The North Coast times-eagle., March 01, 2002, Page 2, Image 2

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THE ALGEBRA OF INFINITE JUSTICE
sake, rights. Instead, when Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. Defense
Secretary, was asked what he would call a victory in America’s
new war, he said that if he could convince the world that Ameri­
cans must be allowed to continue with their way of life, he would
consider it a victory.
The September 11 attacks were a monstrous calling
card from a world gone horribly wrong. The message may have
been written by Osama Bin Laden (who knows?) and delivered
by his couriers, but it could well have been signed by the ghosts
of the victims of America’s old wars. The millions killed in Korea,
Vietnam and Cambodia, the 17,500 killed when Israel — backed
by the U.S. — invaded Lebanon in 1982, the 200,000 Iraqis
killed in Operation Desert Storm, the thousand of Palestinians
who have died fighting Israel's occupation of the West Bank.
And the millions who died in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Haiti,
Nicaragua, Chile, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic,
Panama, at the hands of all the terrorists, dictators and
genocidists whom the American government supported, trained,
bankrolled and supplied with arms. And this is far from being a
comprehensive list.
For a country involved in so much warfare and conflict,
the American people have been extremely fortunate. The strikes
on September 11 were only the second on American soil in over
a century. The first was Pearl Harbor. The reprisal for this took a
long route, but ended with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This time the world waits with bated breath for more
horrors to come.
Someone recently said that if Osama Bin Laden didn't
exist, America would have to invent him. But in a way, America
did invent him. He was among the jihadis who moved to Afghan­
istan in 1979 when the CIA commenced its operations there
against the Soviet invasion. Bin Laden has the distinction of
being created by the CIA and wanted by the FBI.
But who is Osama Bin Laden really? Let me rephrase
that. What is Osama Bin Laden? He is America’s family secret.
He is the American President’s dark dopplegSnger. The savage
twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilized. He has
been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by
America’s foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear
arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of “full-spectrum dominance,"
its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous
military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial
regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has munched
through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts.
Its marauding multinationals that are taking over the air we
breathe, the ground we stand on, the water we drink, the
thoughts we think. Now that the family secret has been spilled,
the twins are blurring into one another and gradually becoming
interchangeable. Their guns, bombs, money and drugs have
been going around in the loop for a while: the Stinger missiles
that greet U.S. helicopters were supplied by the CIA; the heroin
used by America’s drug addicts comes from Afghanistan.
Now Bush and Bin Laden have even begun to borrow
each other’s rhetoric. Each refers to the other as “the head of
the snake.” Both invoke God and use the loose millenarian
currency of good and evil as their terms of reference. Both are
engaged in unequivocal political crimes. Both are dangerously
armed —one with the nuclear arsenal of the obscenely powerful,
the other with the incandescent, destructive power of the utterly
hopeless. The fireball and the icepick. The bludgeon and the
axe. The important thing to keep in mind is that neither is an
acceptable alternative to the other.
President Bush’s ultimatum to the people of the world
— “If you’re not with us, you’re against us" — is a piece of
presumptuous arrogance. It is not a choice that people want to,
need to, or should have to make.
Nothing can excuse or justify an act of terrorism whether
it is committed by religious fundamentalists, private militia,
people’s resistance movements — or whether it is dressed up as
a war of retribution by a recognized government. The bombing
of Afghanistan is not revenge for New York and Washington.
It is yet another act of terror against the world. Each innocent
person who is killed must be added to, not set off against, the
grisly toll of civilians who died in New York and Washington.
People rarely win wars, governments rarely lose them.
People get killed. Governments molt and group, hydra-headed.
They use flags first to shrink-wrap people’s minds and smother
thought, and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury their willing
dead. On both sides, in Afghanistan as well as America, civilians
are now hostage to the actions of their own governments. ,
ROGER HAYES
BY ARUNDHATI ROY
In the aftermath of the unconscionable September 11
suicide attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center,
an American newscaster said: “Good and evil rarely manifest
themselves as clearly as they did last Tuesday. People who we
don’t know massacred people who we do. And they did so with
contemptuous glee.” Then he broke down and wept.
