Date: Sat, 22 Sep 2001 11:04:05 +1200
Subject: An Article by Robert Fisk
From: Danny Butt <db-AT-dannybutt.net>


http://www.smh.com.au/news/0109/22/world/world7.html

BUSH IS MARCHING STRAIGHT INTO BIN LADEN'S TRAP

Arabs would rather like some of that democracy and liberty the President has
been talking about, writes Robert Fisk.

Sydney Morning Herald
22nd September 2001

Retaliation is a trap. In a world that was supposed to have learnt that the
rule of law comes above revenge, George 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 Pentagon is preparing.

Bin Laden has described to me how he wishes to overthrow the pro-American
regimes 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 US.

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 Bush for his "war against people".

Vladimir Putin must surely have a sense of humour to appreciate the cruel
ironies that have come to pass, though I doubt if he will let 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.

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 Hezbollah guerilla would kill an Israeli occupation
soldier, and the Israelis would fire back in retaliation at a village in
which a civilian would die. The Hezbollah 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 Hezbollah -
the "centre of world terror" according to 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.

"America was targeted for attack," Bush informed us last week, "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 Bush has
been telling them about.

Instead, they get a president who wins 98per cent in the elections
(Washington's friend, Hosni 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.

I will always remember how Bill Clinton announced that Saddam Hussein -
another of the West's 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 Bush is 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?

On 16 September 1982, Israel's Phalangist militia allies started the
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 Palestine
Liberation Organisation 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.

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
US 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 the missiles fired by Israel into
Palestinian buildings in Gaza and the West Bank. Only four weeks ago, I
identified one as an AGM 114-D air-to-ground rocket made by Boeing and
Lockheed-Martin at their factory in Florida, the state where some of the
suiciders trained to fly.

It was fired from an Apache helicopter (made in America) during the 1982
Israeli invasion of Lebanon, when hundreds of cluster bombs were dropped in
civilian areas of Beirut by the Israelis in contravention of undertakings
given to the US. 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 in Georgia - 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 missile's developer say 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.

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. Colin Powell was insisting last week that his message to
the Taliban is simple: they have to take responsibility for sheltering Osama
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 massacres at Sabra and Shatila -
announces that Israel also wishes to join the battle against "world terror".

No wonder the Palestinians are fearful.

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 Bush is supposedly going to war. Not for nothing did 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. Bush is now walking into it - and perhaps his
allies too.

The Independent



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