Oct 19, 2002 op eds

October 19, 2002 Opinion Editorials

Drawing the wrong lessons from Bali
By Patrick Seale , Gulf News 18-10-2002

The car-bomb attack which devastated a crowded Bali nightclub last weekend, causing hundreds of dead and wounded, will have terrible consequences. Apart from shattering the already fragile Indonesian economy, it has aroused acute political paranoia in a great arc of countries, from Thailand to the Philippines and Australia.

It follows closely on the killing of a U.S. Marine in Kuwait and a suicide attack by a small boat packed with explosives against a French supertanker, the Limbourg, off the coast of Yemen, exactly two years after a similar attack on a U.S. warship, the USS Cole, in Aden harbour.

There have also been other smaller-scale assaults on American and Western targets in Pakistan, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. Islamic militants have gone to war against the West in many parts of the world.

It is not clear whether these are isolated operations – individual expressions of fury – or a co-ordinated campaign, masterminded by Al Qaida or some similar organisation, as the U.S. administration wants us to think.

What is clear is that the violent epidemic of anti-American sentiment in the Arab world has now spread to east and south-east Asia with grave consequences for America's allies such as Australia, Britain and France, whose citizens were among the victims of the Bali bombing.

The United States and much of the West failed to draw any lesson from September 11. Now they are in danger of repeating and compounding their political mistakes as they confront the expanding danger from Islamic militancy.

After September 11, the U.S. was guilty of a double error – an error in its analysis of the terrorist threat and an error in the nature of its response. Washington adamantly refused to recognise that the attack it suffered was a reaction to its Middle East policies, and particularly to its blind support for Israel in its oppression of the Palestinians.

Although the link was obvious to any independent observer, it was vehemently denied in Washington, and continues to be so. The U.S. has systematically underestimated the tremendous impact on Arab and Muslim opinion of Israel's daily killing of Palestinians, and the wholesale destruction of their society, graphically conveyed by satellite television. This is not a purely Middle Eastern phenomenon.

Muslims in Malaysia and Indonesia are among the most devout in the entire ummah, and are as attached to Jerusalem as a holy site of Islam as are Muslims in Arab countries. The brutality of Israel's response to the Intifada has aroused passions far beyond the Arab world.

By seeking to crush the Palestinian national movement by force – and thus defy world-wide Muslim opinion – Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has shown characteristic folly.

The Bush administration has shown far greater folly in letting him get away with it. Sharon's visit to Washington this week - his seventh as prime minister – illustrates the extent of U.S.– Israeli collusion. It will be mainly Western civilians who will pay the bill for this relationship, which is being delivered in terrorist attacks.

In a recent article in the Jakarta Post, a highly-respected Indonesian analyst, Jusuf Wanandi, a founder of the Jakarta Centre for Strategic and International Studies, warned that, unless the U.S. was more even-handed towards the Arab-Israeli conflict, moderate Muslim leaders in south-east Asia would find it difficult to counter the influence of Muslim radicals on their domestic public opinion.

"Every day," he wrote, "they see Muslims being oppressed, defeated, humiliated." If America was to attack Iraq, "real hatred" could result. These views are echoed by Philip Bowring, one of the most perceptive observers of the Asian scene.

In a report from Hong Kong this week in the International Herald Tribune, he wrote that Washington's "policy on Iraq has few supporters in East Asia... the war rhetoric has done immense damage to the U.S. image... It is hard to find Asians who believe Saddam is a threat to the United States, or that the United States has the right to impose 'regime change'."

"Among Muslim Asians", he continued, "there is particular animosity toward what they see as an overtly anti-Muslim campaign being drummed up by Christian fundamentalists and other pro-Israeli elements in Washington."

Instead of recognising the root causes of terrorism, most Ameri-cans have sought to explain the attacks by blaming Arab and Muslim societies, which they depict as "failed states", inherently "evil" because of their adherence to a "violent" religion, Islam, and their opposition to the West and Israel.

