Some reckon that the provision of any sort of historical context
is an outrage to the memory of those slaughtered in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Here's Christopher Hitchens, writing in the current Nation: "Loose talk
about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful
garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same
intellectual content."
Hitchens seems to be arguing that Osama bin Laden and his Muslim
cohorts are so pure a distillation of evil that they are outside history and
any system of overall accounting. So all you can tell your kids is that the
guys who planned and carried out those Sept. 11 attacks are really bad guys.
This isn't very helpful, particularly since among those kids to
whom we are trying to explain Sept. 11 are America's future leaders and
policymakers. Don't we want them to understand history in terms more complex
than those of flag-wagging at the moral level of a spaghetti western?
What moved those kamikaze Muslims, among them many middle-class
graduates from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to embark some many months ago on the
training that they knew would culminate in their deaths as well of those
(they must have hoped) of thousands upon thousands of innocent people. Was
it bin Laden's extreme Muslim fundamentalism? I doubt the suicide bombers
went to their deaths in the cause of forcing women to stay home and only go
shopping when clad in blue tents, or of having men never trim their beards.
More likely they were moved to action by bin Laden's main political themes
as expressed on at least one tape. On it he denounces Israel's occupation of
Palestine and America's complicity with that occupation. He attacks the
corrupt regimes of the Arab world and its leaders as bloodsuckers living off
the oil, which is a "common property."
In fact, if I had to cite what steeled the homicidal and
suicidal resolve of the kamikaze bombers, my list would surely include the
exchange on CBS in 1996 between Madeleine Albright, then U.S. ambassador to
the United Nations, and Lesley Stahl. Albright was maintaining that
sanctions had yielded important concessions from Saddam Hussein.
Stahl: "We have heard that half a million children have died. I
mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the
price worth it?"
Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price? We
think the price is worth it."
They read that exchange in the Middle East. It was infamous all
over the Arab world. So would it be unfair today to take Madeleine Albright
down to the ruins of the Trade Towers, remind her of that exchange and point
out that the price turned out also to include that awful mortuary. Was that
price worth it, too, Mrs. Albright?
Mere nitpicking among the ruins and the dust of the 6,500? I don
't think so. America has led a charmed life amid its wars on people. The
wars mostly didn't come home, and the political culture of the United States
ensured that folks, including the ordinary workers in the Trade Towers,
weren't really up to speed on what was being wrought in Freedom's name.
What about Afghanistan? In April of 1978, an indigenous populist
coup overthrew the government of Mohammed Daoud. The new Afghan government
was led by Noor Mohammed Taraki, and the Taraki administration embarked,
albeit with a good deal of urban Marxist intellectual arrogance, on land
reform, hence an attack on the opium-growing feudal estates. Taraki went to
the UN, where he managed to raise loans for crop substitution for the poppy
fields.
In the summer of 1979, the U.S. State Department produced a memo
making it clear how the U.S. government saw the stakes, no matter how
modern-minded Taraki might be or how feudal his enemies, the mujahideen
later to be joined by bin Laden: "The United States' larger interest ...
would be served by the demise of the Taraki-Amin regime, despite whatever
setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in
Afghanistan. The overthrow of the DRA (Democratic Republic of Afghanistan)
would show the rest of the world, particularly the Third World, that the
Soviets' view of the socialist course of history being inevitable is not
accurate."
Taraki was killed by Afghan army officers in September 1979.
Fearing a fundamentalist, U.S.-backed regime in Afghanistan, the Soviets
invaded in force in December 1979.
Well, the typists, messenger boys and back-office staffs
throughout the World Trade Center didn't know that history. There's a lot of
other relevant history they probably didn't know, but which those men on the
attack planes did. How could those people in the Towers have known, when
U.S. political and journalistic culture is so often a conspiracy to
perpetuate their ignorance? It would honor the memory of those who perished
on Sept. 11 to insist that in the future our policymakers, policy executives
and our press offer a better accounting of how America's wars for freedom
are fought, and what the actual price might include.
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.
