Dear RN,
Dan Brook, whose e-mail list I can recommend highly, sends us a thoughtful
message below. I especially like that it asks some very obvious but
difficult questions, and in a way that I hope will reach people who have
been in agreement with this war up till now.
all the best, Jan
***********************************************************
Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2001 16:44:21 -0800
From: CyberBrook <•••@••.•••>
Subject: Questions of War
Questions of War
Dan Brook
We need some answers.
I keep asking certain questions about what the US is doing in and to
Afghanistan, because I’m the inquisitive sort, but the answers I get, when
I get any at all, are uniformly lacking. I’ve asked the hawks, including
those who fully support Bush and this war du jour, and those who
reluctantly do so. I’ve asked the doves, including those who are pacifists
and those who don’t support particular wars. It shouldn’t be so difficult
to get answers to questions about matters literally of life and death, but
it is.
Here are some of the questions I’ve been asking:
—Why didn’t people who support the war do so before 9/11, rather than
waiting until Bush announced it? Are people who support the war just being
reactionary in the face of terror, supportive in the face of perceived
powerlessness, or acquiescent in the face of Bush? Surely the Taliban, a
despicable and fascist biophobic gang of male thugs, was no more horrible
in October 2001 than it was in May 2001, when the Bush administration gave
them another $43 million on top of the perhaps $100 million already doled
out. I’ve heard of corporate welfare, but terrorist welfare, misogynist
welfare? It seems to me that the best way to have stopped totalitarians and
terrorists like Al Qaeda and the Taliban was to not create them, not
support them, not fund them, not give them weapons and explosives, and not
glorify them, all of which the US did. I guess my curse is that I refuse to
forget history, especially very recent history. Taking Santayana seriously,
I don’t want us to repeat it.
—If people now support the bombing of the Taliban for their atrocious human
rights record and their harboring of terrorists, do they also currently
support the bombing of other countries that have similar qualifications?
Here I’m thinking of Saudi Arabia (e.g., 15 of the 19 hijackers on
September 11th were Saudi, as is Osama bin Laden, and Saudi Arabia refuses
to release evidence of who financed that terrorism; it also heavily
subsidizes moujahedeen training camps, Hamas, and other terror
organizations), Pakistan (e.g., Pakistani General Mahumd reportedly wired
$100,000 to hijacker Mohammed Atta), Uzbekistan (which harshly suppresses
freedoms and dissent)—need I go on?—the UAE, Kuwait, Syria, Iran, Iraq,
Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, Israel, Russia, China, Indonesia,
Turkey, Algeria, and Colombia, to name a few, and indeed the US itself.
Tragically, all these countries qualify, as does the Northern Alliance. How
willing are people to extend their beliefs to their logical conclusions?
How willing are people to fight, or send their children to fight, in the
wars they support? How willing are they to become its victims?
—Is support for this war following or creating some principle, to be
universally followed, or is it merely ad hoc, applying only to this case
(just like the Supreme Court’s improper and infamous decision in Bush v.
Gore)? If there is a principle involved, I’d like to hear it and, more
importantly, hear it discussed. If, more likely, people are merely
supporting this war as it steamrolls along, then it is more a case of
responding to legitimate fear, government-induced hysteria, and military
vengeance, with its kill and overkill, rather than responding with
practical policies, legal strategies, and moral justice.
—Does might makes right? If so, how can democracy and the rule of law be
justified? If not, how can terrorism and war be justified? Might does not
make right—whether by terrorists against civilians, nation against nation,
majorities against minorities, men against women, bosses against workers,
adults against children, humans against animals. Might makes force and
power, but it does not confer authority and legitimacy. Indeed, it only
makes more wrongs, more injustice, more alienation, and more suffering.
Millions of people in the US and many millions more around the world easily
recognize this basic reality. In fact, much of what motivates terrorists is
exactly this phenomenon. Terrorists, frequently retaliating against
previous use of force by a larger power, too often the US, in turn also
illegitimately and immorally use violence. In both cases, almost
invariably, ordinary people suffer for the crimes of others.
—Are American lives, even three thousand of them, worth more than thousands
or millions of Afghan or other non-American lives? Are the facts that the
US has and uses weapons of mass destruction, supports and engages in
terrorism, and breaks and flouts international laws simply to be ignored
because it is the US and not another country? Can only “foreign” nations,
following State Department dictates, be “rogue states”? Ethnocentrism and
nationalism are powerful cultural and political forces. These deadly
ideologies cause us to exaggerate others’ sins, while minimizing or taking
for granted one’s own. Is this fair and just? How much should we blame and
punish others for what we ourselves do?
