BY PETER BOYLE
When the US government declared an open-ended "war on terrorism" in retaliation for the September 11 terror attacks in New York and Washington, world politics shifted into a new and more dangerous phase. US President George Bush warned that this war might last many years and extend to many countries. Afghanistan was to be just the first military target.
Bush ominously threatened to "use every necessary weapon of war". The imperialists foreshadowed complementing the terror bombing tactics used against Iraq, Serbia and, most recently, Afghanistan with a legitimised use of the "dirty tricks" the US has previously used widely in the Third World — political assassinations, working with mass murderers, torturers and drug lords, etc.
Even the use of nuclear weapons is not ruled out. A recent US military report to a congressional committee revealed that military officials and nuclear scientists "have completed initial studies on how existing nuclear weapons can be modified to defeat those (deeply buried targets) that cannot be held at risk with conventional high-explosive weapons".
After a month of relentless bombing by US warplanes and cruise missiles, the Taliban relinquished control of most of Afghanistan. According to a meticulous documentation by Professor Marc Herold of the University of New Hampshire there were 3767 Afghan civilian deaths from the first eight and a half weeks of US bombing — already more than the falling estimates of the numbers killed in the September 11 attacks.
From his secret bunker, US Vice-President Dick Cheney warned that the war was just beginning. Iraq, Somalia and Yemen appear to be next on the list for attack.
The hawks in Washington are calling upon the Bush administration to finish the "unfinished wars" of the previous administrations, mainly the war against Iraq (though some of their spokespeople even include Vietnam and Korea as "unfinished business").
The three-month notice that the Bush administration has served on Iraq to get rid of all weapons of mass destruction means that Iraq will probably come under major attack before May. This US demand cannot be "satisfied" by any Iraqi action since, as former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter has pointed out, even under the most stringent on-site inspection regime in history, the UN "never once found evidence that Iraq had either retained biological weapons or associated production equipment, or was continuing work in the field".
Meanwhile the Israeli government, led by the war criminal Ariel Sharon, has taken advantage of the new situation to escalate its war against the Palestinians. Even before the first US bomb was dropped on Afghanistan Israeli tanks rolled into Palestine Authority territory. Israel's many years of systematic use of state terror — through air strikes, tank assaults on densely populated towns and refugee camps, political assassinations and kidnappings — have been given a green light by the US.
"Just as the United States acts in its battle against terror, under the brave leadership of President Bush, just as it acts with all its strength, so shall we", declared Sharon.
In the US, the war is also being fought on the home front with draconian attacks on civil liberties. Within weeks of September 11 more than 1000 people, mostly Arab Americans and Arab visitors to the US, were detained without trial on suspicion of being involved with terrorism.
The Bush administration also sought laws to detain foreigners indefinitely without trial and toeliminate the right to a fair trial for alleged foreign terrorists — they will be tried in special military courts.
University administrations have been pressed to hand over lists of student activists to the FBI. And academics have had their jobs threatened if they are judged insufficiently "patriotic". The CIA has been given back its official right to carry out assassinations and work with torturers and dictators. And some FBI officials even made public bids for the right to torture "terrorist suspects".
Other imperialist governments are introducing similar restrictions on civil liberties, threatening a new global McCarthyism.
Bush would have us all believe that his open-ended war is the legitimate response to the terror attacks on the US on September 11. We are told over and over again that the September 11 attacks were an unprecedented "act of evil". We are told over and over again that September 11 "changed everything forever".
The mass murder of September 11 was an atrocity. However, more innocent civilians have already died in the US bombing of Afghanistan than were killed in the September 11 attacks. Many times more may die in Afghanistan once this Northern winter is over. In this most hi-tech war against one of the world's most backward countries, can this be any less a calculated act of mass murder?
Thousands of innocent civilians were killed when the US deliberately bombed the Chorrillo barrio when it invaded Panama in 1989. Cold, calculated, mass killings by the world's most hi-tech military again.
But, no, we are told, the September 11 attacks were much worse, were acts of "unprecedented evil", "pure evil", "evil incarnate", etc. And hence demand a special kind of response from the global superpower, one in keeping with the wrathful god of the Old Testament.
However, even the Vatican, under a pope not known for his progressive views, protested at the US bombing of Afghanistan. According to Noam Chomsky, the Vatican called for the US to use "measures appropriate to the crime", whatever its scale: if someone robs my house and I think I know who did it, I am not entitled to go after him with an assault rifle, in the process killing people randomly in his neighbourhood".
