Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September 16, 2003
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
Recent
Stories
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
September 9, 2003
William A. Cook
Eating
Humble Pie
Robert Jensen / Rahul
Mahajan
Bush
Speech: a Shell Game on the American Electorate
Bill Glahn
A Kinder, Gentler RIAA?
Janet Kauffman
A Dirty River Runs Beneath It
Chris Floyd
Strange Attractors: White House Bawds Breed New Terror
Bridget Gibson
A Helping of Crow with Those Fries?
Robert Fisk
Thugs
in Business Suit: Meet the New Iraqi Strongman
Website of the Day
Pot TV International
September 8, 2003
David Lindorff
The
Bush Speech: Spinning a Fiasco
Robert Jensen
Through the Eyes of Foreigners: the US Political Crisis
Gila Svirsky
Of
Dialogue and Assassination: Off Their Heads
Bob Fitrakis
Demonstration Democracy
Kurt Nimmo
Bush and the Echo Chamber: Globalizing the Whirlwind
Sean Carter
Thou Shalt Not Campaign from the Bench
Uri Avnery
Betrayal
at Camp David
Website of the Day
Rabbis v. the Patriot Act
September 6 / 7, 2003
Neve Gordon
Strategic
Abuse: Outsourcing Human Rights Violations
Gary Leupp
Shiites
Humiliate Bush
Saul Landau
Fidel
and The Prince
Denis Halliday
Of Sanctions and Bombings: the UN Failed the People of Iraq
John Feffer
Hexangonal Headache: N. Korea Talks Were a Disaster
Ron Jacobs
The Stage of History
M. Shahid Alam
Pakistan "Recognizes" Israel
Laura Carlson
The Militarization of the Americas
Elaine Cassel
The Forgotten Prisoners of Guantanamo
James T. Phillips
The Mumbo-Jumbo War
Bill Glahn
RIAA Watch: Slumlords of the Internet
Walter A. Davis
Living in Death's Dream Kingdom
Adam Engel
Midnight's Inner Children
Poets' Basement
Stein, Guthrie and Albert
Book of the Weekend
It Became Necessary to Destroy the Planet in Order to Save It
by Khalil Bendib
September 5, 2003
Brian Cloughley
Bush's
Stacked Deck: Why Doesn't the Commander-in-Chief Visit the Wounded?
Col. Dan Smith
Iraq
as Black Hole
Phyllis Bennis
A Return
to the UN?
Dr. Susan Block
Exxxtreme Ashcroft
Dave Lindorff
Courage and the Democrats
Abe Bonowitz
Reflections on the "Matyrdom" of Paul Hill
Robert Fisk
We Were
Warned About This Chaos
Website of the Day
New York Comic Book Museum
September 4, 2003
Stan Goff
The Bush
Folly: Between Iraq and a Hard Place
John Ross
Mexico's
Hopes for Democracy Hit Dead-End
Harvey Wasserman
Bush to New Yorkers: Drop Dead
Adam Federman
McCain's
Grim Vision: Waging a War That's Already Been Lost
Aluf Benn
Sharon Saved from Threat of Peace
W. John Green
Colombia's Dirty War
Joanne Mariner
Truth,
Justice and Reconciliation in Latin America
Website of the Day
Califoracle
September 3, 2003
Virginia Tilley
Hyperpower
in a Sinkhole
Davey D
A Hip
Hop Perspective on the Cali Recall
Emrah Göker
Conscripting Turkey: Imperial Mercenaries Wanted
John Stanton
The US is a Power, But Not Super
Brian Cloughley
The
Pentagon's Bungled PsyOps Plan
Dan Bacher
Another Big Salmon Kill
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors Weep' Ninth Circuit Overturns 127 Death Sentences
Uri Avnery
First
of All This Wall Must Fall
Website of the Day
Art Attack!
September 2, 2003
Robert Fisk
Bush's
Occupational Fantasies Lead Iraq Toward Civil War
Kurt Nimmo
Rouind Up the Usual Suspects: the Iman Ali Mosque Bombing
Robert Jensen / Rahul Mahajan
Iraqi Liberation, Bush Style
Elaine Cassel
Innocent But Guilty: When Prosecutors are Dead Wrong
Jason Leopold
Ghosts
in the Machines: the Business of Counting Votes
Dave Lindorff
Dems in 2004: Perfect Storm or Same Old Doldrums?
Paul de Rooij
Predictable
Propaganda: Four Monts of US Occupation
Website of the Day
Laughing Squid
August 30 / Sept. 1,
2003
Alexander Cockburn
Handmaiden
in Babylon: Annan, Vieiera de Mello and the Decline and Fall
of the UN
Saul Landau
Schwarzenegger
and Cuban Migration
Standard Schaefer
Who
Benefited from the Tech Bubble: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Gary Leupp
Mel Gibson's Christ on Trial
William S. Lind
Send the Neocons to Baghdad
Augustin Velloso
Aznar: Spain's Super Lackey
Jorge Mariscal
The Smearing of Cruz Bustamante
John Ross
A NAFTA for Energy? The US Looks to Suck Up Mexico's Power
Mickey Z.
War is a Racket: The Wisdom of Gen. Smedley Butler
Elaine Cassel
Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Show Isn't Winning Many Converts
Stan Cox
Pirates of the Caribbean: the WTO Comes to Cancun
Tom and Judy Turnipseed
Take Back Your Time Day
Adam Engel
The Red Badge of Knowledge: a Review of TDY
Adam Engel
An Eye on Intelligence: an Interview with Douglas Valentine
Susan Davis
Northfork,
an Accidental Review
Nicholas Rowe
Dance
and the Occupation
Mark Zepezauer
Operation
Candor
Poets' Basement
Albert, Guthrie and Hamod
Website of the Weekend
Downhill
Battle
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
August 29, 2003
Lenni Brenner
God
and the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party
Brian Cloughley
When in Doubt, Lie Your Head Off
Alice Slater
Bush Nuclear Policy is a Recipe for National Insecurity
David Krieger
What Victory?
Marjorie Cohn
The Thin Blue Line: How the US Occupation of Iraq Imperils International
Law
Richard Glen Boire
Saying Yes to Drugs!
Bister, Estrin and Jacobs
Howard Dean, the Progressive Anti-War Candidate? Some Vermonters
Give Their Views
Website of the Day
DirtyBush
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
September
16, 2003
Is There a Way Out?
The
Dialectics of Terror
By M. SHAHID ALAM
"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 means to deliver their message: by
killing civilians they 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 and a contributor
to The
Politics of Anti-Semitism. 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
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
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