Date: Mon, 01 Oct 2001 12:53:08 -0400
From: Malini Schueller <mschuell-AT-english.ufl.edu>
Subject: Re: arundhati roy in the guardian


While I liked a lot of Arundhati Roy's article, I also found it disturbing
in many ways. Can we really compare the head of Union Carbide to the
Taliban even though the former caused the death of so many? (and I do think
the Union Carbide survivors got a horrible deal) Is intentionality not an
issue at all? And how can we call the Taliban reasonable? Are public
executions in football stadiums reasonable? 
Malini    






At 09:10 AM 9/29/01 -0500, you wrote:
>http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4266289,00.html
>
>Arundhati Roy
>Guardian
>
>Saturday September 29, 2001
>
>
>In the aftermath of the unconscionable September 11 suicide attacks on the
>Pentagon and the World Trade Centre, an American newscaster said: "Good and
>evil rarely manifest themselves as clearly as they did last Tuesday. People
>who we don't know massacred people who we do. And they did so with
>contemptuous glee." Then he broke down and wept.
>
>Here's the rub: America is at war against people it doesn't know, because
>they don't appear much on TV. Before it has properly identified or even
>begun to comprehend the nature of its enemy, the US government has, in a
>rush of publicity and embarrassing rhetoric, cobbled together an
>"international coalition against terror", mobilised its army, its air force,
>its navy and its media, and committed them to battle.
>
>The trouble is that once Amer ica goes off to war, it can't very well return
>without having fought one. If it doesn't find its enemy, for the sake of the
>enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture one. Once war begins,
>it will develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own, and
>we'll lose sight of why it's being fought in the first place.
>
>What we're witnessing here is the spectacle of the world's most powerful
>country reaching reflexively, angrily, for an old instinct to fight a new
>kind of war. Suddenly, when it comes to defending itself, America's
>streamlined warships, cruise missiles and F-16 jets look like obsolete,
>lumbering things. As deterrence, its arsenal of nuclear bombs is no longer
>worth its weight in scrap. Box-cutters, penknives, and cold anger are the
>weapons with which the wars of the new century will be waged. Anger is the
>lock pick. It slips through customs unnoticed. Doesn't show up in baggage
>checks.
>
>Who is America fighting? On September 20, the FBI said that it had doubts
>about the identities of some of the hijackers. On the same day President
>George Bush said, "We know exactly who these people are and which
>governments are supporting them." It sounds as though the president knows
>something that the FBI and the American public don't.
>
>In his September 20 address to the US Congress, President Bush called the
>enemies of America "enemies of freedom". "Americans are asking, 'Why do they
>hate us?' " he said. "They hate our freedoms - our freedom of religion, our
>freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each
>other." People are being asked to make two leaps of faith here. First, to
>assume that The Enemy is who the US government says it is, even though it
>has no substantial evidence to support that claim. And second, to assume
>that The Enemy's motives are what the US government says they are, and
>there's nothing to support that either.
>
>For strategic, military and economic reasons, it is vital for the US
>government to persuade its public that their commitment to freedom and
>democracy and the American Way of Life is under attack. In the current
>atmosphere of grief, outrage and anger, it's an easy notion to peddle.
>However, if that were true, it's reasonable to wonder why the symbols of
>America's economic and military dominance - the World Trade Centre and the
>Pentagon - were chosen as the targets of the attacks. Why not the Statue of
>Liberty? Could it be that the stygian anger that led to the attacks has its
>taproot not in American freedom and democracy, but in the US government's
>record of commitment and support to exactly the opposite things - to
>military and economic terrorism, insurgency, military dictatorship,
>religious bigotry and unimaginable genocide (outside America)? It must be
>hard for ordinary Americans, so recently bereaved, to look up at the world
>with their eyes full of tears and encounter what might appear to them to be
>indifference. It isn't indifference. It's just augury. An absence of
>surprise. The tired wisdom of knowing that what goes around eventually comes
>around. American people ought to know that it is not them but their
>government's policies that are so hated. They can't possibly doubt that they
>themselves, their extraordinary musicians, their writers, their actors,
>their spectacular sportsmen and their cinema, are universally welcomed. All
>of us have been moved by the courage and grace shown by firefighters, rescue
>workers and ordinary office staff in the days since the attacks.
