Infinite Justice

[DonkeyWan]

Hi I haven't been on the forum in a while and I would just like to add my two cents. Before I get a rather adverse reaction to the below article, let me explain my position. I abhor terrorism and the acts of violence in the US. I am acutely aware of the problems involved in discussing terrorism, being from ireland we have a long history of such problems. In a manner I am acting as the devil's advocate, displaying an opposite point of view to much of what is being said on this site. Quite simply put, I find the attitude of the US governemnt hard to stomach. Yes Bin Laden is possibly the mastermind behind the crime. Possibly he still has evil plans for America. He definitely is using the incident to further his own anti-capitalist, anti-American campaign. Yet does this give the US the right to invade Afghanistan to catch a known criminal? The ruling Taliban reasonably required evidence from America before releasing Bin Laden. So would any country, before extraditing any one from their borders. The invasion by the US is therefore founded on questionable ethical and moral foundations. The possible escalation of the war into Iraq (and possibly Chechnya to support the USSR) is also suspect and extremely worrying. If we examine world history and see the the outbreak of WWI, we will see a similar situation to the invasion of Serbia by Austria evolving in the Middle East, even as we speak. The fight with Afghanistan seems to have mutated from anti-terrorism into a clash of civilizations and cultures, it represents an extremely poor precedent. The Bush administration uses Bin Laden as an excuse to invade Afghanistan, an indefensible viewpoint. Did Spain invade Britain when they had Pinochet within their borders? Did Britain invade the Republic of Ireland when IRA suspects from the North hid within our borders? Can one state defy the integrity of another in pursuit of criminal elements? This for me is the flawed nature of the war on terrorism, the frightening precedent set by the US. How will other more powerful nations act in future years? Will Iran/Israel/China invade its weaker neighbouring states on the pretext of catching criminals, pointing to the current actions of the United States for validation of their actions? Below is a rather lenghty article by an indian correspondent. Read it, whether you agree with it or not, at least read it and be informed of the opposing views that exist. Without research, evidence, historical understanding we are but chafe in the wind....


The algebra of infinite justice.

Arundati Roy

The Guardian on 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 America 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 U.S. government says they are, and there's nothing to support that either.
For strategic, military and economic reasons, it is vital for the U.S. 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 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 fire-fighters, 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 commentatorsand 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 co-ordinates 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, hard-line 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 it's 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 druglords 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 supported, 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 garrotte 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'1l 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, layoff 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 U.S. 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 trans-national, 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 multinationals. 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 grief's and stories and songs and sorrows and, for heaven's sake, rights. Instead, when Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 11attacks. 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. [t'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 doppelganger. 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. It's 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 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.
@AnJndhati Roy 2001

[AzureWolf]

This is an extremly insightful post. IMO it symbolises my feelings on this. Dont get me wrong I have lived in America and have friends there so I do not American bash. But this story shows the other sides views for once.
THANKYOU Donkeywan.

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"I was born of darkness. My fathers eyes closed before mine opened. I am not of this world or the other, and I have the right to be what I am..."

Overlord of all that I behold and anything that i happen to not notice either.

Founding Hamlet of the HADB.

[skywalker]

Originally posted by AzureWolf: This is an extremly insightful post. IMO it symbolises my feelings on this. Dont get me wrong I have lived in America and have friends there so I do not American bash. But this story shows the other sides views for once. THANKYOU Donkeywan.

Thanx for posting this Donkeywan. Much food for thought!

And Thanx AzureWolf. Your response made me think twice and actually read it.

Mark

[AzureWolf]

Originally posted by skywalker: Thanx for posting this Donkeywan. Much food for thought! And Thanx AzureWolf. Your response made me think twice and actually read it. Mark

Thats good
People should think twice about this post.
Their first intial reaction may be anger at this Indians story but you have to know both sides of the story

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"I was born of darkness. My fathers eyes closed before mine opened. I am not of this world or the other, and I have the right to be what I am..."

Overlord of all that I behold and anything that i happen to not notice either.

