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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: asenna1 who wrote (186873)	9/26/2001 10:09:31 AM
From: Rollcast...	Respond to of 769670

Anne McElvoy: Against the war? So what would your alternative be? ''Justice not revenge' is a pointless slogan unless you have first hunted down the culprits to face such justice' 26 September 2001 What are we arguing about? Two weeks after the mass execution at the World Trade Centre, on the eve of military action in Afghanistan to root out its sponsors, it is not so much the fog of war which has descended as a thick mist of muddled arguments. Why are we about to fight a war? We are doing so because a war has been declared upon Western societies. It is mistaken to view the events of 11 September solely as a war on America. It was an act of war in America, on the West. The choice of venue for the mass execution was a building that housed a vast cross-section of the world's citizens, united by their jobs at the heart of the web of world trade. As much as I appreciate the genuine concern of many people who oppose the war, calling for "justice not revenge" is a rather pointless slogan unless you have first hunted down the culprits of terror to be the recipients of that justice. They are not likely to emerge from their hideouts declaring that it is a fair cop and asking for a cell next to Mr Milosevic in The Hague. Genuine liberals on both sides of the Atlantic have a special duty to sift good from bad arguments here. We are not by temperament gung-ho, but neither can we take the easy recourse of parts of the right towards isolationism. Powerful states do have duties to help alleviate misery and address the causes of wrongdoing in the world. Sometimes force is part of this responsibility. A war in Afghanistan is not the final answer – of course not. But a limited war in Afghanistan to end the Taliban harbouring the heart of a terror network is the beginning of an answer. The worst misunderstanding of 11 September is that it was some sort of retaliation for America's misdemeanours on the world stage and its strident support for Israel. An even less credible variant blames America's "tone" or "manner" or something conveniently imprecise. In either case, runs the argument, the US should try to understand how much it is loathed. It is possible that the timing of the attack was influenced by such considerations. There is no evidence – repeat, no evidence – that the motivation of this attack was the treatment of Palestinian people. The self-immolation in which the terrorists engaged two weeks ago was not the Islamic equivalent of Jan Palach's protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia – a drastic act intended to draw attention to a single cause. In its choice of target and the spectacular manner of its execution, it was intended as a made-for-television orgy of destruction. Its effects were calculated to fan out across the West – to unsettle our sense of identity, weaken our alliances and send a general message of vulnerability. Had the perpetrators wanted an exclusively American target, they could have carried on the tried and tested embassy bombing or chosen another uniquely American institution in the Middle East or Washington so that there would be no ambiguity about the intended enemy. Some of the anti-war arguments doing the rounds do seem to harbour some truly extraordinary idea of what a terrorist is. At the Liberal Democrats' conference in Bournemouth, a number of speakers this week voiced the theory that if we were a bit nicer to them, they'd be nicer be nicer to us. In its purist form, this ardent misunderstanding was voiced by Jenny Tong, the party's foreign aid spokeswomen, who said that we should, "Bomb [Afghanistan] with food and aid", and claimed that "Poverty and starvation breeds terrorism and conflict". No, Ms Tong. It does not. Poverty and starvation are evils in themselves. The reasons to address them are inherent, the duty of the rich world towards the poor. We do not need to draw a spurious link to terrorism to do so. Osama bin Laden and his willing martyrs were not bred in poverty or starvation. They are the affluent products of middle-class families. Indeed, if we look back over the annals of past century terror, to Black September, Baader-Meinhof and further still to Lenin's brother trying to assassinate the Tsar, we are more likely to find that prosperity and education are the "breeding grounds" of terrorism. As for the food parcels and more aid, why didn't we think of that before? The Taliban can be defeated with an onslaught of groceries and save the marines and the SAS the trouble of going all that way with their kit. Again, no: you can pour aid into a country in the grip of a bad government and the effects, apart from corruption, will be negligible. It would be far better for those who oppose military action to do so for the sound old reason that too many innocent civilians get killed along the way. The rest of the prattle about needing to understand what drives people to such extremes, like some social worker ministering to the world's guerrilla movements, is beyond satire. Behind it lurks a cynical argument masquerading as a liberal one – that you can buy off terrorism. You cannot. It always comes back for more because it is the hard hit of instant, callous destruction which makes it so effective to start with. I keep hearing opponents of the war claiming that it has no clear objectives. It has. Two obvious primary goals present themselves. The first is the capture or death of Mr bin Laden, thereafter to pursue his colleagues-in-destruction and close down their networks. The second is to peel away the shaky public support for the Taliban in Afghanistan and help restore a less brutal and repressive regime which won't harbour terrorists. That is hardly an unclear agenda. The other set of bad arguments against intervention is based on the kind of wilful defeatism which is always anxious to believe that America cannot win a war, whatever the evidence to the contrary. We were unreliably informed at the beginning of the Gulf War that Saddam Hussein's army was formidable, which it was not. We were then told that the conflict in Serbia could not be won from the air. It was. Now we are told that the United States could not win a ground war in Afghanistan because the Soviets lost one or Britain failed to subdue it as a colony. The analogies are futile. As for those lessons the West is being encouraged to learn – fine. But let's keep the horse and cart in the right order. All mature powers learn the lessons of what led to a particular conflict – but only when they have won the war against those who are waging war on it. I wish there were a more palatable way to go about it but there is not. There is every reason for America to re-involve itself in the Middle East peace process and use its influence with Israel to pursue an eventual withdrawal from the West Bank as a key to a peaceful future. There is every reason for the West to consider how it projects itself throughout the Arab world. All of these are important questions. But none of them is an answer to the terror of 11 September and the continuing threat from its perpetrators. To the question "what would you do?", I hear, from the opponents of the war, a long silence. Nothing comes of nothing.