FISK: Grandiose Folly--The Political Capital of 911
- From: "I Khan" <no1khan@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <imran_dist@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 14 Sep 2003 13:30:21 +0100
FISK: Grandiose Folly--The Political Capital of 911
Sep 13, 2003
By Robert Fisk, The Independent
When the attacks were launched against the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon
two years ago today, who had ever heard of Fallujah or Hillah? When the
Lebanese hijacker flew his plane into the ground in Pennsylvania, who would
ever have believed that President George Bush would be announcing a "new front
line in the war on terror" as his troops embarked on a hopeless campaign
against the guerrillas of Iraq?
Who could ever have conceived of an American president calling the world to
arms against "terrorism" in "Afghanistan, Iraq and Gaza"? Gaza? What do the
miserable, crushed, cruelly imprisoned Palestinians of Gaza have to do with the
international crimes against humanity in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania?
Nothing, of course. Neither does Iraq have anything to do with 11 September.
Nor were there any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, any al-Qa'ida links
with Iraq, any 45-minute timeline for the deployment of chemical weapons nor
was there any "liberation".
No, the attacks on 11 September have nothing to do with Iraq. Neither did 11
September change the world. President Bush cruelly manipulated the grief of the
American people--and the sympathy of the rest of the world--to introduce a
"world order" dreamed up by a clutch of fantasists advising the Secretary of
Defence, Donald Rumsfeld.
The Iraqi "regime change", as we now know, was planned as part of a
Perle-Wolfowitz campaign document to the would-be Israeli prime minister
Benjamin Netanyahu years before Bush came to power. It beggars belief that Tony
Blair should have signed up to this nonsense without realising that it was no
more nor less than a project invented by a group of pro-Israeli American
neo-conservatives and right-wing Christian fundamentalists.
But even now, we are fed more fantasy. Afghanistan--its American-paid warlords
raping and murdering their enemies, its women still shrouded for the most part
in their burqas, its opium production now back as the world's number one export
market, and its people being killed at up to a hundred a week (five American
troops were shot dead two weekends ago) is a "success", something which Messrs
Bush and Rumsfeld still boast about. Iraq--a midden of guerrilla hatred and
popular resentment--is also a "success". Yes, Bush wants $87bn to keep Iraq
running, he wants to go back to the same United Nations he condemned as a
"talking shop" last year, he wants scores of foreign armies to go to Iraq to
share the burdens of occupation--though not, of course, the decision-making,
which must remain Washington's exclusive imperial preserve.
What's more, the world is supposed to accept the insane notion that the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict--the planet's last colonial war, although all
mention of the illegal Jewish colonies in the West Bank and Gaza have been
erased from the Middle East narrative in the American press--is part of the
"war on terror", the cosmic clash of religious will that President Bush
invented after 11 September. Could Israel's interests be better served by so
infantile a gesture from Bush?
The vicious Palestinian suicide bombers and the grotesque implantation of Jews
and Jews only in the colonies has now been set into this colossal struggle of
"good" against "evil", in which even Ariel Sharon--named as "personally"
responsible for the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacre by Israel's own commission
of inquiry--is "a man of peace", according to Mr Bush.
And new precedents are set without discussion. Washington kills the leadership
of its enemies with impunity: it tries to kill Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar
and does kill Uday and Qusay Hussein and boasts of its prowess in "liquidating"
the al-Qa'ida leadership from rocket-firing "drones". It tries to kill Saddam
in Baghdad and slaughters 16 civilians and admits that the operation was "not
risk-free". In Afghanistan, three men have now been murdered in the US
interrogation centre at Bagram. We still don't know what really goes on in
Guantanamo.
What do these precedents mean? I have a dark suspicion. From now on, our
leaders, our politicians, our statesmen will be fair game too. If we go for the
jugular, why shouldn't they? The killing of the UN's Sergio Vieira de Mello,
was not, I think, a chance murder. Hamas's most recent statements--and since
they've been added to the Bush circus of evil, we should take them
seriously--are now, more than ever, personally threatening Mr Sharon. Why
should we expect any other leader to be safe? If Yasser Arafat is driven into
exile yet again, will there be any restraints left?
Of course, America's enemies were a grisly bunch. Saddam soiled his country
with the mass graves of the innocents, Mullah Omar allowed his misogynist
legions to terrify an entire society in Afghanistan. But in their absence, we
have created banditry, rape, kidnapping, guerrilla war and anarchy. And all in
the name of the dead of 11 September. The future of the Middle East--which is
what 11 September was partly about, though we are not allowed to say so--has
never looked bleaker or more bloody. The United States and Britain are trapped
in a war of their own making, responsible for their own appalling predicament
but responsible, too, for the lives of thousands of innocent human beings--cut
to pieces by American bombs in Afghanistan and Iraq, shot down in the streets
of Iraq by trigger-happy GIs.
As for "terror", our enemies are closing in on our armies in Iraq and our
supposed allies in Baghdad and Afghanistan--even in Pakistan. We have done all
this in the name of the dead of 11 September. Not since the Second World War
have we seen folly on this scale. And it has scarcely begun.
Robert Fisk is a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity the Nation. He
is also a contributor to Cockburn and St. Clair's forthcoming book, The
Politics of Anti-Semitism.
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