The war against terrorism is a fraud. After three weeks' bombing, not a single terrorist implicated in the attacks on America has been caught or killed in Afghanistan.

Instead, one of the poorest, most stricken nations has been terrorised by the most powerful - to the point where American pilots have run out of dubious "military" targets and are now destroying mud houses, a hospital, Red Cross warehouses, lorries carrying refugees.

Unlike the relentless pictures from New York, we are seeing almost nothing of this. Tony Blair has yet to tell us what the violent death of children - seven in one family - has to do with Osama bin Laden.

And why are cluster bombs being used? The British public should know about these bombs, which the RAF also uses. They spray hundreds of bomblets that have only one purpose; to kill and maim people. Those that do not explode lie on the ground like landmines, waiting for people to step on them.

If ever a weapon was designed specifically for acts of terrorism, this is it. I have seen the victims of American cluster weapons in other countries, such as the Laotian toddler who picked one up and had her right leg and face blown off. Be assured this is now happening in Afghanistan, in your name.

None of those directly involved in the September 11 atrocity was Afghani. Most were Saudis, who apparently did their planning and training in Germany and the United States.

The camps which the Taliban allowed bin Laden to use were emptied weeks ago. Moreover, the Taliban itself is a creation of the Americans and the British. In the 1980s, the tribal army that produced them was funded by the CIA and trained by the SAS to fight the Russians.

The hypocrisy does not stop there. When the Taliban took Kabul in 1996, Washington said nothing. Why? Because Taliban leaders were soon on their way to Houston, Texas, to be entertained by executives of the oil company, Unocal.

With secret US government approval, the company offered them a generous cut of the profits of the oil and gas pumped through a pipeline that the Americans wanted to build from Soviet central Asia through Afghanistan.
A US diplomat said: "The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did." He explained that Afghanistan would become an American oil colony, there would be huge profits for the West, no democracy and the legal persecution of women. "We can live with that," he said.

Although the deal fell through, it remains an urgent priority of the administration of George W. Bush, which is steeped in the oil industry. Bush's concealed agenda is to exploit the oil and gas reserves in the Caspian basin, the greatest source of untapped fossil fuel on earth and enough, according to one estimate, to meet America's voracious energy needs for a generation. Only if the pipeline runs through Afghanistan can the Americans hope to control it.

So, not surprisingly, US Secretary of State Colin Powell is now referring to "moderate" Taliban, who will join an American-sponsored "loose federation" to run Afghanistan. The "war on terrorism" is a cover for this: a means of achieving American strategic aims that lie behind the flag-waving facade of great power.

The Royal Marines, who will do the real dirty work, will be little more than mercenaries for Washington's imperial ambitions, not to mention the extraordinary pretensions of Blair himself. Having made Britain a target for terrorism with his bellicose "shoulder to shoulder" with Bush nonsense, he is now prepared to send troops to a battlefield where the goals are so uncertain that even the Chief of the Defence Staff says the conflict "could last 50 years".

The irresponsibility of this is breathtaking; the pressure on Pakistan alone could ignite an unprecedented crisis across the Indian sub-continent. Having reported many wars, I am always struck by the absurdity of effete politicians eager to wave farewell to young soldiers, but who themselves would not say boo to a Taliban goose.
In the days of gunboats, our imperial leaders covered their violence in the "morality" of their actions. Blair is no different. Like them, his selective moralising omits the most basic truth. Nothing justified the killing of innocent people in America on September 11, and nothing justifies the killing of innocent people anywhere else.

By killing innocents in Afghanistan, Blair and Bush stoop to the level of the criminal outrage in New York. Once you cluster bomb, "mistakes" and "blunders" are a pretence. Murder is murder, regardless of whether you crash a plane into a building or order and collude with it from the Oval Office and Downing Street.

If Blair was really opposed to all forms of terrorism, he would get Britain out of the arms trade. On the day of the twin towers attack, an "arms fair", selling weapons of terror (like cluster bombs and missiles) to assorted tyrants and human rights abusers, opened in London's Docklands with the full backing of the Blair government.
Britain's biggest arms customer is the medieval Saudi regime, which beheads heretics and spawned thereligious fanaticism of the Taliban.

If he really wanted to demonstrate "the moral fibre of Britain", Blair would do everything in his power to lift the threat of violence in those parts of the world where there is great and justifiable grievance and anger.

