"... it has always been American policy that the iron-fisted Mr. Hussein plays a useful role in holding Iraq together."--Thomas Friedman, NYT chief diplomatic correspondent
The strikes on the WTC and Pentagon are repeatedly referred to as "sneak" and "surprise" attacks, and among Americans there is a general sense of incredulity (hardening even as I speak into grim vengefulness) that anyone could hate the US so much. Most Americans feel that the US has never, ever done anything wrong, or at least nothing that could possibly be compared to such an awful thing as has just been done to us.
This is partly, I think, a result of naivete and consistent public disinformation; partly wilful denial; and partly the inconsistent perception of death and damage that I discussed in a separate essay. Since we have reason to believe now that the hijackers were Muslim Arabs of some radical group or other, we need to think about why (aside from diabolical possession or innate evil, both of which I've heard suggested recently) Muslim Arabs would hate the US deeply enough to commit a suicide attack of this magnitude. We could pick any of several countries for a starting point, but Iraq is probably the most obvious choice.
If the US, say, had used nuclear bombs on Iraq and killed a million people in one strike, the world would have been shocked and Americans (most of us, I hope) would have felt some kind of remorse. That would have felt like murder. I suppose some of our people might have relished having the blood of "the enemy" on our hands, but others would be appalled. None of us, of whichever stripe, could escape the connection between what we did and how they died.
We would feel, perhaps, some sense that the survivors might well hate and loathe us after such a massive killing. Whether we defended our actions or regretted them, we would not be surprised to be hated. But we feel rather differently (as a nation) about how the Iraqi war really played out. Most Americans have no sense of culpability or anything "wrong" with the outcome. Saddam was a bad guy, we punished him, end of story; if anything's wrong, it's that we didn't finish the job. This is how most people I know feel about Iraq today -- it's a story that is almost over: Saddam is bottled up, neutralized, embargo'd into a corner; if he ever dares come out again, we'll nail him. Meanwhile, Iraq is no longer on our minds.
Iraqi officials reported to the UN this summer that the death toll from shortages of food and medicine caused by the severe sanctions imposed by the US and its allies (starting in 1990), had reached 1.5 million -- of which over 600,000 were children under the age of five. These deaths were mostly from common, treatable conditions like diarrhea and respiratory illness, easily handled with basic, common drugs. The report claimed that 49 percent of medical orders submitted by Iraq for approval by the UN sanctions committee had been blocked by US and British representatives on the committee.
The implication of this report is that the official US and NATO policy (and NATO does whatever the US tells it to) has killed one and a half million people in Iraq over ten years, or 150,000 people per year. But because they died individually, not all at once in a fireball, it doesn't seem so bad. Because they died quietly of disease and hunger rather than screaming in one collective moment of noisy catastrophe, it doesn't seem so bad.
Of course one could (and people do) argue that the Iraqi government exaggerated these figures. All governments lie, and the Iraqi government has very good reasons for lying and a recent track record of lying. Given the coercive, tyrannical nature of Hussein's regime, all "official" figures coming out of Iraq are suspect. Some Americans who do think about Iraq these days, say that things are not as bad as the government likes to make out; they are playing for sympathy by exaggerating their situation.
On the other hand, Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, an American churchman from Detroit, went personally to Iraq in 1998, defying the US State Department's ban and threats of a $1M fine or 12 years in prison. (BTW, State has never actually hit anyone with either penalty, but apparently they always threaten Iraq-bound US travellers with both.) Gumbleton, if you don't know of him, is a co-founder of Pax Christi (the Catholic Church's human rights organization) and has been a human rights advocate for many years. He is obviously not a Muslim (!), nor a tool of the Iraqi government, and his eyewitness report is consistent with the report made to the UN.
Even the Washington Report (a newsletter for and by ex-foreign service personnel and hardly a radical rag) seems to concur that the effect of the sanctions has been devastating. Its report in 1995 largely substantiates Gumbleton's report in 1998: the story is consistent. Its followup later in 1998 also confirms his reportage.
reference URLS http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0795/9507010.htm http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0498/9804117.html http://www.wsws.org/news/1998/feb1998/toll.shtml http://www.iacenter.org/moral.htm http://www.umich.edu/~canter/icpj/mar99/gumbleton.htm http://puffin.creighton.edu/human/csrs/news/F94-2.html
Though some readers may be put off by the inclusion of the World Socialist Website in these references :-) I would advise against leaping to the conclusion that concern for the plight of Iraqi civilians is some kind of Communist plot. It is notable that the strongest condemnation of the US sanctions has come from US Catholic churches. Anglican prelates in England also challenged the UK government on Blair's support for sanctions. The World Council of Churches, after sending a delegation to Iraq to inspect conditions there, recommended that churches world-wide urge their governments to oppose military action in Iraq and lift the sanctions;
The delegation spoke of the growing death toll and worsening of health, education, agriculture and the infrastructure of Iraq since sanctions began. Rather than undermining popular support for President Saddam Hussain, the sanctions had 'galvanized' Iraqis against foreign intervention and 'forged stronger bonds among various ethnic and religious communities,' the delegation reported.
