Rhetoric And Reality

So it appears the Taliban have fallen, orare close to a total collapse. And given what we know about their brutal rule inAfghanistan, this is, so far as it goes a good thing. Furthermore, this is trueno matter how we feel about the war being waged that has brought it about. Afterall, good results can occasionally come from actions that are themselves unjustor likely to aggravate human suffering in the long run.

Just as one might celebrate if all whitesupremacists were to transform to vapor at noon tomorrow, one could still opposea plan to hunt down such folks and facilitate the process with neutron bombs. Sotoo, we can condemn the bombing of Afghanistan, and insist there were other waysto help topple the Mullahs — ways that might prove more lasting given theguerilla war of attrition that may be around the bend — while stillacknowledging that the immediate collapse of such fascists is a joyful event.

Yet we should also give pause and considerthe magnitude of the present unknown. As the Revolutionary Association of Womenof Afghanistan has made clear, the prospects of a marauding band of NorthernAlliance fanatics in power is hardly a massive improvement. Their record forrape, murder, and summary execution should give anyone pause, especially thosewho believe that we have "liberated" the Afghan people. Liberationremains to be seen. A few days of celebrations in the street — punctuated bygrowing atrocities carried out by Alliance members — hardly indicates what thelong-term outcome of Operation Enduring Freedom is likely to be.

Nowhere are the results of said action morein doubt than in the area most Americans consider key: namely, will ourmonth-long bombing of Afghanistan, and whatever remains to be done there,actually have an impact on reducing terrorism the likes of which we experiencedon September 11^th? After all, the whole point of this war — or sowe were told — was to destroy al-Qaeda, and to a lesser extent its leaderOsama bin Laden. That the fall of the Taliban has happened, and that we mayrejoice in this occurrence, does not change the fact that such an end is onlyone small part of a much larger picture. If our actions not only fail toincrease security from terrorism, but actually decrease it by inflaming certainsegments of the Islamic community, then the verdict on bombing and thedestruction it has wrought may yet prove to be an unfavorable one, even in theeyes of those presently overjoyed.

Likewise, if the bombing does not endimmediately so that food can be trucked in and supplied to the millions facingstarvation, the change in government will amount to little in terms of lesseninghuman misery.

If history tells us anything, it is thatsecurity is never finally obtained from the barrel of a gun, for peace is mostlya political, not military issue. Unfortunately, the expertise with which theU.S. drops bombs and breaks things has rarely been matched by a similar talentin political diplomacy, or the development of peaceful and just foreignpolicies. And even as we celebrate battle victories thusfar, there is littlereason to believe that the U.S. has any intention of addressing the fundamentalinconsistencies in our "war on terrorism": inconsistencies that onlymake it less likely that our cause will be viewed as just, or that a campaignagainst terrorists can prevail.

To expect the Muslim world to accept theU.S. as a leader in some united front against terrorism is asking a lot.Especially when we are known to have bombed thousands of innocent civilians inAfghanistan. And especially as we maintain sanctions on Iraq, which formerSecretary of State Albright concedes have contributed to the deaths of perhaps ahalf-million children, on top of the 130,000 civilians whom the Red Crossestimates were killed by American bombing during the Gulf War.

Unless we are prepared to step back andattempt to see ourselves as others do, we will likely never gain the neededinsight that would allow us to fashion more rational, ethical, and effectivepolicies than those currently in vogue. Because no matter what one thinks of theextant bombardment, there is simply no denying that to much of the world — andunderstandably so — the U.S. is supremely hypocritical with regard to thepremises we have put forth to justify our recent actions in Central Asia.

Consider first, the obvious premise that itis wrong to kill innocent people, as the terrorists of 9/11 did. And it iswrong, no matter how angry one may be at the actions of the government underwhich those innocents live. All this is true of course, and the premise isvalid. But not only for those who carried out the recent atrocities. To beconsistent we must accept that the premise is applicable to all, includingourselves. Yet we have never adhered to this premise and have not done so as webombed Afghans.

The U.S. has regularly killed civilians,and not merely as an accidental happenstance to otherwise valid bombing ofmilitary targets. Tokyo and Dresden were firebombed during World War Two, notbecause they were military installations — they weren’t — but because wethought such killing would help win the war by raising the cost to our enemies.Hiroshima and Nagasaki were more of the same, and since declassified documentsindicate the atomic attacks were not needed to end the war (as Japan was readyto surrender and we knew it), they amounted to nothing less than premeditatedmass murder, without even the slimmest of historical justification.

In Vietnam, free fire zones wereestablished in which it was known civilians would be killed. But sinceVietnamese civilians resembled combatants (they all look alike, after all),sparing lives was seen as too risky a proposition.

And now in Afghanistan our planes have beendropping cluster bombs, known for their lack of military precision, buteffectiveness at killing and maiming civilians who happen upon dozens ofunexploded "bomblets" that are released when they fall to Earth.Despite claims that the U.S. has been trying to avoid civilian casualties, theuse of such weapons renders such promises hollow. Even though civilian deathshave not been the deliberate goal of the current bombing — as they were forthe attackers of 9/11 — the end result has been a distinction without adifference. Dead is dead, and when one’s actions have entirely foreseeableconsequences, it is little more than a precious and empty platitude to arguethat those consequences were merely accidental.