He would do more than make gestures; he would demand that Israel ends its illegal occupation of Palestine and withdraw to its borders prior to the 1967 war, as ordered by the Security Council, of which Britain is a permanent member.

He would call for an end to the genocidal blockade which the UN - in reality, America and Britain - has imposed on the suffering people of Iraq for more than a decade, causing the deaths of half a million children under the age of five.

That's more deaths of infants every month than the number killed in the World Trade Center.

There are signs that Washington is about to extend its current "war" to Iraq; yet unknown to most of us, almost every day RAF and American aircraft already bomb Iraq. There are no headlines. There is nothing on the TV news. This terror is the longest-running Anglo-American bombing campaign since World War Two.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the US and Britain faced a "dilemma" in Iraq, because "few targets remain". "We're down to the last outhouse," said a US official. That was two years ago, and they're still bombing. The cost to the British taxpayer? 800 million so far.

According to an internal UN report, covering a five-month period, 41 per cent of the casualties are civilians. In northern Iraq, I met a woman whose husband and four children were among the deaths listed in the report. He was a shepherd, who was tending his sheep with his elderly father and his children when two planes attacked them, each making a sweep. It was an open valley; there were no military targets nearby.
"I want to see the pilot who did this," said the widow at the graveside of her entire family. For them, there was no service in St Paul's Cathedral with the Queen in attendance; no rock concert with Paul McCartney.
The tragedy of the Iraqis, and the Palestinians, and the Afghanis is a truth that is the very opposite of their caricatures in much of the Western media.

Far from being the terrorists of the world, the overwhelming majority of the Islamic peoples of the Middle East and south Asia have been its victims - victims largely of the West's exploitation of precious natural resources in or near their countries.

There is no war on terrorism. If there was, the Royal Marines and the SAS would be storming the beaches of Florida, where more CIA-funded terrorists, ex-Latin American dictators and torturers, are given refuge than anywhere on earth.

There is, however, a continuing war of the powerful against the powerless, with new excuses, new hidden agendas, new lies. Before another child dies violently, or quietly from starvation, before new fanatics are created in both the east and the west, it is time for the people of Britain to make their voices heard and to stop this fraudulent war - and to demand the kind of bold, imaginative non-violent initiatives that required real political courage.

The other day, the parents of Greg Rodriguez, a young man who died in the World Trade Center, said this: "We read enough of the news to sense that our government is heading in the direction of violent revenge, with the prospect of sons, daughters, parents, friends in distant lands dying, suffering, and nursing further grievances against us.

"It is not the way to go...not in our son's name."

US bombs are boosting the Taliban
Abdul Haq

Days before the Kabul regime killed him, Afghan leader Abdul Haq argued against the American raids 

Friday November 2, 2001
The Guardian 

Probably the US has already made up its mind what to do, and any recommendations by me will be too late. However, military action by itself in the present circumstances is only making things more difficult - especially if this war goes on a long time and many civilians are killed. The best thing would be for the US to work for a united political solution involving all the Afghan groups. Otherwise there will be an encouragement of deep divisions between different groups, backed by different countries and badly affecting the whole region. 
I am not sure that the air campaign will work. Before the attacks started, the Taliban's people were very nervous, and their support in the population was very low. Everyone was afraid. But once the bombing started, people began to say: "Well, it's not so bad. We have known worse. We can stand it." This is something I have often seen in battle. The soldier runs away, terrified. Then he realises he is not in immediate danger. He stops and faces the enemy, and his courage comes back. 

So in these last weeks I have seen more support for the Taliban than before. We have been trying to create a revolt within the Taliban, but the US hasn't given us the chance. They seem to have been determined to attack, even if someone came up with the best proposal in the world to avoid this. This has been a big setback for me. 
The US should keep up the pressure, above all with money, but should not bomb. The top leadership of the Taliban is impossible to change by bombing or talking. Instead I have been talking with second-level Taliban commanders, ex-mojahedin and tribal elders. What I am working for is that these should make a statement saying that the Taliban must go, and that anyone who rejects this can be fought. 

However, what everyone is telling me is that for this to happen, there must be some alternative structure for Taliban people to come over to. Most won't go over to the Northern Alliance, and the Alliance must not be allowed to take power, because they would take revenge on anyone who had ever fought them and drive people back to the Taliban. And the Northern Alliance must not be allowed to launch attacks, at least against Kabul and to the east and south [ie into core Pashtun territories].

