January 5, 2002

[Intended as an op-ed column in a local paper, it was not published. (Links not in original.]

It seems I'm a traitor.

I have this on no less an authority than Attorney General John Ashcroft, who in the course of cowing a timid and reluctant Senate Judiciary Committee on December 6, said those who "scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty only aid terrorists" and "give ammunition to America's enemies." Or, put more directly, "Anyone who questions anything we're doing is an anti-American terrorist-lover."

Well, that must be me, because I do question; in fact, I denounce. I denounce the idea espoused by Bush, Ashcroft, and the rest that crew that human rights and due process are frills to be dumped when they become inconvenient.

I denounce the idea that those accused of crime, even terrorism - bearing in mind the word is "accused" (unless "innocent until proven guilty" is just another frill to be given the boot) - deserve less due process than Nazi war criminals got at Nuremberg.

I denounce military tribunals, secret trials with secret evidence, no right of appeal, and death sentences within easy reach.

I denounce the blatant bias of questioning thousands of Arab men, supposedly seeking ties to terrorists, on the grounds - and only on the grounds - that they are Arab men. And anyone who denies that is racial profiling needs a remedial course in basic logic.

I denounce the practice of detaining hundreds of people, holding them virtually incommunicado to where even their families couldn't find them, often on the flimsiest and most technical of charges, detention which under our new "anti-terrorist" legislation could become all but indefinite, even without the pretext of actual charges.

Speaking of that legislation, I denounce the sweeping new powers to poke, prod, and pry into our private lives, to threaten dissent; powers long desired by the Ashcrofts of this nation but which not even they have claimed would have prevented the catastrophe of September 11 had they been in force.

I denounce, that is, the attack on our human rights, the erosion of our privacy, the guilt by association, the proof by suspicion, and the sweeping up of the innocent in the idle hope that the guilty will by some chance be among them.

And, apparently doubling my treason, as I denounce the sweeping up of the innocent here I denounce the mowing down of the innocent elsewhere.

I denounce, that is, our war in Afghanistan, soon to become the war in Somalia? Iraq? Yemen? Sudan? The list is extensive, but consists entirely of poor countries in the Middle East and the horn of Africa. (There is one nation in that region, which despite espousing an extremist form of Islam, having coddled terrorists, and having clear links to Osama bin Laden, is surely safe from attack: Saudi Arabia.)

Note well: The issue is not whether or not to fight terrorism. It's how you do that without becoming a terrorist yourself. In that light, it must be said that our "war on terrorism" as presently pursued is wrong, immoral, and wholly ineffective.

Consider that in the course of our war in Afghanistan, we killed perhaps as many as 4,000 innocent civilians. (By the way, when was the last time you heard any discussion of civilian casualties? Perhaps that's because the White House "advised" the networks to avoid the subject. CNN management followed up with a memo to reporters and anchors that it would be "perverse" to focus on civilian deaths.) The interruption of aid supplies caused by the war has already condemned at least thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, perhaps more, to death by starvation this winter - which would be true even if we hadn't blown up two storehouses full of Red Cross aid supplies outside Kabul. That is, we have already killed or condemned to death more than twice as many innocents as were killed in the World Trade Center atrocity.

And for what? To what end? Supposedly, the bombing was to force the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden for trial; when it started, George Bush even said "We are not looking to replace one government with another." But it soon became obvious that was exactly our intent, as sorties moved to front-line support for Northern Alliance forces (which wound up directing US air strikes) and the argument smoothly segued from the Taliban harboring al-Qaeda to the Taliban being the same as al-Qaeda. Indeed, when there were reports that a deal was being struck for the Taliban to surrender Kandahar in return for safe passage of Mullah Muhammed Omar out of the city, Donald Rumsfeld said the US would "accept no deal" which allowed him to go free. (Just how did it get to be our decision as to what sort of peace deal the Afghanis would make among themselves?)

What makes this doubly - triply - outrageous is that according to the UK newspaper the "Daily Mirror," in early October Pakistani Muslim clerics had scored an agreement with bin Laden under which he would be extradited to Pakistan and held under house arrest, while an international tribunal decided whether to try him itself or turn him over to the US. The deal was killed when Pakistani President Musharraf said he "could not guarantee bin Laden's safety," a truly odd claim considering that at the time much concern was expressed about how popular bin Laden was in Pakistan. Significantly, in the same article a US official is quoted as worrying about "a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance bin Laden was captured." In other words, "Yes, we want him taken - but not yet." [A slight error: It was the Daily Telegraph, not the Daily Mirror, that broke the story. The "premature collapse" quote was from a column in the Mirror by John Pilger, which referred to the Telegraph piece.]

But perhaps the worst thing is that, in the final analysis, we lacked even the limp justification of effectiveness - it just won't work, and neither will extending our attacks beyond other borders. If the recent history of the Middle East proves nothing else, it proves that neither terrorism nor counterterrorism, neither retaliation nor counter-retaliation, work in the long run. They may gain you a lull, but not an end. To cite the obvious example: For decades, Palestinians have been committing terrorism against Israelis - they still do not have a home. For decades, Israelis have been committing terrorism against Palestinians - they still do not have security.

And while September 11 is clearly the worst attack on Americans, it was hardly the first. (Remember the USS Cole? The 1993 World Trade Center bombing? The embassy attacks? The disco bombing?) And neither, contrary to what seems to be the current notion, was this our first military response. (Remember the shelling of Beirut? The bombings of Libya, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan?) It was, rather, another turn in the cycle of mayhem, a cycle that grows deadlier over time.

The fact is, terrorism can't be stopped unless it is understood - any more than you can cure a disease without knowing the cause. Terrorism is born of desperation-driven fanaticism, a desperation that can't be separated from the social and economic conditions in which such as al-Qaeda can take root and grow, conditions - it must be said bluntly - which we as a nation are complicit in maintaining for our own selfish benefit.

Together, all this means three things:

One, unless we are prepared to wipe out entire peoples, our "war against terrorism" will not succeed. It will only produce more anger, more hatred, more suicide bombers; the more so as it spreads to more poor nations.

Two, patient police work of effective investigation and intelligence has done and will do more to oppose terrorism than all our bombing sorties combined. (September 11, it's become clear, didn't arise from a lack of police powers but from a failure to use those already there.)

Three and most importantly, our best targets for "attack" in this "extended campaign" are not the actual terrorists (who likely number no more than a few thousand) but the tens of thousands, the millions, of denigrated, degraded, and denied people among who they recruit and from who they draw their strength. Our best weapons are bread and butter, not bombs; our best tactic reconstruction, not retaliation; our best strategy justice, not jingoism. The best way for us to fight terrorism is to ensure that the dispossessed have a genuine stake in the world and don’t see us as grasping bullies - and the best way to no longer be seen as a grasping bully is to stop being one.