>
>America's grief at what happened has been immense and immensely public. It
>would be grotesque to expect it to calibrate or modulate its anguish.
>However, it will be a pity if, instead of using this as an opportunity to
>try to understand why September 11 happened, Americans use it as an
>opportunity to usurp the whole world's sorrow to mourn and avenge only their
>own. Because then it falls to the rest of us to ask the hard questions and
>say the harsh things. And for our pains, for our bad timing, we will be
>disliked, ignored and perhaps eventually silenced.
>
>The world will probably never know what motivated those particular hijackers
>who flew planes into those particular American buildings. They were not
>glory boys. They left no suicide notes, no political messages; no
>organisation has claimed credit for the attacks. All we know is that their
>belief in what they were doing outstripped the natural human instinct for
>survival, or any desire to be remembered. It's almost as though they could
>not scale down the enormity of their rage to anything smaller than their
>deeds. And what they did has blown a hole in the world as we knew it. In the
>absence of information, politicians, political commentators and writers
>(like myself) will invest the act with their own politics, with their own
>interpretations. This speculation, this analysis of the political climate in
>which the attacks took place, can only be a good thing.
>
>But war is looming large. Whatever remains to be said must be said quickly.
>Before America places itself at the helm of the "international coalition
>against terror", before it invites (and coerces) countries to actively
>participate in its almost godlike mission - called Operation Infinite
>Justice until it was pointed out that this could be seen as an insult to
>Muslims, who believe that only Allah can mete out infinite justice, and was
>renamed Operation Enduring Freedom- it would help if some small
>clarifications are made. For example, Infinite Justice/Enduring Freedom for
>whom? Is this America's war against terror in America or against terror in
>general? What exactly is being avenged here? Is it the tragic loss of almost
>7,000 lives, the gutting of five million square feet of office space in
>Manhattan, the destruction of a section of the Pentagon, the loss of several
>hundreds of thousands of jobs, the bankruptcy of some airline companies and
>the dip in the New York Stock Exchange? Or is it more than that? In 1996,
>Madeleine Albright, then the US secretary of state, was asked on national
>television what she felt about the fact that 500,000 Iraqi children had died
>as a result of US economic sanctions. She replied that it was "a very hard
>choice", but that, all things considered, "we think the price is worth it".
>Albright never lost her job for saying this. She continued to travel the
>world representing the views and aspirations of the US government. More
>pertinently, the sanctions against Iraq remain in place. Children continue
>to die.
>
>So here we have it. The equivocating distinction between civilisation and
>savagery, between the "massacre of innocent people" or, if you like, "a
>clash of civilisations" and "collateral damage". The sophistry and
>fastidious algebra of infinite justice. How many dead Iraqis will it take to
>make the world a better place? How many dead Afghans for every dead
>American? How many dead women and children for every dead man? How many dead
>mojahedin for each dead investment banker? As we watch mesmerised, Operation
>Enduring Freedom unfolds on TV monitors across the world. A coalition of the
>world's superpowers is closing in on Afghanistan, one of the poorest, most
>ravaged, war-torn countries in the world, whose ruling Taliban government is
>sheltering Osama bin Laden, the man being held responsible for the September
>11 attacks.
>
>The only thing in Afghanistan that could possibly count as collateral value
>is its citizenry. (Among them, half a million maimed orphans.There are
>accounts of hobbling stampedes that occur when artificial limbs are
>airdropped into remote, inaccessible villages.) Afghanistan's economy is in
>a shambles. In fact, the problem for an invading army is that Afghanistan
>has no conventional coordinates or signposts to plot on a military map - no
>big cities, no highways, no industrial complexes, no water treatment plants.
