24 September 2001 03:33 GMT+1
Home > Argument > Commentators
Robert Fisk: Bush
is walking into a
trap
16 September 2001
Retaliation is a trap. In a world that was
supposed to have learnt that the rule of
law comes above revenge, President
Bush appears to be heading for the very
disaster that Osama bin Laden has laid
down for him. Let us have no doubts
about what happened in New York and
Washington last week. It was a crime
against humanity. We cannot
understand America's need to retaliate
unless we accept this bleak, awesome
fact. But this crime was perpetrated – it
becomes ever clearer – to provoke the
United States into just the blind,
arrogant punch that the US military is
preparing.
Mr bin Laden – every day his
culpability becomes more apparent –
has described to me how he wishes to
overthrow the pro-American regime of
the Middle East, starting with Saudi
Arabia and moving on to Egypt, Jordan
and the other Gulf states. In an Arab
world sunk in corruption and
dictatorships – most of them supported
by the West – the only act that might
bring Muslims to strike at their own
leaders would be a brutal,
indiscriminate assault by the United
States. Mr bin Laden is unsophisticated
in foreign affairs, but a close student of
the art and horror of war. He knew how
to fight the Russians who stayed on in
Afghanistan, a Russian monster that
revenged itself upon its ill-educated,
courageous antagonists until, faced with
war without end, the entire Soviet
Union began to fall apart.
The Chechens learnt this lesson. And
the man responsible for so much of the
bloodbath in Chechnya – the career
KGB man whose army is raping and
murdering the insurgent Sunni Muslim
population of Chechnya – is now being
signed up by Mr Bush for his "war
against people''. Vladimir Putin must
surely have a sense of humour to
appreciate the cruel ironies that have
now come to pass, though I doubt if he
will let Mr Bush know what happens
when you start a war of retaliation;
your army – like the Russian forces in
Chechnya – becomes locked into battle
with an enemy that appears ever more
ruthless, ever more evil.
But the Americans need look no further
than Ariel Sharon's futile war with the
Palestinians to understand the folly of
retaliation. In Lebanon, it was always
the same. A Hizbollah guerrilla would
kill an Israeli occupation soldier, and
the Israelis would fire back in
retaliation at a village in which a
civilian would die. The Hizbollah
would retaliate with a Katyusha missile
attack over the Israeli border, and the
Israelis would retaliate again with a
bombardment of southern Lebanon. In
the end, the Hizbollah – the "centre of
world terror'' according to Mr Sharon –
drove the Israelis out of Lebanon.
In Israel/Palestine, it is the same story.
An Israeli soldier shoots a Palestinian
stone-thrower. The Palestinians
retaliate by killing a settler. The Israelis
then retaliate by sending a murder
squad to kill a Palestinian gunman. The
Palestinians retaliate by sending a
suicide bomber into a pizzeria. The
Israelis then retaliate by sending F-16s
to bomb a Palestinian police station.
Retaliation leads to retaliation and more
retaliation. War without end.
And while Mr Bush – and perhaps Mr
Blair – prepare their forces, they
explain so meretriciously that this is a
war for "democracy and liberty'', that it
is about men who are "attacking
civilisation''. "America was targeted for
attack,'' Mr Bush informed us on Friday,
"because we are the brightest beacon
for freedom and opportunity in the
world.'' But this is not why America
was attacked. If this was an
Arab-Muslim apocalypse, then it is
intimately associated with events in the
Middle East and with America's
stewardship of the area. Arabs, it might
be added, would rather like some of
that democracy and liberty and freedom
that Mr Bush has been telling them
about. Instead, they get a president who
wins 98 per cent in the elections
(Washington's friend, Mr Mubarak) or a
Palestinian police force, trained by the
CIA, that tortures and sometimes kills
its people in prison. The Syrians would
also like a little of that democracy. So
would the Saudis. But their effete
princes are all friends of America – in
many cases, educated at US
universities.
I will always remember how President
Clinton announced that Saddam
Hussein – another of our grotesque
inventions – must be overthrown so
that the people of Iraq could choose
their own leaders. But if that happened,
it would be the first time in Middle
Eastern history that Arabs have been
permitted to do so. No, it is "our''
democracy and "our'' liberty and
freedom that Mr Bush and Mr Blair are
talking about, our Western sanctuary
that is under attack, not the vast place
of terror and injustice that the Middle
East has become.
