Bush Inexperience (Nice article by Eric Margolis)

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Published on Sunday, December 2, 2001 in the Toronto Sun
Bush's Inexperience is Showing
Dire Threats Emanating from Washington Have Horrified America's Allies

by Eric Margolis

Crusades are messy, bloody affairs, and it's often hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys.
Exhibit A: Afghanistan, where the United States just suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the wily Russians. Happily for the White House, neither the media nor the American public understand what just happened. They continue to cheer on the president, who is mighty thankful he is leading a jolly little war against Muslims instead of having to explain to voters why the economy is nose-diving and hundreds of thousands are losing their jobs.


The Northern Alliance is not a merry band of pro-American freedom fighters battling the wicked Taliban, but a Russian front organization run by leaders of the revived Afghan Communist party. It has also reopened the heroin trade the Taliban had shut down.
The Alliance proclaimed itself Afghanistan's legitimate government last week. Moscow recognized the Alliance, and rushed "advisers" and troops into Afghanistan.

On Sept. 11, Alliance forces were a mere 10,000 men. A month later, it fielded 30,000 with an array of Russian armour and artillery. It's likely regular troops from neighbouring Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan - all Russian satellite states - were sent into Afghanistan.

OIL AND GAS RESOURCES


Russia now dominates Afghanistan, thus reversing its historic defeat of the 1980s, shutting the U.S. and Pakistan out of Central Asia, and ensuring future Russian control of the Caspian Basin's oil and gas resources. Bush was too busy trying to "smoke out" outlaws Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar to notice his new best friends, the Russians, had drygulched him and grabbed the lion's share of Afghanistan.

The much ballyhooed Afghan unity conference in Germany last week, hailed by the U.S. and UN as a "breakthrough" and the beginning of a viable "democratic" government in Afghanistan, was a farce.
The U.S., UN, and Europe are waiting to shower tens of millions in aid on a "new," non-Islamic Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance realize they need a few women and some toothless royalists to create the illusion of a multi-party government in order to cash in on western aid. Armed, supplied and guided by the Russian Army and KGB, the Alliance remains the real power in Afghanistan.


Last week, hundreds of Taliban prisoners of war were reportedly massacred in the Mazar-E-Sharif fort by soldiers of communist warlord Rashid Dostam, assisted by U.S. and British special forces, and air strikes by U.S. warplanes. Our side says the prisoners tried to break out and had to die. Some more neutral observers claim the prisoners were murdered en masse. Amnesty International is calling for an investigation. U.S. troops also watched while 140 Taliban prisoners were executed in southern Afghanistan.
The U.S has been using fuel-air munitions that rights organizations claim are inhumane weapons that should be banned.


Last week, bin Laden's holy war syndrome seemed to infect the White House. Bush proclaimed a new jihad against Saddam Hussein, warning Iraq was next on his hit list. Saddam was moved into the terrorist column by Bush for allegedly planning to produce weapons of mass destruction to threaten his neighbours. The president forgot to mention Israel and India, who have also threatened their neighbours with nukes.
While Bush was preaching a new crusade against Iraq, other high administration officials were warning that Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Somalia and even Pakistan might be added to Bush's jihad list. A decade ago, this would have been called warmongering. Now, the frightful Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. are being used to justify all sorts of adventures abroad, and the curtailment of civil rights and free speech at home.

Bush's anti-Muslim crusading policy is being advocated by a group of Dr. Strangeloves, hardline "neo-conservatives" - the Washington chapter of Ariel Sharon's far-right Likud party. They want to use America to destroy all of Israel's enemies and block peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

RESTRAINT

Sensible Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and the administration's sharpest mind, Secretary of State Colin Powell, are trying to restrain the Sharonistas, who seem dangerously close to convincing Bush to launch a crusade against much of the 1.2-billion-person Islamic world. They failed with clever Bill Clinton, but are succeeding with the unworldly Bush.

America's European, Asian and Muslim allies are horrified by the dire threats emanating from Washington, but so far no one has dared to publicly break ranks and tell the president to holster his sixguns and simmer down. America is not refighting World War II.

In fact, it is not even at war, since none has been declared by Congress. It is fighting a handful of small but deadly international criminal organizations. This is not D-Day, nor the Alamo, and certainly no reason to launch America on the 21st century's first world war.

