by M. Shahid Alam
"If you kill one person, it is murder. If you kill a hundred
thousand, it is foreign policy."--Anonymous
I doubt if I have come across a more pithy statement exposing the
hypocrisy of America's war against terrorism; but this is what I
read, well before September 11, 2001, on a car-sticker in the
commuter parking lot in Attleboro, Massachusetts, USA.
States are founded on a monopoly over violence, which has nearly
always included the right to kill. In fact, that is the very essence
of the state. States seek to enforce this monopoly by amassing
instruments of violence; but that is scarcely enough. They also use
religion, ideology and laws to deligitimize and root out violence
stemming from non-state agents.
This monopoly over violence creates its own problem. Unchallenged,
the state can turn the instruments of violence against its own
population. This leads to state tyranny. The state can also wage
wars to enrich one or more sectional interests. This defines the
dual challenge before all organized societies: restraining state
tyranny and limiting its war-making powers.
Often, there has existed a tradeoff between tyranny and wars.
Arguably, such a tradeoff was at work during the period of European
expansion since the sixteenth century, when Europeans slowly secured
political rights even as they engaged in growing, even genocidal,
violence, especially against non-Europeans. As Western states
gradually conceded rights to their own populations, they intensified
the murder and enslavement of Americans and Africans, founding white
colonies on lands stolen from them. Few Westerners were troubled by
this inverse connection: this was the essence of racism.
The United States is only the most successful of the colonial
creations, a fact that has left its indelible mark on American
thinking. It is a country that was founded on violence against its
native inhabitants; this led, over three centuries of expansion, to
the near extermination of Indians, with the few survivors relocated
to inhospitable reservations. Its history also includes the violence
--on a nearly equal scale--perpetrated against the Africans who
were torn from their continent to create wealth for the new
Republic. Such a genesis, steeped in violence against others races,
convinced most Americans that they had the divine right--like the
ancient Israelites--to build their prosperity on the ruin of other,
'inferior' races.
In addition to the manipulations of a corporate media, this ethos
explains why so many Americans support the actions of their
government abroad--in Cuba, Nicaragua, Chile, Vietnam, Iran,
Palestine or Iraq, to name only a few. It is unnecessary to look too
closely into these interventions since they are undertaken to secure
'our' interests. Even if they result in deaths--the deaths of more
than three-quarters of a million children, as in Iraq--to borrow a
felicitous phrase from Madeline Albright, "the price is worth it."
Of course, few Americans understand that their country has long
stood at the apex--and, therefore, is the chief beneficiary--of a
global system that produces poverty for the greater part of
humanity, including within the United States itself; that this
system subordinates all social, cultural, environmental and human
values to the imperatives of corporate capital; a system that now
kills people by the millions merely by setting the rules that
devastate their economies, deprive them of their livelihood, their
dignity and, eventually, their lives. The corporate media, the
school curricula, and the Congress ensure that most Americans never
see past the web of deceit--about a free, just, tolerant and caring
United States--that covers up the human carnage and environmental
wreckage this system produces.
The wretched of the earth are not so easily duped. They can see--
and quite clearly, through the lens of their dark days--how
corporate capital, with United States in the lead, produces their
home-based tyrannies; how their economies have been devastated to
enrich transnational corporations and their local collaborators; how
the two stifle indigenous movements for human rights, women's
rights, and worker's rights; how they devalue indigenous traditions
and languages; how corporate capital uses their countries as
markets, as sources of cheap labor, as fields for testing new,
deadlier weapons, and as sites for dumping toxic wastes; how their
men and women sell body parts because the markets place little value
on their labor.
The world--outside the dominant West--has watched how the
Zionists, with the support of Britain and the United States, imposed
a historical anachronism, a colonial-settler state in Palestine, a
throw-back to a sanguinary past, when indigenous populations in the
Americas could be cleansed with impunity to make room for Europe's
superior races. In horror, they watch daily how a racist Israel
destroys the lives of millions of Palestinians through US-financed
weaponry and fresh-contrived acts of malice; how it attacks its
neighbors at will; how it has destabilized, distorted and derailed
the historical process in an entire region; and how, in a final but
foreordained twist, American men and women have now been drawn into
this conflict, to make the Middle East safe for Israeli hegemony.
In Iraq, over the past thirteen years, the world has watched the
United States showcase the methods it will use to crush challenges
to the new imperialism--the New World Order--that was launched
after the end of the Cold War. This new imperialism commands more
capital and more lethal weapons than the old imperialisms of
Britain, France or Germany. It is imperialism without rivals and,
therefore, it dares to pursue its schemes, its wars, and its
genocidal campaigns, under the cover of international legitimacy:
through the United Nations, the World Bank, IMF, and World Trade
Organization. In brief, it is a deadlier, more pernicious
imperialism.
