The left is getting itself tied up in knots about the Just War
and the propriety of bombing Afghanistan. The respected Princeton professor
Richard Falk has outlined in The Nation an intricate guide to "the relevant
frameworks of moral, legal and religious restraint" to be applied to the
lethal business of attacking Afghans.
War, as the United States has been fighting it in Iraq and
Yugoslavia, consists, at least thus far, mostly of bombing, intended to
terrify the population and destroy the fabric of tolerable social existence.
Remember that bombs mostly miss their targets. Colonel John Warden, who
planned the air campaign in Iraq, said afterwards that dropping dumb bombs
"is like shooting skeet -- 499 out of 500 pellets may miss the target, but
that's irrelevant." There will always be shattered hospitals and wrecked old
folks' homes, just as there will always be Defense Department flacks saying
that the destruction "cannot be independently verified" or that the
hospitals or old folks' homes were actually sanctuaries for enemy forces for
"command and control."
How many bombing campaigns do we have to go through in a decade
to recognize all the usual landmarks? What's unusual about the latest
onslaught is that it is being leveled at a country where, on numerous
estimates from reputable organizations, around 7.5 million people were,
before Sept. 11, at risk of starving to death. Within four days of the Sept.
11 terror attacks the United States forcibly told Pakistan it desired
elimination of truck convoys that were providing much of the food and other
supplies to Afghanistan's civilian population. In early October, the UN's
World Food Program was able to resume shipments at a lower level, then the
bombing began and everything stopped once more, amid fierce outcry from
relief agencies that the United States was placing millions at risk, with
winter just around the corner.
On Oct. 15 the UN's special rapporteur, Jean Ziegler, said in
Geneva that the food airdrops by the same military force dropping bombs
undermined the credibility of humanitarian aid. "As special rapporteur I
must condemn with the last ounce of energy this operation called
snowdropping (the air drops of food packagers]; it is totally catastrophic
for humanitarian aid." The relief organization Oxfam reckons that before
Sept. 11, 400,000 Afghans were on the edge of starvation ("acute food
insecurity"), 5.5 million were "extremely vulnerable," and the balance of
the overall 7.5 million were at great risk. Once it starts snowing, 500,000
people will be cut off from the food convoys that should, were it not for
the bombing, have been getting them provisions for the winter. Relief
organizations are saying that the bizarre Pentagon charge that the Taliban
is poisoning its own people further compromises humanitarian food aid.
So, by the time Falk was inscribing the protocols of what a just
war might be, the United States was already creating the conditions for
human disaster on an immense scale. Not, to be sure, the ghastly instant
entombment of Sept. 11, what Noam Chomsky has called "the most devastating
instant human toll of any crime in history, outside of war," but death on
the installment plan: malnutrition, infant mortality, disease, premature
death for the old and so on. The numbers will climb and climb, and there
won't be any "independent verification," such as the Pentagon demands.
Let's accept the so-far unproven charge that the supreme
strategist of the Sept. 11 terror is Osama bin Laden. He's the Enemy. So
what have been this Enemy's objectives? He desires the widest possible war;
to kill Americans on American soil; to destroy the symbols of U.S. military
power; to engage the United States in a holy war. The first two objectives
the Enemy could accomplish by themselves; the third required the cooperation
of the United States. Bush fell into the trap, and Falk, The Nation and some
on the left have jumped in after him.
There can be no "limited war with limited objectives" when the
bombing sets matches to tinder from Pakistan and Kashmir to Ramallah and
Bethlehem, Jerusalem. "Limited war" is a far less realistic prospect than to
regard Sept. 11 as a crime, to pursue its perpetrators to justice in an
international court, using all relevant police and intelligence agencies
here and abroad.
The left should be for peace, which in no way means ignoring the
demands of either side. Bin Laden calls for: an end to sanctions on Iraq;
U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia; justice for Palestinians. The left says aye
to those, though we want a two-state solution, whereas bin Laden wants to
drive Jews along with secular and Christian Palestinians into the sea. The
U.S. government calls for a dismantling of the Terror Network, and the left
says aye to that, too. Of course, the left opposes networks of people who
wage war on civilians.
So the left is pretty close to supporting demands on both sides,
but knows these demands are not going to be achieved by war. The left doesn'
t want the "war on terror" to be cashed in blood in Colombia or anywhere
else, or for anyone to kill or die in the name of Islamic fundamentalism.
The left is for the common sense, humane and legal option. Go to the UN,
proceed on the basis that Sept. 11 was a crime. Bring the perpetrators to
justice by legal means.
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St Clair of the
muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander
Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the
Creators Syndicate Web page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2001 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
