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Sept. 11 Three Views from Britain

Americans cannot ignore what their government does abroad

A Message From the Global South
Terror in America

Americans cannot ignore what their government does abroad

by Seumas Milne
Thursday September 13, 2001
The Guardian (UK)

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.
____________________________________________________________________________
A Message From the Global South

http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0912-04.htm

by Saskia Sassen
Guardian of London
September 12, 2001

Yesterday's attack brings home the fact that we cannot hide behind our
peace and prosperity. The evidence has been growing but our leaders did
not want to see it. The horrors of wars and deaths far away in the
global south do not register. But missile shields cannot protect us.
Powerful states cannot fully escape bricolage terrorism, nail bombs,
elementary nuclear devices, and homemade biological weapons.

The growth of debt and unemployment, and the decline of traditional
economic sectors, has fed an illegal trade in people directed at the
rich countries. The diseases and pests of the global south are now in
the global north as well: TB is back in the US and the UK, the
encephalitis-producing Nile mosquito has arrived for the first time in
the north. As governments become poorer they depend more on the
remittances of immigrants in the north and have little interest in
managing emigration and illegal trafficking. The pressures to be
competitive make governments in poor countries cut their health,
education and social budgets, further delaying development and
stimulating emigration.

The rising debt, poverty, and disease in the south are beginning to
reach deep into rich countries in the north. We can no longer turn our
backs on this misery. If we dislike humanitarian reasons for addressing
these issues, we should at least be motivated by self-interest.

We must now accept that markets cannot take care of everything.
Governments will have to govern more. But we cannot return to the old
system of countries surrounding themselves with protective walls. It
will take genuine multilateralism and internationalism; radical
innovations and new forms of collaboration with civil society and
supranational institutions. The violence of hunger and poverty; the
destruction of once fertile lands; the oppression of weaker states by
highly militarized ones; persecution - all these feed a complex, slow
but relentless movement towards the north. The north creates much of
the damage and the north has the resources to redress some of it.

Part of the challenge is actually to recognize the interconnectedness
of forms of violence that we do not view as being connected or even as
forms of violence. We are suffering from a translation problem. The
language of poverty and misery is unclear and uncomfortable. The
language of yesterday's attacks is clear.

There are two problems in particular that must be addressed: the debt
trap and immigration. The debt trap is far more significant than many
in the north understand. The focus is always on the amounts of the
debts, which are a small fraction of the overall global capital market,
now estimated at about 83 trillion dollars. But the debt trap will
eventually ensnare the rich countries through the increase in illegal
trafficking in people, in drugs, in arms, through the re-emergence of
diseases we had thought were under control and through the further
devastation of our fragile eco-system. The debt trap is now entangling
more countries and it has reached middle income countries.

There are now about 50 countries that are hyper-indebted and unable to
redress the situation. It is no longer a matter of loan repayment but a
fundamental new structural condition. What is often overlooked or even
unknown is that many of those debts are far more extreme than those
that were considered as unmanageable levels of debt in the Latin
American crisis of the 80s. Debt to GNP ratios are especially high in
Africa, where they stood at 123%, compared with 42% in Latin America
and 28% in Asia.

The IMF asks HIPCs to pay 20-25% of their export earnings toward debt
service. In contrast, in 1953 the Allies canceled 80% of Germany's war
debt and only insisted on 3-5% of export earnings debt service. These
are the terms asked from Central Europe after Communism.

What can be done to pull these countries out of the trap? Poor
countries need to import goods and the West will only accept payment in
dollars or other high value currencies. This produces a trap that
reproduces itself endlessly. One of the few solutions to neutralize the
trap is to allow countries to pay in their own currencies, which would
enable them to import needed goods for development and, importantly,
eventually strengthen their currencies.

Few poor countries can avoid trade deficits - of 93 low and moderate
income countries, only 11 had trade surpluses in the year 2000. These
countries would like to export more, as is shown by the recent setting
up of a new African Trade Insurance Agency supporting exports to, from
and within Africa. Such specialized and focused efforts are promising.
Most countries in the south are heavily dependent on imports of oil,
food, and manufactured goods. They need loans, and once they have
debts, interest payments and other debt servicing costs escalate
rapidly and their currencies are likely to devalue further. Borrowing
in the leading foreign currencies is a trap.

The government debts of poor countries, and increasingly of middle-
income countries as well, need to be taken out of the global capital
markets and placed in the domain of the interstate system. J M Keynes
proposed this in the 40s when the IMF was created. And the IMF went in
this direction with its plan to provide early financing before a
crisis, rather than bailing out rich countries' investors.

The second great problem in immigration and illegal trafficking in
people. The growth of debt and its attendant economic griefs have
created whole new migrations. As the rich economies become richer, they
become more desirable places to be and have to raise their walls to
keep immigrants and refugees out. So they actually encourage the
illegal trade in people.