As a result of this obtuse analysis, Washington failed to change its policies but instead turned its attention to changing Arab regimes. The second error, which, like the first, continues to this day, was to respond to the terrorism by military means alone.

Yesterday in Afghanistan, to-morrow in Iraq, and in the ongoing "war on terror" around the world, America's energies have been devoted to identifying and physically eliminating those who oppose it.

The principal objective of President George W. Bush's foreign policy appears to be world hegemony imposed by military force. But, as history shows, any hegemonic ambition inevitably stimulates others to rebel against it.

It would be wise for the U.S. to recognise that military force should be only one strategy – perhaps the least effective in the long run – in an anti-terrorist campaign, which must include political, economic and diplomatic responses.

Quite apart from anger at Israeli policies, and American support for them, Indonesians have their own reasons for loathing American interference in their domestic affairs. The U.S. manipulated the overthrow in 1965 of President Sukarno, the father of Indonesia's independence from the Netherlands. He was the founder of an independent state, which he unified with creative brilliance from disparate and often warring ethnicities.

Concerned to protect Indon-esia's natural resources from foreign exploitation, he was also a founder of the non-aligned movement, with Tito of Yugoslavia, Nasser of Egypt, Nkrumah of Ghana and others, and as such was a thorn in the side of American foreign policy.

The CIA was directly implicated in the horrific massacres in 1965-66, in which some 600,000 people are believed to have been murdered, which eliminated all dissent, especially on the left.

General Suharto was put in power in Jakarta, inaugurating 32 years of army-backed one-man rule. He became America's favourite dictator in East Asia, and the most corrupt and ruthless.

The CIA is said to have furnished the army with a list of as many as 5,000 alleged communist supporters who were then captured or murdered, and American officials are said to have ticked off the victims from that list when they were eliminated.

The Australian historian Harold Crouch believes that the Indonesian Communist Party, the PKI, "had won widespread support not as a revolutionary party but as an organisation defending the interests of the poor."

It was the PKI's stance that angered the Americans. Suharto's Indonesia, like many countries in Asia, benefited from an economic boom for a time. In 1984, Indonesia achieved self-sufficiency in rice production.

But the 1997 financial crisis, which was in many ways the product of the cronyism of the Indonesian regime, and the misguided policies of the U.S. and the International Monetary Fund in respo-nse, wiped out the economic gains of the previous 30 years, plunging over 100 million people – half the population – below the poverty line.

Suharto was finally ousted in 1998 after riots which killed more than 1,200 people in Jakarta alone. In the wake of the riots, thousands of ethnic Chinese fled Indonesia, taking some $85billion in capital with them.

Under Suharto, Indonesia's six million citizens of Chinese ancestry constituted only 3.5 per cent of the population but contributed close to three-quarters of the country's wealth. Today, under the presidency of Magawati Suk-arnoputri, Indonesia is enjoying a shaky democracy but also suffering great poverty, now made worse by the Bali bomb's blow to the vital tourist industry.

In a book published in 2000, Chalmers Johnson, an Asia specialist and professor at the University of California, showed remarkable foresight: "If Indonesia is allowed to stagnate", he wrote, "it is quite possible to predict that Islam, which until now has shown its tolerant and broad-minded face throughout most of the country, will turn militant and implacable.

This, in turn, would guarantee the end of American influence (much as it did in Khomeini's Iran)... It is a direction which some in the Indonesian army would welcome..." A former Indonesian air force officer has confessed to having assembled the Bali bomb and is now under interrogation.

Patrick Seale is an eminent commentator and the author of several books on Middle East affairs.

North Korea, Iraq
Arab News Editorial, 19 October 2002

It appears that North Korea has admitted to US officials that, despite its commitments enshrined in a 1994 agreement, it has undertaken a program to enrich nuclear fuel as part of a covert drive to acquire nuclear weapons.

