Activism

Eleven Reasons Not to Buy the Bush-Cheney "War on Terrorism"

I am asking everyone who reads this to do something difficult -- to admit that at some time in your life, maybe only briefly, you have been persuaded by the guys who run our national security to support something that you later figured out was wrong. Maybe it was the Vietnam War, maybe it was the Gulf War, maybe it was our Central America policy.

You can be fooled, and there are people in high office in Washington who are willing to fool you, and people in the mass media whose first loyalty is to continuing to be an insider. You knew that before September 11, and it's still true. Face the fact that it may be happening again.

Eleven Reasons Not to Buy What You Hear From the Media and the White House

1) War with Afghanistan is not a straightforward path to justice. Afghanistan is a big country, whose terrain and culture between them have defeated every empire that has attacked them. And that was before the country was covered with land mines that kill 88 of the people who already live there every year. Bin Laden has been there long enough to know a lot of good hiding places, and to set a lot of traps. As I write, in early December, it looks like we have "won." But the Soviets did much the same thing when they invaded, quickly conquering all the cities. It will be years before the situation is sorted out in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, thousands of Afghanis, and some US citizens, will die preventable and unjust deaths.

2) War with Afghanistan won't necessarily deal with Bin Laden. Bin Laden is not tied down to Afghanistan. He can go to Indonesia or Mauritania or Chechnya and find support. He could go to Turkey or Brazil or Mexico if he is willing to hide and still has a few million. In fact, he may already have done any one of those things -- Bush says Bin Laden is still in Afghanistan, but he obviously does not know exactly where he is, or he would have "smoked him out." Bin Laden's loyalty is to his ideology, not to a country.

3) Killing Bin Laden will end his network. Bin Laden didn't personally fly into the Towers and the Pentagon. There are other people out there who are willing to do these things -- probably hundreds of thousands of them, maybe millions. And there are other people besides Bin Laden to recruit them. Every civilian we bomb in Afghanistan will multiply the numbers of both. What matters is changing the conditions that create them, not trying to knock off individuals. This will sound ugly, but it makes the point. If the Taliban kill 10 U.S. Marines, will there be less or more Marines?

4) Retaliation doesn't work and isn't practical. I and every citizen of the United States are going to see our security decreased, not increased, because of this action in Afghanistan. Revenge leads to revenge, in an uncontrollable spiral. We have options between going to war and turning the other cheek. Most of the world would be delight- ed to join us in an aggressive anti-terrorist program that included outlawing the trade in small arms, ending nuclear proliferation and biological warfare research, making all international financial transactions transparent, setting up an international court to try those committing mass murder for political reasons, and establishing interfaith norms for controlling political violence. These may sound idealistic, but they are as do-able as ending the slave trade, once an implausible goal.

Continuing an international feud, especially with an enemy who has so much less to lose than we do, is simply irrational -- except for those who gain from war.

5) War creates enormous opportunities for crime. The anthrax attacks appear to be an example of this -- a domestic terrorism that is taking advantage of the fear created by international terrorism. Threats against women's health facilities, U.S. residents of Arab, Muslim and South Asian descent, and dissident university faculty and media have all been stepped up. Con-men of various kinds have flourished, from those claiming to be raising money for victims to those that claim a corporate tax break helps restore the economy -- to those who plan to sell us invasive technologies as a solution to "security." The popular notion that we have all pulled together may be true for the majority of U.S. citizens -- but for a substantial minority, a fuzzy state of war and a time of social chaos is a great time to express their anti-social impulses.

6) We are risking our nation's character -- again. War always puts our Bill of Rights at risk. Even the "good" wars -- the ones that crushed slavery and fascism -- curtailed our rights. Being an American patriot should mean that any one of us willing to die, so long as the ideal of the United States of America survives. Right now, our government's approach is to ditch the Fourth Amendment, and maybe the First and Fifth, supposedly to save our lives. Just as I have risked jail and injury for the sake of freedom and peace, I am willing to risk death by terrorism to ensure that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth." i will not tear up the Bill of Rights to save my scared ass, even if I do live within walking distance of the Pentagon.

7) We are creating a set of opportunistic alliances with dictators -- exactly how we got in this mess. In 1989, the Richmond Times Dispatch published a letter in which i wrote that military support for fundamentalist Afghani forces would backfire on the U.S. While Uzbekistan is scary, the immediate major nightmare is Pakistan, whose General has to show he's still a real Muslim, even though he just gave up the Taliban to the U.S. He may do that in Kashmir. This could easily lead to the first war between two nuclear powers -- India and Pakistan (And of course our new friends the Northern Alliance are best known for being the folks that made the Taliban look good to Afghanis -- not a good prospect for stable democratic government).