If this is followed, then, many Taliban people have told me, they will be prepared to abandon the Taliban. 
I have said all this to US officials, and so have others. But it's impossible to find anyone beneath the level of the president who is willing to take responsibility for a decision. If the US keeps bombing and helps the Northern Alliance, then our work will be much more difficult. The problem is that the Americans cannot control Alliance commanders on the ground if they decide to attack Kabul or massacre people. How can they control them? By threatening to bomb them too? 

The Taliban is mostly from Pashtun areas and Pashtuns are the key to getting rid of them. Whenever the Taliban is weak, it turns to Pashtun nationalism, and it does have a certain effect. The anti-Taliban campaign needs two stages: a military strategy to split and remove the Taliban, which should be carried out by Afghans themselves, not the US; and a Loya Jirga [grand national assembly] to create a future government, including representatives of all ethnic groups and tribes. 

We should be concentrating on avoiding bloodshed as far as possible. The Taliban are like a crystal ball. They are very hard, but brittle. If they are hit in the right way, they will shatter into a million pieces. But bombing the whole of Afghanistan is not the right way. Instead, we should undermine the central leadership, which is a very small and closed group and the only thing which holds them all together. If they are destroyed, every Taliban fighter will pick up his gun and blanket and disappear back home, and that will be the end of the Taliban. 
But the US is trying to show its muscle, score a victory and scare everyone in the world. They don't care about the suffering of the Afghans or how many people we will lose. And we don't like that. Because Afghans are now being made to suffer for these Arab fanatics, but we all know who brought these Arabs to Afghanistan in the 1980s, armed them and gave them a base. It was the Americans and the CIA. And the Americans who did this all got medals and good careers, while all these years Afghans suffered from these Arabs and their allies. Now, when America is attacked, instead of punishing the Americans who did this, it punishes the Afghans. 
• Afghan opposition leader and former mojahedin commander Abdul Haq was captured last week by the Taliban and executed as an American spy. This article is an edited version of an interview he gave on October 11 to Anatol Lieven of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 

It might seem strange, given my involvement in antiwar work at a time when most people support the war, that I would title a talk “Against Dissent.” How could I be against something in which I seem to be engaged quite actively?

I am not going to argue against political activity that challenges the dominant view, but instead will suggest a different way to understand that political activity. The point is not simply semantic, but goes to the heart of what it means to be a citizen in a democracy. More on that later.

Let me say up front that I believe that in light of what is happening in Afghanistan at the moment, the topic of free speech seems, in some sense, trivial. I do not mean that speech does not matter. I believe free speech is a good thing in and of itself. But my main concern at the moment is not the intrinsic value of free speech, the way it fosters the growth and development of individuals, which is one powerful argument for protecting free speech. Right now, free speech is on my mind because I live in the nation that has the most destructive military capacity in the history of the world. I live in a nation that has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to use that capacity to kill, and kill civilians. And I live in the nation that at this moment is using that capacity again to kill civilians in a conflict that is being sold to us as a war on terrorism that will keep us safe, but is, I believe, primarily a war to extend the power of a particular segment of U.S. society.

In other words, free speech matters so much right now not primarily because it is good for us, which it is, but because without it citizens of this country will have fewer chances to stop our government from destroying human life abroad. Tonight I want to talk about why free speech and democracy are in some sense more important than ever. In this sense, free speech is not a trivial matter. How we defend and use our free speech is, quite literally, a matter of life and death.

It is a matter of life and death for the Afghan child who sees the bright yellow cylinder on the ground and bends over to pick it up; the child who picks up the bright yellow unexploded bomblet from a cluster bomb dropped from a U.S. plane; unexploded because 7 percent of the bomblets released by a cluster bomb do not detonate at first; a bomblet that will explode when picked up and send steel shards ripping into the child’s body. And then the child will die. And then U.S. officials explain that we must keep using cluster bombs because they are effective antipersonnel and antiarmor weapons.

Our freedom to speak is not trivial to that child. So let us speak of free speech.

Let us begin with a little history.

On June 16, 1918, labor leader Eugene Debs made a speech in Canton, Ohio, in which he dared to question U.S. involvement in World War I. In this speech, he said, “Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. …the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish their corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace.”

He continued: “They are continually talking about their patriotic duty. It is not their but your patriotic duty that they are concerned about. There is a decided difference. Their patriotic duty never takes them to the firing line or chucks them into the trenches.”

