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I. THE SANE GLOBAL CONSENSUS: STOP THE BOMBING

(This is the first part of a longer essay evaluating America's prospects as this war continues, including a critique of triumphalist and militant ideologies in Washington, such as those of Michael Lind's "third American empire," and above all Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations. It will argue that "civilizations communicate; only barbarisms clash.")

In October 2001, a month after 9/11, my wife and I left for a long-planned 12-day holiday in France. I am grateful for that chance to have gained perspective on our crisis, and above all to see that opposition to the US bombing campaign against the Taliban is very widely endorsed around the world. Abroad, it is clear that sustained massive bombing has been almost universally condemned as counterproductive, even by counterinsurgency experts working for the US and UK governments.

(I was also pleased by the slightly ironic allusions in the French press to Samuel Huntington's trendy thesis "The Clash of Civilizations," which has just been brilliantly deconstructed in the Nation by Edward Said. More of this later.)

The two papers I chiefly read, Le Monde and Le Figaro, were sympathetic to Washington's dilemmas; but they also gave considerable sympathetic space to the rising tide of criticism of Washington's policies from the Muslim world and elsewhere. On October 10, for example, Le Monde reported complex Muslim criticisms of the bombing (often mixed with condemnations of terrorism) from Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Kuwait, Sudan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. This was more than ample rebuttal to the claim in the International Herald Tribune that up to then the response of the Muslim world had been "muted."

In short I found the French perspective, towards what they called "le clash," to be far more even-handed than the American. In a word, it was more sane. But sanity is a virtue that comes easily to those not in power. From my limited experience in government and international assemblies, I would say that sanity and great power exclude each other (another way of putting Lord Acton's maxim that all power corrupts).

This quasi-spectatorial perspective of the French towards "le clash" has helped me refine my own. What after all is the point of this webpage, caught at mid-point between two factions in the emerging clash within this country?

On the one hand it is not simply an anti-war webpage, because I fully accept that some US response to this crisis is necessary, a response going beyond normal police and judiciary procedures. Thus although I may well be marching at some future point, I will not be chanting slogans like "Justice not revenge" or "We-don't-want-to-go-to-war."

What I would chant, and am saying clearly now, is not "Stop the War," but "Stop the Bombing." As has been pointed out by innumerable authors, this program is counter-productive, both militarily and above all politically.

Don Hazen has summarized these arguments well. The bombing will herd more civilian refugees into wretched camps. From their ranks, as well as from enraged Muslims around the world, more new terrorists will be recruited. The bombing makes more difficult our purported new goal of nation-building, and ultimately will help discredit those leaders whom the US endorses. As Muslims are aware, the bombing punishes Afghans, none of whom are known to have taken part in the 9/11 attacks. The bombings threaten the regime of Pakistani President Musharraf, and could provoke a fundamentalist coup from within his government.

To Hazen's persuasive list of moral and common sense arguments against the bombing, one can add some more. Perhaps most urgent is the need for at least a bombing pause to allow relief to threatened civilians. According to the London Observer of 10/21/01, the UN "is set to issue an unprecedented appeal to the United States and its coalition allies to halt the war on Afghanistan and allow time for a huge relief operation.... Aid officials estimate that up to 7.5 million Afghans might be threatened with starvation." (I did not see this story reported in the US press.)

Another is the professional point made by UK and US experts: that bombing is a disastrous prelude to an unconventional war. One can forget about the US "winning the hearts and minds" of Afghans after this punishing campaign. Small food packets containing peanut butter (a product unknown in the region) are a grotesquely inadequate apology. Seasoned Afghan observer Jason Burke has reported in the London Observer his considered reasons "Why This War Will Not Work."

In short, the bombing may well weaken the Taliban. But it is an absolute godsend for al-Qaeda, and may well be exactly what the destroyers of the WTC wanted. The strategy of intelligent terrorists (and these men were clearly intelligent) is never to destroy their enemy by their own limited force, but to provoke the enemy into the folly of a self-destructive response.

The classic instance of this was the 19th century terrorist campaign against imperial Russia. The campaign succeeded, albeit with the aid of World War I. Russia was weakened, not because dukes and duchesses were blown up in their carriages, but because the Tsarist court was provoked into oppressive responses which alienated even the middle class. In the same way the US bombing campaign seems certain to alienate the rest of the world. And it has made bin Laden a hero to multitudes in dozens of countries, who might otherwise not have heard of him.

As Jonathan Schell wrote recently in the Nation, "Terrorism is jujitsu, by which the violent weak use the power of the powerful to overthrow them. [In writing this, Schell is summarizing the doctrine of the Brazilian urban terrorist Carlos Marighella.]...When all is said and done, it is not in the power of America's enemies to defeat us. Only we can do that. We should refrain."

P.S. You might wish to look at an excellent article by John Tirman on 10/24/01, summarizing the long history of disastrous U.S. interventions in Southwest Asia since the CIA's destruction of Iranian democracy in 1953. Although I do not endorse all the details of this article, it is an excellent overview of policy failures in an area US leaders understand so poorly, even while coveting its petroleum resources.

October 29 update: As the bombing continues to expand and we hear less and less about any search for terrorists, one has to wonder if the real objective is not, as John Pilger has argued, a campaign to secure Afghanistan permanently as a US military base at the edge of oil-rich Central Asia. Another consideration is that we now know the US has had to worry for some time about its access to military bases in Saudi Arabia, particularly since the pro-US King Fahd suffered a severe stroke in November 1995, and Crown Prince Abdullah, a Pan-Arabist, has been the de facto ruler in his place. (The authoritative Washington Institute for Near East Policy noted in 1994 that "Succession -- or rather, squabbles over it -- could greatly affect the closeness of ties with the United States.")

It is clear that the advocates of US unipolar supremacy, both inside the government like Wolfowitz, and outside it like Brzezinski, regard it as vital that the US maintain a forward base in order to dominate the oil reserves of the Persian Gulf and of Central Asia.