NP Guardian article: Bush and Blair recruiting for Bin Laden

[Tiarnan O'Corrain]

Bush and Blair have become Bin Laden's recruiting sergeants

Seumas Milne

Thursday October 11, 2001

The Guardian

There is an eerie familiarity about the scenes being played out every
night, as the United States and Britain launch wave after wave of
bombing and cruise missile attacks on Afghanistan. The grinning marine
on the USS Enterprise, promising "to destroy a lot of things over
there"; the RAF corporal, showing off his "We came, we saw, we kicked
ass" T-shirt; the daily military briefings with their before-and-after
images of destruction; the sombre excuses offered for civilian
casualties and other forms of "collateral damage"; the cheerleaders'
untiring comparison of the enemy with the Nazis and the war's
opponents with appeasers - they almost seem routine.

Perhaps that is scarcely surprising, as we've been here before, again
and again. This is the fifth time since Tony Blair became prime
minister that Britain and the US have taken military action - though
not always together - without an explicit United Nations mandate: in
Iraq, Yugoslavia, Sudan, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan. In four cases,
the attacks have consisted overwhelmingly or exclusively of aerial
bombardments; in three, the targets have been Muslim states - all have
been more or less impoverished and none of those under attack has been
able to offer anything but token resistance. In the case of Iraq,
major assaults - such as the four-day Desert Fox operation nearly
three years ago - have only punctuated what has been a 10-year regime
of relentless bombing raids and grinding economic sanctions.

>From such a perspective, this conflict did not begin last Sunday or on
September 11, but a decade ago, when the pattern of wars against
developing countries under the new world order was established by the
first President Bush in his campaign to drive Saddam Hussein from
Kuwait. It was then that US troops were first sent to Saudi Arabia and
the devastation of Iraq began - two of the three festering Muslim
grievances cited by Osama bin Laden in his broadcast describing the
New York and Washington atrocities as America tasting "what we have
tasted".

But none of the Anglo-American onslaughts since 1991 can match the
cruel absurdity of this week's bombing of one of the poorest and most
ruined countries in the world by the planet's richest and most
powerful state, assisted as ever by its British satrap. For all the
earnest assurances about pinpoint targeting, the civilian death toll
is already mounting, including the incineration of four employees of
the UN's mine-clearing agency by a cruise missile as they lay sleeping
in a Kabul suburb. The almost comical futility of the military
overkill was epitomised by General Richard Myers, US Joint Chiefs of
Staff chairman, who declared yesterday that "we now have air supremacy
over Afghanistan".

But this is also potentially by far the most perilous of all the
western wars since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The case against
the campaign now being waged against Afghanistan - with the explicitly
stated prospect that it may be widened in future - does not primarily
hinge on its dubious legality, lack of UN involvement or absence of
convincing evidence of responsibility for the September 11 attacks.

The most serious objections are, first, that by triggering large-scale
refugee movements and interrupting food supplies, the war is turning
an existing humanitarian crisis into a disaster, which will cause the
deaths of many more than were slaughtered in the World Trade Centre,
for no remotely proportional gain. Second, whatever success is
achieved in killing or capturing Bin Laden and his supporters or
forcing the Afghan theocrats from power, there is no reason to believe
that that will stamp out anti-western terrorism, even by the al-Qaida
networks, which operate across the world without assistance from their
Taliban friends. In other words, it won't work. Finally, and most
dangerously, the entire "crusade" in defence of civilisation, as Bush
the younger so sensitively described his campaign, shows every sign of
creating a political backlash throughout the Muslim world and spawning
even more terrorist attacks, rather than curbing them.

Few of those pressing for the alternative of legal, diplomatic and
security action are the pacifists they are caricatured to be. But
while Bin Laden is fast developing popular cult status across the
Middle East, Bush and Blair have turned themselves into recruiting
sergeants for al-Qaida and militant Islamism - and increased the
likelihood of a cycle of revenge and retaliatory violence. The longer
the campaign goes on and the wider it spreads, the greater the risk
that many Middle Eastern governments dearest to the west will be
consigned to oblivion. If the aim of the war launched last Sunday is
to put an end to terrorism, it makes no sense. But if, as some in the
US clearly want, this campaign becomes the vehicle for achieving wider
US strategic objectives - in Iraq, central Asia or elsewhere - it
risks a catastrophe.

s.milne at guardian.co.uk

--
Tiarnán Ó Corráin
Technical Writer
CMG Cork.
Email: tiarnan.o'corrain at cmg.nl
Phone: + 353 21 4933316