Spooky
09-13-2001, 10:27 PM
Niall Ferguson: America should hit back and hit hard
The writer is professor of political and financial history at Oxford University
Americans are of course used to catastrophes. Only this summer there was Pearl Harbor, the movie. Not to mention Independence Day. Somehow even so shocking a spectacle as the destruction of the World Trade Centre had something familiar about it. Was it in Die Hard that we saw it? Or was it Godzilla? Americans are of course not used to real catastrophes, as opposed to the sort that Bruce Willis is able to avert at the 11th hour. Even Pearl Harbor, where 2,395 Americans died in 1941, is rather a long way from the United States proper.
Of course, the 1995 Oklahoma bombing gave Americans a foretaste of what war against civilians is like. But not until this week had an American city come so close to experiencing an aerial bombardment comparable in its destructiveness with those of the Second World War. So this was not Pearl Harbor III, but an American Blitz.
Yet this was a Blitz with a difference, for Londoners at least had the consolation in the 1940s of knowing exactly who the enemy was. Perhaps the true significance of this week's attacks, then, is that they mark America's belated arrival in the age of terrorism.
The implications go far beyond the long overdue tightening of security on American domestic flights, however. It is the American psyche that these horrors will change forever. And if one were feeling callous, one might add: not before time. I have spent a good deal of time in the US in the past couple of years; indeed, I was due to fly to New York on Wednesday morning for a series of lectures (I even had a room booked between the World Trade Centre and Wall Street). The last time I was there, it really hit me – the way Americans subconsciously feel themselves to be in a planet of their own. It is, or rather it was, a strangely seductive planet, part Planet Hollywood, part Spacestation Nasdaq.
The longer I spent there – chomping tuna steaks, slurping Zinfandel, watching baseball and tracking tech stocks – the further away the rest of Planet Earth seemed to be. To many Americans, Europe might as well be on the moon, Asia on Mars and Africa on the dark side of Neptune. Only Mexico feels near, and that's only because half the Mexicans seem to have moved to the US.
That illusion of separateness is now over. The only question is whether George W Bush will draw the right conclusions for US foreign and defence policy. Unfortunately, he may not.
It is widely believed by many US policy wonks that Bill Clinton was too much of an interventionist in foreign trouble spots. From Sarajevo to Somalia, people have bad memories of GIs under fire in places disconcertingly remote from Planet Hollywood. (The truth about Clinton, however, was that his interventions were generally too short and underpowered to be effective: for Clinton, the exit strategy and the approval ratings were alpha and omega.)
There will be those who will argue strongly against precipitate retaliatory action by the US. They will warn against a repeat of Bill Clinton's bombing of Khartoum after the attacks by Osama bin Laden on US embassies in East Africa in 1998. The "don't be hasty" school would rather take the Lockerbie approach – the long haul to justice.
This view could not be more wrong. On the contrary, this is the moment – and it will not last long – when the US can and should take decisive military action against those rogue regimes which have for too long harboured and financed terrorism. Top of the hit list must be Saddam Hussein, closely followed by the Taliban government in Afghanistan. I should be sorry if Colonel Gaddafi were to escape unscathed. Whether or not one or all of them gave their backing to this particular attack does not especially matter. They are dangerous – not least to the people of the countries they despotically rule.
Is this realistic? Sure. The US is, after all, the world hegemony. Whether Americans like it or not, they are an imperial power – and hated as such by many impoverished and aggrieved people around the world. Well, they may as well be hung for sheep as for lambs. They may as well act like an imperial power.
Americans are, of course, used to military action. Unfortunately, thanks to another cinema genre – the anti-Vietnam movie – they exaggerate its difficulty and cost. There is in fact no state in the world capable of resisting the full might of the US armed forces today, if Americans have the will to exert that might.
So the next 48 hours will reveal the future role of the United States on this planet it turns out to share with the rest of us. The choice is between moving swiftly – and just plain going to the movies. If America chooses the latter, the terrorists will be able to choose their next target with impunity.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Said Ghazali: There can be no more dancing on the dead
The author is a freelance Palestinian journalist
'The only way we Palestinians can beat the Israelis is by seizing the moral high ground'
The Palestinian lady with a sinister look brandishing her arms and almost dancing with delight in front of a CNN camera looks like a witch. There is venom in her heart and evil in her eyes. And yet that image, continuously projected worldwide by so many TV stations, in the aftermath of the worst terror attack of the modern age is not true and not fair.