We may think that the debt and growing poverty in the south have
nothing to do with the violence in New York and Washington. But they
do.

The attacks are a language of last resort: the oppressed and persecuted
have used many languages to reach us so far, but we seem unable to
translate the meaning. So a few have taken the personal responsibility
to speak in a language that needs no translation.
--------------
[An updated version of Saskia Sassen's book, The Global City, is
published by Princeton University Press.]
______________________________________________________________________

Terror in America

The wickedness and awesome cruelty of a crushed
and humiliated people

By Robert Fisk
12 September 2001

So it has come to this. The entire modern history of the Middle East ­
the collapse of the Ottoman empire, the Balfour declaration, Lawrence
of Arabia's lies, the Arab revolt, the foundation of the state of Israel, four
Arab-Israeli wars and the 34 years of Israel's brutal occupation of Arab
land ­ all erased within hours as those who claim to represent a crushed,
humiliated population struck back with the wickedness and awesome
cruelty of a doomed people. Is it fair ­ is it moral ­ to write this so soon,
without proof, when the last act of barbarism, in Oklahoma, turned out to
be the work of home-grown Americans? I fear it is. America is at war and,
unless I am mistaken, many thousands more are now scheduled to die in the
Middle East, perhaps in America too. Some of us warned of "the explosion
to come''. But we never dreamt this nightmare.

And yes, Osama bin Laden comes to mind, his money, his theology, his
frightening dedication to destroy American power. I have sat in front of bin
Laden as he described how his men helped to destroy the Russian army in
Afghanistan and thus the Soviet Union. Their boundless confidence allowed
them to declare war on America. But this is not the war of democracy versus
terror that the world will be asked to believe in the coming days. It is also about
American missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and US helicopters firing
missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and American shells crashing into
a village called Qana and about a Lebanese militia ­ paid and uniformed by
America's Israeli ally ­ hacking and raping and murdering their way through
refugee camps.

No, there is no doubting the utter, indescribable evil of what has happened
in the United States. That Palestinians could celebrate the massacre of 20,000,
perhaps 35,000 innocent people is not only a symbol of their despair but of
their political immaturity, of their failure to grasp what they had always
been accusing their Israeli enemies of doing: acting disproportionately. All the
years of rhetoric, all the promises to strike at the heart of America, to
cut off the head of "the American snake'' we took for empty threats. How could
a backward, conservative, undemocratic and corrupt group of regimes and small,
violent organisations fulfil such preposterous promises? Now we know.

And in the hours that followed yesterday's annihilation, I began to remember
those other extraordinary assaults upon the US and its allies, miniature now by
comparison with yesterday's casualties.

Did not the suicide bombers who killed 241 American servicemen and 100
French paratroops in Beirut on 23 October 1983, time their attacks with
unthinkable precision?

There were just seven seconds between the Marine bombing and the destruction
of the French three miles away. Then there were the attacks on US bases in
Saudi Arabia, and last year's attempt ­ almost successful it now turns out ­ to sink
the USS Cole in Aden. And then how easy was our failure to recognise the new
weapon of the Middle East which neither Americans nor any other Westerners
could equal: the despair-driven, desperate suicide bomber.

And there will be, inevitably, and quite immorally, an attempt to obscure the
historical wrongs and the injustices that lie behind yesterday's firestorms. We
will be told about "mindless terrorism'', the "mindless" bit being essential if we
are not to realise how hated America has become in the land of the birth of three
great religions.

Ask an Arab how he responds to 20,000 or 30,000 innocent deaths and he or
she will respond as decent people should, that it is an unspeakable crime. But
they will ask why we did not use such words about the sanctions that have
destroyed the lives of perhaps half a million children in Iraq, why we did
not rage about the 17,500 civilians killed in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
And those basic reasons why the Middle East caught fire last September ­ the
Israeli occupation of Arab land, the dispossession of Palestinians, the bombardments
and state-sponsored executions ... all these must be obscured lest they provide
the smallest fractional reason for yesterday's mass savagery.

No, Israel was not to blame ­ though we can be sure that Saddam Hussein and
the other grotesque dictators will claim so ­ but the malign influence of history
and our share in its burden must surely stand in the dark with the suicide
bombers. Our broken promises, perhaps even our destruction of the Ottoman
Empire, led inevitably to this tragedy America has bankrolled Israel's wars for
so many years that it believed this would be cost-free. No longer so. But, of
course, the US will want to strike back against "world terror'', and last
night's bombardment of Kabul may have been the opening salvo. Indeed,
who could ever point the finger at Americans now for using that pejorative
and sometimes racist word "terrorism''?

Eight years ago, I helped to make a television series that tried to explain
why so many Muslims had come to hate the West. Last night, I remembered
some of those Muslims in that film, their families burnt by American-made
bombs and weapons. They talked about how no one would help them but
God. Theology versus technology, the suicide bomber against the nuclear
power. Now we have learnt what this means.