In the light of a fair amount of corroborating evidence I think we may take seriously Bishop Gumbleton's own report of conditions on the ground:
Gumbleton described the virtual destruction of the Iraqi infrastructure and the breakdown of such vital services as medicine. Doctors, he said, were unable to operate because of the lack of anesthesia and basic medical supplies such as cotton and syringes. He reported that diseases related to malnutrition were rampant. He noted that there had been a recent surge in cancer deaths among young adults in Iraq, with doctors reporting an extraordinarily large number of cases of leukemia, and colon and rectal cancer. He said there was reason to believe that these cancer deaths were a product of the radioactive contamination produced by the thousands of US projectiles tipped with depleted uranium which were fired at Iraqi targets during the gulf war.Gumbleton said what he saw in Iraq demonstrated the disregard for human life exhibited by the US and its allies in the gulf war bombing of Iraq and the continuing embargo. He estimated that some 100,000 to 200,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed in the course of saturation bombing. He described a visit to the air raid shelter in Baghdad destroyed by US bombs during the gulf war, one of the better-publicized US atrocities. Marks could still be seen on the walls where men, women and children were vaporized. Gumbleton described how he had spoken to an Iraqi woman who had lost nine children in the US air attack.
He said that UN officials in Iraq had explained to him how the United States and Britain had effectively blocked even the totally inadequate amounts of food and medicine provided to Iraq under United Nations Resolution 986. Under the complex set of regulations established by the UN to govern the sale of food and medicine to Iraq in exchange for oil, every contract has to be approved by a 16-member committee, including representatives of the US and Britain. These countries have veto power as permanent members of the Security Council.
And yet there are many people who do not understand why anyone in Muslim countries would feel a deep, festering hatred for the US -- a hatred which would easily drive the more volatile over the edge into a kind vengeful madness. We cannot understand why anyone from a country where the US first killed between 100,000 and 200,000 civilians by carpet bombing, then another one and a half million slowly by policy and by lingering radiation poison, could possibly hate us enough to kill 6000 of us: about 1/300th of their own losses.
Most Americans who have thought about it at all will say in our defence that we did try not to hit too many civilians (true) and that we could have nuked them, but we refrained (true, but a very weak moral argument); "we did our best", and they should be grateful for our mercy. It is hard to imagine an argument more devoid of understanding of human nature, let alone of traditional Arab culture. One has to wonder how "grateful" Americans would feel under such circumstances of defeat, humiliation, and impotent rage, and how easily we would put aside our anger and resentment against those who had brought us so low.
We could also say that these deaths are not our fault, they are Hussein's fault. All we are doing, US apologists will say, is turning up the heat on a corrupt system to try to bring it down, trying to use "non violent" means of coercing our "criminal" oppponents.
In other words, our official story is that we are holding the civilian population of the "enemy nation" hostage in an attempt to force their leaders to meet our demands: exactly the same tactic that terrorists have traditionally used, but on a grander scale. We are hoping that if public suffering and despair grow great enough, the leaders will cave in or the population will rise and overthrow them.
So far this has been a losing strategy: the leaders are not democratically elected and don't give a damn about the population as long as there are enough recruits for the army; and the hatred of the West created by our destruction of their economy and infrastructure ensures that there will never be a shortage of passionate, wild-eyed young men thirsting for revenge -- against us, not against their leaders. We can and should believe that the leaders of extremist parties in the Third World are even more effective public speakers than Mr Bush, and that their populations are just as easily stirred into a nationalist frenzy.
Even our official story (depressingly frank though it is) does not reflect the whole truth. Our relationship to the tyrannical leaders we periodically demonise is a complex one; sometimes they are our friends, receiving money and materiel from the US for acting as our iron-fisted policemen in their area of the world, but at other times it is expedient to redefine them as enemies. This pattern has been played out so many times that one would expect the US public to have become wary and skeptical when it recurs; but American historical memory is so short that the connection is seldom made.
