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by
M. Shahid Alam
September
15, 2003
“If you kill one person, it is murder.
If you kill a hundred thousand, it is
foreign policy.”
-- Anonymous
I
doubt if I have come across a more pithy statement exposing the hypocrisy of
America’s war against terrorism; but this is what I read, well before September
11, 2001, on a car-sticker in the commuter parking lot in Attleboro,
Massachusetts, USA.
States
are founded on a monopoly over violence, which has nearly always included the
right to kill. In fact, that is the very essence of the state. States seek to
enforce this monopoly by amassing instruments of violence; but that is scarcely
enough. They also use religion, ideology and laws to deligitimize and root out
violence stemming from non-state agents.
This
monopoly over violence creates its own problem. Unchallenged, the state can
turn the instruments of violence against its own population. This leads to
state tyranny. The state can also wage wars to enrich one or more sectional
interests. This defines the dual challenge before all organized societies:
restraining state tyranny and limiting its war-making powers.
Often,
there has existed a tradeoff between tyranny and wars. Arguably, such a
tradeoff was at work during the period of European expansion since the
sixteenth century, when Europeans slowly secured political rights even as they
engaged in growing, even genocidal, violence, especially against non-Europeans.
As Western states gradually conceded rights to their own populations, they
intensified the murder and enslavement of Americans and Africans, founding
white colonies on lands stolen from them. Few Westerners were troubled by this
inverse connection: this was the essence of racism.
The
United States is only the most successful of the colonial creations, a fact
that has left its indelible mark on American thinking. It is a country that was
founded on violence against its native inhabitants; this led, over three
centuries of expansion, to the near extermination of Indians, with the few
survivors relocated to inhospitable reservations. Its history also includes the
violence – on a nearly equal scale – perpetrated against the Africans who were
torn from their continent to create wealth for the new Republic. Such a
genesis, steeped in violence against others races, convinced most Americans
that they had the divine right – like the ancient Israelites – to build their
prosperity on the ruin of other, ‘inferior’ races.
In
addition to the manipulations of a corporate media, this ethos explains why so
many Americans support the actions of their government abroad – in Cuba,
Nicaragua, Chile, Vietnam, Iran, Palestine or Iraq, to name only a few. It is
unnecessary to look too closely into these interventions since they are
undertaken to secure ‘our’ interests. Even if they result in deaths – the
deaths of more than three-quarters of a million children, as in Iraq – to
borrow a felicitous phrase from Madeline Albright, “the price is worth it.”
Of
course, few Americans understand that their country has long stood at the apex
– and, therefore, is the chief beneficiary – of a global system that produces poverty
for the greater part of humanity, including within the United States itself;
that this system subordinates all social, cultural, environmental and human
values to the imperatives of corporate capital; a system that now kills people
by the millions merely by setting the rules that devastate their economies,
deprive them of their livelihood, their dignity and, eventually, their lives.
The corporate media, the school curricula, and the Congress ensure that most
Americans never see past the web of deceit – about a free, just, tolerant and
caring United States – that covers up the human carnage and environmental
wreckage this system produces.
The
wretched of the earth are not so easily duped. They can see – and quite
clearly, through the lens of their dark days – how corporate capital, with
United States in the lead, produces their home-based tyrannies; how their
economies have been devastated to enrich transnational corporations and their
local collaborators; how the two stifle indigenous movements for human rights,
women’s rights, and worker’s rights; how they devalue indigenous traditions and
languages; how corporate capital uses their countries as markets, as sources of
cheap labor, as fields for testing new, deadlier weapons, and as sites for
dumping toxic wastes; how their men and women sell body parts because the
markets place little value on their labor.
The
world – outside the dominant West – has watched how the Zionists, with the
support of Britain and the United States, imposed a historical anachronism, a
colonial-settler state in Palestine, a throw-back to a sanguinary past, when
indigenous populations in the Americas could be cleansed with impunity to make
room for Europe’s superior races. In horror, they watch daily how a racist
Israel destroys the lives of millions of Palestinians through US-financed
weaponry and fresh-contrived acts of malice; how it attacks its neighbors at
will; how it has destabilized, distorted and derailed the historical process in
an entire region; and how, in a final but foreordained twist, American men and
women have now been drawn into this conflict, to make the Middle East safe for
Israeli hegemony.