The reality is far different, far more complex, and hard for the western mind to comprehend. The great majority of Palestinians are not sinister terrorists, savage, blood-drinking cannibals who glory in the massive slaughter of other people. We are human beings, who feel acutely sensitive to the suffering of others, and especially the brutality of Tuesday's events in America.
Yet this is so hard to get across to outsiders. And, in my view, this is the fault of both the Israelis and my own people. Israeli officials are far smarter than their Palestinian counterparts in the subtle arts of public relations. They write – often without the reader knowing who they are – in leading American newspapers and participate in the endless talk show circuit. Their English is better than ours; they are more articulate. They beat us hands down.
But it is also the fault of our own leadership and we – the Palestinian people – will now pay the price more heavily than ever before. Nothing can justify glorying in the massacre suffered in the United States. Those scenes of people – who, by the way, were few in number – dancing in the streets of the occupied territories made me feel sick. And many others like me felt the same way.
My wife, Sana, cried as she watched the ball of fire coming out of the collapsing World Trade Centre. "They are bastards." Who, I asked? "Those who are celebrating. This is the ugliest crime of the twenty-first century." But these people do not represent the Palestinian people. They do not represent those who have relatives in the United States or those who have businesses in the West Bank town of Ramallah and in New York. Nor do they have anything to do with those who came back – so hopefully – from abroad during the Oslo years to build hotels and McDonald restaurants, or those who built their own World Trade Centre – a tiny building in the Gaza Strip – or those Palestinian policemen who were trained by the CIA, no less, to combat terror.
In short, they are uneducated, the members of the generations lost to the last intifada, the intensely poor. They are the 13-year-olds who have come to admire gunmen as heroes, and the 21-year-old gunmen themselves who used to throw stones during the intifada of 1987-1993. You cannot defend what they did. But you try to understand what lies behind it – a task that TV pictures fail miserably to perform.
The TV coverage of the Palestinian reaction to Tuesday's horrors failed to mention that 50 per cent of the Palestinians now live under the poverty line – that's $2 a day. It failed to mention that most Palestinians live in separated enclaves – Bantustans now ringed by the Israeli military. My uncle in Hebron simply could not attend my cousin's wedding in east Jerusalem last week. The Israeli checkpoints made sure of that. I cannot begin to list the number of friends I have, in Gaza, Nablus, Hebron, Tulkarm, who are trapped in their own towns – people who used freely to come to see me in Jerusalem.
Many Palestinians have no food, no jobs, insufficient medicine. They have been bombarded time and again by Israeli Apaches and F-16s. And they have taken note that these weapons are manufactured in the United States.
No matter. There is no excuse for any kind of celebration over the deaths of thousands of innocents in America. And the time has come to stop celebrating our own dead too. If there is a way forward it is through peace. The only way we can beat the Israelis is by seizing the moral high ground. The last time Palestinians danced in the streets was at the start of the Oslo peace process. Now some – a pathetic rabble – dance over the bodies of dead Americans.
But do not allow those stupid demonstrations of mirth to act as a reason for setting aside the underlying causes for anti-American sentiment, or for paying no further heed to the Palestinian plight. Now we must do something tangible to change our damaged image and to condemn this horrible massacre, and not only in words. Oslo brought us unemployment, a new mafia – the Palestinian Authority, who sucked our economy dry, like Israel used to do – and now a new conflict. But now is a moment for reflection.
It is the job of our leadership dramatically to change its tactics and strategy. Our president, Yasser Arafat – who condemned it verbally – should take action now. He should tell every single Palestinian man, woman and child that the killing must stop. Stop the violence. Look for peaceful means. Talk with the Israelis. But stick to our rights. This will take time, but it is our only option. And no more – my brothers – dancing over the dead.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chris Buckley: To punish innocent Afghans would be immoral
The writer is the Afghanistan programme officer of Christian Aid
'Most people there don't have televisions or radios. They will not have heard of the World Trade Centre'
I have just returned from Afghanistan, and cannot avoid a growing feeling of dread at what may be about to befall the people I have left behind. The bellicose statements being issued by America and her allies about revenge and retaliation for Tuesday's horrific terrorist attacks against New York and Washington seem to be softening up Western electorates for some kind of massive military action against the Afghan people.