The people of Afghanistan are not fully responsible for their government’s
actions in the same way that Americans are not fully responsible for
theirs. There is absolutely no justification at all for someone to bomb US
cities, regardless of what the US government is doing or has ever done.
There are unequivocally no circumstances under which, as citizens and
residents of America, our towns and cities could be legitimate targets of a
terrorist attack or a bombing campaign. That type of terrorism would be
wholly unacceptable. Likewise, there is positively no justification for
bombing villages and cities in Afghanistan to achieve political goals,
which is indeed the definition of terrorism. Same goes for Vietnam, Iraq,
Israel, Palestine, and everywhere else. Worse still, the US use of
radioactive depleted uranium ammunition and chemically-toxic bombs may also
condemn future generations of humans and animals to disease and premature
death.
—Does it make sense to terrorize Afghanistan and to Talibanize the US in
order to fight terrorism and the Taliban? Does the US have to act as
viciously and violently as Osama bin Laden in an effort to vanquish him?
Bush is launching a crusade against a jihad, making war abroad to bring
peace, abrogating freedoms at home to bolster democracy. Which part of this
Orwellian “logic” makes sense? In the war against Afghanistan, the US has
bombed the UN (it was four UN minesweepers, in a country of some ten
million mines, who were the first victims of the US bombing of
Afghanistan), the Red Cross (which was hit twice, destroying food and
clothing), mosques (one was hit on the first night of Ramadan), various
villages, old age homes, people’s houses, and other civilian sites of
everyday life for ordinary people, destroying their lives, families, and
communities.
In the US, there is a different sort of threat. Bush’s belief that “there
ought to be limits to freedom” and his simplistic and polarizing warning of
September 20th declaring that “either you are with us, or you are with the
terrorists” sets the harsh tone for the rest of the administration, and
indeed the country. White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer followed up
on September 26th, with his threat “to all Americans that they need to
watch what they say, watch what they do”. Attorney General John Ashcroft,
not to be left out of the fascistic fun, admonished people concerned about
rights and liberties on December 6th. Speaking to a Senate committee, he
said: “to those who scare peaceloving people with phantoms of lost liberty,
my message is this: Your tactics aid terrorists, for they erode our
national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America’s
enemies, and pause to America’s friends.” What a baseless, horrible, and
anti-democratic charge to level against citizens exercising their
fundamental rights. This is precisely why we have, and should highly value,
our First Amendment. How authoritarian and cruel to say to people who
disagree or dissent, who are fearful or are already victims, that what they
may be doing is comparable to terrorism and treason!
Scores of people deemed “other”—Arabs and South Asians, Israelis and
Central Asians, Muslims and Jews—have been xenophobically harassed and
attacked by the state, corporations, and vigilantes in the US. There have
been approximately 1,200 people held in secret detention—perhaps 50 or 60
of whom are Jewish Israelis—mostly held in solitary confinement and
incommunicado, most likely with no connection to terrorism, all of whose
names and charges are unknown to us, including one Pakistani who died in
custody. Additionally, there is possibly 5,000 or more people—primarily
Middle Eastern men, though anyone may be considered “fair” game—to be
“questioned”.
So secretive and duplicitous the Bush Administration has been that it won’t
divulge the evidence against bin Laden it claims to have and promised to
publicize. Even if we already reasonably assume his guilt due to
circumstantial evidence, direct evidence and proof is still of course
necessary. The administration also does not release the names, and other
information, of those it detains, while the government alarmingly increases
its powers of surveillance, search, and seizure.
Further eroding of civil rights comes in the form of military tribunals, a
form of judicial martial law. Speaking of the executive order signed by
Bush to establish secret military tribunals, Rogers M. Smith says that
The order allows military officials within the United States to arrest
aliens on mere suspicion of terrorism, without having to show probable
cause; to try them entirely in secret; to use any evidence against them
that military officials judge to have ‘probative value,’ even if it is mere
hearsay or illegally obtained; to convict them on simple preponderance of
such evidence, rather than proof beyond a reasonable doubt; to convict them
by a vote of two-thirds of the military judges, without a requirement of
unanimity, much less trial by jury; and to sentence them to death, without
appeal to the civilian courts. This is a grotesque Magna Charta for a new
Star Chamber.
Additionally, it is Bush himself who personally decides who gets charged in
these kangaroo courts and it is Secretary of Defense (sic) Rumsfeld himself
who personally has to OK the defense lawyer, keeping in mind that Rumsfeld
and Bush are also the commanders of the judge and the prosecutor. And,
according to Attorney General Ashcroft during Congressional hearings on
this subject, Bush and Rumsfeld are the appellate process. The Bush
Administration is sounding more and more like a monarchy everyday.