In
Iraq, over the past thirteen years, the world has watched the United States
showcase the methods it will use to crush challenges to the new imperialism –
the New World Order – that was launched after the end of the Cold War. This new
imperialism commands more capital and more lethal weapons than the old
imperialisms of Britain, France or Germany. It is imperialism without rivals
and, therefore, it dares to pursue its schemes, its wars, and its genocidal
campaigns, under the cover of international legitimacy: through the United
Nations, the World Bank, IMF, and World Trade Organization. In brief, it is a
deadlier, more pernicious imperialism.
Under
the cover of the Security Council, the United States has waged a total war
against Iraq – a war that went well beyond the means that would be needed to
reverse the invasion of Kuwait. The aerial bombing of Iraq, in the months preceding
the ground action in January 1991, sought the destruction of the country’s
civilian infrastructure, a genocidal act under international law; it destroyed
power plants, water-purification plants, sewage facilities, bridges and bomb
shelters. It was the official (though unstated) aim of these bombings to sting
the Iraqis into overthrowing their rulers. Worse, the war was followed by a
never-relenting campaign of aerial bombings and the most complete sanctions in
recorded history. According to a UN study, the sanctions had killed half a
million Iraqi children by 1995; the deaths were the result of a five-fold
increase in child mortality rates. It would have taken five Hiroshima bombs to
produce this grisly toll.
Then
came September 11, 2001, a riposte from the black holes of global capitalism to
the New World Order. Nineteen hijackers took control of passenger airplanes in
Boston, Newark and Virginia, and rammed them, one after another, into the twin
towers of the Word Trade Center and the Pentagon; the fourth missed its target,
possibly the White House. Following a script that had been carefully rehearsed,
the nineteen hijackers enacted a macabre ritual, taking their own lives even as
they took the lives of nearly three thousand Americans. The hijackers did not
wear uniforms; they were not flying stealth bombers; they carried nothing more
lethal (so we are told) than box cutters and plastic knives; they had not been
dispatched or financed by any government. And yet, using the principles of
jujitsu, they had turned the civilian technology of the world’s greatest power
against its own civilians. As Arundhati Roy put it, the hijackers had delivered
“a monstrous calling card from a world gone horribly wrong.”
The
terrorist attacks of 9-11 shocked, perhaps traumatized, a whole nation. Yet the
same Americans expressed little concern – in fact, most could profess total
ignorance – about the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians caused
by daily bombings and crippling sanctions over a period of thirteen years. Of
course, the dollar and the dinar are not the same. American deaths could not be
equated on a one-to-one basis with Iraqi deaths. If indeed so many
Iraqis had been killed by the United States, those were deaths they deserved
for harboring ill-will towards this country. They were after all evil. And evil
people should never be given a chance to repent or change their evil-doing
propensities. Senator John McCain said it succinctly: “We’re coming after you.
God may have mercy on you, but we won’t.”
There
are some who were impressed and alarmed – in equal measure – by the grisly
efficiency with which the terrorists had executed their operation. (On this
ground, some even argued that it could not have been the work of “incompetent”
Arabs.) However, it would appear that there is greater political cunning at
work in the conception of these attacks. Al-Qaida gave the Bush hawks what they
wanted, a terrorist attack that would inflame Americans into supporting war
against the Third world; and the Bush hawks gave al-Qaida what they wanted, a
war that would plant tens of thousands of Americans in the cities and towns of
the Islamic world.