For this, Debs was charged and convicted under the Espionage Act for trying to discourage enlistment and promote insubordination in the armed forces. Debs gave that speech knowing that it could land him in prison, and he was sentenced to 10 years. During his two years in prison, he ran his fifth and final campaign for president and won 913,664 votes. He was pardoned, not by Wilson -- the allegedly liberal Democratic president who took the country into that disastrous war -- but by Harding, the conservative Republican.
If Debs were alive today, I believe he would be part of this antiwar movement, speaking about the hypocrisy of U.S. policy and the immorality of killing civilians. The big difference would be that if Debs were speaking today, he would not be thrown in jail. We are not being thrown in jail for making antiwar speeches this time around. At least not yet.

That’s progress. That’s a good thing. The space for free speech in the United States has expanded dramatically since 1918. That space is not guaranteed forever, but we have it right now.

But that’s not where our analysis should end. We must think not only about the scope of formal freedoms, of legal guarantees, but of the context in which that speech happens. We must look not only at the actions of government, but also how wealth and power in the private sector affects these questions. We must ask about how free we are to gain access to the mass media channels through which most people get their news. While celebrating the expansion of formal freedom of speech, we must ask questions about how effectively citizens can exercise those freedoms in the world in which we live.

If we ponder these questions, we come to a paradox: How is it that in the United States we have arguably the most expansive free speech rights in the industrial world and an incredibly degraded political culture? How did political freedom produce such a depoliticized culture?

Let’s examine that in the context of what I have been writing since September 11 and the reaction to it.
An op/ed piece that ran on September 14 in the Houston Chronicle, in which I talked about the history of terrorist activities by the U.S. government and its importance to understanding 9-11, sparked many angry letters to me and university officials. Let’s start with University of Texas President Larry Faulkner’s public response.
His letter in response to my op/ed made three points. First, he said he supported my First Amendment right to speak, which is fine with me. Second, he pointed out that I do not speak for the university in any official capacity, which also is fine with me; I don’t want to speak for the university. Finally, Faulkner said, “Jensen is not only misguided, but has become a fountain of undiluted foolishness on issues of public policy. Students must learn that there is a good deal of foolish opinion in the popular media and they must become skilled at recognizing and discounting it. I, too, was disgusted by Jensen's article, but I also must defend his freedom to state his opinion. The First Amendment is the bedrock of American liberty.”

Many people, including a surprising number of faculty colleagues, have told me they saw nothing wrong with Faulkner’s statement because he defended my rights and then exercised his own right to speak. A slightly more sophisticated analysis is called for.

First, let me be clear: None of this is personal for me. I don’t care what Larry Faulkner says about me. I do care, however, how a person in power on a campus misuses that power.

Larry Faulkner does have a right to speak. But that does not mean he is free from criticism for his speech, any more than I should escape criticism. As president of the university, Faulkner has considerable power -- the power to hire and fire, to dictate policy, and to set the intellectual tone on campus. It should be a truism that with power comes responsibility. For example, in the classroom I have considerable power. If a student were to make a comment that I felt was foolish, it would be irresponsible for me -- the person in the room with the ability to determine grades and set the intellectual tone of the class -- to respond to the student by saying, “You are foolish and no one should listen to you.” Even if I believed that, I shouldn’t say it, for the obvious reason that it would inhibit other students from speaking. Even if the student in question had the strength to challenge me, the incident might lead other students to silence themselves.

The analogy holds for the president and the campus.

The first and most obvious point to make is that the president offered a bad model of intellectual engagement. I wrote an essay that made a political argument. Faulkner responded with an ad hominem attack. I used to teach a course called Critical Thinking for Journalists, and I used a textbook called Attacking Faulty Reasoning, which defines ad hominem as a fallacy that “consists in attacking one’s opponent in a personal and abusive way as a means of ignoring or discrediting his or her criticism or argument.” If I were to grade Faulkner based on the standards from my introductory journalism class -- well, perhaps it is best not to be obsessed with grades.
But rather than simply criticize Faulkner, let’s think about what he could have done. He could have issued a statement that said something like this:

“Many people have been upset by the public comments of a faculty member, and I understand their concerns. But at the University of Texas we take seriously the mission of creating the most open, engaged intellectual atmosphere possible in which people can explore ideas. As a public institution, we also hope that our faculty, staff, and students will be part of a broader public dialogue, taking their knowledge beyond the campus as active and engaged citizens. Inevitably in a pluralist democracy, that will produce clashes between people over deeply held beliefs. We should celebrate that engagement, not try to shut it down. Given the importance of the events of September 11, I encourage members of the UT community to seek all possible venues for discussion of the political and moral questions, on campus and in public. Now, more than ever, let us make good on the promise of democracy.”