>Farms have been turned into mass graves. The countryside is littered with
>land mines - 10 million is the most recent estimate. The American army would
>first have to clear the mines and build roads in order to take its soldiers
>in.
>
>Fearing an attack from America, one million citizens have fled from their
>homes and arrived at the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The UN
>estimates that there are eight million Afghan citizens who need emergency
>aid. As supplies run out - food and aid agencies have been asked to leave -
>the BBC reports that one of the worst humanitarian disasters of recent times
>has begun to unfold. Witness the infinite justice of the new century.
>Civilians starving to death while they're waiting to be killed.
>
>In America there has been rough talk of "bombing Afghanistan back to the
>stone age". Someone please break the news that Afghanistan is already there.
>And if it's any consolation, America played no small part in helping it on
>its way. The American people may be a little fuzzy about where exactly
>Afghanistan is (we hear reports that there's a run on maps of the country),
>but the US government and Afghanistan are old friends.
>
>In 1979, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA and Pakistan's
>ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) launched the largest covert operation in
>the history of the CIA. Their purpose was to harness the energy of Afghan
>resistance to the Soviets and expand it into a holy war, an Islamic jihad,
>which would turn Muslim countries within the Soviet Union against the
>communist regime and eventually destabilise it. When it began, it was meant
>to be the Soviet Union's Vietnam. It turned out to be much more than that.
>Over the years, through the ISI, the CIA funded and recruited almost 100,000
>radical mojahedin from 40 Islamic countries as soldiers for America's proxy
>war. The rank and file of the mojahedin were unaware that their jihad was
>actually being fought on behalf of Uncle Sam. (The irony is that America was
>equally unaware that it was financing a future war against itself.)
>
>In 1989, after being bloodied by 10 years of relentless conflict, the
>Russians withdrew, leaving behind a civilisation reduced to rubble.
>
>Civil war in Afghanistan raged on. The jihad spread to Chechnya, Kosovo and
>eventually to Kashmir. The CIA continued to pour in money and military
>equipment, but the overheads had become immense, and more money was needed.
>The mojahedin ordered farmers to plant opium as a "revolutionary tax". The
>ISI set up hundreds of heroin laboratories across Afghanistan. Within two
>years of the CIA's arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland had become
>the biggest producer of heroin in the world, and the single biggest source
>of the heroin on American streets. The annual profits, said to be between
>$100bn and $200bn, were ploughed back into training and arming militants.
>
>In 1995, the Taliban - then a marginal sect of dangerous, hardline
>fundamentalists - fought its way to power in Afghanistan. It was funded by
>the ISI, that old cohort of the CIA, and supported by many political parties
>in Pakistan. The Taliban unleashed a regime of terror. Its first victims
>were its own people, particularly women. It closed down girls' schools,
>dismissed women from government jobs, and enforced sharia laws under which
>women deemed to be "immoral" are stoned to death, and widows guilty of being
>adulterous are buried alive. Given the Taliban government's human rights
>track record, it seems unlikely that it will in any way be intimidated or
>swerved from its purpose by the prospect of war, or the threat to the lives
>of its civilians.
>
>After all that has happened, can there be anything more ironic than Russia
>and America joining hands to re-destroy Afghanistan? The question is, can
>you destroy destruction? Dropping more bombs on Afghanistan will only
>shuffle the rubble, scramble some old graves and disturb the dead.
>
>The desolate landscape of Afghanistan was the burial ground of Soviet
>communism and the springboard of a unipolar world dominated by America. It
>made the space for neocapitalism and corporate globalisation, again
>dominated by America. And now Afghanistan is poised to become the graveyard
>for the unlikely soldiers who fought and won this war for America.
>
>And what of America's trusted ally? Pakistan too has suffered enormously.