An
act of terror is nearly always attributed to a failure of intelligence,
security, or both. In a country that, annually, spends tens of billions of
dollars on intelligence gathering and trillions more on its military, the
attacks of 9-11 amounted to massive failures on two fronts: intelligence and
security. This should have led immediately to a Congressional inquiry to identify
and remedy these failures. However, due to obstructions from the Bush
administration, the Congress could not start an official inquiry into these
failures until more than a year after 9-11. Instead, the Bush administration
claimed falsely, as it turns out – with hardly a murmur from the Congress or
the US corporate media – that 9-11 was unforeseen, it could not have been
imagined, and there had been no advance warnings. Instantly, President Bush
declared that 9-11 was an act of war (making it the first act of war
perpetrated by nineteen civilians), and proceeded to declare unlimited war
against terrorists (also the first time that war had been declared against
elusive non-state actors). In the name of a bogus war against terrorism, the
United States claimed for itself the right to wage preemptive wars against any
country suspected of harboring terrorists or possessing weapons of mass
destruction (what are weapons for if not mass destruction?) with an intent (US
would be the judge of that) to use them against the United States.
Osama
bin Laden had the victory that he had hoped for: he had the world’s only
superpower running mad after him and his cohorts. Al-Qaida had now taken the
place vacated by the Soviet Union. It had to be a worthy opponent to have succeeded
in monopolizing the hostile attention of United States; the actions of al-Qaida
now threatened the world’s only superpower. No terrorist group could have asked
for greater prestige, a distinction that was almost certain to help in its
recruitment drive. Secondly, by declaring war against al-Qaida, the United
States had tied its own prestige to the daily outcome of this war. Every
terrorist strike – the softer the target the better – would be counted by
Americans and the rest of the world as a battle lost in the war against
terrorism. It should come as no surprise that the frequency of large-scale
terrorist strikes has increased markedly since 9-11 – from Baghdad to Bali and
Bombay. Thirdly, President Bush’s pre-emptive wars have already placed 160,000 American
troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, not counting additional thousands in other
Islamic countries. President Bush’s wars against terrorism had made American
troops the daily target of dozens of attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it
would appear that al-Qaida is seizing the opportunity to open a broad front
against the United States on its home turf.
Although
the onslaughts of the Crusaders against the Muslims in the Levant, starting in
the 1090s, lasted for nearly two centuries; and although their conquests at
their peak embraced much of old Syria, it is quite remarkable that this did not
alarm the Islamic world into waging Jihad against the ‘Infidels.’ On several
occasion, one Muslim prince allied himself with the Crusaders to contain the
ambitions of another Muslim prince. It was only in 1187, after Salahuddin
united Syria and Egypt, that the Muslims took back Jerusalem. But they did not
pursue this war to its bitter end; the Crusaders retained control of parts of
coastal Syria for another hundred years. In fact, several years later,
Salahuddin’s successors even returned Jerusalem to the Cruaders provided they
would not fortify it. In other words, the Crusades which loom so large in
European imagination were not regarded by the Muslims as a civilizational war.
Of
course that was then, when Islamic societies were cultured, refined, tolerant,
self-confident and strong, and though the Crusades threw the combined might of
Western Europe – that region’s first united enterprise – to regain the
Christian holy lands, the Muslims took the invasions in their stride.
Eventually, the resources of a relatively small part of the Muslim world were
sufficient to end this European adventure, which left few lasting effects on
the region. In the more recent past, Islamic societies have been divided,
fragmented, backward, outstripped by their European adversaries, their states
embedded in the periphery of global capitalism, and their rulers allied with
Western powers against their own people. These divisions are not a natural
state in the historical consciousness of Muslims.
More
ominously, since 1917 the Arabs have faced settler-colonialism in their very
heartland, an open-ended imperialist project successively supported by Britain
and the United States. This Zionist insertion in the Middle East,
self-consciously promoted as the outpost of the West in the Islamic world,
produced its own twisted dialectics. An exclusive Jewish state founded on
fundamentalist claims (and nothing gets more fundamentalist than a
twentieth-century imperialism founded on ‘divine’ promises about real estate
made three thousand years back) was bound to evoke its alter ego in the Islamic
world. When Israel inflicted a humiliating defeat on Egypt and Syria in 1967 –
two countries that were the leading embodiments of Arab nationalism – this
opened up a political space in the Arab world for the insertion of Islamists
into the region’s political landscape. One fundamentalism would now be pitted
against another.
