Nov 29, 2002 op eds

November 29, 2002 Opinion Editorials http://www.aljazeerah.info

Palestinians' plight
Gulf News, 29-11-2002

Regardless of who is in power in Israel, the violence will continue to rain upon the Palestinians. Neither contender for the head of the Likud Party can be considered "men of peace". In fact, both are apparently trying to out-do each other in being hawkish and repressive towards Palestinians in a blatant attempt to try and lull the Israelis into the belief that more suppression of the Palestinians means greater security for Israelis. The voices of sanity and reason are not being heard, so the opportunities to reduce the continuing round of violence and counter-violence are ignored as each side seeks revenge for the latest act perpetrated against the other. Every indication is being given by the Israelis that they are no longer interested in seeking a peaceful solution to the ongoing carnage - on the contrary, it is as if the Israeli government is anxious to escalate an already bad situation into
all-out war.

Presently, top Israeli officials are in Washington seeking special financial aid to help the country deal with an economic downturn triggered by the two-year Palestinian Intifada. Israel is not disclosing how much money it wants, but media speculate it could be as much as $14 billion, of which $4 billion would be military aid and $10 billion as loan guarantees. If the amount sought is granted, and it appears likely if not in full, then a good part of it, then the only possible interpretation is that it is a nod of approval from the Bush administration on the way the Israeli government is handling the Palestinian situation. And if that is correct, then the future looks very bleak indeed for Palestinians. For it will illustrate clearly that Bush and his colleagues have given up on Palestine and decided to leave it to whoever is in power in Israel.

Misinformation about Iraq

By Edward Said

Al-Ahram Weekly, 11/28/02

The flurry of reports, leaks, and misinformation about the looming US war against Saddam Hussein's dictatorship in Iraq continues unabated. It is impossible to know, however, how much of this is a brilliantly managed campaign of psychological war against Iraq, how much the public floundering of a government uncertain about its next step. In any event, I find it as possible to believe that there will be a war as that there will not. Certainly the sheer belligerency of the verbal assaults on the average citizen are unprecedented in their ferocity, with the result that very little is totally certain about what is actually taking place. No one can independently confirm the various troop and navy movements reported on a daily basis, and given the lurching opacity of his thinking, George W Bush's real intentions are difficult to read. But that the whole world is concerned -- indeed, deeply anxious -- about the catastrophic chaos that will ensue after another Afghanistan-like air campaign against the people of Iraq, of that there is little doubt.

And yet, one aspect of the deluge of opinion, and a fact that is most disturbing quite on its own and without reference to its actual intention, is the spate of articles concerning post-Saddam Iraq. One that I'd like to discuss in particular is obviously part of a continuing effort by an Iraqi expatriate, Kanan Makiya, to promote himself as the father of what he calls a "non-Arab" and decentralised post-Ba'ath country. Now it is quite clear to anyone with the slightest concern about the travails of this rich and once-flourishing country that the years of Ba'athist rule have been disastrous, despite the regime's early programme of development and building. So there can be little quarrel with trying to imagine what Iraq might look like if Saddam is toppled either by American intervention or by internal coup. Makiya's contribution to this effort has been a steady one, both on the airwaves and in quality journals where he is given a platform to air his views, about which I shall speak in a moment. What has been made less clear, however, is who he is and from what background he emerges. I think it is important to know these things, if only to judge the value of his contribution and to understand more precisely the special quality of his thoughts and ideas.

Usually identified as having a research connection with Harvard and as a professor at Brandeis University (both in Boston), Makiya when I knew him first in the early 1970s was closely affiliated with the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. As I recall, he was then an architecture student at MIT, but he hardly said anything during the occasions I saw him. Then he disappeared from view, or rather from my view. He surfaced in 1990 as Samir Khalil, the author of a vaunted book called The Republic of Fear that described Saddam Hussein's rule with considerable dread and drama. One of the media-rousing works of the first Gulf War, The Republic of Fear seemed to have been written -- according to a fawning interview with Makiya that appeared in the New Yorker magazine -- while Makiya took time off from working as an associate of his father's architectural firm in Iraq itself. He admitted in the interview that, in a sense, Saddam had financed the writing of his book indirectly, although no one accused Makiya of collaborating with a regime he obviously detested.