After all, imagine that the 9/11 terroristshad not hijacked commercial airliners and flown them into crowded buildings, butinstead had rigged up powerful explosives to bring the Trade Towers and Pentagondown. Furthermore, let’s imagine they set these bombs to go off at 10 p.m.,precisely to avoid unnecessary loss of innocent life, while still making thepoint that they could reach any target. Let’s further imagine that unbeknownstto the terrorists, there were hundreds of people still in the buildings thatnight, perhaps for office parties. Would we really be inclined to cut thebombers slack, just because they had tried to minimize casualties, and becausethe innocent deaths were in many ways "accidental?" Of course not, norshould we.

Or consider a second premise behind ourcurrent actions: namely, that it is wrong to harbor terrorists, train them, givethem aid and comfort, or knowingly accept their presence in your country.Furthermore, any nation that does these things deserves to be attacked.

Once again the U.S. hardly believes this inpractice. Many of our allies are known to harbor terrorists; indeed the verysame al-Qaeda forces we say we must destroy. Yet we aren’t going to attackSaudi Arabia, Egypt or Pakistan. We attack Afghanistan because we can, andbecause they can’t fight back to any real degree, and because everyone rightlyhates the Taliban anyway. So it’s easy and satisfies the public need to"do something." But it has little to do with adhering to the principlearticulated above. If evidence emerged tomorrow that the Saudi princes were theprimary funders of al-Qaeda, and had been offering their leadership safe harborfor years, there is simply no possibility that the U.S. would bomb Saudi Arabiaor go to war with a nation upon whom we are so dependent for oil.

And to the rest of the world, the U.S.itself has harbored terrorists, trained them, and accepted their presence in ourland. At the School of the Americas, we have trained those who we had everyreason to know were guilty of human rights abuses in their home countries:terroristic death squad leaders, encouraged by U.S. government manuals to engagein torture and kidnapping to achieve their political goals.

Yet it is doubtful that Americans wouldextend to those nations harmed by the thugs we have trained, the right to attackus in retaliation. It is doubtful that we would extend to Cuba the right toattack the U.S. despite the fact that we have protected anti-Castro extremistslike Orlando Bosch, implicated in the bombing of a Cuban airline, resulting inthe deaths of dozens of innocent people.

In the 1980’s, when the ReaganAdministration was waging its covert war on Nicaragua, arming the contras andcontributing to the deaths of over 30,000 civilians, the brother of contraleader Adolfo Calero raised money for the covert army from his home in Gretna,Louisiana. And the CIA developed assassination manuals for the contras, advisingthem on how to kill political enemies and any civilians seen as too friendly tothe Sandinistas. Although we may view these as different from theterrorist-training guides distributed by bin Laden and al-Qaeda, it is doubtfulthe rest of the world would agree.

And finally, war supporters insist thatnations have the right to launch strikes against those governments that havesponsored terrorism, as a way to prevent future attacks. This notion of"preventive warfare" has become especially prescient with the claimsmade by President Bush that bin Laden and his associates seek weapons of massdestruction.

Perhaps it would be too much to point outthat millions of people the world over find it hard to understand why theycan’t have weapons of mass destruction, but superpowers like the U.S., or ourallies like Israel can. Especially when we, more so than any other nation havemade use of said weapons: atomic bombs, fuel-air explosives, and chemicals.

That Americans consider our government tobe trustworthy with such munitions, unlike the "madmen" elsewhere whomight wish to obtain them is of little consequence. To others, it is Americanpolicy and use of force that indicates madness. They see not only that we havethese weapons but that we are prepared to use them and have. Lecturing them atthis point about the impropriety of possessing such devices, while we insist onour right to retain them seems unlikely to prove persuasive.

More to the point, if we really believed inpreventive war as valid then we would have to accept such attacks by othernations, either against us, or rival nations with whom they have disputes, andfrom whom they fear assault. Iraq could attack us under this principle, byclaiming that they have reason to fear ongoing bombing and crippling sanctionsimposed by Washington. Likewise, Pakistan could attack India, or vice-versa; sotoo with Israel and the Palestinian Authority. War to prevent war is not onlyinherently contradictory and indeed a concept more suited to Orwellian fiction,but indeed, it is a recipe for constant bloodshed.

Of course some claim that there is still adifference between the attacks led by the U.S. and those perpetrated byterrorists. Namely, they argue that whereas our actions have only come aboutbecause we are at war, and trying to respond, the terrorists who carried out theattacks of 9/11 initiated hostilities, and thus are more ethically suspect whenthey kill civilians. But such an argument can only make sense to those whoaccept as gospel the Western version of history. To those who carried out theSeptember attacks, they were not initiating hostilities, and did not begin thewar. To them, the war began long ago, and was initiated by the West. To them,9/11 was merely the first time that those who had been losing the warsuccessfully struck back.

So, contrary to the claims of many — thatthe left seeks to justify attacks on America because of our foreign policyhistory — the truth is quite the opposite. If anything, it is the supportersof the war whose position tends toward a justification of the events of 9/11. Tosupport Operation Enduring Freedom one must accept that killing civilians isacceptable, and that preventive war is a positive thing, and that harboringterrorists is justification for attack. And these notions actually lend validityto terrorist attacks on the U.S: not only those of recent months, but more inthe future.

Only be taking an uncompromising standagainst killing innocent civilians, and against preventive war, and againstblind retaliation can we truly condemn the actions of 9/11 without exposingourselves as hypocrites. And unless we begin to consider the effects of thathypocrisy, it is safe to say that we will continue to be at risk of attack, nomatter which group of fundamentalists is running Afghanistan.

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