The mysterious transformation of enemies into new friends, and old friends into new enemies, is characteristic of the politics of empire in any era. In our own time, the Nazis were our sworn enemies until the end of the war, but at the same time companies like IBM and Standard Oil maintained business ties with the "enemy" regime; and after the war, Nazi intelligence chief Richard Gehlen (among others) was absorbed quietly into the American intelligence fraternity. His "Gehlen Org" intelligence agency eventually became the BND (the German equivalent of our CIA). Enemies become friends; friends become enemies; and the enemy of my enemy is my friend. This is the politics of expedience rather than principle.
If your president gives me talk about democracy, parliament and constitutions, he, his parliament and his constitution may not last very long.-- President Lyndon B Johnson, to the Greek Ambassador at the time
There are in fact so many countries whose populations suffered terribly due to US interference in their affairs, that it is somewhat surprising not that someone should launch a terrorist strike on US territory -- but that so few such attacks have so far occurred. The CIA, US military, and US business interests were directly involved in the establishment of brutal, repressive regimes in: Iran (we put the Shah in power), Guatemala (we deposed Arbenz in 1954), Zaire (we supported and aided Mobutu), Dominican Republic (we backed Trujillo for 30 years and later invaded the island to insure continuation of right-wing rule), Indonesia (we backed the genocidist Suharto against the moderate Sukarno), Greece (we supported the military coup of 1965), Chile (we destroyed Allende and put Pinochet in power), Laos (rather than let the leftist party Pathet Lao participate in democratic coalition government, we bombed Laos into ruins), Cambodia (we deposed Sihanouk and put Lon Nol in power, then later supported the atrocious Khmer Rouge against the Vietnamese), Angola (we backed the tyrannical Savimbi, pouring money into his support from '75 to '93), Libya (CIA agents, later denied and disowned by the agency, armed and trained Qadaffi), Grenada (sabotage of moderate democratic government and a phony invasion), El Salvador (we trained and armed right wing death squads), Nicaragua (we supported Somoza and armed and trained the right-wing contra), Fiji (sabotage of democratic elections), Panama (Noriega was on CIA payroll for years, receiving millions in aid until he became a Bad Guy), Haiti (invasion and bloodshed 1915-35, sabotage of Aristide campaign), Yugoslavia (target of German/US destabilization) . . .
So we should also bear in mind that Saddam, as the earlier pull-quote recalls, was partly something we did to Iraq. He has not always been cast as our Antichrist. Mr Hussein is just one of many dictators around the world who (as mentioned above) at various times have been considered useful to US interests, then demonised when we needed a visible villain, then rehabilitated. The US had its chance to back the Iraqi opposition leadership in March 1991, during armed uprisings against Hussein. State Department declined. If we were really sincere about encouraging the civilian population to revolt by imposing hardships, a little covert or overt aid to the rebels would have come in handy about then. But as Friedman pointed out, State preferred the possibility of a military coup to a genuine democratic popular uprising; "and then Washington would have the best of all worlds: an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein." Given the choice between a genuine democratic movement and Hussein, State preferred Hussein. It was not the first time, and it would not be the last, that such decisions would be made.
The challenge has often been issued on mailing lists and usenet groups lately: if you feel so much sympathy for those lousy terrorist bastards, how would you feel if it was your wife, husband, child killed in the WTC strike? Would you be so damned understanding then?
Of course the answer is No, and for the obvious reason: when we have seen our families and friends killed (whether slowly or quickly) we are full of rage and grief, beyond reason and out of balance. We are not capable, at such a time, of a reasoned or measured response.
So I have to ask the question in reverse: say you were an ordinary civilian living in Afghanistan or Iraq under a terrifying, totalitarian regime; and the response of the "free world" to the crimes of your self-appointed masters was to seal you into a box with them (apparently forever) and let you starve -- let you watch your children go hungry, watch them die of easily preventable diseases -- then how would you feel about the nation that above all others promoted and enforced this policy? Would your heart not also be filled with a corrosive hate, a hate just as bitter and menacing as that being expressed today by many Americans towards "whoever did this to us"?
Would not a million and a half deaths weigh at least as heavily on Iraqi hearts (and hearts throughout the Arab world) as our 6000 dead now weigh on ours? Wouldn't the same angry young (and old) men who are now rattling their sabres all over our nation's op/ed pages be howling for blood, and plotting how to spill some?
Leonard Pitts' recent, and regrettable, editorial in the Miami Herald sums it up: we will, he says, make you feel pain. You will suffer for what we have just suffered. But you will suffer more. We will get even -- with interest.
