http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=94254
Robert Fisk: Bush is walking into a trap
16 September 2001
Retaliation is a trap. In a world that was supposed to have learnt that the
rule of law comes above revenge, President Bush appears to be heading for
the very disaster that Osama bin Laden has laid down for him. Let us have no
doubts about what happened in New York and Washington last week. It was a
crime against humanity. We cannot understand America's need to retaliate
unless we accept this bleak, awesome fact. But this crime was perpetrated ?
it becomes ever clearer ? to provoke the United States into just the blind,
arrogant punch that the US military is preparing.
Mr bin Laden ? every day his culpability becomes more apparent ? has
described to me how he wishes to overthrow the pro-American regime of the
Middle East, starting with Saudi Arabia and moving on to Egypt, Jordan and
the other Gulf states. In an Arab world sunk in corruption and
dictatorships ? most of them supported by the West ? the only act that might
bring Muslims to strike at their own leaders would be a brutal,
indiscriminate assault by the United States. Mr bin Laden is unsophisticated
in foreign affairs, but a close student of the art and horror of war. He
knew how to fight the Russians who stayed on in Afghanistan, a Russian
monster that revenged itself upon its ill-educated, courageous antagonists
until, faced with war without end, the entire Soviet Union began to fall
apart.
The Chechens learnt this lesson. And the man responsible for so much of the
bloodbath in Chechnya ? the career KGB man whose army is raping and
murdering the insurgent Sunni Muslim population of Chechnya ? is now being
signed up by Mr Bush for his "war against people''. Vladimir Putin must
surely have a sense of humour to appreciate the cruel ironies that have now
come to pass, though I doubt if he will let Mr Bush know what happens when
you start a war of retaliation; your army ? like the Russian forces in
Chechnya ? becomes locked into battle with an enemy that appears ever more
ruthless, ever more evil.
But the Americans need look no further than Ariel Sharon's futile war with
the Palestinians to understand the folly of retaliation. In Lebanon, it was
always the same. A Hizbollah guerrilla would kill an Israeli occupation
soldier, and the Israelis would fire back in retaliation at a village in
which a civilian would die. The Hizbollah would retaliate with a Katyusha
missile attack over the Israeli border, and the Israelis would retaliate
again with a bombardment of southern Lebanon. In the end, the Hizbollah ?
the "centre of world terror'' according to Mr Sharon ? drove the Israelis
out of Lebanon.
In Israel/Palestine, it is the same story. An Israeli soldier shoots a
Palestinian stone-thrower. The Palestinians retaliate by killing a settler.
The Israelis then retaliate by sending a murder squad to kill a Palestinian
gunman. The Palestinians retaliate by sending a suicide bomber into a
pizzeria. The Israelis then retaliate by sending F-16s to bomb a Palestinian
police station. Retaliation leads to retaliation and more retaliation. War
without end.
And while Mr Bush ? and perhaps Mr Blair ? prepare their forces, they
explain so meretriciously that this is a war for "democracy and liberty'',
that it is about men who are "attacking civilisation''. "America was
targeted for attack,'' Mr Bush informed us on Friday, "because we are the
brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.'' But this is not
why America was attacked. If this was an Arab-Muslim apocalypse, then it is
intimately associated with events in the Middle East and with America's
stewardship of the area. Arabs, it might be added, would rather like some of
that democracy and liberty and freedom that Mr Bush has been telling them
about. Instead, they get a president who wins 98 per cent in the elections
(Washington's friend, Mr Mubarak) or a Palestinian police force, trained by
the CIA, that tortures and sometimes kills its people in prison. The Syrians
would also like a little of that democracy. So would the Saudis. But their
effete princes are all friends of America ? in many cases, educated at US
universities.
I will always remember how President Clinton announced that Saddam Hussein ?
another of our grotesque inventions ? must be overthrown so that the people
of Iraq could choose their own leaders. But if that happened, it would be
the first time in Middle Eastern history that Arabs have been permitted to
do so. No, it is "our'' democracy and "our'' liberty and freedom that Mr
Bush and Mr Blair are talking about, our Western sanctuary that is under
attack, not the vast place of terror and injustice that the Middle East has
become.