Now, if he wanted to go on to disagree with my essay, he could have said something like this:
“In the spirit of that democratic engagement, I would like to offer my critique of Jensen’s argument.”

What would come after that, I do not know, because President Faulkner chose not to make public the reasons for his critical assessment.

So, we might can look around UT and ask whether, at the largest campus in the United States, we see the maximal realization of freedom of expression. No formal suppression of speech rights has occurred, but has the institution supported free speech in a meaningful way? Has it done its job of creating the space for that speech? In light of those questions, we might ask what has been the role a statement from the president that endorses the formal guarantee of freedom that also offers an ad hominem attack?

I also want to discuss the public reaction to my essay. Here I want to highlight the difference between the messages I received from people in the United States, which ran about 70-30 against my views, and the messages I received from abroad, which were overwhelmingly either supportive of my view or interested in a rational discussion of them. These are not adequate samples for making definitive claims, but the difference hints at a simple fact: The things I said about U.S. history and politics that were so controversial in the United States are well understood in the rest of the world. We come back to the paradox: Why is it that people in the United States, with such expansive formal political freedoms, know less about their own history and politics than people abroad?

Which leads to another question: Why did so many Americans not only disagree with me, but become enraged with me? What is it about this political culture that leads people to see a different political analysis not as something to be argued with, but something to eliminate?

Again, we are left to ponder how the freedoms enjoyed in our version of democracy have produced a culture that is so hostile to intellectual engagement and democratic participation.

But that question obscures a point that is perhaps even more important. More distressing than the relatively small number of people who wanted me fired or deported (I got a lot of offers of one-way tickets to Afghanistan), is the much larger number of people who simply do not care enough to react at all -- not just to react to me, but to react to the entire issue, beyond a few patriotic platitudes. What does it mean to live in a society in which the president can declare an unlimited war against unspecified enemies, then begin to fight that war with extreme brutality and disregard for the lives of innocent civilians, and a significant segment of the population simply does not care? When I ask such questions, people often say, “You have a right to your opinion; I support your right to speak.”

I think that indicates a fundamental moral, political, and intellectual crisis. Free speech has come to mean not a process of engagement, but a right to shout into the wind. People see no reason or obligation to engage. This tells me that we live in a political system that has democratic features but is not a meaningful democracy. I say that because I believe a meaningful democracy requires an active citizenry. That is why I titled this talk “Against Dissent.” Finally, I’ll explain what I mean by that.

In a meaningful democracy, citizens would be part of the process by which pubic policy is formulated. That is, citizens would discuss issues and problems, with access to the broadest range of information, leading to an exploration of the widest possible range of solutions and responses. The views of people would not only be relevant to the decisions politicians end up implementing, but would structure the choices politicians could make.
Instead, we live in a system in which many people think they are participating fully if they vote. Some will participate a bit further by working in the electoral process. Others will work at educating themselves about the policy options that politicians and other powerful people have laid out, so that they can better choose among those options. But very few people understand democracy to mean direct engagement in the process by which policy options are formulated.

That is why, for example, so many Americans do not know what to think of the movement to resist corporate domination of the global economy. Those people, such as the folks in the streets of Seattle, were asserting their right to be involved in the formulation of policy options, and it seemed strange to many Americans.
If that is what democracy could be -- an active role for engaged citizens -- then we can see why the term dissent doesn’t quite fit. If we all are part of the process of formulating policy options -- if we do not give up the right to be involved in that process -- then we begin with the idea that all policy options are open, and that the people will decide which option they want the government to pursue.

If that were the case, then I, and others who offer an antiwar perspective, wouldn’t be dissenting from some already-agreed-upon position. We would be contributing a policy option to the discussion. That wouldn’t be dissent; it would be participation in a conversation about which option or options might be most desirable.
Now, after the political process has concluded and a policy is chosen, then it makes sense to say that one dissents from that. But literally from September 12 on, my public speech has been labeled dissent. But it wasn’t dissent. It was my contribution to the policy discussion. It was labeled dissent only because this culture assumes that the pronouncements of the president and other “important” people are the policy, and we the people then have a right to either agree with it or dissent from it.