Yet that's just what the US has done in the name of national self-defence. Law professors have pointed out that there is no precedent in international law for what the US has done. At the Nuremburg Trials in 1946, some Nazi war criminals tried to justify World War II as an act of "national self-defence" but it was given short shrift by the judges.
As Chomsky has noted, Washington preferred to reject Security Council authorisation and to insist on its unique right to act unilaterally in violation of international law and treaty obligations. This "right" to stand above international law has been proclaimed by numerous US administrations, including the Clinton administration.
The US also contemptuously dismissed tentative offers from the Taliban regime to extradite Osama bin Laden. This, says Chomsky, is an exercise in "establishing credibility" of the sole global superpower. After all, if a mafia "godfather" plans to collect protection money, he does not first ask for a court order, even if he could obtain it!
Conservative ideologues in the US have welcomed the September 11 attacks as a chance to shift mass consciousness in that country to the right. Writing in the November 5 US Weekly Standard, senior editor David Brooks eagerly predicted a sea change in politics and culture after September 11: "The next few years will be defined by conflict. And it's possible to speculate about what that means. The institutions that fight for us and defend us against disorder — the military, the FBI, the CIA — will seem more important and more admirable. The fundamental arguments won't be over economic or social issues, they will be over how to wield power — whether to use American power aggressively or circumspectly. We will care a lot more about ends — winning the war — than we will about means. We will debate whether it is necessary to torture prisoners who have information about future biological attacks. We will destroy innocent villages by accident, shrug our shoulders, and continue fighting. In an age of conflict, bourgeois virtues like compassion, tolerance, and industriousness are valued less than the classical virtues of courage, steadfastness, and a ruthless desire for victory."
Are these conservatives right? Has September 11 given the imperialists the chance to decisively shift mass consciousness to the right in the First World?
The early overwhelming pro-war majorities fell away sharply first in the imperialist countries other than the US — in Germany, Britain and New Zealand. In continental Europe, the pro-war sentiment was even weaker. This was while the reported casualties of the US bombing remained in the hundreds and before any serious casualties among the imperialist forces.
A Gallup international poll taken in 30 countries in mid-September revealed that majorities in all countries except the US and Israel opposed the US decision to take military action as a first response to the September 11 terror bombings. These majorities thought that the US should have sought to extradite those alleged to have masterminded the attacks. There were very large anti-war demonstrations in Lisbon, London and Rome.
Even in the US, opinion polls showed poor support for an extended foreign war with significant US casualties. For example a Washington Post-ABC poll released on November 8, 2001 showed 70% support for sending significant US troops to Afghanistan but only 52% if this meant a long war with many US casualties. The "Vietnam syndrome" has yet to be tested by returning body bags.
Maybe it won't have to be tested. Some commentators are hailing the latest one-sided Afghan war as a template for a new hi-tech style of war, finally mastered by the world's last remaining "superpower".
But the Vietnam syndrome cannot be reduced to a public aversion to wars with significant casualties. It is just one expression of the political defeat the imperialists suffered in Vietnam, a defeat grounded in the fact that it was an unjust, imperialist war of aggression. It was a symptom of mass rejection of the idea that imperialist governments were waging war to defend "democracy", as they claimed. It was a symptom of solidarity with the oppressed nations of the world. It was a symptom of a broad consciousness that governments served the needs of a powerful and greedy corporate ruling class.
After the Vietnam War this consciousness was kept alive as the US waged its covert wars, thumbed its nose at environmental activists and the world's leading scientists over global warming.
There was a steady erosion of confidence in traditional ruling parties, in the parliamentary political system, in the police, spy agencies and international institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation. This showed up at elections, in opinion polls and in the series of popular mobilisations at the local, national and international level that followed Seattle 1999.
The growing public cynicism about corporate power and the institutions that support it was widely expressed in popular music, in fictions and even in Hollywood movies. Now there is a concerted attempt to turn this around. The corporate media empires are self-censoring and disciplining media personalities who dare express opposition to war. Even Hollywood's movie moguls have formed a committee to insert pro-military propaganda into their future productions.