Let me illustrate what I mean. Nineteen years ago today, the greatest act of
terrorism ? using Israel's own definition of that much misused word ? in
modern Middle Eastern history began. Does anyone remember the anniversary in
the West? How many readers of this article will remember it? I will take a
tiny risk and say that no other British newspaper ? certainly no American
newspaper ? will today recall the fact that on 16 September 1982, Israel's
Phalangist militia allies started their three-day orgy of rape and knifing
and murder in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila that cost
1,800 lives. It followed an Israeli invasion of Lebanon ? designed to drive
the PLO out of the country and given the green light by the then US
Secretary of State, Alexander Haig ? which cost the lives of 17,500 Lebanese
and Palestinians, almost all of them civilians. That's probably three times
the death toll in the World Trade Centre. Yet I do not remember any vigils
or memorial services or candle-lighting in America or the West for the
innocent dead of Lebanon; I don't recall any stirring speeches about
democracy or liberty. In fact, my memory is that the United States spent
most of the bloody months of July and August 1982 calling for "restraint".
No, Israel is not to blame for what happened last week. The culprits were
Arabs, not Israelis. But America's failure to act with honour in the Middle
East, its promiscuous sale of missiles to those who use them against
civilians, its blithe disregard for the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi
children under sanctions of which Washington is the principal supporter ?
all these are intimately related to the society that produced the Arabs who
plunged America into an apocalypse of fire last week.
America's name is literally stamped on to the missiles fired by Israel into
Palestinian buildings in Gaza and the West Bank. Only four weeks ago, I
identified one of them as an AGM 114-D air-to-ground rocket made by Boeing
and Lockheed-Martin at their factory in ? of all places ? Florida, the state
where some of the suiciders trained to fly.
It was fired from an Apache helicopter (made in America, of course) during
the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, when hundreds of cluster bombs were
dropped in civilian areas of Beruit by the Israelis in contravention of
undertakings given to the United States. Most of the bombs had US Naval
markings and America then suspended a shipment of fighter bombers to
Israel ? for less than two months.
The same type of missile ? this time an AGM 114-C made inGeorgia ? was fired
by the Israelis into the back of an ambulance near the Lebanese village of
Mansori, killing two women and four children. I collected the pieces of the
missile, including its computer coding plate, flew to Georgia and presented
them to the manufacturers at the Boeing factory. And what did the developer
of the missile say to me when I showed him photographs of the children his
missile had killed? "Whatever you do," he told me, "don't quote me as saying
anything critical of the policies of Israel."
I'm sure the father of those children, who was driving the ambulance, will
have been appalled by last week's events, but I don't suppose, given the
fate of his own wife ? one of the women killed ? that he was in a mood to
send condolences to anyone. All these facts, of course, must be forgotten
now.
Every effort will be made in the coming days to switch off the "why''
question and concentrate on the who, what and how. CNN and most of the
world's media have already obeyed this essential new war rule. I've already
seen what happens when this rule is broken. When The Independent published
my article on the connection between Middle Eastern injustice and the New
York holocaust, the BBC's 24-hour news channel produced an American
commentator who remarked that "Robert Fisk has won the prize for bad
taste''. When I raised the same point on an Irish radio talk show, the other
guest, a Harvard lawyer, denounced me as a bigot, a liar, a "dangerous man''
and ? of course ? potentially anti-Semitic. The Irish pulled the plug on
him.
No wonder we have to refer to the terrorists as "mindless''. For if we did
not, we would have to explain what went on in those minds. But this attempt
to censor the realities of the war that has already begun must not be
permitted to continue. Look at the logic. Secretary of State Colin Powell
was insisting on Friday that his message to the Taliban is simple: they have
to take responsibility for sheltering Mr bin Laden. "You cannot separate
your activities from the activities of the perpetrators,'' he warned. But
the Americans absolutely refuse to associate their own response to their
predicament with their activities in the Middle East. We are supposed to
hold our tongues, even when Ariel Sharon ? a man whose name will always be
associated with the massacre at Sabra and Shatila ? announces that Israel
also wishes to join the battle against "world terror''.
No wonder the Palestinians are fearful. In the past four days, 23
Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank and Gaza, an astonishing
figure that would have been front-page news had America not been blitzed. If
Israel signs up for the new conflict, then the Palestinians ? by fighting
the Israelis ? will, by extension, become part of the "world terror''
against which Mr Bush is supposedly going to war. Not for nothing did Mr
Sharon claim that Yasser Arafat had connections with Osama bin Laden.
I repeat: what happened in New York was a crime against humanity. And that
means policemen, arrests, justice, a whole new international court at The
Hague if necessary. Not cruise missiles and "precision'' bombs and Muslim
lives lost in revenge for Western lives. But the trap has been sprung. Mr
Bush ? perhaps we, too ? are now walking into it.