Under the cover of the Security Council, the United States has waged
a total war against Iraq--a war that went well beyond the means
that would be needed to reverse the invasion of Kuwait. The aerial
bombing of Iraq, in the months preceding the ground action in
January 1991, sought the destruction of the country's civilian
infrastructure, a genocidal act under international law; it
destroyed power plants, water-purification plants, sewage
facilities, bridges and bomb shelters. It was the official (though
unstated) aim of these bombings to sting the Iraqis into
overthrowing their rulers. Worse, the war was followed by a
never-relenting campaign of aerial bombings and the most complete
sanctions in recorded history. According to a UN study, the
sanctions had killed half a million Iraqi children by 1995; the
deaths were the result of a five-fold increase in child mortality
rates. It would have taken five Hiroshima bombs to produce this
grisly toll.
Then came September 11, 2001, a riposte from the black holes of
global capitalism to the New World Order. Nineteen hijackers took
control of passenger airplanes in Boston, Newark and Virginia, and
rammed them, one after another, into the twin towers of the Word
Trade Center and the Pentagon; the fourth missed its target,
possibly the White House. Following a script that had been carefully
rehearsed, the nineteen hijackers enacted a macabre ritual, taking
their own lives even as they took the lives of nearly three thousand
Americans. The hijackers did not wear uniforms; they were not flying
stealth bombers; they carried nothing more lethal (so we are told)
than box cutters and plastic knives; they had not been dispatched or
financed by any government. And yet, using the principles of
jujitsu, they had turned the civilian technology of the world's
greatest power against its own civilians. As Arundhati Roy put it,
the hijackers had delivered "a monstrous calling card from a world
gone horribly wrong."
The terrorist attacks of 9-11 shocked, perhaps traumatized, a whole
nation. Yet the same Americans expressed little concern--in fact,
most could profess total ignorance--about the deaths of hundreds of
thousands of Iraqi civilians caused by daily bombings and crippling
sanctions over a period of thirteen years. Of course, the dollar and
the dinar are not the same. American deaths could not be equated on
a one-to-one basis with Iraqi deaths. If indeed so many Iraqis had
been killed by the United States, those were deaths they deserved
for harboring ill-will towards this country. They were after all
evil. And evil people should never be given a chance to repent or
change their evil-doing propensities. Senator John McCain said it
succinctly: "We're coming after you. God may have mercy on you, but
we won't."
There are some who were impressed and alarmed--in equal measure Ð
by the grisly efficiency with which the terrorists had executed
their operation. (On this ground, some even argued that it could not
have been the work of "incompetent" Arabs.) However, it would appear
that there is greater political cunning at work in the conception of
these attacks. Al-Qaida gave the Bush hawks what they wanted, a
terrorist attack that would inflame Americans into supporting war
against the Third world; and the Bush hawks gave al-Qaida what they
wanted, a war that would plant tens of thousands of Americans in the
cities and towns of the Islamic world.
An act of terror is nearly always attributed to a failure of
intelligence, security, or both. In a country that, annually, spends
tens of billions of dollars on intelligence gathering and trillions
more on its military, the attacks of 9-11 amounted to massive
failures on two fronts: intelligence and security. This should have
led immediately to a Congressional inquiry to identify and remedy
these failures. However, due to obstructions from the Bush
administration, the Congress could not start an official inquiry
into these failures until more than a year after 9-11. Instead, the
Bush administration claimed falsely, as it turns out--with hardly a
murmur from the Congress or the US corporate media--that 9-11 was
unforeseen, it could not have been imagined, and there had been no
advance warnings. Instantly, President Bush declared that 9-11 was
an act of war (making it the first act of war perpetrated by
nineteen civilians), and proceeded to declare unlimited war against
terrorists (also the first time that war had been declared against
elusive non-state actors). In the name of a bogus war against
terrorism, the United States claimed for itself the right to wage
preemptive wars against any country suspected of harboring
terrorists or possessing weapons of mass destruction (what are
weapons for if not mass destruction?) with an intent (US would be
the judge of that) to use them against the United States.
Osama bin Laden had the victory that he had hoped for: he had the
world's only superpower running mad after him and his cohorts.
