NP The Economist

[Doug Millison]

"Morris"
> I'M afraid of the battle that lies ahead too.  We
> ALL are!  We'd be fools to 
> be otherwise.  That doesn't obviate the need for the
> confrontation.  As for 
> the battlegroud, 9-11-01 proved we are all on the
> front line.  THAT'S why we 
> need to drive back the enemy.


Which enemy?  Where?  In which of the dozens of
countries where terrorists operate?

Maybe there are terrorists living right next door!
They may look just like ordinary people! Will anybody
have the nerve to make today's version of Invasion of
the Body Snatchers?  I doubt it the way artists and
entertainers are falling all over themselves to wave
the flag and call for war -- wouldn't want to offend
the movie-going U.S. public, after all, who, the
pollsters tell us, support Bush 9 out of 10.  (Note: 
polls adn focus groups can be slanted and the results
manipulated to demonstrate just about anything the
pollsters want to demonstrate.)

Consider that the biggest enemies of freedom in
America right now may well be the politicians who are
lining up, bending over, and offering to give away our
civil liberties. 

Fools? The only fools will be those who sacrifice
themselves, their children, or kill innocent people in
other countries to blindly follow the President and
his weapons manufacturing/oil pumping supporters into
a bloody, ill-defined adventure that hasn't a hope of
"ending terrorism."

Re an earlier comment, self-sacrifice is one thing
(with regard to the airplane passengers who, we're
told, fought the hijackers); asking others to give up
their lives, or their children's lives, is something
altogether different.


http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=95825

Robert Fisk: This is not a war on terror. It's a fight
against America's enemies

25 September 2001

[...] But what exactly are we planning to do? Kidnap
Mr bin Laden? Storm his camps and kill the lot of
them, Mr bin Laden and all his Algerian, Egyptian,
Jordanian, Syrian and Gulf Arabs?

Or is Mr bin Laden merely chapter one of our new
Middle Eastern adventure, to be broadened later to
include Iraq, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the
destruction of the Lebanese Hezbollah, the humbling of
Syria, the humiliation of Iran, the reimposition of
yet another fraudulent "peace process" between Israel
and the Palestinians?

If this seems fanciful, you should listen to what's
coming out of Washington and Tel Aviv. While The New
York Times Pentagon sources are suggesting that Saddam
may be chapter two, the Israelis are trying to set up
Lebanon – the "centre of international terror"
according to Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon – for
a bombing run or two, along with Yasser Arafat's
little garbage tip down in Gaza where the Israelis
have discovered, mirabile dictu, a "bin Laden cell".

The Arabs, of course, would also like an end to world
terror. But they would like to include a few other
names on the list. Palestinians would like to see Mr
Sharon picked up for the Sabra and Chatila massacre, a
terrorist slaughter carried out by Israel's Lebanese
allies – who were trained by the Israeli army – in
1982. At 1,800 dead, that's only a quarter of the
number killed on 11 September. Syrians in Hama would
like to put Rifaat Al-Assad, the brother of the late
president, on their list of terrorists for the mass
killings perpetrated by his Defence Brigades in the
city of Hama in the same year. At 20,000, that's more
than double the 11 September death toll.

The Lebanese would like trials for the Israeli
officers who planned the Israeli invasion of Lebanon
in 1982, which killed 17,500 people, most of them
civilians – again, well over twice the 11 September
statistic. Christian Sudanese would like President
Omar al-Bashir arraigned for mass murder.

But, as the Americans have made clear, it's their own
terrorist enemies they are after, not their terrorist
friends or those terrorists who have been slaughtering
populations outside American "spheres of interest".
Even those terrorists who live comfortably in the US
but have not harmed America are safe: take, for
example, the pro-Israeli militiaman who murdered two
Irish UN soldiers in southern Lebanon in 1980 and who
now live in Detroit after flying safely out of Tel
Aviv. The Irish have the name and address, if the FBI
are interested – but of course they're not.

So we are not really being asked to fight "world
terror". We are being asked to fight America's
enemies. If that means bagging the murderers behind
the atrocities in New York and Washington, few would
object. But it does raise the question of why those
thousands of innocents are more important – more
worthy of our effort and perhaps blood – than all the
other thousands of innocents. And it also raises a
much more disturbing question: whether or not the
crime against humanity committed in the US on 11
September is to be met with justice – or a brutal
military assault intended to extend American political
power in the Middle East.

Either way, we are being asked to support a war whose
aims appear to be as misleading as they are secretive.
We are told by the Americans that this war will be
different to all others. But one of the differences
appears to be that we don't know who we are going to
fight and how long we are going to fight for.
Certainly, no new political initiative, no real
political engagement in the Middle East, no neutral
justice is likely to attend this open-ended conflict.
The despair and humiliation and suffering of the
Middle East peoples do not figure in our war aims –
only American and European despair and humiliation and
suffering.

As for Mr bin Laden, no one believes the Taliban are
genuinely ignorant of his whereabouts. He is in
Afghanistan. But has he really gone to ground? During
the Russian war, he would emerge, again and again, to
fight Afghanistan's Russian occupiers, to attack the
world's second superpower. Wounded six times, he was a
master of the tactical ambush, as the Russians found
out to their cost. Evil and wicked do not come close
to describing the mass slaughter in the US. But – if
it was Mr bin Laden's work – that does not mean he
would not fight again. And he would be fighting on
home ground. There are plenty of dark defiles into
which we may advance. And plenty of cheap rifles to
shoot at us. And that wouldn't be a "new kind of war"
at all. 




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