William Safire, the conservative New York Times essayist, argues that each
military tribunal would be empowered to “conceal evidence by citing
national security, make up its own rules, find a defendant guilty even if a
third of the officers disagree, and execute the alien with no review by any
civilian court”. Cutting out the judicial branch of government altogether,
it would be the executive branch alone that is the “investigator,
prosecutor, judge, jury and jailer or executioner”. How convenient! This is
what Bush calls a “full and fair trial”. This type of Orwellian
authoritarianism is not entirely surprising, however, given that Bush has
three times publicly said, as recently as last December 18th and this past
July 27th, that things would be much easier if he were the dictator—for
him, that is. Apparently, and ominously, things are starting to get easier
for Bush, but that doesn’t bode well for the rest of us.
Many legal experts have criticized the use of military tribunals. A letter
signed by more than 300 law professors, for example, describes the military
tribunals as “legally deficient, unnecessary and unwise”. The Wall Street
Journal simply calls Bush’s military tribunals “indefensible”, arguing that
we shouldn’t be “shredding the Constitution—which applies to all ‘persons,’
not just citizens”. In 1866, other legal experts also took issue with
military tribunals. In Ex Parte Milligan, the Supreme Court ruled that
“martial law, established on such a basis, destroys every guarantee of the
Constitution and effectively renders the military independent of and
superior to the civil powers...Civil liberty and this kind of martial law
cannot endure together; one or the other must perish...Martial rule can
never exist where the Courts are open...”
Sent to Dachau by the Nazi Gestapo in 1938 and freed in 1945, Martin
Niemoeller reminds us that
First they came for the communists,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the homosexuals,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a homosexual.
Then they came for the Jews,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
But I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
And there was no one left to speak up.
It is never an inopportune time to assert one’s rights and to “speak up” on
behalf of justice. The attacks of September 11th were clearly “crimes
against humanity”, especially based on their scope and scale, their horror
and human toll, the number of people killed and from so many countries, the
number of survivors still terrified. Bush, however, is treating the
terrorist attacks as “acts of war”, even though he earlier and correctly
compared Al Qaeda to the mafia. It is an instructive comparison.
When trying to stop and punish the mafia (not to mention mass murderers
such as Kaczinski, Pinochet, McVeigh, and Milosovic), we appropriately
attempt to locate, capture, arrest, arraign, impartially try, convict, and
imprison the guilty people, giving them access to their accusers, the
evidence, and an independent defense counsel, following the rules of law
and the norms of justice. We do not, it should be needless to say, carpet
bomb and destroy entire blocks, neighborhoods, towns, cities, and countries
for the purposes of tracking down individuals or even groups of suspected
criminals.
The rule of law simply means that the rules need to follow the law—not the
fear, not the fad, not the anger, and not the president—without exception.
—Are we really toppling the Taliban for the sake of women? The war in
Afghanistan is being fought for women the same way that World War II was
fought for Jews and other religious minorities, Gypsies/Romani, gays and
lesbians, people with disabilities, and leftists. That is to say, it is not
being fought for women, only to some extent in women’s names. RAWA (the
Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan), one of the leading
women’s organizations in that country and one of the bravest groups of
people working under some of the harshest conditions, strongly opposes the
Taliban, Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the
Northern Alliance, and the US bombing campaign against their country. Each
of these, they assert, are violent and misogynist, regardless of whether or
not the burqa is required. These Afghan women simply ask why more innocent
women and others should have to suffer for the sins of criminal and
illegitimate leaders—Bush, the Taliban, and the Northern Alliance included.
They deserve an answer, but like me they do not get one. We probably
wouldn’t like the answer anyway. It’s called “collateral damage”.
Women always seem to be collateral damage, both during war and peacetime.
Many people look to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, for example, where hundreds of
thousands of US troops were stationed during the Gulf War, for “protection”
and “liberation”, and are sorely disappointed to find that women still
can’t vote in Kuwait and are still not allowed to even drive in Saudi
Arabia, where schools are sex-segregated. Reuters reports that “Saudi women
are generally barred from public life”. Amnesty International regularly
writes of severe discrimination and rights violations for women in Saudi
Arabia. Oil and geo-politics (read: capitalism and imperialism) are always
more important than democracy and women, apparently, just as the security
dogs in Washington, D.C. were considered more important and tested for
anthrax before human postal workers, during the recent anthrax attacks. “A
few privileged Afghan women have been caught smiling for AP cameras”, since
the dislodging of the Taliban, Cynthia Peters reports, “but many Afghan
women, men and children are silently dying behind the burqa of U.S.
deceit”. We have a lot to learn from our government’s actions, regardless
of its sometimes lofty rhetoric.