Al-Qaida had now taken the place vacated by the Soviet Union. It had
to be a worthy opponent to have succeeded in monopolizing the
hostile attention of United States; the actions of al-Qaida now
threatened the world's only superpower. No terrorist group could
have asked for greater prestige, a distinction that was almost
certain to help in its recruitment drive. Secondly, by declaring war
against al-Qaida, the United States had tied its own prestige to the
daily outcome of this war. Every terrorist strike--the softer the
target the better--would be counted by Americans and the rest of
the world as a battle lost in the war against terrorism. It should
come as no surprise that the frequency of large-scale terrorist
strikes has increased markedly since 9-11--from Baghdad to Bali and
Bombay. Thirdly, President Bush's pre-emptive wars have already
placed 160,000 American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, not counting
additional thousands in other Islamic countries. President Bush's
wars against terrorism had made American troops the daily target of
dozens of attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it would appear that
al-Qaida is seizing the opportunity to open a broad front against
the United States on its home turf.
Although the onslaughts of the Crusaders against the Muslims in the
Levant, starting in the 1090s, lasted for nearly two centuries; and
although their conquests at their peak embraced much of old Syria,
it is quite remarkable that this did not alarm the Islamic world
into waging Jihad against the 'Infidels.' On several occasion, one
Muslim prince allied himself with the Crusaders to contain the
ambitions of another Muslim prince. It was only in 1187, after
Salahuddin united Syria and Egypt, that the Muslims took back
Jerusalem. But they did not pursue this war to its bitter end; the
Crusaders retained control of parts of coastal Syria for another
hundred years. In fact, several years later, Salahuddin's successors
even returned Jerusalem to the Cruaders provided they would not
fortify it. In other words, the Crusades which loom so large in
European imagination were not regarded by the Muslims as a
civilizational war.
Of course that was then, when Islamic societies were cultured,
refined, tolerant, self-confident and strong, and though the
Crusades threw the combined might of Western Europe--that region's
first united enterprise--to regain the Christian holy lands, the
Muslims took the invasions in their stride. Eventually, the
resources of a relatively small part of the Muslim world were
sufficient to end this European adventure, which left few lasting
effects on the region. In the more recent past, Islamic societies
have been divided, fragmented, backward, outstripped by their
European adversaries, their states embedded in the periphery of
global capitalism, and their rulers allied with Western powers
against their own people. These divisions are not a natural state in
the historical consciousness of Muslims.
More ominously, since 1917 the Arabs have faced settler-colonialism
in their very heartland, an open-ended imperialist project
successively supported by Britain and the United States. This
Zionist insertion in the Middle East, self-consciously promoted as
the outpost of the West in the Islamic world, produced its own
twisted dialectics. An exclusive Jewish state founded on
fundamentalist claims (and nothing gets more fundamentalist than a
twentieth-century imperialism founded on 'divine' promises about
real estate made three thousand years back) was bound to evoke its
alter ego in the Islamic world. When Israel inflicted a humiliating
defeat on Egypt and Syria in 1967--two countries that were the
leading embodiments of Arab nationalism--this opened up a political
space in the Arab world for the insertion of Islamists into the
region's political landscape. One fundamentalism would now be pitted
against another.
This contest may now be reaching its climax--with United States
entering the war directly. It is an end that could have been
foretold--this did not require prophetic insight. In part at least,
it is the unfolding of the logic of the Zionist insertion in the
Arab world. On the one hand, this has provoked and facilitated the
growth of a broad spectrum of Islamist movements in the Islamic
world, some of which were forced by US-supported repression in their
home countries to target the United States directly. On the other
hand, the Zionist occupation of one-time Biblical lands has given
encouragement to Christian Zionism in the United States, the belief
that Israel prepares the ground for the second coming of Christ. At
the same time, several Zionist propagandists--based in America's
think tanks, media and academia--have worked tirelessly to arouse
old Western fears about Islam, giving it new forms. They paint Islam
as a violent religion, perennially at war against infidels, opposed
to democracy, fearful of women's rights, unable to modernize, and
raging at the West for its freedoms and prosperity. They never tire
of repeating that the Arabs 'hate' Israel because it is the only
'democracy' in the Middle East.
There are some who are saying that the United States has already
lost the war in Iraq; though admission of this defeat will not come
soon. One can see that there has been a retreat from plans to bring
about regime changes in Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. There
is still talk of bringing democracy to Iraq and the Arab world, but
it carries little conviction even to the American public. There is
new-fangled talk now of fighting the "terrorists" in Baghdad and
Basra rather than in Washington, New York and Los Angeles. And now
after two years of bristling unilateralism, after starting an
illegal war which sidelined the Security Council, the United States
is courting the Security Council, seeking its help to
internationalize the financial and human costs of their occupation
of Iraq. It is doubtful if Indian, Polish, Pakistani, Egyptian,
Fijian, Japanese or French mercenaries of the United States will
receive a warmer welcome in Iraq than American troops. This
'internationalization' is only likely to broaden the conflict,
possibly in unpredictable ways.