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Eric margolis always makes you think and here is another writer;

Robert Fisk: This terrible conflict is the last colonial war
'Arafat used to make the same expressions of grief when his gunmen murdered innocent Lebanese'
04 December 2001
Can Ariel Sharon control his own people? Can he control his army? Can he stop them from killing children, leaving booby traps in orchards or firing tank shells into refugee camps? Can Sharon stop his rabble of an army from destroying hundreds of Palestinian refugee homes in Gaza? Can Sharon "crack down" on Jewish settlers and prevent them from stealing more land from Palestinians? Can he stop his secret-service killers from murdering their Palestinian enemies – or carrying out " targeted killings", as the BBC was still gutlessly calling these executions yesterday in its effort to avoid Israeli criticism.

It is, of course, forbidden to ask these questions. So let's "legalise" them. The Palestinian suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Haifa are disgusting, evil, revolting, unforgivable. I saw the immediate aftermath of the Pizzeria suicide bombing in Jerusalem last August: Israeli women and children, ripped apart by explosives that had nails packed around them – designed to ensure that those who survived were scarred for life.

I remember Yasser Arafat's grovelling message of condolence, and I thought to myself – like any Israeli, I guess – that I didn't believe a word of it. In fact, I don't believe a word of it. Arafat used to make the same eloquent expressions of grief when his gunmen murdered innocent Lebanese during that country's civil war. Bullshit, I used to think. And I still do.

But there was a clue to the real problem only hours after the latest bloodbath in Israel. Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, was being questioned with characteristic obsequiousness on CNN about his reaction to the slaughter. Nothing, he said, could justify such "terrorism", and he went on to refer to the plight of the Palestinians, who suffer "50 per cent unemployment". I sat up at that point. Unemployment? Is that what Mr Powell thought this was about.

And my mind went back to his speech at Louisberg University on 20 November when he launched – or so we were supposed to believe – his Middle-East initiative. "Palestinians must..." was the theme: Palestinians must "end the violence"; Palestinians must "arrest, prosecute and punish the perpetrators of terrorist acts"; Palestinians "need to understand that, however legitimate their claims" – note the word "however" – "they cannot be... addressed by violence"; Palestinians "must realise that violence has had a terrible impact on Israel". Only when General Powell told his audience that Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza must end, did it become clear that Israel was occupying Palestine rather than the other way round.

The reality is that the Palestinian/Israeli conflict is the last colonial war. The French thought that they were fighting the last battle of this kind. They had long ago conquered Algeria. They set up their farms and settlements in the most beautiful land in North Africa. And when the Algerians demanded independence, they called them "terrorists" and they shot down their demonstrators and they tortured their guerrilla enemies and they murdered – in "targeted killings" – their antagonists.

In just the same way, we are responding to the latest massacre in Israel according to the rules of the State Department, CNN, the BBC and Downing Street. Arafat has got to come alive, to get real, to perform his duty as the West's policeman in the Middle East. President Mubarak does it in Egypt; King Abdullah does it in Jordan; King Fahd does it in Saudi Arabia. They control their people for us. It is their duty. They must fulfil their moral obligations, without any reference to history or to the pain and the suffering of their people.

So let me tell a little story. A few hours before I wrote this article – exactly four hours after the last suicide bomber had destroyed himself and his innocent victims in Haifa – I visited a grotty, fly-blown hospital in Quetta, the Pakistani border city where Afghan victims of American bombing raids are brought for treatment. Surrounded by an army of flies in bed No 12, Mahmat – most Afghans have no family names – told me his story. There were no CNN cameras, no BBC reporters in this hospital to film the patient. Nor will there be. Mahmat had been asleep in his home in the village of Kazikarez six days ago when an bomb from an American B-52 fell on his village. He was asleep in one room, his wife with the children. His son Nourali died, as did Jaber – aged 10 – Janaan, eight, Salamo, six, Twayir, four, and Palwasha – the only girl – two.

"The plane flies so high that we cannot hear them and the mud roof fell on them," Mahmat said. His wife Rukia – whom he permitted me to see – lay in the next room (bed No 13). She did not know that her children were dead. She was 25 and looked 45. A cloth dignified her forehead. Her children – like so many Afghan innocents in this frightful War for civilisation – were victims whom Mr Bush and Mr Blair will never acknowledge. And watching Mahmat plead for money – the American bomb had blasted away his clothes and he was naked beneath the hospital blanket – I could see something terrible: he and the angry cousin beside him and the uncle and the wife's brother in the hospital attacking America for the murders that they had inflicted on their family...