—Who pays the price of this war, a war that Dick Cheney and Osama bin Laden
(both presumably hiding in underground bunkers) say may go on forever, or
at least will probably exceed our lifetimes? Clearly it is not those who
decide to go to war. Is the frightening, displacing, and killing of
civilians due to war—fully expected and foreseen even if not fully
intentional and strictly deliberate, essentially a case of negligent
homicide or involuntary manslaughter rather than murder—any different that
the frightening, displacing, and killing due to terrorism? Both involve
violent attacks against people for political purposes, even when those
victimized people have little or no control over their political situation.
Afghans have been victims of the British, the Russians, the Northern
Alliance, the Taliban, and now the US bombing, and then will probably have
to again suffer the wrath of the despicable Northern Alliance. War is
terrorism on a grand and international scale. And, because this so-called
war on terrorism is understood to be unjust by much of the world, at least
outside the US, it will almost undoubtedly increase the threats and
realities of future terrorism.
It is no less a figure that Dwight Eisenhower, first a general and
then US president, who eventually realized that
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired,
signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not
fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not
spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius
of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
Terrorists are generally motivated by injustice, both real and perceived.
Further injustice only fans the flames; justice would dampen the fire.
—Who decides if the price of war is worth it? I guess people like Secretary
of State Madeleine Albright does. When she was asked in May 1996 about the
harsh sanctions against Iraq and the fact that some half a million kids had
died due to them, she responded that “the price is worth it”. Many more
have died since and presumably the price is still worth it to Bush, Cheney,
Powell, Rice, and the others who organize and support this war. Historian
Howard Zinn, in A People’s History of the United States, asks “how can the
judgment be made if the benefits and losses cannot be balanced because the
losses are either unmentioned or mentioned quickly?” “We can all decide to
give up something of ours”, Zinn challenges, “but do we have the right to
throw into the pyre the children of others, or even our own children?”
Besides being morally disgusting and outrageously cruel, Albright’s casual
remark flies in the face of democratic theory which suggests that those
affected by a decision have a say in that decision. At the very least,
democracy requires informed consent. We have to decide—while we still
can—whether we want to be a democracy. And remember: if we don’t decide,
others most certainly will.
—Why are people so unimaginable, and so quick to beat the drums of war,
when there may be other and more effective courses of action? Anti-war
activists do not oppose action. We just oppose the destructive paths of
action chosen by the Bush Administration. Instead, we prefer paths of
action that are consistent with the power of law not the law of power, with
democracy not authoritarianism, indeed with justice not vengeance.
Madeleine Bunting worries that “US ruthlessness may turn out to be a
greater threat” than the fanaticism and terrorism of foreigners. Many of us
should worry too, but only to the extent that our worry motivates—rather
than paralyzes—us to take action.
One major way that American citizens can help stop terrorism is to get our
government to stop supporting and engaging in it. The US has actively
supported—often politically, financially, and militarily—Osama bin Laden
and the Taliban, the Northern Alliance (members of whom Cheney said are
“not the kind of people we would invite to dinner or we would want as
neighbors”, probably because of their recent and repugnant record of
murder, torture, rape, sex slavery, child abuse, and drug dealing, as the
US government well knows), the Saudi royal family, Kuwaiti dictators, Uzbek
tyrants, Colombian human rights abusers, Pakistani Taliban-wannabes,
Nicaraguan contras, Mozambiquan Renamo, Angolan Unita, Honduran military
torturers, Salvadoran death squads, Indonesian genocide, Noriega, the Shah,
Suharto, Marcos, Somoza, Batista, Mobutu, Savimbi, Duvalier, Pinochet, Pol
Pot, Sharon, Saddam Hussein, and tragically many other brutal dictators and
terrorists, both foreign and domestic.
There are, of course, other ways to stop terrorism, but getting the US out
of the game would no doubt go a very long way in the right direction.
Present policy will unfortunately and almost certainly guarantee future
repeats of dictators and dictatorship, terrorism and terror, war and
warmongering, death and destruction. I am not predicting the future so much
as reading the past. It’s there for all to witness.
One of the other ways to stop war and terrorism is to take the words of
some of our most acclaimed scholars seriously. In a statement recently
signed by 100 Nobel laureates on the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Prize,
it says that if “we permit the devastating power of modern weaponry to
spread through this combustible human landscape, we invite a conflagration
that can engulf both rich and poor. The only hope for the future”, it
continues, “lies in co-operative international action, legitimized by
democracy”. The statement concludes by cautioning us that “to live in the
world we have transformed, we must learn to think in a new way. As never
before, the future of each depends on the good of all”.
One last question remains, then: Must we destroy something in order to save it?
We need answers. It’s a matter of life and death.