In his next book, Cruelty and Silence, Makiya attacked Arab intellectuals whom he accused of opportunism and immorality because they either praised various Arab regimes or remained silent about the various governments' abuses against their own people. Of course Makiya said nothing about his own history of silence and complicity as a beneficiary of the Iraqi regime's munificence, even though, of course, he was entitled to work for whomever he pleased. But he said the vilest things about people like Mahmoud Darwish and myself for being nationalists, allegedly supporting extremism and, in Darwish's case, for having written an ode to Saddam. Most of what Makiya wrote in the book was, in my opinion, revolting, based as it was on cowardly innuendo and false interpretation, but the book, of course, enjoyed a popular moment or two since it confirmed the view in the West that Arabs were villainous and shabby conformists. It seemed not to matter that Makiya himself had worked for Saddam or that he had never written anything about the Arab regimes until his Republic of Fear, until, that is, he was out of Iraq and done with his employment there. He was hailed here and there in America for being a brave man of conscience and for having defied the self-censoring practice of Arab intellectuals, but this praise was usually heaped on Makiya by people who had no knowledge of the fact that Makiya himself never wrote in an Arab country or that whatever meagre writing he produced had been written behind a pseudonym and a prosperous, risk-free life in the West.

Except for his two books and an article urging the US administration to occupy Baghdad during the first Gulf War, Makiya wasn't much heard from after that. Then last year he produced an unreadable novel proving somehow that the Dome of the Rock was really built by a Jew; it was sent to me by the publisher, so I happened to have skimmed it before it appeared officially, but was nevertheless aghast at how badly written it was, and how, unable to resist showing off how many books its author had read, it was peppered with footnotes, surely an unusual thing for what purported to be a work of fiction. It died a merciful death, however, and Makiya lapsed back into silence.

Until the government-inspired campaign against Iraq broke out a few months ago Makiya had said little about the war against terror, the events of 9/11, and the war in Afghanistan. It is true that he did a kind of commentary for a popular American biweekly of Mohamed Atta's supposed Islamic terrorist handbook, but even by his standards it was a negligible performance. I vividly recall, however, that late last summer I happened by chance to hear a radio interview with him in which he was identified for the first time as heading a US State Department group planning for a post-war, post-Saddam Iraq. His name had not appeared among those mentioned as being part of the US-funded Iraqi opposition groups, nor had he contributed anything that could be read by a member of the general public about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict or any other Middle Eastern issues, although I had heard that he had visited Israel a number of times.

The most complete version of his plans for Iraq after an American invasion that derive from his current employment as a resident employee of the US Department of State, appears in the November 2002 issue of Prospect, a good liberal British monthly to which I subscribe. Makiya begins his "proposal" by enumerating the extraordinary assumptions behind his arguments, two of which almost by definition are unimaginable. The first is that "the unseating" of Saddam should not occur after a bombing campaign. Makiya must have been living on Mars to imagine that, in the event of a war, a massive bombing attack would not occur even though every single plan circulated for regime change in Iraq has stated explicitly that Iraq would be bombed mercilessly. The second assumption is equally imaginative, since Makiya seems to believe against all evidence that the US is committed to democracy and nation- building in Iraq. Why he thinks that Iraq is like Germany and Japan after World War II (both of which were rebuilt because of the Cold War) is beyond me; besides, he doesn't once mention the fact that the US is determined to bring down the Iraqi regime because of the country's oil reserves and because Iraq is an enemy of Israel. So, he starts out by making preposterous assumptions that simply fly in the face of all the evidence.

Undeterred by such unimportant considerations, he presses on. Iraqis are committed to federalism, he says, rather than to a centralised government. The proof that he offers is pretty negligible. Like all his other attempts to convince his reader that he makes telling points, his logic is so weak because it is based equally on fictional supposition and his own, highly dubious personal affirmations. He is committed to federalism, and so he says are the Kurds. Where federalism as a system is supposed to come from (other than from his desk in the State Department), he doesn't bother to say. Clearly, he plans to have it imposed from the outside, although he makes the largely unsubstantiated claim that "everyone" is agreed that federalism in Iraq should be the outcome. This "means devolving power away from Baghdad to the provinces", presumably by a stroke of General Tommy Franks' pen. One would have thought that post-Tito Yugoslavia never existed and that that tragic country's federalism was a total success. But Makiya is so committed to his views as a kinglike theoretician of government that he simply ignores consequences, history, people, communities, and reality altogether so that he can make his ludicrously improbable case. This, of course, is exactly what the US government likes, that is, to have miscellaneous Arab intellectuals responsible to no constituency who urge the US military on to war while pretending to be bringing "democracy" to the place in full contradiction of America's real aims and its actual historical practices. Makiya seems not to have heard about ruinous US interventions in Indochina, Afghanistan, Central America, Somalia, Sudan, Lebanon, and the Philippines, or that the US is currently involved militarily with about 80 countries.

