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ROGER HAYES
DUALITY OF TERRORISM
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BY MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
“Because God had chosen America as the construction
site of the earthly paradise, America's cause was always just
and nothing was ever America’s fault. "
-LEWIS LAPHAM
Once upon a time in a fairy tale past the United States
of America thought it was safe from the strifes of the world,
isolated by oceans it fatuously believed would protect it; even
after half a century of a nuclear arms race and the development
of intercontinental missiles the USA assumed a Buck Rogers
space shield would defend it from harm
And from its inviolable fortress it exported a highly
sophisticated form of terror, attacking countries all over the
world for one purpose or another, generally from the air with
bombs and missiles. The USA pioneered many of the methods
of war from the air and stratosphere and used bombs more than
any other nation, especially on cities and small villages of other
nations.
The morning of September 11, 2001 dramatically ended
the nation’s illusory immunity The USA was finally attacked in
its own homeland by suicidal commandos who made guided
missiles out of American airliners in a brilliant scheme of
calculated devastation aimed at the cosmic cathedrals of
American civilization and its ambitions for global supremacy:
the aptly named World Trade Center and the Pentagon
The perspective of those who elaborately planned and
executed the attacks regarded those employed in these two
centers of American omnipotence not as innocent civilians but
as directly responsible for America's warlike actions around the
world just as are American soldiers, diplomats and multinational
corporations based in the USA.
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The United States has been dealt a grievous blow and
might be dealt worse. We who inhabit this country now live in
uncertainty and justifiable paranoia. Contrary to incessant pleas
for healing it is not a time to heal but to instead discover why we
have been attacked and join the rest of the world in finding out
how to justifiably put an end to it. If all we do is retaliate that is
all we will be able to do, endless retaliation and retribution until
nukes or bio/chemical weapons are slipped onto our shores in
enough quantities to kill millions of us.
Now we know for certain that none of us are safe from
the world, nor should any of us expect to be. We must realize,
as the President and his administration of corporate Tories seem
not to, that safety on this planet is a debilitating illusion (if not a
joke), that we are all vulnerable despite heroic efforts by public
officials to comfort as well as make richer the already affluent
in this crisis while scaring the hell out of the rest of us to justify
the collateral theft of public money — the same persons and
corporations who have benefited immensely from tax cuts
are also enriched by the tremendous upscale in Pentagon
budgets.
We might for a moment think we are united in a single
great national tragedy and subsequent righteous “crusade”
(a politically incorrect term) against international terrorism, but
it is transparent and soon enough the familiar old war between
rich and poor will unravel the flimsy rapport in our society as well
as the rest of the world — the ancient antipathy that is the true
leit-motif of this new war (and human relations in general).
The war we have been thrust into should arguably be a
police action without past euphemisms of the term. It must not
be a unilateral effort — as it somehow appears to have been
conducted in Afghanistan despite a few token presences of other
nation’s forces — why are we solely in charge of prisoners? —
and it must be conducted at several levels which must include
enormous efforts by the United Nations to eradicate despotism,
hunger and poverty because these are especially causes for
violence and terrorism, the courts of last resort for the hopeless
and desperate.
Yet the self-proclaimed Warriors of God who suicided
on 9/11 defied the usual profile of terrorists except for their
religious fanaticism: they were not poor or uneducated but rather
sophisticated worldly persons (all male) who moved effortlessly
through Western society on both sides of the Atlantic, using
credit cards and transferable banking accounts to learn to fly
airplanes (though not necessarily how to land them) among
other things.
They were inspired not by poverty but by obstinate
religious nationalism, a militant ambition for theological world
supremacy to eventually supplant what they hypersensitively
perceive as Judeo/Christian domination
September 11 transcends the secularly political and
moves dangerously into the demagogic metaphysical, an
archaic and mythological abstraction of people certain they are
the instruments of God. whether Judeo/Christian or Islamic —
bloody minded retribution against innocents to revenge the
deaths of innocents; they highjacked our airplanes we have
highjacked the high moral ground as rationale to strike back
A major rhetorical elevation of our vengeance against
the terrorists is the President’s appellation of them as evil and
their accused leader Osama bin Laden as “The Evil One"
(a virtual mimicry of George Bush Sr.’s earlier comparison of
Saddam Hussein, whose name he pronounced in a way that
sounded like Satan, to Adolf Hitler). Osama bin Laden seems
to desire a return to 7th century Mecca; to early Islam which
paradoxically harbored the world’s most literate and scholastic
civilization — a return to basics, so to speak, in a manner similar
to ecumenical Christians who wish a revival of a piety that never
existed except in imagination and myth.
Rather than demonize Osama bin Laden we ought to
remember Gamel Nasser and his dream of a Pan Arabia. That
dream is not dead and is reflected in Osama bin Laden's hopes
for a Caliphate of Arabian Nights times, and to a much lesser
extent Bush Sr.’s nemesis Saddam Hussein, the old fashioned
tyrant/sheik of Iraq.
It might be more helpful to consider Osama bin Laden,
not as an Islamic John Brown, but as a rogue billionaire who
thinks his wealth puts him above the law and entitles him to
impose his brand of Pan Arabic Islam onto whomever and in
whatever form he desires, just as our own arrogant billionaires
who assume they have the right to rule the world for their
personal pleasures. They are, after all, accused of stealing the
Presidency for their own use.
We are cynical about the motives of terrorist leaders —
Yet it is imperative we question not only the motives of our own
leaders but their methods as well The essential question is if
we are being misled: Do our leaders reflect our true feelings and
principles? Do our global policies and actions reflect the founda
tions of our purpose as a nation (which we ardently proclaim as
the best ever conceived) — or are they ordinary power hungry
imperial wannabes grabbing for history's golden ring of world
supremacy?
Charles Krauthammer elucidated the “Bush Doctrine"
in one of his newspaper columns:
"In the liberal internationalist view the U.S. is merely
one among many — a stronger country, yes, but one that has to
adapt itself to the will and needs of the 'international community’
This is folly America is no mere international citizen. It is the
most dominant power in the world, more dominant than since
NORTH COAST
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