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"WW III? No thanks...!" On-Line Library

What is an appropropriate response?
Political and philosophical considerations after the attack on the Word Trade Center

They can't see why they are hated

Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New 
York and Washington, it has become clear that most Americans simply don't get it

SEUMAS MILNE
The Mail&Guardian (South Africa)
2001/09/14

From the president to passers-by on the streets, the message seems to be the 
same: this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy that must be 
answered with force Ñ just as soon as someone can construct a credible account 
of who was actually responsible.

Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of recognition of
why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing 
their own lives in the process Ñ or why the United States is hated with such 
bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing 
world Ñ seems almost entirely absent.

Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull people 
from the rubble, any but a small minority might make the connection between 
what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon 
large parts of the world.

But make that connection they must if such tragedies are not to be repeated, 
potentially with even more devastating consequences. US political leaders are 
doing their people no favours by reinforcing popular ignorance with 
self-referential rhetoric. And the echoing chorus of British Prime Minister 
Tony Blair will only fuel anti-Western sentiment. So will calls for the defence
of "civilisation", with its overtones of Samuel Huntington's poisonous theories 
of post-Cold War confrontation between the West and Islam, heightening 
perceptions of racism and hypocrisy.

Since President George W Bush's father inaugurated his new world order a decade
ago, the US, supported by its British ally, bestrides the world like a colossus.
Unconstrained by any superpower rival or system of global governance, the US 
giant has rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own interest;
ripped up a string of treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to every 
corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq without 
troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of murderous embargoes 
against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown its weight behind Israel's 
illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

If, as the Wall Street Journal insisted, the East Coast carnage was the fruit 
of the Clinton administration's Munich-like appeasement of the Palestinians, 
the mind boggles as to what US Republicans imagine to be a Churchillian 
response.

It is this record of unabashed national egotism and arrogance that drives 
anti-Americanism among swaths of the world's population, for whom there is 
little democracy in the current distribution of global wealth and power. If it 
turns out that Tuesday's attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden's supporters,
the sense that the Americans are once again reaping a dragons' teeth harvest 
they themselves sowed will be overwhelming.

It was the Americans, after all, who poured resources into the 1980s war 
against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul. Bin Laden and his mojahedin were 
armed and trained by the CIA and MI6, as Afghanistan was turned into a 
wasteland and its communist leader, Najibullah Ahmadzai, was left hanging from 
a lamp-post with his genitals stuffed in his mouth.

But by then Bin Laden had turned against his American sponsors, while 
US-sponsored Pakistani intelligence had spawned the grotesque Taliban now 
protecting him. To punish its wayward Afghan offspring, the US subsequently 
forced through a sanctions regime that has helped push four million to the 
brink of starvation, according to UN figures, while Afghan refugees fan out 
across the world.

All this must doubtlessly seem remote to Americans desperately searching the 
debris of what is expected to be the largest-ever massacre on US soil - as must
the killings of yet more Palestinians in the West Bank, or even the two million 
people estimated to have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo's wars since 
the overthrow of the US-backed Mobutu Sese Seko regime.

"What could some political thing have to do with blowing up office buildings 
during working hours?" one bewildered New Yorker asked.

Already, the Bush administration is assembling an international coalition for 
an Israeli-style war against terrorism, as if such counterproductive acts of 
outrage had an existence separate from the social conditions out of which they 
arise. But for every "terror network" that is rooted out, another will emerge -
until the injustices that produce them are addressed.