[Reader-list] Anniversary of 9/11

[Monica Narula]

As we all know too well, its a year since 9/11.  There are many 
strands of reflection, criticism, thinking etc. that the memory of 
those events has and will arouse. Below is a piece forwarded to me, 
which may be of interest to some people on the list.

best
Monica

Who Cares For Human Rights, It's A Just War

By Ilija Trojanow and Ranjit Hoskote

The events of September 11, 2001, have been widely described as a 
tragedy, and so they undoubtedly were, for the victims and their 
families. But, as we all know, one person’s tragedy can be another 
person’s windfall. The greatest beneficiary of these attacks, and of 
the perception of national threat they produced, is the 
military-industrial establishment that dominates the USA, and by 
extension, the world. It is ironic that the Pentagon, a key target of 
the operation, has since risen to a position of unchallenged global 
supremacy, an achievement signalled shortly after
September 11, when the most gargantuan defence budget in history was 
rushed through legislation without occasioning even a ripple of 
dissent.

Since then, no one in the US establishment has challenged the view 
that the best way to deal with terrorists is to out-gun, out-bomb, 
and out-massacre them, along with any non-combatants who happen to 
get in the way. And the
few voices that were heard after the attacks, which drew attention to 
the underlying conditions of oppression and injustice that breed 
terrorism, have been quickly sidelined and silenced.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the American government and 
mainstream media have spent the last year working spin-offs from the 
perceived threat. Right after September 11, there were doomsday 
prophecies
of further terrorist attacks, followed by the mass hysteria over the 
anthrax letters. The former never materialised; the latter were 
traced back to US Army biological warfare facilities, which, by the 
way, have never been visited by UN inspectors.

The interested parties will surely do all that is necessary to ensure 
that the American public continues to feel besieged and under threat. 
The public discussion concerning the future of the WTC site in New 
York, for instance,
reveals a strong impulse towards building a memorial shrine to the 
feeling of injustice, the sense of having been wronged. As is 
customary with patriotic monuments, which serve to declare one's own 
innocence and essential virtue, while emphasising the irrationality 
and essential evil of the enemy: they foreground a combination of 
martyrdom, triumphalism, and ritualised grief.

Interestingly and not so paradoxically, the Pentagon, although it has 
grown exponentially in power, has become completely invisible in the 
patriotic iconography of the September 11 events. As the headquarters 
of the US Army,
the Pentagon cannot afford exposure in the dramatic and by-now 
globally televised demonstration of American vulnerability. Instead, 
it is the civilian target, the World Trade Center, which has been 
fixed as the iconic
reminder of the attacks. The twin towers, ablaze and collapsing, are 
a contemporary version of the burning ships keeling over in Pearl 
Harbor: they symbolise the American identity, the self-image of a 
people always ready to
do good in the world, but who are often misunderstood, and once in an 
epic while, subjected to treacherous attack.

But the global scenario today is light-years away from that of 1941. 
In the aftermath of September 11, the US has programmatically swept 
aside the model of equity among nations. US unilateralism becomes 
more entrenched with every successive operation. The bombing of 
Afghanistan was justified, however thinly, by invoking Article 51 of 
the UN Charter and UN Security Council Resolution 1373: the US 
deliberately misread both as authorising
nation-states to launch military action in self-defence against 
international terrorism. But this year, the US establishment has 
skipped even that flimsy and dubious sanction in proposing an 
invasion of Iraq: high
US officials have repeatedly declared that they can and will attack 
Iraq simply because they wish to do so.

This unilateralism is in line with a corresponding strategy of 
withdrawal, by which the US has stepped back from most of the mutual 
obligations that commit it to collaboration with other nations. It 
has reneged on the SALT
and START agreements that it signed with the erstwhile USSR and 
continued with the CIS successor states, and which mandate the 
signatories to limit their ballistic-missile capabilities. The US has 
also failed to ratify all
the major treaties of recent years, including the Kyoto Agreement. In 
May, it withdrew from the proposed International Criminal Court; 
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned his NATO partners against 
contemplating any future action against US defence personnel, 
proclaiming that his country "will regard as illegitimate any attempt 
by the court, or state parties to the treaty, to assert the ICC's 
jurisdiction over American citizens."