The grand climax of Makiya's justification for the invasion of Iraq by the United States is his proposal that the new Iraq should be non-Arab. (Along the way, he speaks contemptuously of Arab opinion which, he says, will never amount to anything. This obviously clears the board for his airy speculations about both the future and the past.) How this magical de-Arabising solution is to come about, Makiya doesn't say, any more than he shows us how Iraq is to be relieved of its Islamic identity and its military capabilities. He refers to a mysterious alchemical quality he calls "territoriality" and proceeds to build another sandcastle on that as the basis for a future state of Iraq. In the end, however, he volunteers that all this is going to be guaranteed "from the outside", by the United States. Where this has ever taken place before is not an issue that troubles Makiya, any more than he seems concerned about US unilateralism and needless destructiveness.

One scarcely knows whether to laugh or cry at Makiya's posturings. Clearly this is a man with no recorded experience of government, or even of citizenship. Between countries and cultures and with no visible commitment to anyone (except to his upwardly mobile career), he has now found a haven deep inside the US government which he uses to fuel his amazingly speculative flights of fancy. For someone who has lectured his peers about intellectual responsibility and independent judgement, he provides examples of neither one nor the other. Exactly the opposite. Perched on a pulpit that has freed him from any accountability he seems now to be serving a master who has paid him well for his services -- as Saddam employed him in the past -- and his versatile conscience. I find it incredible that Makiya allows himself such sanctimony and vanity, but then why shouldn't he? He has never engaged in a public debate with any of his fellow Iraqis, never written for an Arab audience, never put himself forward for an office or for any political role requiring personal courage and commitment. He has either written pseudonymously or attacked people who have had no chance to respond to his defamations.

It is sad that Makiya implicitly suggests that his is the voice and the example of the future Iraq. And to think that thousands of lives have already been lost to his patron's cruel sanctions or that many more lives and livelihoods are about to be destroyed by electronic warfare wreaked on his country by George Bush's government. But this man is untroubled by any of this. Devoid of either compassion or real understanding, he prattles on for Anglo- American audiences who seem satisfied that here at last is an Arab who exhibits the proper respect for their power and civilisation, regardless of what role Britain played in the imperialist partition of the Arab world or what mischief the US dealt the Arabs through its support for Israel and the collective Arab dictatorships.

In and of himself, Makiya is a passing phenomenon. He is, however, a symptom of several things at once. He represents the intellectual who serves power unquestioningly; the greater the power, the fewer doubts he has. He is a man of vanity who has no compassion, no demonstrable awareness of human suffering. With no stable principles or values, he is typical of the cynical anti-Arab hawks (like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld) who dot the Bush administration like flies on a cake. British imperialism, Israel's brutal occupation policies, or American arrogance do not detain him for a moment. Worst of all, he is a man of pretension and superficiality, flattering himself on his reasonableness even as he condemns his own people to more travail and more dislocation. Woe to Iraq!

New anti-imperialism will get sharp response
By Patrick Seale , Gulf News, 29-11-2002

As we approach the end of 2002, President George W Bush's global 'war on terror' continues to be the main feature of the international scene. Although they are different in every possible way, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussain have merged together in the American mind as 'enemies of civilization' who must be destroyed for the 'West' to feel secure.

On what evidence does this analysis rest? It rests above all on the rash of attacks on American and Western targets which have captured the headlines and spread alarm, such as the murder of an American official in Amman, the shooting of American soldiers in Kuwait, the killing of an American woman evangelist in Sidon, south Lebanon. To these recent incidents should be added the slaughter of Australian and other Western tourists in Bali, of German tourists in Djerba, of French technicians in Karachi, the large-scale attacks against Americans in Saudi Arabia, East Africa and Aden harbour, the attack on a French oil tanker off Mukallah, and, of course, the 'mother of all attacks' - the September 11, 2001 assaults on the American heartland.

