alittlepoison

A Tuesday evening.

She sits at the kitchen table. She is slumped forward, holding her head in her hands. She is exhausted, worn out with crying. Her brother is dead, a victim of international terrorism.

She doesn’t know who these people are who have killed him. They come from a country she has never been to. Her grief gives way to confusion. Who are they attacking? Those in power? He didn’t vote for those in power. The military? He never had anything to do with the military. Her confusion gives way to anger. Who could do this evil thing? How can they kill her brother. He was an innocent, a civilian. Whoever it must be punished. Vengeance is not only a right, it is a duty. The world must be rid of this menace, be rid of these people who have so little respect for human life, they who kill the innocent without mercy.

She lives in Basrah, Iraq. Her brother was a young child. One of an estimated four thousand killed every month by US and UK sanctions, the sanctions described by the former UN co-ordinator in Baghdad, Dennis Halliday as ‘genocidal’. As he resigned, he commented that Iraq’s younger generation of young professionals, the political leadership of the future - bitter, angry, alienated and dangerously isolated from the world - is maturing in an environment not dissimilar to that found in Germany under the conditions set by the Treaty of Versailles. Prophetic words indeed, if this is indeed to be WWIII.

The woman slumped at the table is Iraqi, but she could be Chechen, Palestinian, Japanese, South American. She could be a resident of any one of a number of countries described by the US as ‘Rogue States’.

Even this very simple example illustrates that the international situation is not one of war between the ‘good’ West and ‘evil’ Arabs, as our leaders are trying to tell us. So how has this happened? How have the complexities of world politics been reduced to this simple formula? Perhaps because of and instinctive human desire to understand. To be able to divide the world along binary lines into the good and the evil, into the friend and the enemy. But perhaps the answer is more complex.

The very language used the media and politicians has been one of reduction and simplification. 87% of Americans consider the attack to be an ‘act of war’ according to a poll by USA Today. In this climate, our leaders have been allowed to make statements that are simply untrue. Bush described the new ‘war on terrorism’ as ‘the first war of the 21st century’. It is not pedantic to point out that there are countless other wars going on around the world at this time, many sponsored by the US. He has also claimed that the new foe faced by the American people is ‘a very different enemy from any they’ve faced before … who preyed on innocent people, and then ran for cover.’ Even the most cursory analysis of modern world history reveals that this is exactly the kind of ‘enemy’ that has been most common. It is, after all, America who, in the Gulf War developed the ‘casualty-less’ war: bombing raids to inflict maximum damage to the enemy with high civilian casualties. We have become obsessed with the idea of being able to strike with great destruction, while remaining ourselves impervious to attack. The proposed ‘Star Wars’ system is a logical extension: we will be able to take out any ‘nation’ on earth without fear of retaliation.

What prevents us from discussing rationally is that we do not have the language to do it. Our vocabulary is riddled with euphemisms that prevent us from close analysis. Collateral damage. Just war. Rogue state. Good. Evil. Terrorist. Militant. Fundamentalists. All of these terms remains vague and undefined. They are used to simplify, to group together under one heading a set of characteristics. Once we have done that, we can stop thinking about what they actually are. We can stop having to constantly revise. So if Israel launches an attack on Palestinian civilians, they are ‘militants’. When Palestinians retaliate, they are terrorists and fundamentalists. This simplification is carried out on an even wider scale on the level of nations. We will persist saying that we are going to war with ‘Iraq’, or ‘Afghanistan’, without ever stopping to consider what we mean when we say it. Of the forty wars going on around the world at the moment, nearly all of them are civil wars. A nation is not an entity with am independent will. Look at the refugee camps on the outskirts of Afghanistan, full of the people who have managed to flee the terror of the Taliban. Just as Bin Laden’s affiliations are not to a nation state, but to an ideology. Those who have not managed to escape may shortly face the most sustained and violent bombing in history.

The way that these are words are used is instrumental not only in justifying violent actions, but in altering the very way we think about world issues. If we are told, and we accept, that ‘collateral damage’ is an unfortunate and unavoidable by-product of the ‘just war’ then next time we hear of collateral damage, we forget that people’s lives are being destroyed. The history of simplification is the history of violence to the innocent. In Kosovo, the US and UK simplistically thought that they could solve problems rooted in history by dropping bombs. They succeeded only in intensifying the misery.1998 Clinton reacted to bomb attacks on US embassies by bombing ‘terrorist bomb factories’ in the Sudan, and then later having to compensate the owner when it was discovered that he in fact did not have any terrorist affiliations.

As in Iraq, those who suffered on Tuesday were the civilians. Governments are untouched, hidden behind a human shield. Throughout the 20th century, civilians have been manipulated by their war-mongering leaders. The Japanese civilians were told that they were winning right up until the moment that the nation was brought to its knees. Not only were the civilians of Japan suppressed, brainwashed and manipulated by their own government, they were then massacred in their millions by the supposed saviour of the free world in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 75,000 people were killed or wounded, and more than one third of the city was devastated. In China during the ‘Great Leap Forward’, hungry peasants were told to pray for Western children who ‘didn’t have enough to eat.’ Saddam Hussein allows his own people to die from lack of basic necessities, which he has the power to provide. And Britain and the US kill them with sanctions. Look at the refugee camps on the edge of Pakistan. These are the people of Afghanistan, brutalised and terrorised by their own people. And now they face the onslaught of a Western world who somehow hold them culpable, or who are prepared to sacrifice their lives in order to avenge their own citizens.

World leaders have already begun to turn this to their own advantage. If Bin Laden is responsible, he is trying to provoke a Holy War for his own ideological ends. Bush’s announcement of a ‘crusade’ is exactly what he wants to hear. Vladamir Putin, one of the first to condemn the attack, has been vociferous in his calls for a transgovernmental organisation to fight terrorism for some time. ‘The entire international community must now unite in the struggle against terrorism’. We all know exactly what Putin means by terrorists. America and Britain have turned their heads in embarrassment from his war with the ‘Chechen rebels’, a dirty war in which ill trained and ill-equipped Russian soldiers have been wreaking havoc on the civilian population. In the Middle East, it is likely that the Oslo peace accord is now dead. The Israeli’s will use this wave of hostility to Arabs to further its own ends. Last night (Sunday 16th September 2001) saw a fresh incursion by Israeli forces into Palestinian territory. It will go largely unreported in the mainstream media. As always happens, the civilian population has suffered as a result of the activities of their war-mongering leaders, while the leaders of all countries hide behind a human shield.

The world now faces a terrible danger, and it comes not from terrorism, but from ourselves. The Western world is sorrowful. It seethes with anger, and hungers for retribution. According to one poll, 43% of Americans would kill innocent civilians in order to be sure of getting the guilty. There is already talk in some quarters of Americans having to give up some of their treasured liberties in order to ensure security, paving the way for further manipulation of civilians. It will be interesting to see what happens to ‘Star Wars’. If the senate, who have been fairly lukewarm towards the proposed missile shield, now approve the billions needed to make the system operational, we may take this as a sign that the worst has happened, and the government is using the threat to push through highly flawed legislation on a wave of public panic.

There is one point on which there can be no argument: killing the innocent is a crime in Washington, Nagasaki and Baghdad. America must be allowed its period of grief. A terrible atrocity has been committed. The image of the destruction of the World Trade Centre is a powerful one. But it we must not let it overpower the images US helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996. Of 17,500 civilians killed in the Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Of 500,000 Iraqi children killed by US sanctions. If there is to be war, it must not be between Muslims and Christians. It must not be between the East and West. It must be between the people and those in all nations who manipulate them for their own ends.