http://www.guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0,1300,551086,00.html
They can't see why they are hated
Americans cannot ignore what their government does abroad
Seumas Milne
Thursday September 13, 2001
The Guardian
Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers
in New York and Washington, it has become painfully clear that most
Americans simply don't get it. From the president to passersby on the
streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an inexplicable
assault on freedom and democracy, which must be answered with
overwhelming force - 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 - or why the
United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and
Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost
entirely absent. Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue
workers struggle to pull firefighters 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 Tony Blair, whose determination to bind Britain ever closer
to US foreign policy ratchets up the threat to our own cities, 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.
As Mahatma Gandhi famously remarked when asked his opinion of western
civilisation, it would be a good idea. Since George 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 embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown
its weight behind Israel's 34-year illegal military occupation of the
West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages.
If, as yesterday's 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, at a time when girls
could go to school and women to work. 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 left hanging from a
Kabul 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 which has helped push
4m to the brink of starvation, according to the latest UN figures,
while Afghan refugees fan out across the world.
All this must doubtless 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
yesterday, or even the 2m estimated to have died in Congo's wars since
the overthrow of the US-backed Mobutu regime. "What could some
political thing have to do with blowing up office buildings during
working hours?" one bewildered New Yorker asked yesterday.
Already, the Bush administration is assembling an international
coalition for an Israeli-style war against terrorism, as if such
counter-productive 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 and inequalities that produce them are addressed.
s.milne@guardian.co.uk