The Western world is in a state of great anxiety. Political leaders in the U.S., Britain, France and other countries have called for great vigilance and have uttered dire warnings of further impending attacks. In almost every country, defences are going up and security services are on high alert. Osama bin Laden's latest threat - 'As you kill, so you will be killed' - is taken very seriously.

At the same time occasional successes in the 'war on terror' have been hailed such as the killing of six activists in Yemen by a missile fired from an unmanned CIA drone, or the recent capture of Abd Al-Rahim Al Nashiri, described as the Al Qaida chief for the Gulf region and one of America's 20 most wanted terrorists.

Rebellion

If all this, as the U.S. would have us believe, is the work of a single shadowy terrorist network, with tentacles stretching across the world, then the way to defeat it is to cut off its head and then destroy its offshoots one by one. This is what America and its allies are trying to do. But what if the West is grappling with an altogether different phenomenon? What if the 'war on terror' being waged is fundamentally wrong-headed?

One strong possibility is that the 'enemy' is not just a terrorist network but a broad, militant, grassroots rebellion against American military and political interventions in the Arab and Muslim world, against Western arrogance, racism and bullying.

Roots of terror

For decades now, but especially under the Bush administration, America's triumphalism, its contempt for the views and interests of others, its boastful display of military power, its refusal to recognise and address the 'roots of terror', its apparent indifference to international law, its economic supremacy, all these have created a world-wide backlash which has put Americans at risk in many countries. History suggests that any power which dominate others will inevitably created violent opposition to it. If this is true, then what we are witnessing is nothing less than an anti-imperialist movement of the 21st century.

Although often expressed in Islamic terms, the movement of rebellion is essentially political. It aims to liberate the Arab and Muslim world from the suffocating embrace of the West - and above all from American neo-imperialism and its Zionist handmaiden. Future historians might well judge Osama bin Laden, for example, not as the outrageous pariah he now seems, but as only the latest in a long line of Islamic activists which includes such well-known figures of the past as Jamal Al Din Al Afghani, Hassan Al Banna, Said Qutb, Musa Sadr, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and even Hussein Nasrallah.

Many separate streams feed the broad river of rebellion. There is no doubt that the epidemic of anti-American sentiment raging from Morocco to Indonesia is fed by American support for Israel's crimes against the Palestinian people. This is the main spring of the rebellion. But there are many others. Israel's repeated aggressions against Lebanon, as well as its 22-year occupation of the South - supported by the U.S. - have bred an army of bitter opponents. The 12-year sanctions against Iraq - the worst inflicted on any country in history - have mobilised opinion powerfully against America and Britain, as has the obsessive threat of war against Baghdad repeated almost every time President Bush or Prime Minister Tony Blair open their mouths.

Quite apart from its irresponsibility, there is something incomprehensible and irrational about America's fixation with Iraq and its alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. As the distinguished American columnist William Pfaff wrote the other day, 'There is, to the best of specialist opinion, no scenario by which the American public is threatened by nuclear, biological or chemical weapons of Iraqi origin.' In other words, there is no credible Iraqi threat to the United States. Why then is America making still more enemies for itself? Is it because hard-line Zionists, anxious to ensure Israel's regional supremacy, have captured American foreign policy? The well-founded suspicion that this is the case is yet another source of rage against the United States.

America's expanding military presence in Arabia, the Gulf and Central Asia, its bases, fleets, and military exercises, as well as the horrible fate of Muslims in Afghanistan, Kashmir and Chechnya are also a cause of widespread anger and resentment. Nor should one forget the harsh conditions and institutionalised racism encountered by Muslim immigrants seeking a better life in 'fortress Europe', hundreds of whom die in the attempt, like the many young Moroccans who drown as they attempt to cross the Straits of Gibraltar.

Target

Anti-imperialist sentiment is a broad current without much structure or leadership, which is no doubt why it is impossible to defeat. Sometimes it finds expression in freelance acts of violence, sometimes, more peacefully, in the boycott of American products or the burning down of American fast food outlets, an act that has earned José Bové, the French anti-globalisation activist, heroic status and a prison sentence. What all these have in common is that they are symptoms of deep-seated anger at the popular level. America should beware: A new militant generation has come of age!

