WAR WITHOUT BORDERS OR END
-
Murray Horton
This is our first opportunity to comment on the dreadful atrocities of September 11, so let’s make it clear from the outset that the Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC) abhors acts of mass murder such as occurred in New York and Washington DC. Terrorism against civilians using weapons of mass destruction is abominable, whether it be the American nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the use of commercial airliners (and their illfated passengers) as flying bombs on American cities (to put things into perspective, the World Trade Center explosions were estimated to have had 2% of the force of the 1945 Hiroshima atomic bomb. But, on the other hand, this one incident killed more people than have died in the whole 30+ years of the current Northern Irish “Troubles”). Not only is terrorism abhorrent, but from the political point of view of the global progressive movement, it is counter-productive – as has been amply borne out by everything that has happened since.
Having made that clear, we need to
equally state that we oppose utterly the response to those atrocities.
Undeniably, these attacks delivered a profound psychological, as well as
physical, blow to the US (not to mention global capitalism, whose physical
headquarters is downtown Manhattan). The Bush Administration has milked it for
all it’s worth (and it’s noticeable that all the post-attack propaganda has
been focused on the New York attack. It’s rather harder to sell the line of
“innocent civilians” when the target is the Pentagon, the very nerve centre of
the American military empire). Bush, only a few months after effectively
stealing the 2000 Presidential election and deeply dividing the American
people, has seen this as a godsend. Ever since taking office he had been
disengaging from the world and aggressively practising a policy of
unilateralism, exploiting the United States’ position as the world’s only
superpower.
For instance, he has scrapped the 1972
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the former Soviet Union and continues to
push for the construction of the bizarre Star Wars missile defence system. In
December 2001, Bush gave the necessary six months formal notice for the US to
withdraw from the Treaty (he reckons Star Wars is necessary to protect the US from
“rogue States”. It would have been completely useless against hijackers using
US commercial flights as missiles. And although he proclaimed as a success the
2001 test of the ability to use a US missile to intercept and destroy an
incoming enemy missile, it later emerged that the incoming missile was fitted
with a location device, so that it could be found. “Rogue” missiles are
unlikely to be so helpful).
September 11 presented the opportunity
to reinvent a desperately needed global enemy (which had been missing since the
collapse of the Soviet Union, a decade earlier). Thus an obscure group of
Islamic terrorists and the States that allegedly back them were hastily
elevated to the status that world Communism had occupied in the earlier Reagan
and Bush 1 Administrations. The present Administration is full of retreads from
Reagan and Bush 1 – men such as Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Armitage, Perle,
Powell. These guys need an enemy figure – Osama bin Laden became the Saddam
Hussein of 2001 (although good old goddam Saddam is still there, a useful
irritant to remind them of the “unfinished business of 1991”).
The more excitable among them talk of a
“clash of civilisations” with Islam, of reviving the religious wars of several
hundred years ago. Nobody is impolite enough to point out that the Crusaders
were roundly defeated by Saladin – now that really is unfinished business.
These guys have won over at least one prominent supporter here: Bill English,
Leader of the Opposition, has made the extraordinary claim that New Zealand’s
semi-mythical World War 1 defeat at Gallipoli (Turkey), our veritable “coming
of age as a nation”, marks our first clash with Islam, a clash with which we
have still to come to terms, in his opinion.
Post-September 11, attention swung
rapidly to Afghanistan and its grotesquely obscurantist Taliban regime.
Fundamentalists and fanatics are the logical end product of war and superpower
meddling. Exactly the same thing had happened in Cambodia in the 1970s,
spawning the genocidal Khmer Rouge as a response to the years of American
bombing, invasion and meddling, all as a by-product of the wars next door, in
Vietnam and Laos. The Taliban are the same holy warriors hailed as heroes by
the Reaganauts when they successfully fought the invading Russians in the
1980s. They were trained, armed and financed by the US Central Intelligence
Agency and its Pakistani proxies. Men such as bin Laden are the children of the
Cold War, which became a hot one in Afghanistan. The Taliban are the very same
men (and they are all men, very deliberately) hailed as heroes for restoring
order in 1996, when they chucked out the same warlords and opium dealers now
restored to their fiefdoms by the current American war. So one bunch of
cutthroat murderous misogynists and fanatical theocrats has been replaced by
another collection of exactly the same hue.
