Robert Fisk - The Age of the Warrior - Selected Writings

*Professor Marc W. Herold, ‘A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan: A Comprehensive Accounting’ (Revised March 2002). ( http://www.cursor.org/stories/civiliandeaths. htm )

Presumably, the CIA will let us pay the Alliance mobsters for their war in Afghanistan. One of the untold stories of this conflict is the huge amount of money handed out to militia leaders to persuade them to fight for the US. When Taliban members changed sides for an Alliance payment of $250,000 and then attacked their benefactors, we all dwelt on their treachery. None of us asked how the Alliance – which didn’t have enough money to pay for bullets a few weeks earlier – could throw a quarter of a million bucks at the Taliban in the middle of a fire-fight. Nor how the Pashtun tribal leaders of Kandahar province are now riding around in brand-new four-wheel-drives with thousands of dollars to hand out to their gunmen. I wasn’t surprised to read that a Somali warlord is now offering his cash-for-hire services to the US for the next round of the War for Civilisation.

Fortunately for us, the civilian victims of America’s B-52s will remain unknown in their newly dug graves. Even before the war ended, around 3,700 of them – not counting Mullah Omar’s and bin Laden’s gunmen – had been ripped to pieces in our War for Civilisation. A few scattered signs of discontent – the crowd that assaulted me two weeks ago, for example, outraged at the killing of their families – can be quickly erased from the record.

It is obviously perverse to note that I haven’t met a single ordinary Muslim or, indeed, many Westerners – Pakistani, Afghan, Arab, British, French, American – who actually believe all this guff. Let’s just remember that the new Kabul government is as committed to support ‘Islam, democracy, pluralism [ sic ] and social justice’ as George W. Bush is to Good and the Destruction of Evil. Roll on next year, and don’t worry about bin Laden – he may be back just in time to participate in Part Two of the War for Civilisation.

The Independent , 22 December 2001

By the autumn of 2007, thousands of Western troops had been fought to a standstill outside Kandahar by a resurgent Taliban. Hamid Karzai’s Afghan ‘government’ controlled little more than its own ministries in Kabul as dozens of suicide bombers assaulted, Iraq-style, his forces and those of his Western allies .

A few days ago, Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia *called upon the ‘conscience’ of the American people to help the Palestinians. The Emir of Qatar went one step further in sel-fabasement. The Arabs, he said – and he apologised for using the word – had to ‘beg’ the United States to use its influence on the Israelis. Truly, when such words are uttered, it is the very pit of Arab desperation. Beg? Conscience? Washington may still turn down Ariel Sharon’s request to break all relations with Yasser Arafat, but President Bush has long ago forgotten his ‘vision’ of a Palestinian state – produced when he needed Arab acquiescence in the bombardment of Afghanistan but swiftly buried once it had served its purpose – and Arafat’s role now is to remember his job: to protect Israel from his own people.

From his office in Ramallah, surrounded by Israeli tanks, Arafat fantasises about his derring-do during Israel’s 1982 siege of West Beirut, but it is diffficult to underestimate the degree of shame with which many Palestinians now regard him. Last Christmas, Arafat insisted that he would march to Bethlehem to attend church services. But when the Israelis refused him permission, he merely appeared on Palestinian television and preposterously claimed that Israel’s refusal was a ‘crime’ and an act of ‘terrorism’. Why, the Arabic daily Al Quds al-Arabi asked, was there no explanation for this ‘bizarre and incomprehensible’ performance by Arafat? Why did he not march out of Ramallah with the Christian clerics who had come to give their support until physically stopped by Israeli troops in front of the television cameras? The more he talks about Israel’s ‘terrorism’, the less we examine his own record of corruption, cronyism and brutality.

*Now King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

In the meantime, Israel’s own mythmaking goes on apace. In New York, Shimon Peres announces the presence of Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon and the arrival of 8,000 long-range missiles for Hizballah; now there hasn’t been an Iranian militiaman in Lebanon for fifteen years, and the ‘new’ missiles don’t exist *– but this nonsense is reported in the US media without the slightest attempt to check the facts. The latest whopper came from Sharon. †He regretted, he said, that he had not ‘liquidated’ Arafat during the 1982 siege of Beirut, but there had been an agreement not to do so. This is rubbish; during the siege, Israeli jets five times bombed the buildings in which Sharon, then Israel’s defence minister, believed Arafat to be hiding, on two occasions destroying whole apartment blocks – along, of course, with all the civilians living in them – only minutes after Arafat had left. Again, Sharon’s untrue version of history was reported in the American press as fact.

Indeed, all the participants in the Middle East conflict are now engaged in a game of self-deception, a massive and fraudulent attempt to avoid any examination of the critical issues that lie behind the tragedy. The Saudis want to appeal to America’s ‘conscience’, not because they are upset at Arafat’s predicament but because fifteen of the 11 September hijackers were themselves Saudis. Sharon’s attempt to join in the ‘war against terror’ – the manufacturing of non-existent Iranian enemies in Lebanon, for example, along with some very real enemies in the West Bank and Gaza – is a blatant attempt to ensure American support for his crushing of the Palestinian intifada and for the continuation of Israel’s colonisation of Palestinian land.

*By 2006, however, mythmaking had become reality: the Hizballah then had many more than 8,000 rockets in Lebanon.

†Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon suffered a massive stroke on 4 January 2006 and was still on life support in February 2008.

Similarly, Mr Bush’s messianic claim that he is fighting ‘evil’ – ‘evil’ now apparently being a fully-fledged nation-state – and that America’s al-Qaeda enemies hate America because they are ‘against democracy’ is poppycock. Most of America’s Muslim enemies don’t know what democracy is – they have certainly never enjoyed it – and their deeds, which are indeed wicked, have motives. Mr Bush knows – and certainly his secretary of state, Colin Powell, does – that there is an intimate link between the crimes against humanity of 11 September and the Middle East. After all, the killers were all Arabs, they wrote and spoke Arabic, they came from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Lebanon. This much we are allowed to reflect upon.

But the moment anyone takes the next logical step and looks at the Arab world itself, we tread on forbidden territory. For any analysis of the current Middle East will encounter injustice and violence and death, often the result – directly or indirectly – of the policies of the United States and its regional allies (Arab as well as Israeli). At this point, all discussion must cease. Because if America’s own involvement in the region – its unconditional support for Israel, its acquiescence in the Jewish colonisation of Arab land, the sanctions against Iraq that have killed so many tens of thousands of children – and the very lack of that democracy that Bush thinks is under attack suggest that America’s own actions might have something to do with the rage and fury that generated the mass murders of 11 September, then we are on very dangerous territory indeed.