But, as with anti-imperialist movements of the past, the target is not only the Western colonial, or neo-colonial, power but also its local allies who seek its protection or its subsidies. The fact that the Arab states, in spite of their great resources, have been unable to contain Israel, or put effective pressure on America to do so, is itself a source of great frustration for much of Muslim opinion.

As has often been said, the Arab world presents a picture of disarray and incoherence. Some regimes express their resistance to U.S. military and political pressure and their opposition to its military threats, others welcome American troops on their soil, and bask in American protection. Others still are so dependent on American aid that they have lost their freedom of action except in media rhetoric.

Tragic recipe

The Palestinians, in turn, have not managed to forge a viable resistance or united movement or a common policy, but are split in numerous factions each with its own political agenda and its own armed forces - a tragic recipe for national failure. Equally, disputes and rivalries between Arab regimes have often served to undermine important Arab initiatives.

The militant anti-imperialist movement has much to feed on. It is directed almost as much against existing Arab establishments as against the United States, Israel and the West. Military and intelligence operations, torture, repression and brutal police action, the tracking of suspects and the arrest of an activist here and there, will not cripple this movement but will in fact incite it to even greater militancy.

It cannot be said often enough that the best way - perhaps the only way - to deal with such a movement is to tackle the problems that have brought it into being - tackle them at their source: End Israel's illegal occupation of Arab territory and give the Palestinians a dignified chance of independent statehood, check anti-Islamic incitement by conceding the Islamists a voice in the political spectrum, decide to resolve disputes by negotiation rather than by force, reduce America's military presence in the Arab and Muslim world, preach peace not war, and promote economic prosperity for the whole world and not just for the gluttonous north.

Patrick Seale is an eminent commentator and the author of several books on Middle East affairs.

As the wind blows
Gulf News, 29-11-2002

The American President has appointed an independent investigation into the nation's security preparedness prior to and after the September 11, 2001 attacks. This is a dramatic volte-face on his previously held opinion. But complaints from families of the victims got Bush to change his mind. It is good the president has had second thoughts, although he may later come to rue his appointment of the controversial Henry Kissinger to head the investigation.

But this is not the first time that the president - seen by many as a man of firm convictions - has changed his mind on important national and international issues. There was the Homeland Security Bill, which originally the White House saw as unnecessary. Yet when Democrat Senator Joseph Lieberman, a former candidate for U.S. president, proposed the bill, it was hijacked by the White House and made its own during the mid-term elections.

There was also the issue of not requiring two bites at a UN resolution against Iraq, which Bush later had to concede to. And the controlling of big business, following several scandals, which Bush was against but had to bow to pressure and introduce. While it is good to know that the president is flexible and prepared to change his mind - presumably on better advice - it can also be inferred he is being manipulated.

Time to break the cycle of violence

By Daoud Kuttab

Jordan Times, 11/29/02

PALESTINIANS MIGHT differ considerably over what is the best way to resist the Israeli occupation. Some might argue for non-violent resistance while others insist that only violent resistance will eventually lead to the exit of the occupation forces. Some Palestinians argue that anti-Israeli attacks must be limited to the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip while others say that since Palestinian civilians are not immune to Israeli attacks, Israeli civilians can't expect any different treatment.

But while Palestinians differ on the type and target of the resistance, there seems to be near consensus about the importance of timing. A badly timed attack, most would, backfires to its initiators. An attack after the Labour Party left the national unity government in Israel has produced an illegal Israeli expansion of the Jewish presence in the heart of predominately Palestinian Hebron.

If the majority of Palestinians agree on the importance of timing, it is logic to discuss the wisdom of anti-Israeli attacks at this particular time? For the next three to six months, important changes are expected in the region. These changes ought to persuade any sincere Palestinian to stop and consider the benefits or lack thereof of their actions.

Israelis are preoccupied with their internal matters and general elections so their external policy will not be changed as a result of attacks. If anything, such attacks might play into the hands of one group on the account of a more forthcoming group. Any violent action on the part of the Palestinians will certainly have an effect on the Israeli elections. By carrying out any attacks during this period, those carrying them out are throwing their weight behind the more radical group of candidates.

On the regional and international level, the timing can't be any worse for the Palestinians. The Iraqi crisis is set to divert attention from the suffering of the Palestinians under occupation. If anti-Israeli attacks continue, they will do little to change Israeli negotiating position; they will not result in a change of the balance of forces in the area nor will they produce any international or Western pressure on Israel.