Here's the rub: America is at war against people it
doesn't know, because they don’t appear much on TV. Before
it had properly identified or even begun to comprehend the
nature of its enemy, The U.S. government, in a rush of publicity
and embarrassing rhetoric, cobbled together an “international
coalition against terror," mobilized its army, its Air Force, its
Navy and its Media, and committed them to battle.
The trouble is that once America goes off to war, it can’t
very well return without having fought one. If it doesn’t find its
enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will
have to manufacture one. Once war begins, it will develop a
momentum, a logic and justification of its own, and we’ll lose
sight of why it’s being fought in the first place.
What we are witnessing here is the spectacle of the
world’s most powerful country reaching reflexively, angrily,
for an old instinct to fight a new kind of war. Suddenly, when
it comes to defending itself, America’s streamlined warships,
cruise missiles and F-16 jets look like obsolete lumbering things.
As deterrence, its arsenal of nuclear bombs is no longer worth
its weight in scrap. Box-cutters, penknives, and cold anger are
the weapons with which wars of the new century will be waged.
Anger is the lock pick. It slips through customs unnoticed. Does
not show up in baggage checks.
President Bush calls the enemies of America “enemies
of freedom...They hate our freedoms — our freedom of religion,
our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and
disagree with each other." People are being asked to make two
leaps of faith here. First to assume that The Enemy is who the
U.S. government says it is. And second, to assume that The
Enemy's motives are what the U.S. government says they are.
For strategic, military and economic reasons, it is vital
for the U.S. government to persuade its public that their commit­
ment to freedom and democracy and the American Way of Life
is under attack. In the current atmosphere of grief, outrage and
anger, it is an easy notion to peddle However, if that were true,
it is reasonable to wonder why the symbols of America’s
economic and military dominance — the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon — were chosen as the targets of the attacks.
Why not the Statue of Liberty?
Could it be that the stygian anger that led to the attacks
has its taproots not in American freedom and democracy, but
in the U.S. government's record of commitment and support to
exactly the opposite things— to military and economic terrorism,
insurgency, military dictatorship, religious bigotry and unimagin­
able genocide (outside America)?
It must be hard for ordinary Americans, so recently
bereaved, to look up at the world with their eyes full of tears
and encounter what might appear to them to be indifference.
It isn't indifference, just augury An absence of surprise. The
tired wisdom of knowing what goes around eventually comes
around. American people ought to know that it is not them but
their government's policies that are so hated
America's grief at what happened has been immense
and immensely public. It would be grotesque to expect it to
calibrate or modulate its anguish. However, it will be a pity
if, instead of using this as an opportunity to understand why
September 11 happened, Americans use it as an opportunity
to usurp the world’s sorrow to mourn and avenge only their own.
Because then it falls to the rest of us to ask the hard questions
and say the harsh things. And for our pains, for our bad timing,
we will be disliked, ignored, and perhaps eventually silenced.
The world will probably never know what motivated
those particular highjackers who flew planes into those particular
American buildings. They were not glory boys. They left no
suicide notes, no political messages. . . All we know is that their
belief in what they were doing outstripped the natural human
instinct for survival, or any desire to be remembered. It’s almost
as though they could not scale down the enormity of their rage
to anything smaller than their deeds. And what they did has
blown a hole in the world as we knew it. Politicians, political
commentators and writers (like myself) invest the act with their
own politics, with their own interpretations. This speculation, this
analysis of the political climate in which the attacks took place,
can only be a good thing.