And in the international groupings of which it continues to be a 
member, the US plays the bully. This April, it ousted the director 
general of the UN Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical 
Weapons, Jose Bustani, who
refused, as he testified, "to take orders from the US delegation". 
Again, in July, the US forced UN Human Rights Commissioner Mary 
Robinson to resign, for her vocal criticism of US human-rights 
violations during the 'war
against terror'.

No nation in the world has signalled its support for the US plan to 
attack Iraq. For one, there is not a shred of evidence that Saddam 
Hussein has managed to re-stock his arsenal of weapons of mass 
destruction, in the teeth
of a drastic international embargo that prevents even pediatric 
medicines from entering his country. For another, the Iraqi ruler has 
been notably quiescent. There were many occasions during his long 
reign when he could
have been deposed on humanitarian grounds, such as when he used 
poison gas against Iranian troops and Kurdish rebels. But then, in 
those palmy days, he was the US establishment’s trusted point man 
against Khomeini’s Islamic
Revolution, not the leader of a 'rogue state'.

In the post-September 11 world order, the US propaganda machine no 
longer deems it necessary to convince the world of the validity of 
American actions. For, after all: "When Caesar says 'Do this', it is 
perform'd." And
so, with or without the support of its allies, the US will move 
towards brutally establishing its control over the second largest oil 
reserve in the world. Already, through their man in Kabul, the former 
oil-company executive
Hamid Karzai, US political interests have highjacked the fragile 
democratic process embodied by the Loya Jirga, re-empowering the 
warlords at the cost of progressive civil-society groups, so as to 
lock their hold on the Central
Asian oil pipelines.

The God-fearing George W. Bush has not deigned, so far, to offer any 
moral justification for US military aggression. To find a 
philosophical basis for it, we turn to the statement, "What We Are 
Fighting For", signed by a group of 60 US intellectuals and widely 
publicised this February. The signatories include reigning gurus and 
media pundits like Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama and Michael 
Walzer. Defining 'radical Islam' as the global enemy and summarily 
dealing with concepts like pacifism, realism and holy war, they 
establish the universal moral principle of a 'just war', arguing for 
a limited and specific use of military aggression when all other 
means have been exhausted. One of the pillars of morality is the 
principle of commensurate justice. Attacking a group of German 
intellectuals who have criticised their position, the US 
intellectuals offer specious acrobatics instead: "It is moral 
blindness to compare the unintentional killing of civilians in a war 
that is morally justified, and in which it is every soldier’s aim to 
minimise civilian casualties, with the premeditated murder of 
civilians in an office building by terrorists whose prime aim is to 
maximise the number of civilian casualties."

Evidently, this grotesque nonsense is the best that the intellectual 
elite of the Free World can come up with, to justify the slaughter of 
Afghans. Perhaps the Afghans gathered at an open-air wedding 
celebration in Kakarak
on July 1 should have been working quietly in office buildings; they 
might then have qualified as legitimate civilians in the eyes of 
Huntington, Fukuyama, Walzer and their fellow luminaries. Instead, 
they suffered a
two-hour US Air Force bombardment. A UN team investigating this 
casualty of the 'just war' reported that 80 people had been killed 
and 200 injured in this maniacal attack. Later, US ground forces 
bound the women’s hands
(standard practice, apparently) and denied the injured medical 
treatment for several hours, while 'sanitising' the site by removing 
shrapnel and other image-damaging evidence.

The only justification offered for the bombing of Afghanistan was the 
capture of the alleged perpetrators of September 11. That aim has not 
been achieved. The act of killing nearly 10,000 people, fighters and 
civilians,
only so as to fail to capture a few CIA acolytes-turned-terrorist 
masterminds, hardly meets the criterion of commensurate justice. 
Instead, it is evidence of an extraordinary cynicism, and testifies 
to the horrifying US
penchant for unleashing Beelzebub to drive out the Devil.
-- 
Monica Narula
Sarai:The New Media Initiative
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054
www.sarai.net