This
contest may now be reaching its climax – with United States entering the war
directly. It is an end that could have been foretold – this did not require
prophetic insight. In part at least, it is the unfolding of the logic of the
Zionist insertion in the Arab world. On the one hand, this has provoked and
facilitated the growth of a broad spectrum of Islamist movements in the Islamic
world, some of which were forced by US-supported repression in their home
countries to target the United States directly. On the other hand, the Zionist
occupation of one-time Biblical lands has given encouragement to Christian
Zionism in the United States, the belief that Israel prepares the ground for
the second coming of Christ. At the same time, several Zionist propagandists –
based in America’s think tanks, media and academia – have worked tirelessly to
arouse old Western fears about Islam, giving it new forms. They paint Islam as
a violent religion, perennially at war against infidels, opposed to democracy,
fearful of women’s rights, unable to modernize, and raging at the West for its
freedoms and prosperity. They never tire of repeating that the Arabs ‘hate’
Israel because it is the only ‘democracy’ in the Middle East.
There
are some who are saying that the United States has already lost the war in
Iraq; though admission of this defeat will not come soon. One can see that
there has been a retreat from plans to bring about regime changes in Iran,
Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. There is still talk of bringing democracy to
Iraq and the Arab world, but it carries little conviction even to the American
public. There is new-fangled talk now of fighting the “terrorists” in Baghdad
and Basra rather than in Washington, New York and Los Angeles. And now after
two years of bristling unilateralism, after starting an illegal war which
sidelined the Security Council, the United States is courting the Security
Council, seeking its help to internationalize the financial and human costs of
their occupation of Iraq. It is doubtful if Indian, Polish, Pakistani,
Egyptian, Fijian, Japanese or French mercenaries of the United States will
receive a warmer welcome in Iraq than American troops. This
‘internationalization’ is only likely to broaden the conflict, possibly in
unpredictable ways.
What
can be the outcome of all this? During their long rampage through history,
starting in 1492, the Western powers have shown little respect for the peoples
they encountered in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Australia. Many of them are
not around to recount the gory history of their extermination through imported
diseases, warfare, and forced labor in mines and plantations. Others, their
numbers diminished, were forced into peonage, or consigned to mutilated lives
on reservations. Many tens of millions were bought and sold into slavery. Proud
empires were dismembered. Great civilizations were denigrated. All this had
happened before, but not on this scale. In part, perhaps, the extraordinary
scale of these depredations might be attributed to what William McNeill calls
the “bloody-mindedness” of Europeans. Much of this, however, is due to
historical accidents which elevated West Europeans – and not the Chinese,
Turks, or Indians – to great power based on their exploitation of inorganic
sources of energy. If we are to apportion blame, we might as well award the
prize to Britain’s rich coal deposits.
In
the period since the Second World War, some of the massive historical
disequilibria created by Western powers have been corrected. China and India
are on their feet; so are Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and
Malaysia. These countries are on their feet and advancing. But the wounds of
imperialism in Africa run deeper. The colonial legacies of fragmented
societies, deskilled populations, arbitrary boundaries, and economies tied to
failing primary production continue to produce wars, civil wars, corruption,
massacres, and diseases. But Africa can be ignored; the deaths of a million
Africans in the Congo do not merit the attention given to one suicide bombing
in Tel Aviv. Africa can be ignored because its troubles do not affect vital
Western interests; at least not yet.
Then
there is the failure of the Islamic world to reconstitute itself. As late as
1700, the Muslims commanded three major empires – the Mughal, Ottoman and
Safavid – that together controlled the greater part of the Islamic world,
stretching in a continuous line from the borders of Morocco to the eastern
borders of India. After a period of rivalry among indigenous successor states
and European interlopers, all of India was firmly in British control by the
1860s. The Ottoman Empire disintegrated more slowly, losing its European
territories in the nineteenth century and its Arab territories during the First
World War, when they were divvied up amongst the British, French, Zionists,
Maronites and a clutch of oil-rich protectorates. Only the Iranians held on to
most of the territories acquired by the Safavids. As a result, when the Islamic world emerged out of the colonial
era, it had been politically fragmented, divided into some forty states, none
with the potential to serve as a core state; this fragmentation was most
striking in Islam’s Arab heartland. In addition, significant Muslim populations
now lived in states with non-Muslim majorities.