One day, I suspect, Mahmat's relatives may be angry enough to take their revenge on the United States, in which case they will be terrorists, men of violence. We may even ask if their leaders could control them. They are not bin Ladens, Mahmat's family said that – "We are neither Taliban nor Arab" – but, frankly, could we blame them if they decided to strike at the United States for the bloody and terrible crime done to their family. Can the United States stop bombing villages? Can Washington persuade its special forces to protect prisoners? Can the Americans control their own people?

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Report from Afghanistan

(November 28, 2001) For the past few weeks, DFN has been transmitting questions from readers about the war in Afghanistan to Dr. Robert Fisk, Britain’s most highly decorated foreign correspondent and currently the only Western journalist in Taliban-held Qandahar. Fisk has spent the past 25 years reporting from the Middle East and sends daily dispatches back to his paper, the London-based Independent.

Fisk has agreed to field questions every few weeks—as his schedule permits—from DFN readers interested in the unstable political situation in Afghanistan and its impact on human rights there. Questions may be submitted using the DFN Web form. The following is a transcript of the most recent interview with Fisk. Questions are been reprinted in the original form in which they were sent to DFN and are attributed to their writers.


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Dr. Robert Fisk.

DFN: Dr. Fisk, thank you for taking time of your hectic schedule to answer questions from our readers. Can you tell us where you are now?

Fisk: Surely. I am in a hotel on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. For the past few days I have been inside Afghanistan in the Taliban-controlled area. I am now staying in the Pakistani border town of Quetta.

DFN: Can you briefly describe a day in the life of Robert Fisk as you cover the war?

Fisk: (laughs) Well, it depends where I am. I don't know when I get up in the morning what it is I will be doing in the afternoon. Last Sunday morning, I was in a town called Chaman [on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border] when I suddenly received word that the Taliban would take me to Qandahar. So I set off down the road to Takhta-Pul. After going 4 miles down the road, Afghan refugees began pouring down the road, saying the town was being controlled by American aircraft, that there were a lot of American F-18s in the sky. One man said his home had just been destroyed by an aircraft which "spits fire from the sky and soaks the ground in fire." It was a pretty good description of the Spectre military aircraft.

The armed Taliban fighter then didn't want to continue to Qandahar. He said, "How can we protect you when we cant protect ourselves?"

In the armed Taliban town of Spin Boldak, newly arrived refugees at Qandahar spoke of their families. One woman told me her two daughters, ages 2 and 3, and her one-year-old son had been killed when their roof collapsed on them during an American air raid in Qandahar. Another woman described how her son has been killed in her home when an American missile hit an ammunition dump, setting off thousands of rounds of bullets which entered the house and killed the young man who was the father of a little boy.

DFN: With all your movement, how do you get your stories daily into the Independent?

Fisk: I call my stories into the Independent. I use either a mobile phone or a land line and I dictate my articles by word of mouth to a writer who takes them down word by word.

ihsan: Did you know that on the day of the attacks the institute of bio-warfare in the U.S. was kept closed? Le Monde reported that it was responsible for equipping and forming teams to launch attacks abroad.

Fisk: Is this a conspiracy theory? I know nothing about this, I'm sorry.

mossy o mahoney: First of all, I would like to congratulate you on being the sole media figure that I feel has given a realistic, unbiased account of the events thus far in the whole 'War on Terrorism' saga. I have heard you speak on a few occasions on various Irish radio programs, most recently with an American on Eamonn Dunphy's "The Last Word" on Today FM. Finally my question: is it your belief that the capture/death of Osama Bin Laden will solve much if anything regarding the terrorist threat posed by Al Qaeda?

Fisk: The intention of the Americans is clearly to kill bin Laden. Hence Bush has passed into law provisions for secret military tribunals and field executions: If bin Laden is killed, all to the good; if he is captured, he won't get a public hearing. All we will have known is that he was put to death. The execution of captured Arab fighters in Afghanistan by Northern Alliance forces—who are working alongside our Special Forces—suggests a general policy of liquidating anyone suspected of being involved with Al Qaeda.

But as I said on the Dunphy show, if you don't deal with their reasons for violence—however painful these reasons may be for us in the west—then those who feel humiliated or lied to or those who feel that we are responsible for the death of their family or friends will inevitably strike back and we will call them terrorists.

Bin Laden is a rich man. Most of the hijackers involved in the crimes against humanity on September 11 came from well-off families. They are not from the "deprived." But when bin Laden demands an end to an Israeli occupation af Arab land, and an end to the death of Iraqi children under U.N. sanctions and an end to the oppressive Arab regimes supported by the West, he undoubtedly speaks for many millions of Arabs.