North Korea, along with Iraq and Iran, comprise the states branded by Washington as an “axis of evil”. President Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq was also known to be busy trying to acquire a nuclear capability, but it is widely believed that UN weapons inspectors detected and then destroyed most of the equipment needed to create a nuclear bomb. The new UN inspection regime probably stands a good chance of discovering and destroying any new Iraqi nuclear program.

North Korea, also like Iraq, has invaded a neighbor and obliged the UN, led by American forces, to intervene massively. North Korea’s past and present leaders, Kim il-Sung and his son Kim Jong-il are like Iraq’s dictator, the subject of official personality cults.

So, are the 40,000 US troops based in South Korea being quietly put on a war footing and is Washington squaring up for a second attack on an axis of evil, one which, presumably, it believes subscribes to and supports international terrorism? Apparently not. If the US has the slightest intention of behaving to North Korea the same way that it is to Iraq, there was precious little indication of it in the hours after the North Koreans finally confirmed what the world at large had long suspected. Many White House watchers indeed detected confusion within the US administration. This is odd for a president who tells us that he is embarking upon an aggressive campaign based upon principles. It is hard to see how the principles could be applied differently toward Iraq and North Korea.

A further anomaly in Washington’s behavior came with the spin that was put on Pyongyang’s nuclear admissions. Far from being outraged that the North Koreans had completely broken solemn and binding assurances, administration officials were saying that maybe now that Pyongyang’s program was out in the open, it was a positive step. This was echoed by the South Korean government, who averred that the only reasonable course was to continue to negotiate with their northern cousins.

All of a sudden, everyone is ignoring that Pyongyang is a renegade regime which has kidnapped foreign tourists, murdered its own officials on foreign trips, very probably blown up an international airliner, sunk South Korean fishing boats as recently as three months ago, and demonstrated that any agreement to which it puts its name is worthless. Yet Washington and Seoul seem prepared to keep talking.

This is odd. One of the main reasons that Washington and London say they need to be prepared to attack Iraq is that time and again Saddam and his ministers have proven duplicitous and slippery in negotiations in which they have been involved. They are masters at playing for time, experts at obstructing at precisely the moment when international will is weakened and extremely good at magnifying their social and economic distress and blaming them on everyone but themselves.

Yet Washington appears glad to talk to one of them while preparing to launch a major assault against the other.

‘I am the Al-Qaeda!’
By Tariq A. Al-Maeena

As with so many hearts, grief enveloped mine on that fateful day of Sept. 11. Grief for the unwarranted loss of so many innocent lives. Human beings who through their abrupt death would be totally unaware of the pain and emptiness they would leave behind in the hearts of families and friends. But scarcely had my grief begun to process itself through, that lines were hastily drawn in the sand.

“You’re with us or without us,” bellowed George W. Bush, president of the United States of America. “This is a crusade” was the rhetoric that followed soon after. He went on to promise “infinite justice”, language that somehow disrupted my moment of solace and sorrow. And then he started with the assault on Afghanistan.

More deaths followed, far greater in number and innocence then those who perished at the World Trade Center. Proponents of America’s war on terrorism dismissed these innocent lives as ‘collateral damage’ in the words of none other than Donald Rumsfeld, the US secretary of defense. I really wonder now? Could anyone have rationally explained that term to any of the surviving members of these victims? And while the American media seized upon America’s war on terrorism in cleverly marketable labels, it was slowly becoming apparent to many of us that this was more like America’s war OF terrorism.

And as aggressive policies were pursued abroad, in the USA itself there were constant reminders of daily threats that manifested themselves in the form of the anthrax affair, bridges being blown up, water supply being contaminated, and so on. In shades not unlike the era of the Cold War when the “Reds were everywhere” and underground bomb shelters were springing up in every neighborhood, this time the Al-Qaeda was everywhere, the Americans were told. The constant reminder drummed up so many times across television screens or front pages of printed media soon enabled the government to pass several bills in the formulation of the Homeland Security Act.