On the Palestinian front, the situation is also fluid, as the present caretaker government is transitional, awaiting new local, legislative and presidential elections in 2003.

All of the above elements must lead Palestinians to take a courageous position of unilaterally suspending anti-Israeli attacks for, say, three or six months. Such a move will send a powerful message to the Israeli public and international community. A three-to-six-month genuine moratorium on violent anti-Israeli acts will also show the discipline among Palestinian militant groups. This will prove that they can stop action when they choose and thus reflect the strength and unity of the Palestinians.

Finally, such a cessation of resistance acts will also benefit the Palestinian population which has suffered untold pains as a result of the Israeli policy of closure, siege, curfew, house destruction, tree-uprooting and apartheid-like travel restrictions. Israel has used the resistance acts as justification for the collective punishment of the Palestinians.

Unfortunately, such a bold Palestinian decision does not ensure an Israeli moratorium of its illegal policy of assassinations and extra judicial killings or even an easing of the oppressive occupation. Every attempt to produce such a quid pro quo with the Israelis during the past two years, whether directly or indirectly, has failed. In fact, recent history shows clearly that Israel has broken periods of Palestinian quiet with its deadly assassination policy, acts that Israel knows very well would produce reprisals.

And so, while it might be logical to expect Palestinian militants, including the Islamic groups, to agree to such a unilateral ceasefire, it will be extremely difficult to hold these groups back once their own leaders and local heroes are killed by Israeli death squads. A lack of response would make the targeted group look weak to its own public. Rejecting public calls for revenge and sustaining such a unilateral ceasefire would require these groups to sacrifice their own public standing for the common good. The only way that these groups might be willing to do that is if they are convinced that the prize is worth for them and their people.

The world has proven in the past not to have the willingness or the ability to deliver promises. Promised monthly Arab financial support to the near bankrupt Palestinian economy has dried up completely in the past two months. The world's inability to get Israel to respect binding international conventions regarding safeguarding civilians under occupation has exasperated confidence in the world community. This contradiction is made that much more blatant as Palestinians look at how Iraq is being forced to enforce every single element of the UN resolutions.

If the present cycle of violence is to be broken, we need courage and statesmanship by Palestinian militants and leaders, sincere efforts by Arab leaders to rescue the Palestinians and genuine non-stop involvement by the world community to end this madness.

Al-Qaeda signature on Mombasa attack
By Robert Fisk
The Independent, 11/29/02

It was inevitable. It was the nightmare of Israeli “security” officials. The one thing they did not think about, even after Bali, is that Al-Qaeda would strike Israel abroad. Of course, there were political advantages for the Israelis which they used: the Palestinians could be blamed, even if they had nothing to do with the suicide bombing of the Paradise Hotel.

As usual, Al-Qaeda did not care about casualties who were not in their target frame. Just as Kenyans provided most of the death toll of the Al-Qaeda bombing of the US Embassy in Nairobi four years ago, so Kenyans were the principal victims in Mombasa yesterday. Children died if they were the target nationality. But the attack provided proof, yet again, that Osama Bin Laden’s outfit has what the Americans would call “global reach.” Bin Laden’s men can strike in Bali, Singapore, in Afghanistan, in Kuwait, over the Atlantic, in Saudi Arabia, in Yemen, in New York and Washington and in a Pennsylvania field.

The “Army of Palestine” which claimed the attacks in Kenya is assuredly mythical — though this claim of responsibility will be used by the Israelis — and largely failed in their assault. It is important to realize this when one calculates the results of Al-Qaeda’s latest attack. The two missiles failed to destroy the Israeli airliner. The suicide bombers surely hoped for a far greater death toll. Nov. 28 was intended to be Israelis’ Sept. 11, with a list of 300 or 400 dead. In the event, the Israeli victims numbered only three.

If one looks for a signature, Al-Qaeda assuredly left its initials on yesterday’s killings. Suicide bombers, simultaneous attacks, Kenya, a holiday resort. To use the word “hallmark” has become a cliche but the Mombasa attacks had Al-Qaeda written all over it.

Two months ago, Israel’s senior military intelligence officers were privately expressing their concern that Al-Qaeda would strike Israel next. They talked about high buildings in Tel Aviv, about nuclear missile sites in the Negev desert and they talked about this softly, of course, because the world is not supposed to discuss Israel’s nuclear capability but they feared, rightly, that Osama Bin Laden would try to put Israel in the same frame as the United States.