What can be the outcome of all this? During their long rampage
through history, starting in 1492, the Western powers have shown
little respect for the peoples they encountered in the Americas,
Africa, Asia and Australia. Many of them are not around to recount
the gory history of their extermination through imported diseases,
warfare, and forced labor in mines and plantations. Others, their
numbers diminished, were forced into peonage, or consigned to
mutilated lives on reservations. Many tens of millions were bought
and sold into slavery. Proud empires were dismembered. Great
civilizations were denigrated. All this had happened before, but not
on this scale. In part, perhaps, the extraordinary scale of these
depredations might be attributed to what William McNeill calls the
"bloody-mindedness" of Europeans. Much of this, however, is due to
historical accidents which elevated West Europeans--and not the
Chinese, Turks, or Indians--to great power based on their
exploitation of inorganic sources of energy. If we are to apportion
blame, we might as well award the prize to Britain's rich coal
deposits.
In the period since the Second World War, some of the massive
historical disequilibria created by Western powers have been
corrected. China and India are on their feet; so are Taiwan, South
Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia. These countries are on
their feet and advancing. But the wounds of imperialism in Africa
run deeper. The colonial legacies of fragmented societies, deskilled
populations, arbitrary boundaries, and economies tied to failing
primary production continue to produce wars, civil wars, corruption,
massacres, and diseases. But Africa can be ignored; the deaths of a
million Africans in the Congo do not merit the attention given to
one suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. Africa can be ignored because its
troubles do not affect vital Western interests; at least not yet.
Then there is the failure of the Islamic world to reconstitute
itself. As late as 1700, the Muslims commanded three major empires Ð
the Mughal, Ottoman and Safavid--that together controlled the
greater part of the Islamic world, stretching in a continuous line
from the borders of Morocco to the eastern borders of India. After a
period of rivalry among indigenous successor states and European
interlopers, all of India was firmly in British control by the
1860s. The Ottoman Empire disintegrated more slowly, losing its
European territories in the nineteenth century and its Arab
territories during the First World War, when they were divvied up
amongst the British, French, Zionists, Maronites and a clutch of
oil-rich protectorates. Only the Iranians held on to most of the
territories acquired by the Safavids. As a result, when the Islamic
world emerged out of the colonial era, it had been politically
fragmented, divided into some forty states, none with the potential
to serve as a core state; this fragmentation was most striking in
Islam's Arab heartland. In addition, significant Muslim populations
now lived in states with non-Muslim majorities.
Why did the Muslims fail to reconstitute their power? Most
importantly, this was because Muslim power lacked a demographic
base. The Mughal and Ottoman Empires--the Ottoman Empire in Europe
Ð were not sustainable because they ruled over non-Muslim
majorities. More recently, the Muslims have been the victims of
geological 'luck,' containing the richest deposits of the fuel that
drives the global economy. The great powers could not let the
Muslims control 'their lifeblood.' They suffered a third setback
from a historical accident: the impetus that Hitler gave to the
Zionist movement. Now there had emerged a powerful new interest--a
specifically Jewish interest--in keeping the Arabs divided and
dispossessed.
It does not appear, however, that the Islamic societies have
accepted their fragmentation, or their subjugation by
neocolonial/comprador regimes who work for the United States,
Britain and France. We have watched the resilience of the Muslims,
their determination to fight for their dignity, in Afghanistan,
Bosnia, Palestine, Chechnya and Mindanao--among other places. In
the meanwhile, their demographic weakness is being reversed. At the
beginning of the twentieth century the Muslims constituted barely a
tenth of the world's population; today that share exceeds one fifth,
and continues to rise. Moreover, unlike the Chinese or Hindus, the
Muslims occupy a broad swathe of territory from Nigeria, Senegal and
Morocco in the west to Sinjiang and the Indonesian Archipelago in
the east. It would be hard to corral a population of this size that
spans half the globe. More likely the US-British-Israeli siege of
the Islamic world, now underway in the name of the war against
terrorism, will lead to a broadening conflict with unforeseen
consequences that could easily turn very costly for either or both
parties.