Because of these threats, aid organisations have been forced to pull out their foreign workers – fearing either that they may be caught in the expected raids, or that they would be attacked because they are Westerners after the Nato bombers have flown away. The effects of this withdrawal could be infinitely more tragic and devastating than the worst that a wounded America may throw at this troubled, long-suffering country.
For, although it has gone largely unreported, Afghanistan is in the grip of a three-year drought and on the verge of mass starvation. Figures from the UN-run World Food Programme claim that, by the end of the year, 5.5 million people will be entirely dependent on food aid to survive the hard winter – that's a quarter of the population. As the Christian Aid programme officer responsible for Afghanistan, I have been helping to supply food and seeds to communities in desperate need. In a few weeks, the winter snows will come, cutting off the hundreds of isolated villages whose only links to the outside world are rutted dirt tracks. Without seeds, they will be unable to replant for next year. Without food aid now, thousands could be dead before the spring.
Already fears on the ground about this pending catastrophe are filtering through. Only yesterday, I received this message from one of the local organisations funded by Christian Aid: "What will happen to the people if aid agencies remain reluctant to resume full operations? The consequences are quite clear that people who are already suffering would be the victims. And if any military action is taken, Afghan staff and civilians will be in real danger.
"Terrorism is the worst thing and it shows how blind these people are as human beings. But if the leaders do not have patience and tolerance, they can only do further damage."
This, I think you must agree, is not a voice from a country of dedicated international terrorists or religious fanatics. But it is a voice from the real Afghanistan, unrecognisable from the demonised image we are constantly being urged to accept.
The real Afghanistan is one where 85 per cent of the population are subsistence farmers. Most Afghans don't have newspapers, television sets or radios. They will not have heard of the World Trade Centre or the Pentagon, and most will have no idea that a group of zealots has attacked these icons of western civilisation. There isn't even a postal service.
Now, in these isolated villages, many families are down to their last few weeks of food and, already, men women and children in the bulging refugee camps are dying of cholera and malnutrition. I have spoken to orphans with swollen bellies. I have spoken to men who have no money to hire trucks to escape the drought and make it to the camps. I have spoken to families who say they will wait in their villages for death. And that was even before the aid agencies were forced to withdraw.
Afghans are not willing victims – they are hardy people, as any Soviet general will testify. For the past three years, they have been doing all they can to survive – sharing food, borrowing money to buy food, crossing the borders with Pakistan and Iran to find illegal, badly-paid work. Many used to work on the opium farms as casual labourers but the work is scarce.
All these sources of income have gradually dried up. Pakistan and Iran are throwing thousands of Afghans out each month, the Taliban have banned opium production and there is no food or credit to be had after three years of stifling drought.
As I write this, our worst fears have been realised. I have just received the following message from a friend who works for another of our partner organisations in western Afghanistan. He writes: "I hope you are fine. We have spoken to the World Food Programme in Herat, and asked them to release food so we can distribute it to our beneficiaries who are in severe need. But WFP has stopped their activities right now. Could you please see if it is possible to get the release from WFP?"
That is a real cry for help. Other friends there have stressed the need for the world to adopt a comprehensive approach to the terrorist threat – addressing the underlying causes of this terrifying phenomenon rather than just seeking to extract revenge.
Let me be clear and straightforward about this. The murder of thousands of innocent Americans has shocked and appalled us all. But any military action which disrupts the flow of aid to millions of equally innocent Afghans would be equally immoral.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------
------------------
sp00ky (http://www.roughjustice.co.uk)
---------------------------
Disclaimer
------------------------------
I am not expecting to change anything by this post other than awareness. Please do not take anything I say as fact, I am only relaying opinon of limited sources, who themselves know nothing and thus should also be ignored as heresay and could never be admissable in a court of law.