One could be forgiven for thinking,
after being bombarded by the uncritical propaganda being dropped on us like daisy
cutter bombs from B52s, that the US had gone into Afghanistan to liberate its
long suffering (and literally invisible) women from oppression, to give one
example. Nonsense – for the several years the Taliban was in power, the US had
no problems with it. It was seen as instrumental in eradicating opium growing
(the source of the global heroin scourge) and was cultivated as being a likely
protector of a proposed Central Asian oil pipeline, which is being promoted as
a safer and more profitable alternative to pipelines running through Iran or
the unstable former Soviet republics. It was a regime with which the US could
do business, and more importantly it promoted stability on one of the wilder
edges of empire, always an important consideration when you’ve got an empire to
run.
If the US had objections to murderous,
misogynistic feudal dictatorships run by corrupt princes and reactionary
mullahs then it would have long ago done something about its staunchest ally in
the Middle East – Saudi Arabia. Instead, it has devoted countless billions and
its entire military might to protecting that most revolting of regimes, the
biggest supplier of America’s oil. Never forget that bin Laden comes from a
fabulously rich Saudi family; the majority of the September 11 suicide
hijackers were Saudis – not one was an Afghan. In the words of the old saying,
the Taliban et al. may have been “sons of bitches but they’re our sons of
bitches”. But the Taliban outlived its usefulness to the US when it became “out
of control” and offered an operational base to bin Laden, who had taken to
gnawing on the hand that had fed him. He, in turn, overplayed his hand by
punching the Emperor right on the nose (and in broad daylight too). It was
inevitable that the US, given its entire 20th Century history as a
lumbering military behemoth (it reminds me of the mountain troll in the “Harry
Potter” movie) would go to war, motivated by hysteria bred of a mixture of
fear, panic and the desire for revenge. Plus the Bush Administration, full of
the most reptilian specimens of the most reactionary tendencies in American
society, seized on this as a perfect excuse to mount a war with neither end nor
borders, under the pretext of rooting out bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network. If that
isn’t enough, there is talk of “unfinished business”, involving States from
North Korea to Iraq. All the American humiliations of the past decades – such
as the ignominious exit from Somalia in the early 1990s, after a warlord’s
ragtag militia humbled the much vaunted US Special Forces – might now be
avenged.
Bush, who has definitely watched too
many cowboy movies, has used apocalyptic language such as “you are either with
us or against us”: the language of the homicidal bully, drunk with power. There
is the personal factor too, the need to look tough. Bush would like it
forgotten that on the day of the attacks, he ran and hid in a nuclear war
bunker on the other side of the US. And war hysteria provides the perfect
pretext to radically reshape your own society in your own reactionary likeness,
because “there’s a war on, don’t you know”. Hence the stampede to ram through
repressive laws such as the Patriot Act, which radically undercuts civil
liberties enshrined since the writing of the US Constitution in the 18th
Century.
Never mind that there are other,
non-violent ways of rooting out terrorists and criminals. Several years of
global pressure on Libya led to Colonel Gaddafi (who once occupied the top spot
in American demonology, now supplanted by Saddam and bin Laden) surrendering
the two men wanted for the 1988 terrorist bombing of the US passenger airliner
over Lockerbie (Scotland). They were tried in a special Scottish court convened
in Holland; one was convicted and is serving a life sentence (whether these men
or Libya per se had anything to do with the Lockerbie bombing is a whole other
issue). To give another example, Slobodan Milosevic, erstwhile leader of what’s
left of Yugoslavia, was arrested by his own people and turned over to the
International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague to face trial for genocide and
other grave charges. Ironically, it is the US which has fought tooth and nail
against the creation of a permanent international war crimes court, because it
won’t countenance any of its own standing in the dock. When you’re the Emperor
and only your side of the story is being told, everybody else are the war
criminals. Never you.
