topic by
nemesis
12/10/2001 (19:58)

http://www.dawn.com/2001/12/10/op.htm#1

Reasonable suspicions?

By Sayeed Hasan Khan & Kurt Jacobsen

In his 1970s film 'The Outlaw Josey Wales' Clint Eastwood plays a tough brigand who fights for the rebel South during the American Civil War. When the war ends the Eastwood character is pursued relentlessly across America by enemy cavalry led by a zealous officer.

On the brink of snaring their deadly quarry a scout turns to his commander and remarks that they soon can return home since the hunt is nearly over. The officer sneers and tells the startled scout: 'Doing good ain't got no end.' He will go on chasing 'evil doers,' forever.

So what exactly does President Bush, who enjoys talking in terms of pure good (everyone who backs him unquestioningly) versus pure evil (everyone else), have in mind when he says that the campaign will not conclude with the destruction of Al Qaeda and the deposing of the Taliban? Isn't that what his allies, and most of the American public, signed up for? 'There's a lot of focus on Afghanistan these days,' Bush warned last week. 'But there's going to be other fronts in this theatre.'

Last week at the White House Bush met Philippines President Arroyo and acknowledged that American advisers are involved in counter-insurgency against Abu Sayyaf Muslim separatists, who allegedly are linked to Bin-Laden - an allegation which looks like a very handy licence for attacking anyone at all: 'We're going to fight terror wherever it exists.'

Bush did not even try to evade the tricky question whether he might commit the US combat troops in new adventures: 'We will work with our allies and friends to use whatever resources we have to win the war against terror.' Why must the hunt for Bin Laden become an open-ended search for ill-defined terrorists wherever US authorities say they lurk? Did anyone read the fine print in the coalition deal?

Obviously, a lone superpower can award itself carte blanche but it is not always a smart thing to do. There evidently are smart people in Bush's administration; the question is whether they will keep the upper hand as the intervention plays out.

Yet suppose Osama bin-Laden's charred body is identified, Taliban remnants are bottled up in pockets of resistance, the leadership of Al Qaeda are killed or captured, and its members dispersed and hounded by police around the planet. How much further can a military mission go, and how can it be justified? To lift a term from US Attorney General John Ashcroft, who is busy eroding civil rights, there are grounds for 'reasonable suspicion' that the Bush agenda merely merged a popular thirst for revenge for September 11 into typical long-range but short-sighted superpower schemes.

American elites, after all, have a bloated military budget to justify despite the absence of a threat of Soviet magnitude. Right-wingers accordingly leap at a chance to put on a carefully edited show of strength for ordinary citizens who now endure a recession and must get by with the most miserly health and social welfare system in the indutsrialized world. The United States, which feeds 80 per cent of its children properly, bombs and raids Afghanistan which is hardly able to feed 20 per cent of its children. Neither figure is anything to brag about.

New legal measures in the US and the UK smack of Orwell's 1984 where a deliberately engineered state of permanent war abroad justifies permanent repression at home. Insert 'anti-terrorist' for 'anti-communist' in cold war era texts and you glimpse what a strong faction in the Bush administration want to recreate, although they may not succeed. Many Pakistanis in the US have become victim of this policy. Too quick a victory in Afghanistan, ironically, may thwart this belligerent agenda.

During the cold war the United States subverted the democratic regime of Chile and undermined liberation movements from Iran to Guatemala to East Timor. Another superpower, for all its own terrible faults, imposed limits on US actions, and even prodded it on occasion to set a few good examples at home and abroad - if only to show up the reds. After the Soviet collapse the ambitions of giddy rightwing American elites went unchecked, although they did miss having a plausible enemy.

Hardliners on opposing sides always need, and reflect, each other. To fill the empty space of the enemy 'other' professor Samuel Huntington (Clash of Civilizations) and Osama Bin Laden, and their respective disciples, have contrived to try to divide the world, delusionally and dangerously, between Islam and the West.

One might imagine that western powers would have enough post-intervention work to do stabilizing a new regime, rebuilding Afghanistan, and working out a Middle East peace accord. British prime minister Tony Blair encouragingly promised the Afghan people that 'the conflict will not be the end' and that he would work for a 'humanitarian coalition alongside the military coalition.'

Secretary of State Colin Powell has made similar remarks but Washington apparently is still debating what its role, if any, will be in a 'peacekeeping mission' phase. The US administration is itching to go after Iraq where Bush wants to attend to his father's 'unfinished business.' (If any unfinished business needs attention, one ought to recall that during the Gulf war, Bush senior promised to solve the Middle East crisis too).

An indiscriminate hunt for militants beyond the lairs of Afghanistan is bound to expand the pool of discontented Muslims as a result of the brutalities of the hunt itself. Osama or Osama look-alikes will be sighted in every dark corner from Yemen to Somalia and forces will be dispatched to punish them and in the process 'collaterally' harm the poor masses in unlucky locales.

As in the cold war, the staunchest American allies coincidentally will be the richest and most repressive groups. The lamentable history of American foreign policy is that it often creates terrorists - Contras in Nicaragua, Mujahideen in Afghanistan - and once its purpose is served it treats them as if they can be switched off by a button.

Hunting for undefined terrorists also leaves a lot of leeway for interpretation. Behold the antics in Zimbabwe of imperious Robert Mugabe, former freedom fighter and terrorist, who faces the prospect of a well-deserved electoral 'overthrow' and is desperately scrambling for any pretext to harass opponents.

'We would like [the Movement for Democratic Change] to know that we agree with President Bush that anyone who in any way finances, harbours or defends the terrorists is himself a terrorist,' the Mugabe-controlled Herald newspaper piously but menacingly stated. 'We too will not make any difference between terrorists and their friends or supporters.' Indeed. these same sentiments could have been uttered by indignant rulers against the African National Congress in the 1970s, Irish rebels in 1920, and for that matter, the Continental Congress of the United States in the late 1770s too.

American foreign policy officials, hopefully, will pause and ponder carefully before embarking on a vindictive adventure in the most volatile area of the world. A likely result of war with Iraq, however repellent Saddam Hussein is, maybe the destabilization of shaky regimes in Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Bush will be left alone with Israel to face the Arab masses who will have nothing to lose and nothing to thank the US for. They will not need to be 'Islamized' to be angry.

Given that prospect, how long will Europe support the US? Hopefully, some bright sparks in the Pentagon or CIA or State Department may mutter the right warning in the right ears. It is easy for Bush to perform on TV for an angry US audience but everything he does looks very different to the masses of the Muslim world. Treading carefully here will avoid the violent 'blowback' that professor Chalmers Johnson, in his insightful book of that same title, finds American policy too often engendering. In international politics, as well as in cowboy movies, it pays to know when to ride off into the sunset.