Is this America’s war against terror in America or against
terror in general? What exactly is being avenged here? Is it the
tragic loss of several thousand lives, the gutting of 5 million
square feet of office space in Manhattan, the destruction of a
section of the Pentagon, loss of several hundreds of thousands
of jobs, the bankruptcy of some airline companies and the dip in
the New York Stock Exchange? Or is it more than that. In 1996,
Madeleine Albright, then U.S. Secretary of State, was asked on
national television what she felt about the fact that 500,000 Iraqi
children had died as a result of U.S. economic sanctions. She
replied that it was “a very hard choice," but that, all things
considered, “we think the price is worth it."
So here we have it. The equivocating distinction
between civilization and savagery, between the “massacre of
innocent people" or, if you like, “a clash of civilizations" and
“collateral damage”. The sophistry and fastidious algebra of
‘infinite justice’. How many dead Iraqis will it take to make the
world a better place? How many dead mojahedin for each dead
investment banker?
’Operation Enduring Freedom’ (renamed from ‘Infinite
Justice’) is ostensibly being fought to uphold the American Way
of Life. It will probably end up undermining it completely. It will
spawn more anger and terror across the world. For ordinary
people in America, it will mean lives lived in a climate of sick­
ening uncertainty: will my child be safe in school? Will there be
nerve gas in the subway? A bomb in the cinema hall? Will my
love come home tonight? There have been warnings about the
possibility of biological warfare — smallpox, bubonic plague,
anthrax — the deadly payload on innocuous crop-duster aircraft.
Being picked off a few at a time may end up being worse than
being annihilated all at once by a nuclear bomb.
The U.S. government, and no doubt governments all
over the world, will use the climate of war as an excuse to curtail
civil liberties, deny free speech, lay off workers, harass ethnic
and religious minorities, cut back on public spending and divert
huge amounts of money to the defense industry. To what
purpose? President Bush can no more “rid the world of evil­
doers" than he can stock it with saints. It is absurd for the U.S.
government to even toy with the notion that it can stamp out
terrorism with more violence and oppression. Terrorism is the
symptom, not the disease Terrorism has no country. It is trans­
national, as global an enterprise as Coke or Pepsi or Nike. At
the first sign of trouble, terrorists can pull up stakes and move
their “factories” from country to country in search of a better
deal. Just like the multinational corporations.
Terrorism as a phenomenon may never go away. But
if it is to be contained, the first step is for America to at least
acknowledge that it shares the planet with other nations, with
other human beings who, even if they are not on TV, have loves
and griefs and stories and songs and sorrows and, for heaven’s
EXISTENTIAL PSY-OPS
The ground war in Afghanistan heated up when the
Allies revealed plans to airdrop a platoon of crack French exist­
entialist philosophers into the country to destroy the morale of
Taliban zealots by proving the nonexistence of God. Elements
from the feared Jean-Paul Sartre Brigade, or Black Berets’, will
be parachuted into the combat zones to spread doubt, despon­
dency and existential anomie among the enemy.
Hardened by numerous intellectual battles fought during
their long occupation of Paris' Left Bank, their first action will be
to establish a number of pavement cafes at strategic points near
the front lines.
There they will drink coffee and talk animatedly about
the absurd nature of life and man's lonely isolation in the
universe.
However, humanitarian agencies have been quick to
condemn the operation as inhumane, pointing out that the
effects of passive smoking from the Frenchmen’s endless
Gitanes could wreak a terrible toll on civilians in the area.
Speculation was mounting that Britain may also
contribute to the effort by dropping Professor Stephen Hawking
into Afghanistan to propagate his non-deistic theory of the
creation of the universe.
This is only one of several Psy-Ops operations mounted
by the Allies to undermine the unswerving religious fanaticism
that fuels the Taliban’s fighting spirit. Pentagon sources have
recently confirmed rumors that America has already sent in a
200-foot tall robot Jesus, which roams the Taliban frontlines
glowing eerily and shooting flames out of its fingers while
saying, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Follow me or
die.*
-LARRY JOSEPHSON
♦