United States making a mistake by going on war footing

While listening to the media over the past two days, I have been disturbed at some of the things that people have been saying. This evening (September 12) CNN correspondent Garrick Uttly casually mentioned the possibility of using nuclear weapons. He was not necessarily proposing using them, but made absolutely no effort to say they shouldn't be used.

A few minutes earlier on the world's first radio station, Pittsburgh's KDKA, a talk show host asked his audience whether all people in the United States of Arab descent should be rounded up and interned, the way Japanese Americans were following the Pearl Harbor Attack. They could be detained until "things are sorted out" and then given "retribution" (I am sure he meant to say "reparations"). Again, he was not specifically proposing this be done, but was inviting his listeners to weigh in on the idea.

While so much was lost yesterday, it may only be the beginning, even if there are no more suicide attackers. And I am not really talking about civil liberties, which so many commentators are saying must be reconsidered as we tighten domestic security, Israel-style. That would be bad enough, of course, but what is really alarming is the war path that America's political and media leaders are leading it on.

In his televised address on the evening of the attack, President Bush said that he would make no distinction between the terrorists and those that harbor them. Colin Powell told reporters that the U.S. will hold any nations that "hosts" the terrorists responsible. The administration is about to submit to Congress legislation giving it free rein to pursue military actions under the War Powers Act. Congress, no doubt, will comply. While the administration still has not officially made any accusations, it is clear that they will soon name Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden as the perpetrator. Moreover, Afghanistan and its Taliban leadership will likely be accused of complicity for hosting bin Laden.

If bin Laden indeed is responsible, it would be dangerous to allow him to remain at large. However, military action against Afghanistan would be a grave mistake for many reasons. First of all, the present-day population of Afghanistan has seen more tragedy than probably any other people on earth. For over 20 years, they have been in the grips of a bitter and bloody civil war that followed a series of coups during the 1970's. Millions of refugees poured into Pakistan and millions more were displaced within the country as the communist government with its Soviet allies fought Mujahedeen Islamic fundamentalists (President Reagan's "freedom fighters") armed and financed by the United States and Pakistan, the staunch U.S. ally. Even the Soviet pull-out in 1988 following Gorbachev's consolidation of power did not stop the violence. The emergence of the Taliban has ended the civil war in most of the country, albeit at the price of a highly repressive theocratic form of government. Still, after 20 years of war and anarchy, most Afghans apparently prefer a very bad government to no government at all. Can we blame them?

Before the war Afghanistan was a dirt-poor, backwards, partly nomadic country, and two decades of civil discord have only made things worse. It would be totally inhumane to allow innocent and long-suffering Afghans to die for the purpose of pursuing bin Laden. The hijackers were willing to kill innocent people in order to obtain their revenge on the United States, and it would put the United States government on exactly the same moral ground as the terrorists to sacrifice the lives of innocent Afghans in the pursuit of the culprits in Tuesday's attack.

Furthermore, if it was bin Laden, the United States should not play into his hands by engaging the Taliban as an enemy and thus securing him an ally. With the Soviets just across the boarder having failed in subduing Afghanistan, bin Laden may well believe that he can further humiliate the United States by fighting it on his own home turf, provided he is fighting along side the Taliban. Rather than a cowboy military action, the United States must gain the cooperation of not only its allies but also Russia, China, and Afghanistan's Taliban government if it is to secure bin Laden's capture.

Also, by describing Tuesday's terrorism as an "act of war" rather than a crime, the administration is actually helping the purpetrators justify it to their potential sympathizers. Tragically, over the past century the world has come to accept that civilians die in war. This United States itself has been willing to inflict death on civilians ("collateral damage") in Iraq and Yugoslavia in their pursuit of "legitamate military targets" such as command and control centers and communications hubs. Well, the Pentagon is a command and control center and the World Trade Center is a communications hub, so, if this was an act of war, then by the same standards that the United States has repeatedly used in recent years, they were legitamate military targets. However, if the terrorist acts are considered a crime, then they are totally unjustifiable and among the most barbaric ever.

Finally, Americans must take a long, hard look at the foreign policy of the United States government. Its decades of underwriting Israel despite that state's often inhumane treatment of Palestinian Arabs and its waging a war against Iraq and insistence on continuing economic sanctions that clearly are causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi children have caused not only the understandable anger that many rational Arabs feel towards the United States, but also the murderous and unjustifiable violence against innocent Americans by fanatics. Of course, the violence against innocent Arabs by the United States and Israeli governments does not justify the killing of thousands of innocent New Yorkers, but neither does Tuesday's attack on the United States justify the killing of innocent Afghans. Violence begets violence, and the United States should break the cycle rather than once again making itself into a target for the hatred of others.

Titus North
Editor-in-chief, Wombat News Center

September 13, 2001