Founding Hamlet of the HADB.

[DonkeyWan]

Thanks for the support guys. I was nervous about posting considering the current climate of anger (understandably so I might add). Once again, I must stress, I don't support violence and condemn all the terrorist actions that are ongoing. Yet I like many others caution a degree of restraint, for fear that we will start something that may prove difficult to stop. It is easy to stand on the sidelines and call the shots, were not the ones who are in the field of fire. It must apppear to Aericans we are being anti-capitalist, fatalists. Not so, anyone who cautions restraint does so from a sense of deja vu, a fear that hasty action now could cause untold damage in the future. American is angry. We understand that. When we question the validity of American actions, we do so from a sense of nationhood, not critical superiority. Please don't see this as arrogant morality, rather a brotherly restraint, fear of hotheaded response from an injured sibling.

[AzureWolf]

Originally posted by DonkeyWan: Thanks for the support guys. I was nervous about posting considering the current climate of anger (understandably so I might add). Once again, I must stress, I don't support violence and condemn all the terrorist actions that are ongoing. Yet I like many others caution a degree of restraint, for fear that we will start something that may prove difficult to stop. It is easy to stand on the sidelines and call the shots, were not the ones who are in the field of fire. It must apppear to Aericans we are being anti-capitalist, fatalists. Not so, anyone who cautions restraint does so from a sense of deja vu, a fear that hasty action now could cause untold damage in the future. American is angry. We understand that. When we question the validity of American actions, we do so from a sense of nationhood, not critical superiority. Please don't see this as arrogant morality, rather a brotherly restraint, fear of hotheaded response from an injured sibling.

Very well said. I cannot stress the fact enough that we are not condemning Americans. We are putting a new perspective on the bombings and how this "war" came to be. You cannot fight fire with fire.
Again I say thankyou

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"I was born of darkness. My fathers eyes closed before mine opened. I am not of this world or the other, and I have the right to be what I am..."

Overlord of all that I behold and anything that i happen to not notice either.

Founding Hamlet of the HADB.

[Kaz]

Wow. That was REALLY GOOD. It shows my views on this almost exactly. It is very detailed and insightful. THANK YOU FOR POSTING THIS! :handshake: *hugs* that is GREAT. BTW, like Azurewolf, I am not American bashing, as I have also lived there and have friends there. I just find a number of attitudes I have heard of (most if not all are mentioned in DonkeyWan's post) very disturbing. One of these is the "if you're not with us, you're against us" statement. Countries like Switzerland were been neutral in all the recent wars, why shouldn't they be so now?
Dio, Fljotsdale, Silver Cheetah, DragonMage, I nominate DonkeyWan as a new member of the Illuminati

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Sapphire Dragoness of ALSB
Waitress at Cloudy's Cafe
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Lux omnis est
Once Upon A Paper Writer's Forum

[This message has been edited by Kaz (edited 10-16-2001).]

[Ryanamur]

That was an awesome post. Many people here have been debating about the logic behind a full blown attack. This article echoes many of the points that have been made by them. However insightfull, I'm doubtfull that the big people of this world (Bush and Blair amongst other) refuse to see the stupidity behind there action because they are more interested in making the public happy. Right now, the public at home call's for revenge and revenge they will get. They are fully aware that they cannot get Bin Ladden by bombing (he's probably not in Aghanistan any more and they know it). However, the removal of the Taliban is definitly a sign of success and so, that's there true aim in this military campaign.

[skywalker]

I wonder what's the big deal with the catchy names for every action our armed forces perform. You know: Desert Storm, Infinite Justice, Operation: Provide Hope, etc. I just find them to be a little over the top.

Mark

[Ryanamur]

Originally posted by skywalker: I wonder what's the big deal with the catchy names for every action our armed forces perform. You know: Desert Storm, Infinite Justice, Operation: Provide Hope, etc. I just find them to be a little over the top. Mark

It's nothing more than a name of virtue to boost spirit of your soldier. Could you imagine a name like "Operation RIP" or "Operation Death to Innocents"?