The writer is professor of political and financial history at Oxford University
Americans are of course used to catastrophes. Only this summer there was Pearl Harbor, the movie. Not to mention Independence Day. Somehow even so shocking a spectacle as the destruction of the World Trade Centre had something familiar about it. Was it in Die Hard that we saw it? Or was it Godzilla? Americans are of course not used to real catastrophes, as opposed to the sort that Bruce Willis is able to avert at the 11th hour. Even Pearl Harbor, where 2,395 Americans died in 1941, is rather a long way from the United States proper.
Of course, the 1995 Oklahoma bombing gave Americans a foretaste of what war against civilians is like. But not until this week had an American city come so close to experiencing an aerial bombardment comparable in its destructiveness with those of the Second World War. So this was not Pearl Harbor III, but an American Blitz.
Yet this was a Blitz with a difference, for Londoners at least had the consolation in the 1940s of knowing exactly who the enemy was. Perhaps the true significance of this week's attacks, then, is that they mark America's belated arrival in the age of terrorism.
The implications go far beyond the long overdue tightening of security on American domestic flights, however. It is the American psyche that these horrors will change forever. And if one were feeling callous, one might add: not before time. I have spent a good deal of time in the US in the past couple of years; indeed, I was due to fly to New York on Wednesday morning for a series of lectures (I even had a room booked between the World Trade Centre and Wall Street). The last time I was there, it really hit me – the way Americans subconsciously feel themselves to be in a planet of their own. It is, or rather it was, a strangely seductive planet, part Planet Hollywood, part Spacestation Nasdaq.
The longer I spent there – chomping tuna steaks, slurping Zinfandel, watching baseball and tracking tech stocks – the further away the rest of Planet Earth seemed to be. To many Americans, Europe might as well be on the moon, Asia on Mars and Africa on the dark side of Neptune. Only Mexico feels near, and that's only because half the Mexicans seem to have moved to the US.
That illusion of separateness is now over. The only question is whether George W Bush will draw the right conclusions for US foreign and defence policy. Unfortunately, he may not.
It is widely believed by many US policy wonks that Bill Clinton was too much of an interventionist in foreign trouble spots. From Sarajevo to Somalia, people have bad memories of GIs under fire in places disconcertingly remote from Planet Hollywood. (The truth about Clinton, however, was that his interventions were generally too short and underpowered to be effective: for Clinton, the exit strategy and the approval ratings were alpha and omega.)
There will be those who will argue strongly against precipitate retaliatory action by the US. They will warn against a repeat of Bill Clinton's bombing of Khartoum after the attacks by Osama bin Laden on US embassies in East Africa in 1998. The "don't be hasty" school would rather take the Lockerbie approach – the long haul to justice.
This view could not be more wrong. On the contrary, this is the moment – and it will not last long – when the US can and should take decisive military action against those rogue regimes which have for too long harboured and financed terrorism. Top of the hit list must be Saddam Hussein, closely followed by the Taliban government in Afghanistan. I should be sorry if Colonel Gaddafi were to escape unscathed. Whether or not one or all of them gave their backing to this particular attack does not especially matter. They are dangerous – not least to the people of the countries they despotically rule.
Is this realistic? Sure. The US is, after all, the world hegemony. Whether Americans like it or not, they are an imperial power – and hated as such by many impoverished and aggrieved people around the world. Well, they may as well be hung for sheep as for lambs. They may as well act like an imperial power.
Americans are, of course, used to military action. Unfortunately, thanks to another cinema genre – the anti-Vietnam movie – they exaggerate its difficulty and cost. There is in fact no state in the world capable of resisting the full might of the US armed forces today, if Americans have the will to exert that might.
So the next 48 hours will reveal the future role of the United States on this planet it turns out to share with the rest of us. The choice is between moving swiftly – and just plain going to the movies. If America chooses the latter, the terrorists will be able to choose their next target with impunity.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Said Ghazali: There can be no more dancing on the dead
The author is a freelance Palestinian journalist
'The only way we Palestinians can beat the Israelis is by seizing the moral high ground'
The Palestinian lady with a sinister look brandishing her arms and almost dancing with delight in front of a CNN camera looks like a witch. There is venom in her heart and evil in her eyes. And yet that image, continuously projected worldwide by so many TV stations, in the aftermath of the worst terror attack of the modern age is not true and not fair.
