- As he gave an official debut to the bombing of
Afghanistan
(entirely illegal under international law and the UN charter) with high
explosive and food packages (a day's worth of food for 37,000 was dropped
on a land of 20 million people, some 7 million of whom are on the verge
of starvation,) Bush's performance on Sunday was a reversion to his
habitual
wooden delivery and inappropriate flaps of the hand. Can't his people see
that like most people W. talks better standing up, addressing a live
audience
rather than peering into a camera while reading the teleprompt. On Sunday
evening a couple of the networks were cross-cutting between Bush and Osama
bin Laden, and bin Laden, offered by far the more compelling iconic
presence,
with pithier sound bites.
-
- "America was hit by God in one of its softest spots.
America is full of fear from its north to its south, from its west to its
east. Thank God for that. This is something, very little, of what we have
tasted for decades. For nearly 80 years we have been tasting this
humility.
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- "I say by God the great, America will never dream,
not those who live in America will never taste security and safety unless
we feel security and safety in our lands and in Palestine."
-
- It's easy to imagine millions of Muslims and other folk
who have been on the receiving end of Uncle Sam's boot thrilling to this
kind of stuff. Two Arabists being interviewed by Peter Jennings on ABC
Sunday night couldn't contain their enthusiasm for the potency of bin
Laden's
message to the Arab "street". He's the most popular figure in
the Arab world since Nasser, probably since Saladin.
-
- But in terms of the actual balance of forces, the bin
Laden video looked to us more like political obituary than a fearsome call
to arms. Though there are plenty of mountain caves for him to hide in and
probably plenty of bin Laden lookalikes roaming the Hindukush as decoys,
it may not be long before he's either sitting up there with Allah and the
houris, or writhing in the seventh circle of hell, depending on which God
you believe in. Included in Dante's seventh circle are those who offer
violence against self (the suicide bombers), violence against neighbors,
violence against God. The eighth circle was reserved for ordinary fraud
and the ninth for complex or treacherous fraud, meaning that Dante got
stung in some bad business deals. As a seventh circle man, bin Laden is
scheduled by Dante to be buried in burning sand forever which, considering
he comes from Saudi Arabia, is his natural habitat anyway.
-
- We're passing from appalling human loss and suffering,
live in the front yard of the media capital of the world, to the
traditional
parameters of imperial retribution. We switched on the tv Monday morning
to hear some idiot on CNN intone solemnly that Diego Garcia, the island
in the Indian ocean from which the B-52s fly their missions to Afghanistan,
is known as the "footprint of freedom", thus purporting to
conflate
its physical shape and its political role. This tells us everything one
needs to know about propaganda in times of conflict. Diego Garcia is
notorious
for being one of the most distressing sinkholes of imperial injustice in
recent history.
-
- "The Footprint of
Freedom"
-
- In the Chagos archipelago Diego Garcia was not so long
ago populated by some 3,000 descendants of African slaves and Indian
labourers
known as the Ilois. In 1965, when Diego Garcia was under British control,
Harold Wilson's Labour government made a secret deal with the US. Diego
Garcia was rented to the US to establish a major air and naval base. In
return for handing over Diego Garcia, Britain was allowed a five million
pound sterling discount against the purchase of a single US-manufactured
Polaris nuclear submarine. The US pays no other rent or charge for its
occupation.
-
- In a ghastly saga supervised by the British, with a
mixture
of trickery and force, the Ilois were kicked out of their homeland and
transported to Mauritius, over a thousand miles south-east. People born
on the Chagos between 1965 (when the government claimed there was no
indigenous
population) and 1973 (when the last Ilois were forcibly removed) have been
refused birth certificates. Lacking skills to cope with a modern urban
society, many succumbed to alcoholism and drug addiction. Ilois women were
forced into prostitution. Thirty five years later, unemployment among the
islanders runs at 60 per cent. Suicide rates are high. They are one of
the poorest communities in the world and of course they have been
struggling
to return to Diego Garcia. In November 2000, the Ilois won a great victory
in the English High Court. Their right to return to their homeland was
upheld. The Ilois' plight has not ended. In defiance of international law,
the US refuse to recognise the court's ruling.
-
- There have been a number of bold United Nations
Resolutions
about the illegality of Anglo-American occupation of the Chagos. Britain
also clearly violated Article 9 of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights
of 1948 at the time, as: "No-one should be subjected to...exile".
The US military base and associated facilities occupy around half of Diego
Garcia. It would be practical for the Ilois to live on the other half of
the island and also their legal right. The US now concedes that it cannot
prevent the islanders from returning to the neighboring islands of Peros
Banhos and Salomon, but it will not allow them on Diego Garcia.
-
- So much for Diego Garcia, footprint of freedom. The
bombing
of targets in Afghanistan is mostly for show, to demonstrate US resolve.
The Pentagon concedes there are few worthwhile targets and as with the
sorties directed at Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, there's been
the usual attempt at aerial assassination, striking at Mullah Omar's
compound,
the usual claims of attacking "command and control centers" (any
place with a telephone, most likely) and the usual result: the uniting
of previously discontented inhabitants in common hatred of the assailants
from the air. What does the claim of destroying "a training camp"
actually mean in substantive terms? Blowing up a few huts or tents at
enormous
expense.