8) We are not vigorously pursuing the real source of terrorism. Saudi money is a far more important element in what led to 9/11 than the training camps or the Taliban. Osama Bin Laden didn't pick up his millions selling lamb kabob in the Kabul market. The terrorists who committed the murders of 9/11 were by and large relatively prosperous Saudis or Egyptians, by and large funded by Saudi money, often that of their families, but also that of many sympathizers, some of them probably in or close to the ruling family. Saudi money comes from the gas pump in Europe and the U.S. and is almost inextricable from oil company money. As long as Saudi money props up a government not that different from the Taliban, there will be more terrorists.

Go to any major city in any country in the world, poke around enough, and you will find a group of people that hates the U.S. and would really like to attack us. Some have good reason to hate us, while others are just spiteful.

We can't change the fact that we are hated, but we can change the fact that some people who hate us are effective and well-funded. To do that, we have to fundamentally change our relations with the Saudis and with the oil companies.

9) The war on terrorism is ill-defined and open-ended. Bush and gang are talking up a "war on terrorism" that has literally no end -- like the drug war. It will create its own enemies and battlefields, and its own blacklists and witch hunts for the foreseeable future. One writer has compared the situation to that in Orwell's 1984, where there is always a war though the enemy changes. Even if what they were doing in Afghanistan was going to accomplish something, it would be important to resist it as a foot in the door for another generation of internalized repression like the Cold War.

10) Bush's leadership is fundamentally com-promised. The problem isn't that he is conservative, or even that he might be a crook. Winston Churchill was a reactionary, but he was key to saving Britain. But Bush and his father and their gang are undeniably complicit in training the Taliban and Bin Laden, and in financing them and being financed by them. The Taliban made several offers to turn over Bin Laden or to discuss his turnover, each of which Bush has dismissed for no convincing reason. During the war in Vietnam, when the Vietnamese made an offer, Nixon or Johnson at least pretended to consider it. Bush isn't even pretending, and has said he will not negotiate, period. Why not? Bush is acting like he is afraid of catching the guy alive. If that is the case, we are being led by someone who does not have the flexibility to do whatever needs to be done.

When the British went into World War II, the first thing they did was throw out the compromised government that had gotten them into the situation. Why can't we even discuss doing the same thing?

11) It's still about oil. Oil profits drive Us policy in the Middle East. There is no other remotely credible reason for us to prop up regimes like the Saudis and the Kuwaitis, which are hostile to every American principle. And now the former Soviet Republics, and even Pakistan, are likely sources of oil and natural gas. We are looking at creating more oil fortunes in nations that are just as hostile to us, and at again picking our allies based on the price of gasoline. There is no reason for this, and there certainly is no moral justification for it.

To get out of the cycle of making oil-driven alliances, we must gain energy independence, with solar and wind and water power. We have the know-how to do it, we must do it, and that should be the focus of our "war on terrorism" -- a "war" to put a solar col-lector on every roof. That would work, because it would dry up the sources that make Bin Laden possible -- both the hatred of the "crusader" troops in the Middle East, and the oil funds.

What should we do?

1) Call together the United Nations, and ask for an international court to try people who kill large numbers of civilians for political ends. Ask for Muslim and other countries to get Bin Laden by whatever means they can, preferably peaceful.

2) Announce that we are going back to our original foreign policy, described by George Washington in his Farewell Address -- in which we have no allies or alliances, trade with everyone, and focus on trade and not war as our means of global interaction (Read the Address -- it's not isolationist, and it is the final suggestion of our founding Chief Executive).

3) Throw out Bush and Cheney and Powell, and replace them with a multiparty government of national unity led by Speaker Hastert, which will implement #2 and will also determine how we can rebuild countries like Vietnam and Guatemala that we have devastated (Nothing was ever better for Us business than the Marshall Plan).

4) Build a national economy that is based on renewable energy and on fair trade with all nations and that does not arm or attack any other nation.

These are not realistic solutions as we understand realism in this country right now. But we are a country in a state of shock, governed by a man who was perfectly willing to come to power through an illegitimate and racist judicial coup. We are under the spell of a massive media machine that is hand in glove with the government. All this will be clear to future generations. Shake loose the propaganda and see it now.

Larry Yates is a member of the Arlington Courthouse Greens.

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