Why
did the Muslims fail to reconstitute their power? Most importantly, this was
because Muslim power lacked a demographic base. The Mughal and Ottoman Empires
– the Ottoman Empire in Europe – were not sustainable because they ruled over
non-Muslim majorities. More recently, the Muslims have been the victims of
geological ‘luck,’ containing the richest deposits of the fuel that drives the
global economy. The great powers could not let the Muslims control ‘their
lifeblood.’ They suffered a third setback from a historical accident: the
impetus that Hitler gave to the Zionist movement. Now there had emerged a
powerful new interest – a specifically Jewish interest – in keeping the Arabs
divided and dispossessed.
It
does not appear, however, that the Islamic societies have accepted their
fragmentation, or their subjugation by neocolonial/comprador regimes who work
for the United States, Britain and France. We have watched the resilience of
the Muslims, their determination to fight for their dignity, in Afghanistan,
Bosnia, Palestine, Chechnya and Mindanao – among other places. In the
meanwhile, their demographic weakness is being reversed. At the beginning of
the twentieth century the Muslims constituted barely a tenth of the world’s
population; today that share exceeds one fifth, and continues to rise.
Moreover, unlike the Chinese or Hindus, the Muslims occupy a broad swathe of
territory from Nigeria, Senegal and Morocco in the west to Sinjiang and the
Indonesian Archipelago in the east. It would be hard to corral a population of
this size that spans half the globe. More likely the US-British-Israeli siege
of the Islamic world, now underway in the name of the war against terrorism,
will lead to a broadening conflict with unforeseen consequences that could
easily turn very costly for either or both parties.
Can
the situation yet be saved? In the weeks preceding the launch of the war
against Iraq, when tens of millions of people – mostly in Western cities – were
marching in protest against the war, it appeared that there was hope; that the
ideologies of hatred and the tactics of fear-mongering would be defeated; that
these massive movements would result in civil disobedience if the carnage in
Iraq were launched despite these protests. But once the war began, the protesters
melted away like picnicking crowds when a sunny day is marred by rains. In
retrospect, the protests lacked the depth to graduate into a political
movement, to work for lasting changes. America does not easily stomach anti-war
protestors once it starts a war. War is serious business: and it must
have the undivided support of the whole country once the killing begins.
The
anti-war protests may yet regroup, but that will not be before many more body
bags arrive in the continental United States, before many more young Americans
are mutilated for life, before many tens of thousands of Iraqis are dispatched
to early deaths. Attempts are already underway to invent new lies to keep
Americans deluded about the war; to tighten the noose around Iran; to hide the
growing casualties of war; to lure poor Mexicans and Guatemalans to die for
America; to substitute Indian and Pakistani body bags for American ones. This
war-mongering by the United States cannot be stopped unless more
Americans can be taught to separate their government from their country, their
leaders from their national interests, their tribal affiliations from their
common humanity. But that means getting past the media, the political
establishment, the social scientists, the schools, and native prejudices. It is
arguable that the nineteen hijackers would not have had to deliver the
“monstrous calling card” if some of us had done a better job of getting past
these hurdles in time. Still, the hijackers chose the wrong way to deliver
their message, since it played right into the game plan of the Bush hawks. The
result has been more profits for favored US corporations, greater freedom of
action for Israel, and more lives and liberties lost everywhere.
M. Shahid Alam is professor of
economics at Northeastern University. His last book, Poverty from the Wealth
of Nations, was published by Palgrave in 2000. He may be reached at m.alam@neu.edu. Visit his webpage at http://msalam.net. © M. Shahid Alam
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