-
- The Bombing Is Purely
Cosmetic
-
- It won't be bombs that settle the issue, and the Pentagon
has small appetite for any substantial foray into Afghanistan on the
ground.
Cash will be the lubricant of victory, and since unlimited supplies of
cash are available to buy support for the US among the Afghan factions,
it may not be long before the Taliban are chased out. The only inauspicious
factors from Bush's point of view are that the bribing will be the province
of the CIA, whose record for screw-ups is ample, and the intermediaries
is be Pakistani military intelligence, which sponsored the Taliban's
triumph
and which has its own agenda, which is not one inclined to peace and
reconstruction
for Afghanistan.
-
- Much has been been made of the doom awaiting martial
forays into Afghanistan, the British debacles of the nineteenth century
and the Soviets' in the 1980s. But the British were exceptionally stupid
and the Russians didn't suffer unduly. Across ten years they lost some
13,000 in Afghanistan. A Russian colonel, veteran of the campaign, recently
disclosed to Patrick Cockburn that about 33 per cent of these mortalities
were due to accidents (tanks falling off roads and so forth), which brings
down the number of Russians actually killed by the muj to under a thousand
a year. (Another numerical perspective is afforded by the fact the Russians
killed at least five times as many Chechens in the days of the conquest
of Grozny, hailed by Clinton, as died in the World Trade Center, and here
we have Bush arm in arm with his soul-bro, Putin, who knows that in these
days of world solidarity against terror he can do what he wants to the
Chechens without arousing even the pretence of moral reproof.)
-
- The muj, including bin Laden, held out against the
Russians
and in the end forced their withdrawal because they enjoyed the limitless
support of the Pakistani military and of the US, in the form of the CIA
running the largest covert op in its history at a cost of $3.5 billion.
Who have the Taliban got? A starving, discontented domestic population
and external enemies on all sides, wallowing in promises of huge American
dispensations. Their original sponsors in the Pakistani military have far
larger satisfactions than temporary loss of a client regime in Kabul before
a new one can be cobbled together. Pakistan is now certified as OK to be
a member of the nuclear club, with its debts rescheduled.
-
- The globe-spinners talk about bin Laden's dangerous
appeal
to Muslims around the world chafing at the despotism and corruption of
their leaders, the occupation of Jerusalem by the Jews and their US
protector,
the starving of Iraqi children, but if the Arab world is so much of a
tinder
box, why didn't bin Laden try to apply the match there? All talk of fragile
Araby notwithstanding, the regimes there have been astoundingly stable
across years of political turmoil.
-
- Impregnable Bush
-
- Putting grief and horror aside, emergencies are usually
political godsends to the regime in power, in this case Bush's. Before
September 11 he was derided across the world as the beneficiary of a
dubious
election, a man out of step with world opinion on the Kyoto Treaty and
on Star Wars. Domestically his programs were in trouble and the country
plunging into recession on his watch after eight go-go years. Now he's
leader of the planet, with his only vocal foes in hiding in the mountains
of Afghanistan. His presidential authenticity is beyond dispute and his
stimulus package looking propitious in Congress. Many people have learned
to like the guy. Opposition is nervous and fitful, as Ashcroft pushes his
dreadful terror package of attacks on the Bill of Rights. Dante didn't
like lawyers, and put them in the Eighth Circle. What would he thought
of this, in the Senate version of the Terror Bill:
-
- "(d) UNDERCOVER ACTIVITIES- Notwithstanding
any provision of State law, including disciplinary rules, statutes,
regulations,
constitutional provisions, or case law, a Government attorney may, for
the purpose of enforcing Federal law, provide legal advice, authorization,
concurrence, direction, or supervision on conducting undercover activities,
and any attorney employed as an investigator or other law enforcement agent
by the Department of Justice who is not authorized to represent the United
States in criminal or civil law enforcement litigation or to supervise
such proceedings may participate in such activities, even though such
activities
may require the use of deceit or misrepresentation, where such activities
are consistent with Federal law.
-
- "(e) ADMISSIBILITY OF EVIDENCE- No violation
of any disciplinary, ethical, or professional conduct rule shall be
construed
to permit the exclusion of otherwise admissible evidence in any Federal
criminal proceedings."
-
- Who else pays the price?
-
- We imagine Ariel Sharon will, though not Israel. He's
been having a Bad Emergency, as Bush says for the benefit of the Arab world
he's always dreamed of a Palestinian state. Someone asked Shimon Peres
if he could remember a time when there had been as tart exchanges as those
that occurred when last week Sharon likened Israel's situation to that
of Czechoslovakia in 1938, the White House announced that his remarks were
entirely "unacceptable" and Sharon publicly apologised. Peres
said there had been a time when Menachem Begin had told Jimmy Carter that
Israel was not a banana republic.
-
- He may have done, but the truly fraught episode in those
years was when Carter got mad at Begin for having lied about withdrawing
from Lebanon after the 1978 invasion. Carter sent the deputy US ambassador
Richard Viets to Begin with a letter saying that unless he got out within
in 24 hours Carter would introduce a resolution in the UN condemning Israel
and cut off aid. Viets later recalled to Andrew Cockburn (it pays to have
industrious brothers, doesn't it, though the bin Laden family probably
wouldn't agree right now)for his 1991 book Dangerous Liaison that Begin
"went over to the sideboard and poured two large whiskeys and then
said, "Mr Viets, you win."
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