Can the situation yet be saved? In the weeks preceding the launch of
the war against Iraq, when tens of millions of people--mostly in
Western cities--were marching in protest against the war, it
appeared that there was hope; that the ideologies of hatred and the
tactics of fear-mongering would be defeated; that these massive
movements would result in civil disobedience if the carnage in Iraq
were launched despite these protests. But once the war began, the
protesters melted away like picnicking crowds when a sunny day is
marred by rains. In retrospect, the protests lacked the depth to
graduate into a political movement, to work for lasting changes.
America does not easily stomach anti-war protestors once it starts a
war. War is serious business: and it must have the undivided support
of the whole country once the killing begins.
The anti-war protests may yet regroup, but that will not be before
many more body bags arrive in the continental United States, before
many more young Americans are mutilated for life, before many tens
of thousands of Iraqis are dispatched to early deaths. Attempts are
already underway to invent new lies to keep Americans deluded about
the war; to tighten the noose around Iran; to hide the growing
casualties of war; to lure poor Mexicans and Guatemalans to die for
America; to substitute Indian and Pakistani body bags for American
ones. This war-mongering by the United States cannot be stopped
unless more Americans can be taught to separate their government
from their country, their leaders from their national interests,
their tribal affiliations from their common humanity. But that means
getting past the media, the political establishment, the social
scientists, the schools, and native prejudices. It is arguable that
the nineteen hijackers would not have had to deliver the "monstrous
calling card" if some of us had done a better job of getting past
these hurdles in time. Still, the hijackers chose the wrong way to
deliver their message, since it played right into the game plan of
the Bush hawks. The result has been more profits for favored US
corporations, greater freedom of action for Israel, and more lives
and liberties lost everywhere.
Copyright © 2003 M. Shahid Alam - M. Shahid
Alam is Professor of Economics at Northeastern University, Boston.
He is the author of Poverty from the Wealth of Nations (Macmillan:
2000). A more complete version of this essay, with footnotes and
references, appeared in Studies in Contemporary Islam 4 (2002),
1:51-78.
[He wrote in 1927(!) that "England, in order to save herself from extinction,
will become a satellite of the United States and incite the imperialism and
capitalism of America to fight by her side." He suggested that a Communist
victory in China would not necessarily mean that the country would be ruled
by the principles of Marx; the role of the "small peasant" would ensure a
departure from "pure communism." At the same time he found it difficult to
escape the prism of the anticolonial freedom fighter; while taking a benign
view of Russian and Chinese communism, he thought that "the great problem of
the near future will be American imperialism, even more than British
imperialism. Or it may be . . . that the two will join to, gether to create
a powerful Anglo-Saxon bloc to dominate the world."--Shashi Tharoor,
"Nehru: The Invention of India," Arcade Publishing (2003)]
Arundhati Roy, "The
New American Century," The Nation, January 16, 2004
VIDEO:
"Pilger
on the US and terrorism," Australian Broadcasting Corporation, March 10,
2004
"1,000
dying per day in DR Congo conflict," Washington Times, December 9, 2004
[Today's Muslim states -- countries where Islam is a majority religion
adhered to by the overwhelming percentage of the population -- emerged on
the ruins of the last major Muslim power -- Ottoman Turkey, and as a result
of the dissolution of British India. Following the end of WWI, and later on,
in 1947, young nation-states emerged in place of the centuries-old
established order and principles. For many decades, Western European powers,
the United States and the Soviet Union all promoted the emergence of these
states onto the world arena, and supported them based on their own
political, military or economic interests. Assistance to these states as
separate political units drove the diverse foreign policies of the major
powers after both world wars, during the Cold War, and in the current
unipolar environment.--"Lines in the Sand: Western State Building in the Muslim
World," PINR, January 26, 2005]
David Holley, "Russia, China Team Up to Assail U.S.
Foreign Policy," Los Angeles Times, July 2, 2005
[Dozens of Western multinationals have made millions of pounds in profits
from exploiting African bio-resources taken from some of the poorest nations
on earth, with not a penny offered in return.
Pharmaceutical firms are accused of breaching the United Nations convention
on biodiversity, which states that nations have sovereignty over their own
natural resources, by scouring continents for samples of unique materials,
from plants to bacteria.
A ground-breaking report identifies numerous materials, taken from Africa to
Western laboratories, which have developed and patented products worth
hundreds of millions of pounds - from a trailing plant beloved of gardeners
across Europe to a natural cure for impotence and a microbe used in fading
designer jeans.--Andrew Buncombe, "
African bio-resources 'exploited by West'," Guardian, February 17, 2006]
Warren Hoge, " U.S. Isolated in Opposing Plan for a New U.N.
Rights Council," New York Times, March 4, 2006