The reality is far different, far more complex, and hard for the western mind to comprehend. The great majority of Palestinians are not sinister terrorists, savage, blood-drinking cannibals who glory in the massive slaughter of other people. We are human beings, who feel acutely sensitive to the suffering of others, and especially the brutality of Tuesday's events in America.
Yet this is so hard to get across to outsiders. And, in my view, this is the fault of both the Israelis and my own people. Israeli officials are far smarter than their Palestinian counterparts in the subtle arts of public relations. They write – often without the reader knowing who they are – in leading American newspapers and participate in the endless talk show circuit. Their English is better than ours; they are more articulate. They beat us hands down.
But it is also the fault of our own leadership and we – the Palestinian people – will now pay the price more heavily than ever before. Nothing can justify glorying in the massacre suffered in the United States. Those scenes of people – who, by the way, were few in number – dancing in the streets of the occupied territories made me feel sick. And many others like me felt the same way.
My wife, Sana, cried as she watched the ball of fire coming out of the collapsing World Trade Centre. "They are bastards." Who, I asked? "Those who are celebrating. This is the ugliest crime of the twenty-first century." But these people do not represent the Palestinian people. They do not represent those who have relatives in the United States or those who have businesses in the West Bank town of Ramallah and in New York. Nor do they have anything to do with those who came back – so hopefully – from abroad during the Oslo years to build hotels and McDonald restaurants, or those who built their own World Trade Centre – a tiny building in the Gaza Strip – or those Palestinian policemen who were trained by the CIA, no less, to combat terror.
In short, they are uneducated, the members of the generations lost to the last intifada, the intensely poor. They are the 13-year-olds who have come to admire gunmen as heroes, and the 21-year-old gunmen themselves who used to throw stones during the intifada of 1987-1993. You cannot defend what they did. But you try to understand what lies behind it – a task that TV pictures fail miserably to perform.
The TV coverage of the Palestinian reaction to Tuesday's horrors failed to mention that 50 per cent of the Palestinians now live under the poverty line – that's $2 a day. It failed to mention that most Palestinians live in separated enclaves – Bantustans now ringed by the Israeli military. My uncle in Hebron simply could not attend my cousin's wedding in east Jerusalem last week. The Israeli checkpoints made sure of that. I cannot begin to list the number of friends I have, in Gaza, Nablus, Hebron, Tulkarm, who are trapped in their own towns – people who used freely to come to see me in Jerusalem.
Many Palestinians have no food, no jobs, insufficient medicine. They have been bombarded time and again by Israeli Apaches and F-16s. And they have taken note that these weapons are manufactured in the United States.
No matter. There is no excuse for any kind of celebration over the deaths of thousands of innocents in America. And the time has come to stop celebrating our own dead too. If there is a way forward it is through peace. The only way we can beat the Israelis is by seizing the moral high ground. The last time Palestinians danced in the streets was at the start of the Oslo peace process. Now some – a pathetic rabble – dance over the bodies of dead Americans.
But do not allow those stupid demonstrations of mirth to act as a reason for setting aside the underlying causes for anti-American sentiment, or for paying no further heed to the Palestinian plight. Now we must do something tangible to change our damaged image and to condemn this horrible massacre, and not only in words. Oslo brought us unemployment, a new mafia – the Palestinian Authority, who sucked our economy dry, like Israel used to do – and now a new conflict. But now is a moment for reflection.
It is the job of our leadership dramatically to change its tactics and strategy. Our president, Yasser Arafat – who condemned it verbally – should take action now. He should tell every single Palestinian man, woman and child that the killing must stop. Stop the violence. Look for peaceful means. Talk with the Israelis. But stick to our rights. This will take time, but it is our only option. And no more – my brothers – dancing over the dead.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chris Buckley: To punish innocent Afghans would be immoral
The writer is the Afghanistan programme officer of Christian Aid
'Most people there don't have televisions or radios. They will not have heard of the World Trade Centre'
I have just returned from Afghanistan, and cannot avoid a growing feeling of dread at what may be about to befall the people I have left behind. The bellicose statements being issued by America and her allies about revenge and retaliation for Tuesday's horrific terrorist attacks against New York and Washington seem to be softening up Western electorates for some kind of massive military action against the Afghan people.
