[Mb-civic] Look in the Mirror

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Boston Globe   July 8, 2005

A Look in the Mirror for America

by Derrick Z. Jackson

In his initial reaction yesterday to the London transit bombings,
President Bush decried ''people killing innocent people." He said: ''The
contrast couldn't be clearer between the intentions and the hearts of
those of us who care deeply about human rights and human liberty and those
who kill -- those who have got such evil in their heart that they will
take the lives of innocent folks."

This came a week and a half after Bush invoked the innocent in his Fort
Bragg, N.C., speech in an attempt to shore up sagging American support for
his invasion and occupation of Iraq. Doggedly tying 9/11 to Saddam Hussein
even though no tie existed, Bush said of global terrorists: ''There is no
limit to the innocent lives they are willing to take. We see the nature of
the enemy in terrorists who exploded car bombs along a busy shopping
street in Baghdad, including one outside a mosque. We see the nature of
the enemy in terrorists who sent a suicide bomber to a teaching hospital
in Mosul. We see the nature of the enemy in terrorists who behead civilian
hostages and broadcast their atrocities for the world to see."

Bush also said the enemy will fail. ''The terrorists can kill the
innocent, but they cannot stop the advance of freedom," he said. Britain's
Prime Minister Tony Blair said the ''slaughter of innocent people" will
fail to cower the British people, and Canada's Prime Minister Paul Martin
called the attack an ''unspeakable attack on the innocent."

It was all appropriate in the moment. In a greater context, there is a
tragic hollowness. The world, of course, shares the sympathies of Mayor
Michael Bloomberg of New York, who said the London bombings were a
''despicable, cowardly act." Yet every invoking of the innocents also
reminds us of our despicable, cowardly killing of innocent Iraqi
civilians.


Or perhaps you forgot about them. That was by design. We have rightfully
mourned the loss of nearly 3,000 people on 9/11. We have begun mourning
the loss of about 40 people in London. We have mourned the loss of 1,751
US soldiers, who, bless them, were following orders of their commander in
chief. But to this day, there has been no major acknowledgement, let alone
apology, by Bush or Blair for the massive amounts of carnage we created in
a war waged over what turned out to be a lie, the nonexistent weapons of
mass destruction.

These innocents never existed, either in Iraq or Afghanistan. ''We don't
do body counts," said both General Tommy Franks, former Iraqi commander,
and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. When Brigadier General Mark 
Kimmitt
was asked about the images of American soldiers killing innocent civilians
on Arab television, Kimmitt said: ''My solution is quite simple: Change
the channel. Change the channel to a legitimate, authoritative, honest
news station. The stations that are showing Americans intentionally
killing women and children are not legitimate news sources. That is
propaganda. And that is lies."

The United States waged its own war of propaganda by refusing to conduct a
legitimate, authoritative, honest accounting of the deaths of innocent
civilians. As it urged people to change the channel, the Bush
administration cut off all channels to finding out what we did to women,
men, and children who were shopping, working, or leaving their mosques. In
an invasion based on falsehoods, the truth of the civilian carnage might
have been too hard for Americans to take, and support for the war might
have ended in the first few weeks.

The propaganda of an invasion with invisible innocents surely allowed Bush
to seamlessly switch his stated reason from the unique horrors of WMD to
liberating an oppressed people. It is a lot easier to tell the world you
are their great liberator if you do not have to own up to the thousands of
dead people who will never get the chance to vote in that free election.
It sounds a little bit like people who say African-Americans should be
thankful for slavery because they are no longer in Africa.

