False promises from the national security state
Could it be more clear that the post-9/11 Terror War being executed by US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair is an abject failure? These proponents of brutal violence, torture, and devastating war under the guise of national security should be naked in their mendacity at this point.
Certain creations-turned-to-opponents of the market elites who run both the US and the UK unfortunately have managed to gain new recruits for spectacular attacks directed back at the controlling societies. After the 7/7 attack last week on public transportation in London, we again face the question: Why do they hate us?
If it was not evident to many in the US in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, now after four years of US-sponsored bombing, war, detention without evidence or trial and torture, any honest answer to the question must examine the notion that a wide swath of the planet’s population feels it is in a fight for its property, culture, and very survival against these US-centered elites.
I examined these questions in my post-911 essay. It’s worth re-reading that today if only to note that President Bush and the war machine he commands is not at all interested in budging from the inimical course it has set since then.
The bellicose public justifications for resort to police-state mentality and military adventures merely have been enhanced after the 7/7 attack in London last week.
“We have carried the fight to the enemy. We are rolling back the terrorist threat to civilization, not on the fringes of its influence, but at the heart of its power,” says President Bush.
Sounds like something he put out since the London attack, right? Er, no… he had terrorism “rolled back” back on September 7, 2003. Since then, as he always steadfastly refuses to notice, his Iraq project has spiraled into a colossal quagmire with thousands US deaths and injuries and countless Iraqi casualties.
For now, I’ll defer to a former Blair adviser, David Clark, who wrote in a Saturday comment in The Guardian that, “This terror will continue until we take Arab grievances seriously”.
The hawkish Clark argued for reducing the threat of terrorism with what has always seemed obvious to me:
An effective strategy can be developed, but it means turning our attention away from the terrorists and on to the conditions that allow them to recruit and operate….
From this point of view, it must be said that everything that has followed the fall of Kabul has been ruinous to the task of winning over moderate Muslim opinion and isolating the terrorists within their own communities. In Iraq we allowed America to rip up the rule book of counter-insurgency with a military adventure that was dishonestly conceived and incompetently executed. Tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis have been killed by US troops uninterested in distinguishing between combatant and noncombatant, or even counting the dead. The hostility engendered has been so extreme that the CIA has been forced to conclude that Iraq may become a worse breeding ground for international terrorism that Afghanistan was. Bin Laden can hardly believe his luck.
In fact a wide range of hawks and former US administration or UK officials from the rationalist group, including former US terrorism czar Richard Clarke, Thomas Sanderson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and Robin Cook (who fell out with Blair prior to the Iraq invasion) have argued that “The struggle against terrorism cannot be won by military means”.
What the military adventures have done instead is create chaos in weak countries battered by years of often-US-supported dictatorship, sanctions, war, bombing, home invasion, extrajudicial arrest & detention in violation of the most basic precepts of international law, dominating violations of personal dignity and religious practice of detainees — certainly this means Iraq, but Afghanistan qualifies in essential respects too. Everyone throughout the Middle East and Arab/Muslim world can see what has happened, even if Americans and their jingo media can’t. What happened in London on 7/7, as terrible as it was, happens multiple times every day in America’s Iraq.
So it is not surprising that people who perceive themselves to be on the wrong end of US attacks would try to turn what President Bush says about how “We will stay on the offense, fighting the terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them at home” right back in his face. We all lose when this happens.