated that some would kill themselves to define their antipathy. There was Madeleine Albright who five years ago said that killing a half million Iraqi children as a result of the sanctions was worth the price. There was Charlie Rose, listening even more intently that usual, to his roundtable of failed, fatuous experts. The only bright spot was when Tom Clancy mercilessly quizzed Clinton-in-waiting John Edwards as to what specifically he would do and Edwards could produce nothing but photogenic platitudes. There was talk of instant revenge, of instant action, talk that echoed that of our generals in Vietnam. We have only failed in quantity and not in quality, they repeatedly told us then.
The Washington Post, as during Vietnam, helped lead the macho masochists. It even published a column by Robert Kagan which declared, "Congress, in fact, should immediately declare war. It does not have to name a country." The rest of the media was not far behind.
Notably absent from the airwaves were Muslim Americans and those who favored resolution rather than retribution. Instead, there was a steady procession of figures who had supported or helped form a foreign policy that has made us the earth's most despised nation, who had insisted that the way to a better world was to arm Israel and anathematize Arabs, who had claimed that the civil liberties we have surrendered over the past two decades would make us safer, and who have told us we must choose between security and freedom and in the end have denied us both. In the face of such overwhelming evidence of their failure, if they did not have the grace to resign, they should at least shut up.
The media would have us believe that these acts were the work of an evil beast that lurks uncontrolled in the global forest ready to strike the unwary. But it isn't like that. Remember that it was less than a year ago that Bill Clinton was hoping to strike a deal between the Palestinians and Israel. In fact, it can be argued that if he had been willing to leave office simply with some progress rather than with a major personal triumph, the next months might have worked out differently. Instead, the failure of his efforts seemed an excuse to both sides to revert to their worst behavior. If George Bush had picked up the pieces, this might have been prevented; instead he turned his back on the Middle East, obsessed with a far less fatal but still misbegotten tax policy. There was, in short, nothing inevitable about what happened. In fact, guerilla attacks had plummeted in the 1990s, thanks in part to peace efforts such as those in the Middle East.
Now we are told that we must take effective action. And what, pray tell is that? We seem to have forgotten, for example, that in the spring of 1996, President Clinton signed a top secret order authorizing the CIA to use any and all means to destroy Osama bin Laden's network.
The media and politicians call what happen terrorism. This is a propagandistic rather than a descriptive term and replaces the more useful traditional phrases, guerilla action or guerilla warfare. The former places a mythical shroud around the event while the latter depicts its true nature. Guerillas do not play by the rules of state organization or military tactics. This does not make them cowardly, as some have suggested, but can make them fiendishly clever. The essence of guerilla warfare is to attack at times and places unsuspected and return to places unknown. You can not invade the land of guerillas, you can not bomb them out of existence, you can not overwhelm them with your technological wonders.
This was a lesson we were supposed to have learned in Vietnam but appear to have forgotten. The journalist Bernard Fall early noted that the French, after Dien Bien Phu, had no choice but to leave Southeast Asia. America, with its vast military, financial, and technological resources, was able to stay because it had the capacity to keep making the same mistakes over and over.
Our war against "terrorism" has been in many ways a domestic version of our Vietnam strategy. We keep making the same mistakes over and over because, until now, we could afford to. One of these has been to define the problem by its manifestations rather than its causes. This turns a resolvable political problem into a irresolvable technical problem, because while, for example, there are clearly solutions to the Middle East crisis, there are no solutions to the guerilla violence that grows from the failure to end it.
In other words, if you define the problem as "a struggle against terrorism" you have already admitted defeat because the guerilla will always have the upper hand against a centralized, technology-dependent society such as ours. We will always be blindsided, just Bernard Fall said the French were under much simpler circumstances: "What surprised the French completely was the Viet-Minh's ability to transport a considerable mass of heavy artillery pieces across road less mountains to Dien Bien Phu and to keep it supplied with a sufficient amount of ammunition to make the huge effort worthwhile."
There is one way to deal with guerilla warfare and that is to resolve the problems that allow it to thrive. As we have shown in the Middle East, one need not even reach a final solution as long as incremental progress is being made. But once that ceases, as happened in the past year, the case for freelance violence is quickly strengthened and people simply forget that peace is possible.
In the present instance, if the alleged provenance of the attacks proves correct, we may have met our own Dien Bien Phu in our long, senseless, and self-defeating effort to subdue and control those of the Muslim states. The answer - humiliating as it may seem over the short run but courageous as it really would be - is not to commence yet another war of empire against the Arab world, but to end the one we have conducted for far too long. |
See also:
http://prorev.com/indexa.htm
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The enemy of my enemy is my friend? |
by Michael Feltes
mfeltes (nospam) newmail.net (unverified) |
Current rating: 0
13 Sep 2001
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America's staggeringly clumsy foreign policy of "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" has placed us on the side of Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War, a war in which he utilized chemical and biological weaponry against Iranians, and the Shah of Iran, a murderous dictator who was enthroned in the 1950's by the CIA in a coup. America supported both of these despicable characters because our leaders did not care for the politics of the Ayatollah Khomeni. The Ayatollah was also a despicable character, to be sure, but he came to power in a popular revolution. He was the Iranians' despicable character, not ours. When we stopped interfering in Iran's politics so forthrightly after the Gulf War, lo and behold! The fundamentalist Muslim elite no longer has the Great Satan of US intervention with which to polarize the people, and the people of Iran are slowly starting to establish a democracy.
When we let other nations find their own way, and stop attempting to manipulate them to our own ends, the people's voice comes through, and the people claim peace, justice, and equality for themselves. |
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Rob |
by Rob
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
24 Oct 2001
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The french should have fuked off and left Vietnam alone after WW2, they fuked it all up! |
