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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 way to deliver their message, since it 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. 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
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