The irony, of course, is that if bin Laden were eventually to become ruler of Arabia, he would run a state even more oppressive than Taliban Afghanistan.

Mossy o mahoney: What in your opinion is the best approach to curing the legacy of hatred, resentment and distrust sewn by the west in the muslim world?

Fisk says the West must take responsibility for its injustices in the Muslim world, and the Muslims for the Islam of the terrorists.

Fisk: To study history. To stop regarding those who hate us as our enemies. To stop accepting the world of Western leaders who often obscure the truth and are themselves sometimes ignorant of events. There are very clear injustices that have taken place in the Muslim word for which we in the West are directly or indirectly responsible. I won't go through the list now (Israel/Palestine, the death of tens of thousands of Iraqi children, the one-sided US approach to the Mideast, etc.).

At the same time, it is important in any conversation with Muslims to raise issues which they too must address: civil rights and human rights go largely ignored in much of the Arab world. Why? Why this slavish obedience to dictators? Also, just as we have to deal with our Unabomers and Timothy McVeighs—and understand how they came to exist—so the Muslim world has yet to ask itself about the nature of violence committed by men who claim to be good Muslims. It's one thing for Muslims to say bin Laden speaks their language and then to condemn the atrocities of September 11.

I believe that bin Laden does speak for millions of Arabs and we've yet to have courtroom-style evidence to prove he was connected to the September 11 massacre. But I don't believe Muslims carry off much self-inquiry about violence that starts within their communities. When I'm in the US, I always notice how many universities contain departments of Islamic and Middle East Studies. And when I'm in the Middle East, I always notice that not a single Arab University contains a department of American Studies.

John Nuttall: Can you tell me if there is any truth to the story that many Jews stayed away from work on Sept.11 at the trade centre. It seems to me if this attack was planed years in advance, Israel's secret service would have, or should have, got wind of it.

Fisk: There is no truth in this story that many Jews stayed away from work on Sept. 11. Sadly, I have heard this story repeatedly in the Arab world.

DFN: You have suggested in your article "The Awesome Cruelty of a Doomed People" that America bears some responsibility for the tragedy of September 11. Do you think America's involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was the primary reason for bin Laden's anger toward the West or do you think it has more to do with America's support of Saudi Arabia?

Fisk: If bin Laden is indeed involved then it is the second point, but you can't divorce the first point. The Arab-Israeli dispute and America's hopelessly biased attempts to solve it are part of foundation of anger and humilation in the Middle East region. You simply can't view incidents however horrific or criminal in isolation from history and the tragedy which is going on in the Middle East. I assume we're both in agreement that the September 11 atrocities was the work of a Middle East group.

I have to add that I was on an aircraft over the Atlantic on September 11 and it was the pilot who told the passengers what happened in New York. I called my office to get the details and then dictated the article you refer to out of my head. The fact that I wrote what I did then and think exactly the same as I do now suggest that I must be convinced of the political and historical background of the crimes that were committed on September 11. It is simply not good enough to say that the terrorist were "mindless men." It is equally worthless to say journalists are anti-American or pro-terrorist because we raise these issues. We have to have the courage to face the fact that US policy has created great wickedness in the Middle East and has caused others to create great wickedness.

DFN: There have been reports in the Independent of brutality committed by the Northern Alliance troops. What do you envision life will be like under the Northern Alliance?

If the Northern Alliance take over Afghanistan, there will be "murder, pillage, and rape."

Fisk: Exactly the same as it was between 1992 and 1996: murder, pillage, and rape. The Northern Alliance are a bunch of thugs just like the Taliban are a bunch of thugs. But the US has decided to join with the Alliance forces in Mazar-e Sharif and Konduz. Outside the prison rebellion there is compelling evidence of executions of surrendered prisoners. By their presence and their assistance, the US forces are also complicit in such crimes. Between 1992 and 1996, the Northern Alliance killed 50,000 people in Kabul. The Taliban has committed their own massacres, most notably outside Mazar-e Sharif when they killed Tajiks and others.

There are no good guys in Afghanistan. We've just backed one bunch of murderers instead of another bunch and claimed it to be a "War for Civilization" when all we have done is restart the Afghan Civil War.

My father was in World War I and received his campaign medal in 1919. I inherited it upon his death in 1992. On the back of the medal it says "The Great War for Civilization." It was referring to a conflict that ended almost a century ago. Maybe I should send the medal to Bush.