>The US government has not been shy of supporting military dictators who have
>blocked the idea of democracy from taking root in the country. Before the
>CIA arrived, there was a small rural market for opium in Pakistan. Between
>1979 and 1985, the number of heroin addicts grew from zero to one-and-a-half
>million. Even before September 11, there were three million Afghan refugees
>living in tented camps along the border. Pakistan's economy is crumbling.
>Sectarian violence, globalisation's structural adjustment programmes and
>drug lords are tearing the country to pieces. Set up to fight the Soviets,
>the terrorist training centres and madrasahs, sown like dragon's teeth
>across the country, produced fundamentalists with tremendous popular appeal
>within Pakistan itself. The Taliban, which the Pakistan government has sup
>ported, funded and propped up for years, has material and strategic
>alliances with Pakistan's own political parties.
>
>Now the US government is asking (asking?) Pakistan to garotte the pet it has
>hand-reared in its backyard for so many years. President Musharraf, having
>pledged his support to the US, could well find he has something resembling
>civil war on his hands.
>
>India, thanks in part to its geography, and in part to the vision of its
>former leaders, has so far been fortunate enough to be left out of this
>Great Game. Had it been drawn in, it's more than likely that our democracy,
>such as it is, would not have survived. Today, as some of us watch in
>horror, the Indian government is furiously gyrating its hips, begging the US
>to set up its base in India rather than Pakistan. Having had this ringside
>view of Pakistan's sordid fate, it isn't just odd, it's unthinkable, that
>India should want to do this. Any third world country with a fragile economy
>and a complex social base should know by now that to invite a superpower
>such as America in (whether it says it's staying or just passing through)
>would be like inviting a brick to drop through your windscreen.
>
>Operation Enduring Freedom is ostensibly being fought to uphold the American
>Way of Life. It'll probably end up undermining it completely. It will spawn
>more anger and more terror across the world. For ordinary people in America,
>it will mean lives lived in a climate of sickening uncertainty: will my
>child be safe in school? Will there be nerve gas in the subway? A bomb in
>the cinema hall? Will my love come home tonight? There have been warnings
>about the possibility of biological warfare - smallpox, bubonic plague,
>anthrax - the deadly payload of innocuous crop-duster aircraft. Being picked
>off a few at a time may end up being worse than being annihilated all at
>once by a nuclear bomb.
>
>The US government, and no doubt governments all over the world, will use the
>climate of war as an excuse to curtail civil liberties, deny free speech,
>lay off workers, harass ethnic and religious minorities, cut back on public
>spending and divert huge amounts of money to the defence industry. To what
>purpose? President Bush can no more "rid the world of evil-doers" than he
>can stock it with saints. It's absurd for the US government to even toy with
>the notion that it can stamp out terrorism with more violence and
>oppression. Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease. Terrorism has no
>country. It's transnational, as global an enterprise as Coke or Pepsi or
>Nike. At the first sign of trouble, terrorists can pull up stakes and move
>their "factories" from country to country in search of a better deal. Just
>like the multi-nationals.
>
>Terrorism as a phenomenon may never go away. But if it is to be contained,
>the first step is for America to at least acknowledge that it shares the
>planet with other nations, with other human beings who, even if they are not
>on TV, have loves and griefs and stories and songs and sorrows and, for
>heaven's sake, rights. Instead, when Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence
>secretary, was asked what he would call a victory in America's new war, he
>said that if he could convince the world that Americans must be allowed to
>continue with their way of life, he would consider it a victory.
>
>The September 11 attacks were a monstrous calling card from a world gone
>horribly wrong. The message may have been written by Bin Laden (who knows?)