It’s worth noting, in passing, that New
Zealand has recent experience of international State terrorism – namely the
fatal bombing of the Greenpeace ship “Rainbow Warrior” in Auckland Harbour, in
1985, by French Intelligence agents. That case was solved and dealt with by
routine NZ Police work (no Cruise missiles or B52s were needed) and international
negotiation. There was a conspicuous silence from the “anti-terrorist” Reagan
and Thatcher governments when nuclear free New Zealand was the victim of State
terrorism from a major “friendly” Power.
Other vassal states have their own
motives for following the Emperor. Russia, which as the Soviet Union, was
driven out of Afghanistan as a defeated superpower, is back in there again and
has the agreement of the West to never again criticise its brutal war of
repression against the Muslim separatists of Chechnya (it’s ironic to consider
that just a few years ago the West, led by the US, was going to war to help
Muslims, in Bosnia and Kosovo. Now it is reported in passing that Al Qaeda has
operatives in Bosnia and that the Kosovo guerillas are violently destabilising
the neighbouring State of Macedonia. Oh well, that was then, this is now). Tony
Blair looks and sounds uncannily like a ventriloquist’s dummy and it’s quite
clear that he’s got Uncle Sam’s hand shoved up him. Britain has been America’s
closest collaborator in all its recent wars, and has been involved in the daily
bombing of Iraq and the slow starving to death of Iraqi children and civilians
via the inhumane blockade of the past decade. Australia’s singularly
unprepossessing leader, John Howard, owes his very continuation as Prime
Minister to Afghanistan – firstly to the Afghan refugees on the “Tampa”, whom
he refused, at gunpoint, to admit to Australia and whom he then had dumped at
various impoverished Pacific holding pens whose governments he bribed to accept
them (New Zealand played a more honourable part in this whole squalid affair,
taking some of these wretched boat people and treating them like human beings).
Howard thus cleaned up big on the racist vote in the 2001 Federal election,
sinking both Labor and One Nation with one king hit. Secondly, he was actually
in Washington on September 11, for the 50th anniversary of the ANZUS
Treaty – from which NZ has been “suspended” since 1986 – and was literally
Johnny on the spot to proclaim Australia’s undying military subservience to the
US (as it has done for the past 50 years). So he gave his Special Air Service
(SAS), fresh from its glorious defeat of the “Tampa” boat people, orders to go
to war in Afghanistan. All up, Australia made its biggest combat commitment
since the Vietnam War. It’s a wonder that Howard hasn’t renamed his capital
Kabulberra in gratitude to the long suffering Afghanis.
And what about little old New Zealand,
the smallest but traditionally most eager of all the minor satraps of whatever
Empire was in the ascendancy? Well we might have a “Centre Left”
Labour/Alliance government, but our Cabinet, full of anti-war protestors from
the 1960s and 70s, fell over themselves to follow the US to war. Before the
smoke had even begun to clear from the twin towers and the Pentagon, our Prime
Minister, Helen Clark, was one of the first world leaders to make a military
commitment. The same Government that has scrapped the hapless Air Force combat wing
(mothballing the Skyhawks) and committed a large chunk of the Army to
commendable United Nations peacekeeping duties in East Timor, committed NZ to
sending over our SAS and increased Intelligence cooperation with the US. Plus
there has been the unseemly haste to bring in the war hysteria-induced
Terrorism Suppression Bill (see the
article about it elsewhere in this issue. Ed.). Everything the SAS does is
shrouded in mystery, which seems to be a wise move on its part – revelations
about it from ex-members show it to be a bunch of blokes with a propensity for
alcohol abuse and a penchant for killing, whose post-military job prospects are
basically confined to working as mercenaries or glorified bouncers. So we’re
never likely to know what, if anything, the NZ SAS contributed to the war in
Afghanistan (or any of the other targets of the US “war on terror”). For all we
know they might have gone on an extended pub crawl. Matt Robson, Associate
Minister of Foreign Affairs, publicly complained that he learned nothing from
the Government of the SAS’ activities, but only from his nephew, who is in the
regiment.
The Intelligence angle is far more
significant. In the early days after September 11 Clark stressed repeatedly how
vindicated she felt that she champions NZ Intelligence ties with the US and how
this proves wrong the critics (such as the ABC) of such ties. Quite the
contrary – this war proves, yet again, how right we are to denounce those ties,
principally in the shape of the Waihopai spybase, as just making us minor
accomplices in whatever policies and wars the US might require us for. The
whole Echelon “keywords” communications interception programme, of which
Waihopai is but one part, completely failed to detect or prevent September 11.