Let me illustrate what I mean. Nineteen
years ago today, the greatest act of
terrorism – using Israel's own definition
of that much misused word – in modern
Middle Eastern history began. Does
anyone remember the anniversary in
the West? How many readers of this
article will remember it? I will take a
tiny risk and say that no other British
newspaper – certainly no American
newspaper – will today recall the fact
that on 16 September 1982, Israel's
Phalangist militia allies started their
three-day orgy of rape and knifing and
murder in the Palestinian refugee camps
of Sabra and Shatila that cost 1,800
lives. It followed an Israeli invasion of
Lebanon – designed to drive the PLO
out of the country and given the green
light by the then US Secretary of State,
Alexander Haig – which cost the lives
of 17,500 Lebanese and Palestinians,
almost all of them civilians. That's
probably three times the death toll in
the World Trade Centre. Yet I do not
remember any vigils or memorial
services or candle-lighting in America
or the West for the innocent dead of
Lebanon; I don't recall any stirring
speeches about democracy or liberty. In
fact, my memory is that the United
States spent most of the bloody months
of July and August 1982 calling for
"restraint".
No, Israel is not to blame for what
happened last week. The culprits were
Arabs, not Israelis. But America's
failure to act with honour in the Middle
East, its promiscuous sale of missiles to
those who use them against civilians, its
blithe disregard for the deaths of tens of
thousands of Iraqi children under
sanctions of which Washington is the
principal supporter – all these are
intimately related to the society that
produced the Arabs who plunged
America into an apocalypse of fire last
week.
America's name is literally stamped on
to the missiles fired by Israel into
Palestinian buildings in Gaza and the
West Bank. Only four weeks ago, I
identified one of them as an AGM
114-D air-to-ground rocket made by
Boeing and Lockheed-Martin at their
factory in – of all places – Florida, the
state where some of the suiciders
trained to fly.
It was fired from an Apache helicopter
(made in America, of course) during the
1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, when
hundreds of cluster bombs were
dropped in civilian areas of Beruit by
the Israelis in contravention of
undertakings given to the United States.
Most of the bombs had US Naval
markings and America then suspended
a shipment of fighter bombers to Israel –
for less than two months.
The same type of missile – this time an
AGM 114-C made inGeorgia – was
fired by the Israelis into the back of an
ambulance near the Lebanese village of
Mansori, killing two women and four
children. I collected the pieces of the
missile, including its computer coding
plate, flew to Georgia and presented
them to the manufacturers at the
Boeing factory. And what did the
developer of the missile say to me when
I showed him photographs of the
children his missile had killed?
"Whatever you do," he told me, "don't
quote me as saying anything critical of
the policies of Israel."
I'm sure the father of those children,
who was driving the ambulance, will
have been appalled by last week's
events, but I don't suppose, given the
fate of his own wife – one of the
women killed – that he was in a mood
to send condolences to anyone. All
these facts, of course, must be forgotten
now.
Every effort will be made in the coming
days to switch off the "why'' question
and concentrate on the who, what and
how. CNN and most of the world's
media have already obeyed this
essential new war rule. I've already
seen what happens when this rule is
broken. When The Independent
published my article on the connection
between Middle Eastern injustice and
the New York holocaust, the BBC's
24-hour news channel produced an
American commentator who remarked
that "Robert Fisk has won the prize for
bad taste''. When I raised the same
point on an Irish radio talk show, the
other guest, a Harvard lawyer,
denounced me as a bigot, a liar, a
"dangerous man'' and – of course –
potentially anti-Semitic. The Irish pulled
the plug on him.
No wonder we have to refer to the
terrorists as "mindless''. For if we did
not, we would have to explain what
went on in those minds. But this
attempt to censor the realities of the
war that has already begun must not be
permitted to continue. Look at the
logic. Secretary of State Colin Powell
was insisting on Friday that his message
to the Taliban is simple: they have to
take responsibility for sheltering Mr bin
Laden. "You cannot separate your
activities from the activities of the
perpetrators,'' he warned. But the
Americans absolutely refuse to
associate their own response to their
predicament with their activities in the
Middle East. We are supposed to hold
our tongues, even when Ariel Sharon –
a man whose name will always be
associated with the massacre at Sabra
and Shatila – announces that Israel also
wishes to join the battle against "world
terror''.
No wonder the Palestinians are fearful.
In the past four days, 23 Palestinians
have been killed in the West Bank and
Gaza, an astonishing figure that would
have been front-page news had
America not been blitzed. If Israel signs
up for the new conflict, then the
Palestinians – by fighting the Israelis –
will, by extension, become part of the
"world terror'' against which Mr Bush
is supposedly going to war. Not for
nothing did Mr Sharon claim that
Yasser Arafat had connections with
Osama bin Laden.
I repeat: what happened in New York
was a crime against humanity. And that
means policemen, arrests, justice, a
whole new international court at The
Hague if necessary. Not cruise missiles
and "precision'' bombs and Muslim lives
lost in revenge for Western lives. But
the trap has been sprung. Mr Bush –
perhaps we, too – are now walking into
it.
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