>and delivered by his couriers, but it could well have been signed by the
>ghosts of the victims of America's old wars. The millions killed in Korea,
>Vietnam and Cambodia, the 17,500 killed when Israel - backed by the US -
>invaded Lebanon in 1982, the 200,000 Iraqis killed in Operation Desert
>Storm, the thousands of Palestinians who have died fighting Israel's
>occupation of the West Bank. And the millions who died, in Yugoslavia,
>Somalia, Haiti, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic,
>Panama, at the hands of all the terrorists, dictators and genocidists whom
>the American government supported, trained, bankrolled and supplied with
>arms. And this is far from being a comprehensive list.
>
>For a country involved in so much warfare and conflict, the American people
>have been extremely fortunate. The strikes on September 11 were only the
>second on American soil in over a century. The first was Pearl Harbour. The
>reprisal for this took a long route, but ended with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
>This time the world waits with bated breath for the horrors to come.
>
>Someone recently said that if Osama bin Laden didn't exist, America would
>have had to invent him. But, in a way, America did invent him. He was among
>the jihadis who moved to Afghanistan in 1979 when the CIA commenced its
>operations there. Bin Laden has the distinction of being created by the CIA
>and wanted by the FBI. In the course of a fortnight he has been promoted
>from suspect to prime suspect and then, despite the lack of any real
>evidence, straight up the charts to being "wanted dead or alive".
>
>>From all accounts, it will be impossible to produce evidence (of the sort
>that would stand scrutiny in a court of law) to link Bin Laden to the
>September 11 attacks. So far, it appears that the most incriminating piece
>of evidence against him is the fact that he has not condemned them.
>
>>From what is known about the location of Bin Laden and the living conditions
>in which he operates, it's entirely possible that he did not personally plan
>and carry out the attacks - that he is the inspirational figure, "the CEO of
>the holding company". The Taliban's response to US demands for the
>extradition of Bin Laden has been uncharacteristically reasonable: produce
>the evidence, then we'll hand him over. President Bush's response is that
>the demand is "non-negotiable".
>
>(While talks are on for the extradition of CEOs - can India put in a side
>request for the extradition of Warren Anderson of the US? He was the
>chairman of Union Carbide, responsible for the Bhopal gas leak that killed
>16,000 people in 1984. We have collated the necessary evidence. It's all in
>the files. Could we have him, please?)
>
>But who is Osama bin Laden really? Let me rephrase that. What is Osama bin
>Laden? He's America's family secret. He is the American president's dark
>doppelgnger. The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and
>civilised. He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste
>by America's foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its
>vulgarly stated policy of "full-spectrum dominance", its chilling disregard
>for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support
>for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has
>munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts. Its
>marauding multinationals who are taking over the air we breathe, the ground
>we stand on, the water we drink, the thoughts we think. Now that the family
>secret has been spilled, the twins are blurring into one another and
>gradually becoming interchangeable. Their guns, bombs, money and drugs have
>been going around in the loop for a while. (The Stinger missiles that will
>greet US helicopters were supplied by the CIA. The heroin used by America's
>drug addicts comes from Afghanistan. The Bush administration recently gave
>Afghanistan a $43m subsidy for a "war on drugs"....)
>
>Now Bush and Bin Laden have even begun to borrow each other's rhetoric. Each
>refers to the other as "the head of the snake". Both invoke God and use the
>loose millenarian currency of good and evil as their terms of reference.
>Both are engaged in unequivocal political crimes. Both are dangerously
>armed - one with the nuclear arsenal of the obscenely powerful, the other
>with the incandescent, destructive power of the utterly hopeless. The
>fireball and the ice pick. The bludgeon and the axe. The important thing to
>keep in mind is that neither is an acceptable alternative to the other.
>
>President Bush's ultimatum to the people of the world - "If you're not with
>us, you're against us" - is a piece of presumptuous arrogance. It's not a
>choice that people want to, need to, or should have to make.
>
> Arundhati Roy 2001
>
>
>
>
>
> Guardian Unlimited  Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001
>
>Jillana Enteen
>jillana-AT-rcnchicago.com
>http://www.rcnchicago.com/~jillana
>
>
>
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