Yet we are being asked to pour yet more money and resources into this
spectacularly unsuccessful system. Waihopai and its sister spybases around the
world are part of the problem, not the solution.
ABC believes that the need is greater
than ever now that New Zealand, led by the same politicians who so bravely made
us nuclear free in the 1980s, finish the job and break all remaining military
and Intelligence ties with the US. Of course they plan nothing of the kind,
having done exactly the same sort of flip flop performed by the anti-war,
anti-conscription Labour activists of World War 1 who, as the Government during
WW2, imposed conscription and slavishly followed Britain (our then Imperial
master) into war, ruthlessly persecuting and imprisoning anybody opposed to it.
But as Bush and his cronies look to expand the “war without end” beyond
benighted Afghanistan, one can detect squeamishness among the various allies
about just where all this is going to end. And how. Clark and Co. keep trying
to soothe mounting disquiet by promising that New Zealand will get its reward,
the holy grail of a free trade agreement with the US. This is the modern
equivalent of the “guns for butter” policy of the Holyoake government of the
1960s and 70s when NZ helped to fight America’s war in Vietnam.
Opposition To The War Is Growing
Not that this war and New Zealand’s collaboration in it has gone unopposed amongst New Zealanders. There has been a small but growing anti-war movement since the outset, but you wouldn’t know that from the mainstream media. And within the ruling parties, all is not well. The Alliance national conference nearly tore the party apart over the issue, with the Ministers and MPs, led by Deputy Prime Minister, Jim Anderton, defending the war and the rank and file, led by Party President, Matt McCarten, attacking the Parliamentary caucus and demanding that the SAS be withdrawn. The caucus eventually agreed to conduct a fairly meaningless review of NZ’s role in the war, fully intending to change nothing. This did not mollify the grassroots (some of whom resigned from the Party), and this issue is far from over within the Alliance as we go to print. Labour’s national conference was a much more sanitised and stage managed affair. There was one very public dissenter – Nick Kelly, who had already been sacked as Chair of the Rimutaka Electorate Committee for publicly excoriating Labour’s pro-free trade policies. As Kelly stated in his own press release (3/12/01):
“Helen Clark and any other Labour MP that supports this so-called war on terrorism should resign from Parliament, as they do not represent the people who elected Labour to government. At this weekend's National conference of the New Zealand Labour Party, our Government's support for the American bombing of Afghanistan wasn't even on the agenda for debate. Believing this to be totally unacceptable I decided to stand up and say a few home truths during Helen Clark's main conference speech. I stood up and said ‘What about the bloody war? Stop the War! In 1999 you (Helen Clark) opposed the bombing of Kosovo. Why aren't you doing the same now? It is unacceptable to support murder in Afghanistan to get a free trade deal with America’. I was then grabbed by Party President Mike Williams, Engineers union official Paul Tolich and a few other party hacks and was handed to a security guard. This guard who nearly broke my arm dragged me out the hall and handed me over to a dozen police officers, who served me with a trespass notice, supported by a Labour Party official who took away my delegate card…”. So much for democracy in the Labour Party.
We’re at the start of a long and
daunting journey, as the world’s sole remaining superpower goes into full blown
war mode (which is always the logical outcome of empire). New Zealand is only a
bit player in all of this but we’re fond of punching above our weight. The best
thing we could do in this so-called war is to take off our gloves and get out
of the ring.
Just in case we get called “anti-American” or told “ït
would have been different if it had been your family in the buildings or on the
planes”, I should point out that my co-editor, Bob Leonard, is American, with
kids and grandkids in the States. In the course of coming home from his latest
trip back there, just days before September 11, he made one of those east-west
flights that was to prove fatal for hundreds of passengers days later. What’s
more, one of his sons was scheduled to be in the World Trade Center on the day
of the attack (a double booking in Detroit very probably saved his life). It
was as close as that to both Bob and his family. It hasn’t altered one bit his
opposition to the American response to the attacks. And he certainly doesn’t
consider himself “anti- American”. MH.
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