And he has. For whatever Al-Qaeda did yesterday, it set Israel up alongside America. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has claimed ever since Sept. 11, 2001, that Israel stands beside President Bush in his “war on terror”, a conflict that has — thanks to Washington’s one-sided, hopelessly biased Middle East policy — given the impression that Sharon and Bush espouse the same goals. Now the world has to acknowledge that Ariel Sharon, regarded as a war criminal by millions of Arabs for his “personal responsibility” for the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinian civilians, has a reason to fight Al-Qaeda.

Are there any Palestinians in the ranks of Osama bin Laden’s legions? I never met any and I met dozens of his men in Sudan and Afghanistan, but by attacking Israelis, Al-Qaeda has, in effect, taken on the cloak of the intifada. If a Palestinian suicide bomber can kill 11 Israelis in Jerusalem and an Al-Qaeda’s suicide squad can kill three Israelis in Mombasa, what is the difference? In future, any Israeli assault in the occupied West Bank and Gaza can be portrayed as part of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden’s men. An Israeli air raid, no matter how many children it kills, can be depicted as no different to the US raids on Afghan villages.

Let’s not for a moment imagine that this thought did not occur to Al-Qaeda. In an organization to whom the idea of “collateral damage”, itself obscene enough on our tongues, is meaningless, the re-intensification of Israeli firepower is an inevitable act. The more Arabs realize the brutality of their enemy’s revenge, the more powerful is Al-Qaeda reach. Yesterday’s attack, minimal in terms of Israeli casualties compared to the death toll of recent Palestinian suicide bombings, does not change that. Two ruthless Israeli leaders will vie with each other for the right to strike back. The Bush administration, after Sept. 11, 2001, will not be urging restraint.

So what does it tell us about Osama Bin Laden? It shows that his men, yet again, can attack their enemies at will. Mombasa and an Israeli-owned hotel should have been obvious security risks. It was just up the coast in Mogadishu that Osama Bin Laden’s fighters first took on the Americans, as Bin Laden told me himself in 1997. The Nairobi bombing of the US Embassy four years ago, along with the embassy in Dar es Salaam, should have proved Al-Qaeda strength in Africa.

And the “text” of the attack goes further. Al-Qaeda attacked a holiday resort at Bali. So they attacked Mombasa. They tried to sink the USS Cole in Aden with a suicide bombers’ boat. They tried to sink the French supertanker Limburg this year with an identical mode of assault. They bombed two US embassies in Africa. They struck two towers of the World Trade Center. Yesterday, they twinned the Mombasa hotel with the attempted missile attack on the Israeli holiday-makers’ plane. Where next?

Well, we have heard Osama Bin Laden’s hit list: Britain first, then France, Italy, Canada. And do not believe for a moment that Al-Qaeda strategists haven’t taken a look at the targets available to them. They have looked at everything, just as the Algerian GIA gunmen did more than four years ago when they planned to fly a hijacked Air France airliner into the Eiffel Tower. Be sure they have looked at the Thames floodgates and the Eurostar and all the other soft, vulnerable symbols of our society. Because they want to bring Europe into an alliance with America and Israel.

The pathetic clash of civilizations predicted in Samuel Huntington’s book of the same name is as important to Bin Laden’s followers as it is to right-wing American Christian fundamentalists.

Yesterday was another step in that direction. (The Independent)

The evil that men do
By Fawaz Turki, Special to Arab News, 11/29/02

Can the mystery of evil, an age-old metaphysical dilemma of the human condition, be solved by a Texan with limited academic credentials? To hear him tell it, George W. Bush thinks so.

In Bucharest last week, speaking before a large crowd of Romanians, as he extended their country an invitation to join NATO, he said: "You value freedom, because you have lived without it. You know the difference between good and evil, because you have seen the face of evil."

Harking back to one of his trinity of bete noires that make up "the axis of evil" in the world today, Bush added: "An aggressive dictator now rules in Iraq. By his search of weapons of mass destruction, by his ties to terrorist groups, the dictator of Iraq threatens the security of every free nation, including the free nations of Europe."

Working the crowd like the true politician that he is, he continued: "We must be willing to stand in the face of evil, to have the courage to always face danger. The people of the Baltic states have shown these qualities to the world. You have known cruel oppression and withstood it. You were held captive by an empire and you outlived it." (Ronald Reagan, were he "with us" today, would be upset at the omission of the term evil in the reference to the Soviet empire.)