This, I believe is exactly the mantra that has been running through the heads of our suicide/assassins for the last several years of their training and preparation: they will make the US feel pain, they will get even. And as you can see from this dismal list above, Iraq is just one chapter in the long Doomsday Book of nations whose people have every reason to desire revenge and payback against the US. Let's consider just one other conveniently changeable Bad Guy.
Our Bad Guy du jour bin Laden, was on the US payroll in the early 1980s. CIA and MI6 trained him and his mujahedin, deploying them against the Soviets who were (uneasily) occupying Afghanistan. bin Laden and his ultrafundamentalists were not our enemies at that time: they were "courageous freedom fighters" against the Godless Communist occupiers. Pakistani intelligence (also receiving substantial US handouts) trained the fundamentalist cadres that later became the Taliban -- the same Taliban that's now on our Enemy Number One list for sheltering the "criminal" bin Laden who used to be our trainee.
Do not mistake me for one moment: bin Laden, from all the information available to us, is a nasty piece of work. When he and his succeeded in forcing a Soviet retreat from Afghanistan, the local Afghan leader of the Socialist Party was found hanging from a lamp post in Kabul with his private parts stuffed into his mouth. The mujahedin's methods were neither subtle nor civilised, and they used terrorist tactics to great effect against the relatively clumsy, cumbersome Soviet armoured divisions -- and against their own countrymen. The US got what it wanted: the Soviets went home licking their wounds. But the Taliban was there to stay, and so was bin Laden.
I mention all this to explain why even informed women living in Afghanistan today under the terror of Taliban rule might possibly hate the US. For those who have been taking a vacation from this planet for the last few years, Afghani women are no longer entitled to education, to employment, to medical care, or to freedom of movement, and can legally be executed by their husbands or senior male relatives for "bad behaviour". The Taliban nightmare was something the US, UK, and (nervously cooperative) Pakistan cooked up; and the consequences of this boyish enthusiasm for continuing Kipling's "Great Game" in the Pamirs has cost Afghan women a price that we in the relatively free West cannot accurately imagine.
Under the Soviets, life in Afghanistan was no picnic -- but women were allowed to teach their daughters to read and write. After the US and NATO were done fooling around, women in Afghanistan now risk prison and death to provide clandestine education and medical services to other women and girls.
http://rawa.hackmare.com/
When Santayana said (1905) that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it, he was describing only part of the problem. Those who forget the past are also deprived of essential understanding which might help them deal with -- or avoid -- unthinkably terrible new futures.
All over the world, governments are slowly, grudgingly, coming to terms with past crimes and tragedies. But the US remains stubbornly unwilling to examine its own past, caught in a kind of time warp, clinging to the Time/Life version of World War Two. The golden-haired GI, tall and manly, stooping to tousle the cute little kid's hair and hand him a candy bar -- that is the only "American presence" that Americans want to remember. It is past time that we took a good long look at the dark side of US foreign policy -- from our encouragement of the Japanese adventure into Manchuria, through the devastation we wrought in Indochina and South America, to our tinkering with other people's governments and economies today. The US likes to think of itself as the policeman of the world, a sort of genetically-modified blend of Andy of Mayberry and Dirty Harry. But for far too many of the world's people we have been the policeman played by Orson Welles in 'A Touch of Evil', and our "world order" has been a film noir nightmare.
Our refusal to recognize this only adds to the rage of those we dominate. Of all the great empires of Earth, the United States stands alone in requiring those it has exploited, abused, crushed and humbled to love it in return.
If we understood our past more clearly, we might be able to take steps to clean house. We might make reparations to those we have wronged, correct policies that have failed repeatedly (failures we are not allowed to remember), heal old wounds rather than allowing them to fester forever. Such wounds are dangerous not only to the victim. The poison that finally bursts forth at the most agonizing peak of the infection is lethal to everything in its path.
Recommended reading: investigative journalism covering the scope and nature of CIA actions over the last 60 years: Blum's The CIA: A Forgotten History, Agee On Company Business, Covert Action Information Bulletin, and Zepezauer's terse summary of the basic facts, The CIA's Greatest Hits. Also see bibliographies in both Blum and Zepezauer. For lighter reading see also the novels of John Le Carre in which many plots turn on actual history of, e.g. the Gehlen Org, CIA operations overseas, the "special relationship" between US and British intelligence, etc. -- a general background impression can be gathered of the nature and spirit of the dirty business of covert geopolitics.