I have a different view of democracy. The antiwar movement has a different view of democracy. The movement for a fair and just global economy has a different view of democracy. In that sense, these kinds of movements are not simply about changing policies; they are about changing the system. They attempt to turn a system that now is democratic in its formal structure into a meaningful democracy in practice.
They are, quite literally, movements engaged in -- to borrow a phrase from my colleague Rahul Mahajan -- the struggle for the soul of a nation.

Ironically, when we engage in that struggle these days we are called anti-American, unpatriotic, or traitors. Let me respond to that, and close, by returning to Eugene Debs. In Canton, Ohio, in 1918, under the threat of a jail term, Debs said:
“Do not worry over the charge of treason to your masters, but be concerned about the treason that involves yourselves. Be true to yourself and you cannot be a traitor to any good cause on earth.”

Debs was one of many Americans who fought for free speech. At the same time these Americans were fighting for that right, they were not afraid to raise their voices against illegitimate authority and for justice, sometimes in the face of harsh repression.

We are lucky; we don’t have to fight those same battles to speak, at least not at the moment. We may face the scorn of some of our fellow citizens, or risk the condemnation of our bosses. Some may lose their jobs. But compared to facing down the barrel of a gun or risking jail time, well, let’s keep our hardships in perspective. Again, these freedoms we have won are not necessarily permanent; we have to work to hold them. But we do have them.

That means that more than ever, the question for us is whether we will use our voices, our energy -- perhaps before too long our bodies in civil disobedience -- to fight against illegitimate authority and for justice.

That child in Afghanistan reaching for a bomblet from an American cluster bomb, the parents in Afghanistan who in the coming weeks will watch their children starve because U.S. bombing has disrupted food distribution -- they have a right to an answer. They are waiting for our answer.
What will our answer be?

Robert Jensen is a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, a member of the Nowar Collective (www.nowarcollective.com) and author of the forthcoming book Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream. He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.
 
 

If people were not being killed and beginning to starve, the American attack on Afghanistan might seem farcical. But there is a logic to what they are doing. Read between the lines and it is clear that they are not bombing large numbers of the Taliban's front-line troops. Why? Because they want to preserve what the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, calls the "moderate" Taliban, who will join a "loose federation" of "nation builders" once the war is over. The moderate Taliban will unite with "elements of the resistance" in the Northern Alliance, the bomb-planters, rapists and heroin dealers, who were trained by the SAS and paid by Washington.

This is known as divide and rule, a strategy as old as imperialism. It will allow the Americans - they hope - to reassert control over a region they "lost". Other countries, such as Pakistan and the neighbouring former Soviet republics, are being bribed into submission. The "war on terrorism", with its Rambo raids, is merely a circus for the folks back home and the media.

It takes me back to the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher announced there were "reasonable" Khmer Rouge. The aim was to bolster a Khmer Rouge-led coalition, in exile, which Washington wanted to run Cambodia and so keep out its recent humiliator, Vietnam, and the influence of the Soviet Union. The SAS were sent to train Pol Pot's killers in Thailand, teaching them how more effectively to blow people up with landmines. They got on so well together that when the United Nations finally turned up, the Khmer Rouge asked for their old British comrades to join them in the zones they controlled. The same thing may happen in Afghanistan when the UN turns up as the facilitator for America "building" an obedient regime.

Among the international relations academics who provide the jargon and apologetics for Anglo-American foreign policy, divide and rule is known as "containment". The aim is to destroy the capacity of nations to challenge US dominance while allowing their regimes to maintain internal order. The nature of the regime is irrelevant. Thus, people all over the world have been divided, ruled and "contained", often violently: the destruction of Yugoslavia is a recent example; the territory administered by the Palestinian Authority is another.

Real reasons for the actions of great power are seldom reported. A morality play is preferred. When George Bush Senior attacked Panama in 1990, he was reportedly "smoking out" General Noriega, "a drug runner and a child pornographer". The real reason was not news. The Panama Canal was about to revert to the government of Panama, and the US wanted a less uppity, more compliant thug than Noriega to look after its interests once the canal was no longer officially theirs.

