[Reader-list] the liberal response

[Rana Dasgupta]

Attached is an article from the Guardian 2 days ago
which is fairly typical of the liberal response from
outside the US in pointing to the violent and
unthinking role of American might in the world as
important context for what entered all our lives as a
shock without prelude.

The list of American wrongs could actually have been
expanded - I think it is important to draw out the
daily experience of intense structural inequality in
the world as well as just the more dramatic moments of
bombs or invasions.  It is a common predicament of
great empires to completely lose perspective and to
think that everyone is as in love with them as they
are with themselves - and that anyone who is not is
just mad.  Over a long period of time it is therefore
important to provide the kind of reportage and
analysis that will allow certain people's fear or
hatred of the American empire to remain *intelligible*
- and thus for the empire itself not to completely
lose touch.  

But I have to confess to wondering what the point of
this stuff is right now.  Are we just trying to say to
the US, "You deserved it"?  Are we attempting to
remain above the sensationalism of the TV networks by
saying "Chill out - it was always going to happen"? 
Or are we hoping that the US will temper its response
as a result of these reminders of its own wrongs?  

I think this last hope is extremely naive.  Clinton
never had much time for sensitivity in these
situations and Bush has much more provocation (his
citizens are already murdering in the streets) and is
endowed with fewer natural resources in the
sensitivity domain anyway.  What the US government is
looking for right now is a course of action, and its
choices are difficult - and a litany of complaints
against it is not very helpful.

The fact is, this a crisis of international relations,
it is war - and in such a situation it is only the
discourse of international relations that will
prevail.  The response of those who believe that the
US must play a more responsible role in the world and
that there is more at stake in the current crisis than
just revenge has to be formulated in the terms of the
urgent conversations that are already happening in
Washington - ie in terms of possible action and
outcomes, and in terms of the ultimate interests of
the US.  

I have not seen any liberal opinion that is helpful
enough to the situation to be of any significance. 
What should Bush do?  What should the US be seeking to
achieve in this situation?  What - this is where
liberals should be able to add to the equation - are
the negative consequences of premature action? 

The Guardian article follows.

R

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Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on
civilian workers in New York and Washington, it has
become painfully clear that most Americans simply
don't get it. From the president to  passersby on the
streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an
inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy, which
must be answered with overwhelming force - just as
soon as someone can construct a credible account of
who was actually responsible.

Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any
glimmer of recognition of why people might have been
driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their
own lives in the process - or why the United States is
hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and
Muslim countries, but across the developing world -
seems almost entirely absent. Perhaps it is too much
to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull
firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority
might make the connection between what has been
visited upon them and what their government has
visited upon large parts of the world.

But make that connection they must, if such tragedies
are not to be repeated, potentially with even more
devastating consequences. US political leaders are
doing their people no favours by reinforcing popular
ignorance with self-referential rhetoric. And the
echoing chorus of Tony Blair, whose determination to
bind Britain ever closer to US foreign policy ratchets
up the threat to our own cities, will only fuel
anti-western sentiment.  So will calls for the defence
of "civilisation", with its overtones of Samuel
Huntington's poisonous theories of post-cold war
confrontation between the west and Islam, heightening
perceptions of racism and hypocrisy.

As Mahatma Gandhi famously remarked when asked his
opinion of western civilisation, it would be a good
idea. Since George Bush's father inaugurated his new
world order a decade ago, the US, supported by its
British ally, bestrides the world like a colossus.
Unconstrained by any superpower rival or system of
global governance, the US giant has rewritten the
global financial and trading system in its own
interest; ripped up a string of treaties it finds
inconvenient; sent  troops to every corner of the
globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq
without troubling the United Nations; maintained a
string of murderous embargos against recalcitrant
regimes; and recklessly thrown its weight behind
Israel's 34-year illegal military occupation of the
West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages.

If, as yesterday's Wall Street Journal insisted, the
east coast carnage was the fruit of the Clinton
administration's Munich-like appeasement of the
Palestinians, the mind boggles as to what US
Republicans imagine to be a Churchillian response.

It is this record of unabashed national egotism and
arrogance that drives anti-Americanism among swaths of
the world's population, for whom there is little
democracy in the current distribution of global wealth
and power. If it turns out that Tuesday's attacks were
the work of Osama bin Laden's supporters, the sense
that the Americans are once again reaping a dragons'
teeth harvest they themselves sowed will be
overwhelming.

It was the Americans, after all, who poured resources
into the 1980s war against the Soviet-backed regime in
Kabul, at a time when girls could go to school and
women to work. Bin Laden and his mojahedin were armed
and trained by the CIA and MI6, as Afghanistan was
turned into a wasteland and its communist leader
Najibullah left hanging from a Kabul lamp post with
his genitals stuffed in his mouth.

But by then Bin Laden had turned against his American
sponsors, while US-sponsored Pakistani intelligence
had spawned the grotesque Taliban now protecting him.
To punish its wayward  Afghan offspring, the US
subsequently forced through a sanctions regime which
has helped push 4m to the brink of starvation,
according to the latest UN figures, while Afghan
refugees fan out across the world.

All this must doubtless seem remote to Americans
desperately searching the debris of what is  expected
to be the largest-ever massacre on US soil – as must
the killings of yet more Palestinians in the West Bank
yesterday, or even the 2m estimated to have died in
Congo's wars since the overthrow of the US-backed
Mobutu regime. "What could some political thing have
to do with blowing up office buildings during working
hours?" one bewildered New Yorker asked  yesterday.

Already, the Bush administration is assembling an
international coalition for an Israeli-style war
against terrorism, as if such counter-productive acts
of outrage had an existence separate from the social
conditions out of which they arise. But for every
"terror network" that is rooted out, another will
emerge - until the injustices and inequalities that
produce them are addressed.

s.milne at guardian.co.uk


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