And soon after, we were not surprised to hear from junior assistants within the various secretariats of the US government that the Al-Qaeda network was active across the globe. Their singular aim? The promotion of terrorism and the destruction of America. And just as suddenly Iraq came into the picture. Iraq, according to Bush, stood out as the biggest danger to America and world peace. Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, Scuds that could barely find their targets during the Gulf War, now posed imminent danger to America’s existence.

And thus began a campaign to drum up support for bombing Iraq. For blood thirsty minds actively promoting such a campaign, the thought of 1,000 pound bombs being dropped from B-52’s 40,000 feet high in the sky and killing indiscriminately somehow does not seem to cross their minds. Either that or a conviction that the innocent people of Iraq deserve to die could be the only rational explanation. In defiance of worldwide reservations, Bush has begun to display a bizarre obsession with carrying on the destruction of Iraq. You were either with him or against him, remember?

Does anyone in the US government pause to ponder on whether the death of innocent adults and children of Iraq that would surely come with indiscriminate bombings would have purged the atrocities of Sept. 11? Or whether those who would lose lives, or limbs or loved family members had anything to do with Sept. 11? Or is it not more like another atrocity in the making, all in the name of homeland defense?

Or far worse, is it perhaps a portent of more evil to come, one contrived among select groups within the US government. North Korea has recently announced that they were attempting to develop a nuclear arsenal capable of delivering mass destruction. Would they be next on Bush’s list of targets? Or is their topography too barren of oil reserves or strategic interests? The on-going diatribes of Bush on the threat to world peace are causing me to reflect. Just who possesses weapons of mass destruction and has shown a propensity to display his mighty arsenal?

I do not wish ill upon America. I do not hate America or resent America. Nor am I jealous of America or the ideals this once great country stood upon. And I do not wish upon America any further destruction or acts of violence. I have long admired America, its peoples and its varied culture. And I abhor violence and terrorism in any form. But Mr. Bush, I shall not cross over that line to your side or to your belligerent and politically distorted principles. And if that makes me the Al-Qaeda, the Red Brigade or the IRA or any other terrorist group you would like to conveniently label up, then so be it!

While the sorrowful memories of Sept. 11 have long been overshadowed by acts of mayhem elsewhere around the globe, at least I shall go to sleep tonight with a clear conscience and a prayer to innocent victims everywhere.

— Tariq A. Al-Maeena, clsencounters@hotmail.com

Imperialistic designs
Gulf News Editorial | 18-10-2002

It is very obvious that from the diplomatic viewpoint, George Walker Bush is not his father's son. Nor, would it seem, does he wish to mould himself in that light. For whereas George Herbert Walker Bush, when American President, advised caution tempered with moderation, the current American President, deems it politic to adopt an opposite line. More specifically, Bush junior wants to invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussain, to "complete the job his father failed to do", while his father states that the mandate given in 1991 did not allow such an invasion and the allied forces would not have accepted such a proposal. So it now raises the question, is it personal revenge the son seeks, or a vain attempt to show his father that he is the tougher of the Bushes.

But there is worse. Whereas Bush senior went to great lengths to get Israel to hold back during the Gulf War, even when it was being attacked by Scud missiles from Iraq, Bush junior sees the issue differently. For he has given a green light to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that, if attacked, Israel "has a right to respond."

The language from the president is daily getting more worrisome, especially to those in the Middle East. Because now Bush has increased the demands he makes upon Saddam by demanding relevant Iraqis and all their families be allowed to leave the country for questioning. Bush is also condoning Sharon increasing pressure on the Palestinians, even during the Iraqi crisis – or perhaps more correctly, especially during the Iraq crisis, since public attention will be diverted. And now, Bush has warned countries in the Middle East not to shelter any Hezbollah, as "it poses a threat to Israel". Will there be no end to the American President's imperialism?

Opinions expressed in various sections are the sole responsibility of their authors and they may not represent Al-Jazeerah's.