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War on terrorism should addresses grievances which inspire militants to strike
by Michael Jansen
Tuesday's
onslaught on key targets in New York City and
Washington DC will, almost certainly, elicit a harsh response from the
Bush administration. However, it is unlikely that the US government, media
or opinion makers will draw the appropriate conclusions about this attack.
Tuesday, Sept. 11, was the
United States' “Yom Kippur,” its “Day of Atonement,” for all the sins its
policy makers have committed against other countries and peoples over the
past 40-odd years.
While the Saudi Islamic
militant Osama Ben Laden is considered the prime suspect, there are others
harbouring a desire for revenge who have the ability to carry out a
coordinated assault of this magnitude. Palestinian, Iranian and Iraqi
militants; Latin Americans with long-standing grudges; European and Asian
leftists seeking to reinvigorate their struggles against the core country
of the capitalist “evil empire”; drug dealers determined to end the US
campaign to curb the trade in narcotics; and international and domestic
activists trying to halt the process of globalisation.
Of these possible culprits
only Osama Ben Laden, the drug lords and the anti-globalisation movements
have the motivation and the global reach to carry out such an operation.
And of these only Ben Laden can field operatives prepared to die in order
to punish the US for its anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and pro-Israel policies.
It is, however, uncertain whether Ben Laden's men have the logistical
expertise to plan a major operation or the technical ability to fly
state-of-the-art civilian aircraft into targeted buildings.
Ben Laden's Al Qa'ida has the
allegiance and support of many “Afghans,” veterans of the 1979-91
US-sponsored war against the Soviet-supported leftist government in Kabul.
Guerrilla fighters, Mujahedeen, were recruited throughout the Arab and
Muslim worlds, trained in Pakistan by that country's military intelligence
apparatus and the US Central Intelligence Agency and sent into the
mountains of Afghanistan to fight Russian forces. The protracted campaign
was largely funded by Saudi Arabia, Ben Laden's home country. He joined
the Mujahedeen in 1979 and became one of its most celebrated fighters.
A member of a wealthy family
which made its money in contracting, Ben Laden contributed millions of
dollars to the campaign. He personally signed up hundreds, perhaps even
thousands, of Arab and Muslim volunteers, transported them to Pakistan and
prepared them for the battlefield. He used his own engineers to blast
massive tunnels for bunkers, command centres and arms dumps into the
rugged mountains of Bakhtiar province and to cut the Mujahedeen trail to
the outskirts of Kabul.
After the Soviet withdrawal
from Afghanistan, many “Afghans” joined the military formations of Afghan
warlords to wage the ongoing civil conflict, others became freelancers in
the “Azzam Brigades,” loosely connected groupings sharing Ben Laden's
Islamic fundamentalist ideology. According to the authoritative Jane's
Intelligence Review, the “Afghans” loosed onto the international scene
included 5,000 Saudis, 3,000 Yemenis, 2,000 Egyptians, 2,800 Algerians,
400 Tunisians, 370 Iraqis, 200 Libyans and several score Jordanians. Some
took part in the Bosnian War and the Kosovo campaign as well as in various
domestic conflicts in Muslim countries, notably the Islamist revolt
against the secular government in Algeria.
The stationing of US troops in
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf during the 1991 Gulf War gave Ben Laden and the
“Afghans” a new cause: the expulsion of the infidels from sacred Muslim
soil; Washington's assets became its scourge. The first operation linked
to Ben Laden was the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre which left six
dead and 1,000 injured. A shadowy Pakistani called Ramzi Yusif was
convicted for being the mastermind of the attack. Ben Laden has also been
blamed for 1995 and 1996 attacks on US servicemen in Saudi Arabia, the
August 1998 bombings of US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es-Salam,
Tanzania, and the October 2000 strike against the USS Cole in the port of
Aden in Yemen. Although Ben Laden may inspire his followers to mount
operations against the US, it is not known whether he is personally
involved in the planning and execution of such actions.
The choice of the twin towers
of the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, home of the US defence
department, was highly significant. These two edifices represent the US
“military industrial complex” which essentially controls both domestic and
foreign policy. At the end of his presidency, Dwight Eisenhower, the
allied supreme commander during World War II, repeatedly warned US
politicians and voters about the dangers posed by the inordinate amount of
influence wielded by the “military industrial complex.” Eisenhower also
understood that Israel could not simply seize and occupy the territory of
its neighbours. In 1957, Eisenhower compelled Israel to withdraw from the
Egyptian Sinai Peninsula after its 1956 capture of this territory during
the Anglo-French assault on Egypt. Since then, no US president has made
any effort to curb either the “military industrial complex” or Israel
which has fused its interests with those of the US defence industry.
While the Bush administration
has announced its determination to “wage war on terrorism,” the US will
never win that war until it addresses the grievances which inspire
militants to strike at Washington. Palestine should be at the top of the
Bush administration's list because the US pro-Israel stance in this
century-old conflict fuels the hatred which drives Muslims to attack
“soft” US targets and kill US citizens.
Mr. Michael Jansen contributed this
article to the Jordan Times.
Source:
by courtesy & © 2001
Jordan
Times & Michael Jansen
by the same author:
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