Because of these threats, aid organisations have been forced to pull out their foreign workers – fearing either that they may be caught in the expected raids, or that they would be attacked because they are Westerners after the Nato bombers have flown away. The effects of this withdrawal could be infinitely more tragic and devastating than the worst that a wounded America may throw at this troubled, long-suffering country.
For, although it has gone largely unreported, Afghanistan is in the grip of a three-year drought and on the verge of mass starvation. Figures from the UN-run World Food Programme claim that, by the end of the year, 5.5 million people will be entirely dependent on food aid to survive the hard winter – that's a quarter of the population. As the Christian Aid programme officer responsible for Afghanistan, I have been helping to supply food and seeds to communities in desperate need. In a few weeks, the winter snows will come, cutting off the hundreds of isolated villages whose only links to the outside world are rutted dirt tracks. Without seeds, they will be unable to replant for next year. Without food aid now, thousands could be dead before the spring.
Already fears on the ground about this pending catastrophe are filtering through. Only yesterday, I received this message from one of the local organisations funded by Christian Aid: "What will happen to the people if aid agencies remain reluctant to resume full operations? The consequences are quite clear that people who are already suffering would be the victims. And if any military action is taken, Afghan staff and civilians will be in real danger.
"Terrorism is the worst thing and it shows how blind these people are as human beings. But if the leaders do not have patience and tolerance, they can only do further damage."
This, I think you must agree, is not a voice from a country of dedicated international terrorists or religious fanatics. But it is a voice from the real Afghanistan, unrecognisable from the demonised image we are constantly being urged to accept.
The real Afghanistan is one where 85 per cent of the population are subsistence farmers. Most Afghans don't have newspapers, television sets or radios. They will not have heard of the World Trade Centre or the Pentagon, and most will have no idea that a group of zealots has attacked these icons of western civilisation. There isn't even a postal service.
Now, in these isolated villages, many families are down to their last few weeks of food and, already, men women and children in the bulging refugee camps are dying of cholera and malnutrition. I have spoken to orphans with swollen bellies. I have spoken to men who have no money to hire trucks to escape the drought and make it to the camps. I have spoken to families who say they will wait in their villages for death. And that was even before the aid agencies were forced to withdraw.
Afghans are not willing victims – they are hardy people, as any Soviet general will testify. For the past three years, they have been doing all they can to survive – sharing food, borrowing money to buy food, crossing the borders with Pakistan and Iran to find illegal, badly-paid work. Many used to work on the opium farms as casual labourers but the work is scarce.
All these sources of income have gradually dried up. Pakistan and Iran are throwing thousands of Afghans out each month, the Taliban have banned opium production and there is no food or credit to be had after three years of stifling drought.
As I write this, our worst fears have been realised. I have just received the following message from a friend who works for another of our partner organisations in western Afghanistan. He writes: "I hope you are fine. We have spoken to the World Food Programme in Herat, and asked them to release food so we can distribute it to our beneficiaries who are in severe need. But WFP has stopped their activities right now. Could you please see if it is possible to get the release from WFP?"
That is a real cry for help. Other friends there have stressed the need for the world to adopt a comprehensive approach to the terrorist threat – addressing the underlying causes of this terrifying phenomenon rather than just seeking to extract revenge.
Let me be clear and straightforward about this. The murder of thousands of innocent Americans has shocked and appalled us all. But any military action which disrupts the flow of aid to millions of equally innocent Afghans would be equally immoral.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------
------------------
sp00ky (http://www.roughjustice.co.uk)
---------------------------
Disclaimer
------------------------------
I am not expecting to change anything by this post other than awareness. Please do not take anything I say as fact, I am only relaying opinon of limited sources, who themselves know nothing and thus should also be ignored as heresay and could never be admissable in a court of law.