Worse, this denial of death, in a war that did not have to happen, is sure
to fuel the very terrorism we say we will defeat. The innocents in the
so-called war on terror are always ''our" citizens or the citizens of our
allies. The only innocent Iraqis are those killed by ''insurgents." Our
soldiers clearly did not intend to kill innocents. But this posturing of
America as the great innocent, when everyone knows we kill innocents
ourselves, is likely only to make us look more like the devil in the eyes
of a suicide bomber.


http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/07/0
8/ a_look_in_the_mirror_for_america?mode=PF

***

Globe and Mail    Friday, July 8, 2005

The Grim Connection

By Rick Salutin

Of course you fell more connected when you can directly relate. A year
ago, I was at King's cross station in morning rush hour with my
five-year-old, on our way to Nottingham and Sherwood Forest. That aside,
as a friend said yesterday: "What's so special? It's Madrid again, isn't
it?" Yes, it is.

But I want to invoke a difference, less personal connection. I say this
against George Bush, who quickly claimed the "contrast" couldn't be
"clearer" between yesterday's London bombing and the concurrent G8 talks
about ending poverty in Africa. Or Tony Blair, who pointed to the same
contrast as intentional and "particularly barbaric.: I think there is a
grim but real relation between the bombings and the acts of the mighty
nations of the G8 - and I'm not speaking metaphorically.

As Columbia prof Mahmood Mamdani traces in his book Good Muslim, Bad
Muslim, the kind of terror that occurred yesterday was inculcated in U.S.
policy going back to the Vietnam years, when Laotian tribesmen were
recruited to fight a secret, brutal war. In the 1980s, the "contras" were
created and maintained by the U.S. to wreak sheer terror on Nicaragua,
targeting innocent people for political ends, in the same despicable way
as happened in London. Ronald Reagan legitimized them as "freedom
fighters" and compared them to the U.S.'s "founding fathers" - as he also
once described Muslim fighters that the U.S. recruited to fight a war of
terror in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. In the 1990s, a
U.S.-led campaign of sanctions sadistically terrorized the people of Iraq
while propping up Saddam Hussein. In this way. Mahmood Mamdani writes.
Terror was normalized into international conflicts.

Let me make the connection more specific. In Afghanistan, working with its
partners in Pakistan's security service, the U.S. funded and trained as
many as 100,000 religiously fanatical mujahedeen, of whom 5,000 to 15,000
saw action. Then it simply abandoned them. Many of these people now are
al-Qaeda and its offshoots. They scattered after the Afghan war, back to
their homelands or around the world, applying their acquired skills. Let
me specify further. The training they got was often in the use of the
kinds of explosion set off in Madrid and, most likely, in London
yesterday. Huge amounts of such weapons were left in their hands.

This is not a bit of unexpected "blowback," as has often been said. This
is the same reliance on terror by many of the same people, possibly using
the same weapons. It's all sickening: the targeting of totally innocent
people, the appalling sanctions against Iraqi kids, the bombs yesterday,
9/11. But you can't create, legitimate and utilize terror for decades,
even as you officially condemn it out of the other side of your mouth,
then suddenly claim to stand utterly clear of int incarnations.

Not even their language separates the "sides." The U.S. justified support
for its terrorist "freedom fighters" by saying they were battling the
"evil empire" of the Soviets. Now the Soviets are gone, but yesterday,
George Bush again said this is about good versus evil. Many mujahedeen
learned the language of good versus evil while in Afghanistan. Today, they
fling it at their former sponsors, who fling it back. None of this
absolves the bombers of responsibility for their bombs, but it makes for
less than a clear contrast with the leaders of the G8.

I don't say this for the sake of academic or intellectual clarity. Nor to
assign moral points and smudges to the various players. It's been
small-scale so far, but who knows when a dirty bomb will enter the
equation? To do that - to alter course - you must know how things reached
this point and, especially, which forces that got us here are still
operating: like torture and "rendition" on side, tracked by beheadings and
kidnapings on the other. The answers may be depressing, but it's better
than Tony Blair's piffle about how "their" aim is to destroy "our way of
life" by attacking "all nations and civilized peoples." Too late, Tony.
Your civilized nations are up to their necks in this muck.


http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/2005070
8/COSA LU08/TPComment/TopStories
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"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
   ---   George Orwell


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