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

To: jlallen who wrote (202355)	11/13/2001 3:30:08 PM
From: DMaA	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Now for a little comic relief - Ramsey Clark weighs in: Former attorney general criticizes U.S. bombing in Afghanistan Eric Black Star Tribune Published Nov 13 2001 "History didn't begin on Sept. 11," says former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. If Americans learned the history of U.S. involvement in the Mideast and saw how that history is viewed by Muslims, they would understand why the bombing of Afghanistan probably won't reduce the threat to the United States and is almost certain to destabilize the region and increase hostility toward the United States, he said. Clark, 73, a long-time critic of U.S. interventions abroad, will give a talk tonight in Minneapolis titled "Realities of U.S. Foreign Policy." "It's not a foreign policy that has created peace on earth," he said. "While people may admire and envy our economic power and well being, for all its maldistribution, the poor of the planet, who are the vast majority, have come to see us as the enemy, despite all of our Madison Avenue efforts to color what we do." And they see our attack on Afghanistan not as a heroic response to terrorism but as one more case of a global bully using military might to dominate the weak, Clark said. A proper understanding of the historical background would focus on three major areas, Clark said: U.S. support for Israel, which is seen by Muslims as an ongoing attack on Palestinians; the U.S. role in imposing the shah of Iran in 1953 over a popularly elected leader who was deemed a threat to Western oil interests, and sustaining the shah's repressive regime for 26 years; and the U.S. determination to use the 1979-89 war in Afghanistan to weaken the Soviet Union, without regard for what it did to Afghanistan. "We pumped money and weapons in there, recruited Arabs to go fight there, trained them and armed them," Clark said. "In that effort, we literally created the Taliban." These actions are consistent with the general direction of U.S. foreign policy, he said, which is to dominate, for economic or geopolitical reasons, as much of the world as it can. "It's shameful, for your own economic well being, to overthrow governments and do harmful things to their people," he said. In the current situation, he said, the United States has reinforced its bully image. First, it proclaimed its "right to kill without a hearing" and hasn't made public the evidence that links Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaida to the attacks of Sept. 11. Second, since it didn't have an effective way to attack Al-Qaida, it transferred the guilt to the Taliban and proclaimed its right to attack the regime. Third, its bombing campaign kills civilians, "who are uninvolved, unaware and are just bombed from the sky one day by a multimillion-dollar machine that they never saw." If Americans could see history through the eyes of those in the region, Clark said, they would realize that the bombing will only create new grudges. Instead of bombing, he said, the United States should strengthen international institutions that nonviolently address conflicts. Clark was attorney general from 1967 to 1969 and made an unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate in 1974. Since then, he has defended many prominent peace activists and has participated in international human-rights cases. He has active cases at the international war crimes tribunal for Rwanda and has consulted with Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president facing genocide charges at the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. startribune.com