I have a problem with President Bush’s rhetoric, not only because of its austere, dry detachment, its ascending rhythm of almost Latinate tone, and the arrogance of disenchanted hauteur that one associates with the leader of a Big Power, but because of its disingenuous, facile craftiness.

Evil is any act that inflicts disaster, misfortune or pain on a human community. So consider in this regard the unspeakable evil that the US, by manipulating the UN Security Council since 1991, has visited on the people of Iraq through the use of economic sanctions — economic sanctions that in this case have been used as a weapon of mass destruction, a legitimized act of slaughter where an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of five have died as a direct consequence, almost three times as many as the number of Japanese killed during the US atomic attacks.

These fatalities have been well-documented, though underreported in the media.

How could such a toll, one wonders, have been glossed over, even justified, for so long?

"As an academic who studies the ethics of international relations, I was curious," writes Joy Gordon, professor of philosophy at Fairfield University, in the current issue of the influential and highly respected Harper’s magazine. "It was easy to discover that for the last ten years a vast number of holdups had been placed on billions of dollars worth of what seemed unobejectionable — and very much needed — imports to Iraq. But I soon learned that all UN records that could answer my questions were kept from public scrutiny Working tirelessly over the last three years, Gordon was able to acquire many of these key confidential documents.

She obtained them, she says, "on the condition that my sources remain anonymous."

What these documents showed was that the US has fought aggressively throughout the last decade to "purposefully" minimize the humanitarian goods that entered the country and has done so "in the face of enormous human suffering, including massive increases in child mortality and widespread epidemics."

Take what in effect are Washington’s fiats inside the UN to block the purchase by Baghdad of materials necessary to generate electricity, or equipment for radio, telephone and other communications. At one time, according to Gordon’s research, Iraq was allowed to purchase a sewage-treatment system but was blocked from buying the generator necessary to run it. The end result? The country has been pouring 300,000 tons of raw sewage daily into its rivers.

Among the many deprivations that Iraqis have suffered, none has been more terrible than the damage to their water system, which dramatically reduced their access to potable water. Again, the end result? Devastation wrought on a whole community.

By 1996, for example, with all sewage plants having broken down, there were widespread outbreaks of cholera, massive increases in child dysentery and skyrocketing infant mortality. (According to UN figures, in the late 1980s the mortality rate for Iraqi children under five was about fifty per 1000. By 1994 it almost doubled, to 93. And by 1999, it increased to 130 — that is, 13 percent of Iraqi children were dead before their fifth birthday.)

"For the most part," wrote Gordon, "they died as a direct or indirect result of contaminated water."

You want to contemplate the face of evil, consider what a senior Pentagon planning officer had to say about the sanctions to a Washington Post reporter in June 23, 1991. The man is quoted as saying that Iraq’s electrical grids had been targeted at the time by bombing strikes precisely in order to undermine the civilian economy.

"People say, ‘You didn’t recognize that it was going to have an effect on water or sewage,’" he declaimed. "Well, what were we trying to do with sanctions — help out the Iraqi people? No. What we were doing with the attacks on infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of the sanctions."

That, dear reader, is evil.

When, in 1979, millions of Iranians daily marched down the streets of their capital hollering, "Death to America," and identifying the US as "The Big Satan," ordinary Americans, often decent folk who would not ordinarily sanction cruelty of any kind, inflicted on any people, for any reason, but nevertheless decent folk who traditionally evince no interest in foreign affairs, were genuinely surprised by that expression of hostility.

They asked, but Gosh, why do these folks hate us so much?

These Americans had not read, or been informed by the media, about their government’s machinations, its acts of evil, if you wish, in that proud country since the early 1950s.

The United States, but more accurately the US government, has generated enduring bitterness against it by peoples all the way from Chile to Palestine, and a lot of other countries in between. (Chile and Palestine in particular, you will agree, are justified to hold special grudges against Washington.)

When degradation is wantonly visited upon a people, its instigations carry over into the language, the culture, and the archetype. They are never wholly or rapidly dispersed. Rather, they insinuate themselves into the marrow of a people’s consciousness.

The bard was right. The evil that men do lives after them.

(disinherited@yahoo.com)

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