Likewise, the real reason for attacking Iraq in 1991 had little to do with defending the territorial sanctity of the Kuwaiti sheikhs and everything to do with crippling, or "containing", increasingly powerful, modern Iraq. The Americans had no intention of allowing Saddam Hussein, a former "friend" who had developed ideas above his imperial station, to get in the way of their plans for a vast oil protectorate stretching from Turkey to the Caucasus.

Undoubtedly, a primary reason for the attack on Afghanistan is the installation of a regime that will oversee an American-owned pipeline bringing oil and gas from the Caspian Basin, the greatest source of untapped fossil fuel on earth and enough, according to one estimate, to meet America's voracious energy needs for 30 years. Such a pipeline can run through Russia, Iran, or Afghanistan. Only in Afghanistan can the Americans control it.
Also, stricken Afghanistan is an easy target, an ideal place for a "demonstration war" - a show of what America is prepared to do "where required", as the US ambassador to the United Nations said recently. The racism is implicit. Who cares about Afghan peasants? No Paul McCartney concert for them. Moreover, people can be sprayed with bomblets that blow the heads off children, and we in the west are spared, or denied, the evidence. It is clear that most of the media are suppressing horrific images, as was done in the Gulf slaughter. With honourable exceptions, the coverage is, as ever, the opposite of Claud Cockburn's truism: "Never believe anything until it is officially denied." The Sunday papers carry little more than fables straight from the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defence. Talking up a land invasion is an important media task, as it was in the Gulf and Yugoslavia. Talking up Iraq as a source of the anthrax scare, and the next target, is another. Mark Urban, Newsnight's diplomatic correspondent, told Jeremy Paxman recently that the Americans were studying "secret information" that Saddam Hussein was about to "fire off a missile". Evidence? Urban said nothing; Paxman did not press him.

There is no "war on terrorism". If there was, the SAS would be storming the beaches of Florida, where more terrorists, tyrants and torturers are given refuge than anywhere in the world. If the precocious Blair was really hostile to terrorism, he would do everything in his power to pursue policies that lifted the threat of violent death from people in his own country and third world countries alike, instead of escalating terrorism, as he and Bush are doing. But these are violent men, regardless of their distance from the mayhem they initiate. Blair's enthusiastic part in the cluster bombing of civilians in Iraq and Serbia, and the killing of tens of thousands of children in Iraq, is documented. The Bush family's violence, from Nicaragua to Panama, the Gulf to the death rows of Texas, is a matter of record. Their war on terrorism is no more than the continuing war of the powerful against the powerless, with new excuses, new hidden imperatives, new lies.

The problem for people in the west who do not see the violence of Bush and Blair and their predecessors is that they cannot appreciate the reaction. "We have sown the wind; he is the whirlwind," wrote Jean-Paul Sartre in his preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, "and all that is stirred up in them is a volcanic fury whose force is equal to that of the pressure upon them [and] the same violence is thrown back upon us as when our reflection comes forward to meet us when we go towards a mirror."

The great people's historian Howard Zinn, Boston University professor and former Second World War bomber pilot, helps us to understand this in his new book, Howard Zinn on War. The attack on the twin towers in New York, he writes, has a moral relation to American and Israeli attacks on the Arab Middle East. If the actions of the west's official enemies receive enormous attention as terrorist atrocities while the terrorist atrocities of the US and its allies and clients are starved of political and press attention, "it is impossible to make a balanced moral judgement", to find solutions to the cycle of revenge and reprisal and to address the underlying issue of global economic inequality and oppression.

Propaganda is the enemy within. "By volume and repetition", a barrage of selective, limited information is turned out by tame media, information isolated from political context (such as the bloody record of the superpower throughout the world). In the absence of alternative views, it is no surprise that people's "reasonable reaction" is that "we must do something". This leads to the quick conclusion that "we" must bomb "them". And when it is over, and the corpses are piled high, "only Milosevic stands in the dock, not Clinton. Only Saddam Hussein is outlawed, not Bush Senior. Only Bin Laden has a $50m price on his head, not Bush Junior and his predecessors." It is, says Zinn, "a tribute to the humanity of ordinary people that horrible acts must be camouflaged [with words] like security, peace, freedom, democracy, the 'national interest'."

One of Bush and Blair's oft-repeated lies is that "world opinion is with us". No, it is not. Out of 30 countries surveyed by Gallup International, only in Israel and the United States does a majority of people agree that military attacks are preferable to pursuing justice non-violently through international law, however long it takes. That is the good news.

http://www.johnpilger.com