The wickedness and awesome cruelty of a crushed and
humiliated people
By Robert Fisk
12 September 2001
The Independent
http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=93623
So it has come to this. The entire modern history of
the Middle East the collapse of the Ottoman empire,
the Balfour declaration, Lawrence of Arabia's lies,
the Arab revolt, the foundation of the state of
Israel, four Arab-Israeli wars and the 34 years of
Israel's brutal occupation of Arab land all erased
within hours as those who claim to represent a
crushed, humiliated population struck back with the
wickedness and awesome cruelty of a doomed people. Is
it fair is it moral to write this so soon, without
proof, when the last act of barbarism, in Oklahoma,
turned out to be the work of home-grown Americans? I
fear it is. America is at war and, unless I am
mistaken, many thousands more are now scheduled to die
in the Middle East, perhaps in America too. Some of us
warned of "the explosion to come''. But we never
dreamt this nightmare.
And yes, Osama bin Laden comes to mind, his money, his
theology, his frightening dedication to destroy
American power. I have sat in front of bin Laden as he
described how his men helped to destroy the Russian
army in Afghanistan and thus the Soviet Union. Their
boundless confidence allowed them to declare war on
America. But this is not the war of democracy versus
terror that the world will be asked to believe in the
coming days. It is also about American missiles
smashing into Palestinian homes and US helicopters
firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and
American shells crashing into a village called Qana
and about a Lebanese militia paid and uniformed by
America's Israeli ally hacking and raping and
murdering their way through refugee camps.
No, there is no doubting the utter, indescribable evil
of what has happened in the United States. That
Palestinians could celebrate the massacre of 20,000,
perhaps 35,000 innocent people is not only a symbol of
their despair but of their political immaturity, of
their failure to grasp what they had always been
accusing their Israeli enemies of doing: acting
disproportionately. All the years of rhetoric, all the
promises to strike at the heart of America, to cut off
the head of "the American snake'' we took for empty
threats. How could a backward, conservative,
undemocratic and corrupt group of regimes and small,
violent organisations fulfil such preposterous
promises? Now we know.
And in the hours that followed yesterday's
annihilation, I began to remember those other
extraordinary assaults upon the US and its allies,
miniature now by comparison with yesterday's
casualties. Did not the suicide bombers who killed 241
American servicemen and 100 French paratroops in
Beirut on 23 October 1983, time their attacks with
unthinkable precision?
There were just seven seconds between the Marine
bombing and the destruction of the French three miles
away. Then there were the attacks on US bases in Saudi
Arabia, and last year's attempt almost successful it
now turns out to sink the USS Cole in Aden. And then
how easy was our failure to recognise the new weapon
of the Middle East which neither Americans nor any
other Westerners could equal: the despair-driven,
desperate suicide bomber.
And there will be, inevitably, and quite immorally, an
attempt to obscure the historical wrongs and the
injustices that lie behind yesterday's firestorms. We
will be told about "mindless terrorism'', the
"mindless" bit being essential if we are not to
realise how hated America has become in the land of
the birth of three great religions.
Ask an Arab how he responds to 20,000 or 30,000
innocent deaths and he or she will respond as decent
people should, that it is an unspeakable crime. But
they will ask why we did not use such words about the
sanctions that have destroyed the lives of perhaps
half a million children in Iraq, why we did not rage
about the 17,500 civilians killed in Israel's 1982
invasion of Lebanon. And those basic reasons why the
Middle East caught fire last September the Israeli
occupation of Arab land, the dispossession of
Palestinians, the bombardments and state-sponsored
executions ... all these must be obscured lest they
provide the smallest fractional reason for yesterday's
mass savagery.
No, Israel was not to blame though we can be sure
that Saddam Hussein and the other grotesque dictators
will claim so but the malign influence of history
and our share in its burden must surely stand in the
dark with the suicide bombers. Our broken promises,
perhaps even our destruction of the Ottoman Empire,
led inevitably to this tragedy. America has bankrolled
Israel's wars for so many years that it believed this
would be cost-free. No longer so. But, of course, the
US will want to strike back against "world terror'',
and last night's bombardment of Kabul may have been
the opening salvo. Indeed, who could ever point the
finger at Americans now for using that pejorative and
sometimes racist word "terrorism''?
Eight years ago, I helped to make a television series
that tried to explain why so many Muslims had come to
hate the West. Last night, I remembered some of those
Muslims in that film, their families burnt by
American-made bombs and weapons. They talked about how
no one would help them but God. Theology versus
technology, the suicide bomber against the nuclear
power. Now we have learnt what this means.
Is the world's favourite hate figure to blame?
Osama bin Laden
By Robert Fisk
12 September 2001
http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=93624
I can imagine how Osama bin Laden received the news of
the atrocities in the United States. In all, I must
have spent five hours listening to him in Sudan and
then in the Afghan mountains, as he described the
inevitable collapse of the US, just as he and his
comrades in the Afghan war helped to destroy the Red
Army.
He will have watched satellite television, he will
have sat in the corner of his room, brushing his teeth
as he always did, with a mishwak stick, thinking for
up to a minute before speaking. He once told me with
pride how his men had attacked the Americans in
Somalia. He acknowledged that he personally knew two
of the Saudis executed for bombing an American
military base in Riyadh. Could he be behind the
slaughter in America?
If Mr bin Laden was really guilty of all the things
for which he has been blamed, he would need an army of
10,000. And there is something deeply disturbing about
the world's habit of turning to the latest hate figure
whenever blood is shed. But when events of this
momentous scale take place, there is a new legitimacy
in casting one's eyes at those who have constantly
threatened America.
Mr bin Laden had a kind of religious experience during
the Afghan war. A Russian shell had fallen at his feet
and, in the seconds as he waited for it to explode, he
said he had a sudden feeling of calmness. The shell
never exploded.
The US must leave the Gulf, he would say every 10
minutes. America must stop all sanctions against the
Iraqi people. America must stop using Israel to
oppress Palestinians. He was not fighting an
anti-colonial war, but a religious one. His supporters
would gather round him with the awe of men listening
to a messiah. And the words they listened to were
fearful in their implications. American civilians
would no more be spared than military targets. Yet I
also remember one night when Mr bin Laden saw a pile
of newspapers in my bag and seized them. By a
sputtering oil lamp, he read them, clearly unaware of
the world around him. Was this really a man who could
damage America?
If the shadow of the Middle East falls over
yesterday's destruction, then who else could produce
such meticulously timed assaults? The rag-tag
Palestinian groups that used to favour hijacking are
unlikely to be able to produce a single suicide
bomber. Hamas and Islamic Jihad have neither the
capability nor the money that this assault needed.
Perhaps the groups that moved close to the Lebanese
Hizbollah in the 1980s, before the organisation became
solely a resistance movement. The bombing of the US
Marines in 1983 needed precision, timing and infinite
planning. But Iran, which supported these groups, is
more involved in its internal struggles. Iraq lies
broken, its agents more intent on torturing their own
people than striking at the the US.
So the mountains of Afghanistan will be photographed
from satellite and high-altitude aircraft in the
coming days, Mr bin Laden's old training camps
highlighted on the overhead projectors in the
Pentagon. But to what end? For if this is a war it
cannot be fought like other wars. Indeed, can it be
fought at all without some costly military adventure
overseas? Or is that what Mr bin Laden seeks above all
else?
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