September 11 has given the imperialist rulers a powerful weapon in the battle for the hearts and minds of the working people of the rich countries — fear. Their argument is that of the mafia, the gangsters: Pay us and we'll protect you. But will the US masses believe their gangster government for long? Or will it soon become clear to more and more working people, even in the world's richest nation, that what's being protected is not their interests but that of their exploiters?
While the September 11 attacks were not unprecedented on the scale of horror, the degree of malevolent intent and calculation behind the attack, it was unprecedented in one sense. This was the first time in a long while that the US has come under serious attack at home. Some might say Pearl Harbour was the last time, but the last serious attack in mainland USA was in 1814 when the British burned down Washington.
The US and other imperialist countries have conquered the world and left a terrible trail of terror and devastation, but, with rare and limited exceptions, in their home countries they were safe from any retribution from the victims of imperialism. Until September 11, 2001.
Even while most of the world's population has been squeezed dry to keep the rich getting richer, many people in the West live with the belief that they will somehow escape the consequences of this global nightmare. Hence the naive question being asked over and over again by some US citizens: Why do they hate us so much?
The military offensive is twinned with a new ideological offensive to break down any solidarity between the working masses in the Third and First Worlds. It's one way of raising the sort of blind patriotism that can help con the masses into becoming cannon fodder. Thus, Bush's early war speeches referred to a "crusade" against the "enemies of civilisation". It was barely disguised code for "Let's go and kill some gooks!" and a crude appeal to the propaganda line of the superiority of Western civilisation over the rest.
The idea of "Western culture under siege" is a central theme in this ideological offensive. So Bush says: "Americans are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what we see right here in this chamber — a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms — our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other."
The idea of "Western civilisation under siege" has obvious war propaganda value after September 11. It buttresses the racist logic of imperialism. That basic dynamic is there but the pseudo scientific theories of racial superiority once relied on by the Western colonialists have been widely discredited. So new theories to explain the superiority of the imperialist nations have to be invented.
John Pilger has called this reactionary ideological push "xeno-racism". It is not a bad term because xenophobic arguments are used to buttress pre-existing racist prejudices that are still in a broad way reinforced by the shape of global inequality.
Generally the "whiter" nations still rules the "darker" nations. Theories of cultural superiority allow for the racial exceptions, the "blacks" who have made it into the imperialist ruling classes or the Asian immigrants who outscore their peers of European origin in the HSC and its equivalents. Yet it can also justify the twisted arithmetic of imperialist war propaganda. It can justify the hugely disproportionate "collateral damage" of imperialist wars of retribution. It can sell the idea that the US has a "score to settle" with Somalia because 18 US soldiers were brutally killed there in 1993, never mind the fact that the US marines left between 7000 and 10,000 Somali dead, according to the CIA.
How can you sell the 1.6 civilian casualties of the decade-long economic embargo on Iraq without the racist idea that the life of an Asian, an African or a Latino is worth much less than that of Westerner?
The "xeno-racists" have some wind in their sails. That cannot be denied. Witness the shameful statistics on attitudes to immigration and asylum seekers in every imperialist country. It is driven by fear and by self-interest, the miserable self-interest of the most privileged of the world's exploited hoping to keep their privileges at the expense of their fellow exploited in the Third World.
But the new war drive, and its associated ideological offensive, is contested. Anti-war demonstrations began in all the imperialist countries, including the US, even before the first bombs were dropped on Afghanistan. Anti-war activists formed committees and coalitions.
The new anti-war movement built on the huge activist base of the movement against corporate globalisation. There were thousands of new activists already reasonably educated about imperialism and strongly committed to building solidarity with the Third World, the activists who had organised the mobilisations of Seattle, Washington, Prague, Melbourne, Genoa, etc.
The radical core of this new movement was motivated by revulsion at the growing inequality between countries of the First and Third Worlds, and a developing understanding of the need for international solidarity against the drive of the ruling elite in the rich countries to subordinate all aspects of life to corporate profits. Subordination of the world, particularly the Third World, to the dictatorship of corporate profits is also the aim of the imperialist rulers "war against terrorism".
"Xeno-racism" is an integral part, not only of the rulers' war against the Third World, but of their drive to break down solidarity between working people around the world. The fight against imperialist war and corporate globalisation is thus inseparably linked with the struggle against racism and xenophobic nationalism within the rich countries.
[This is an abridged version of a talk presented to the Democratic Socialist Party/Resistance educational conference, held in Sydney January 3-7.]
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, January 30, 2002.
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