War With An Asterisk

Now does he feel his title
hang loose about him,like a giant's robe
Upon a dwarfish thief.
- Macbeth, Act V, Scene II

ONLY an attack as murderous and audacious as the one perpetrated last week upon the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon could have given George W. Bush the kind of approval ratings he now commands from Americans, and the kind of appalling military leeway which he may yet unleash upon the world. The day after, Bush announced on national television that the terrorist attacks were 'not acts of terror, but acts of war'. Let us not forget, blinded as we may be by the sheer scale of the attack, that this is a deliberately chosen interpretation of these events. How many 'acts of war' have been perpetrated (i) by no particular state, (ii) with no declaration of war, and (iii) with no identifiable enemy? In short, without knowing whom we are at war with or why, an American president has declared 'war', not on a particular nation, but on 'terrorism', a concept too slippery to be uncontentious. And he has been no more specific than that. But never mind: I have the feeling that state terrorism - such as the kind perpetrated by the Israeli government against the civilians of the occupied territories or south Lebanon - will not feature as the focus of Mr. Bush's crusade.

So what does it mean to declare war on terrorism? Given that terrorism is not a state, a people, or an invadable or even nuke-able tract of land, a military endeavour to wipe out 'international terrorism' - leaving aside the quixotic nature of such a project - sounds rather like sending out an army to eradicate bad table manners. How can it possibly be carried out? Following a war, a nation may be said to be defeated, but even if we can say that we have militarily pounded a terrorist matrix such as Afghanistan to dust, can we say that we have defeated terrorism? Bearing in mind that terrorism normally arises in circumstances where peoples are unable to muster an effective military response to their oppressor (the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the textbook example), surely the brutal crushing of nations from which terrorism has sprung will merely perpetuate the cycle. But as no less a luminary than Benjamin Netanyahu pointed out last week, 'we are not interested in the grievances of terrorists' - precisely the disinterest that will ensure terrorism's continued existence.

It needs to be said plainly. Mr. Bush's 'war' on terrorism is so much shadow-boxing carried out by an NMD-crazed president who now enjoys the backing of a populace fully stoked-up with sheer bellicosity. On Prime Time the other night Robert Fisk put it perfectly: if, instead of enacting what he called 'the Dodge City rule of law' as expressed by Mr. Bush's 'dead or alive' fatwa this week, the US were to attempt a more imaginative response to the assault that involved taking punitive measures against the perpetrators whilst taking a more flexible approach to the affairs of the middle east, they might have a chance of eliminating the wellspring from which such terrorists come.

When the first attack on the World Trade Centre came in 1993, it was accompanied by Ramzi Yousef's demands that the US cut off all diplomatic and military support for Israel. In short, the warning signs were there: they were not heeded. It has taken the deaths of over 5000 innocents to drive the point home, and still it seems that this has not put an end to the hubris of the sole superpower. The US may rightly condemn the assault and justifiably seek retribution but it cannot, barring an epidemic of wilful ignorance at the highest levels, say that it was completely shocked and could never have anticipated what happened last week. What happened was exactly how the weak of the world attack the strong who brutalise them, and if the nation with the world's most powerful intelligence-gathering apparatus is not able to make its executors aware of this, we are in trouble.

The chronology of American interference in the middle east is already well known. Uninflecting US support for Israel's refusal to enter meaningful peace negotiations with Egypt with a view to handing back the captured Sinai peninsula following the 1967 six day war (and, more specifically, Henry Kissinger's arrogance in blocking the State Department's efforts to make Golda Meir's government more accommodating), gave president Sadat no choice but to launch the joint Egyptian-Syrian attack that was the 1973 Yom Kippur war, from which Israel was only saved from defeat by a massive $2bn US airlift. The Saudi-led oil embargo that accompanied the war reduced global Arab oil exports by 25% and completely cut off exports to the US and Holland.

This caused the first oil crisis of the 1970s, one that threatened to tip many small nations into recession. The Shah of Iran, put in power in 1953 by a CIA-backed coup, was deposed in 1979 by the Islamic revolution that resented his hasty westernising of his nation and the flow of petrodollars out of the region: the subsequent removal of Iranian crude from the world market created the second oil crisis of the seventies. Unending military and diplomatic support for Israel in its denial of Palestinian rights to national self-determination, placing Israel in the position of regional superpower from which it simply does not need to compromise, has been the single greatest hindrance to peace in the middle east since 1967. And, most recently, there are the invisible dead - the 500,000 Iraqi children who have died as a result of US-enforced sanctions, explained away by Madeline Albright as 'a hard choice - but we think the price is worth it'. Their slow-burning extinction is too gradual, ignorable and unspectacular to capture the attention of the world in the manner in which last week's events did, though if we are to ask which is the greater tragedy in human terms, the answer is given by simple arithmetic. All this, plus the fact that the universally execrated Taliban are essentially a US creation.

The sheer scale of the crisis and the delicate precision it will require to resolve now makes a president as fatuous and unimaginative as Mr. Bush look like J.B. Priestly's definition of a politician - an anxious dwarf trying to grill a whale. The brutality of these acts has now made life very simple for a president utterly lacking in political sophistication and maturity - he may now enact a brute, brutal response with little fear of popular criticism, and little worry about international condemnation. The US has, most worryingly, already circled the wagons and extracted promises of support from virtually all Western nations: Tony Blair, most embarrassingly, leaped in with both feet, 'shoulder to shoulder', if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor. Perhaps the one beneficial thing that may emerge from this is that NMD - a defence plan premised on Strangelove-like logic and utterly unrealistic threats - has now been proven useless in the face of the more real, surreptitious and lethal threat confronting America.

by

Gary J. Malone,
September 20th, 2001.