So it has come to this. The entire modern history of the Middle East ? the collapse of the Ottoman empire, the  Balfour declaration, Lawrence of Arabia's lies, the Arab revolt, the  foundation of the state of Israel, four Arab-Israeli wars and the 34  years of Israel's brutal occupation of Arab land ?  All erased within hours as those who claim to represent a crushed,  humiliated population struck back with the wickedness and awesome cruelty  of a doomed people. Is it fair? is it moral ? to write this so  soon, without proof, when the last act of barbarism, in Oklahoma,  turned out to be the work of home-grown Americans? I fear it is.  America is at war and, unless I am mistaken, many thousands more are now scheduled to die in the Middle East, perhaps in  America too. Some of us warned of "the explosion to come''. But we never dreamt this nightmare.

 

And yes, Osama bin Laden comes to mind, his money, his theology, his frightening dedication to destroy American  power. I have sat in front of bin Laden as he described how his men helped to destroy the Russian army in Afghanistan and thus the Soviet Union. Their boundless confidence allowed them to declare war on  America. But this is not the war of democracy versus terror that  the world will be asked to believe in the coming days. It is also about American missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and US  helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and  American shells crashing into a village called Qana and about a  Lebanese militia ? paid and uniformed by America's Israeli ally ?  hacking and raping and murdering their way through refugee camps.    No, there is no doubting the utter, indescribable  evil of what has  happened in the United States. That Palestinians  could celebrate  the massacre of 20,000, perhaps 35,000 innocent  people is not only  a symbol of their despair but of their political  immaturity, of  their failure to grasp what they had always been  accusing their  Israeli enemies of doing: acting  disproportionately. All the years  of rhetoric, all the promises to strike at the  heart of America, to  cut off the head of "the American snake'' we took  for empty  threats. How could a backward, conservative,  undemocratic and  corrupt group of regimes and small, violent  organisations fulfil  such preposterous promises? Now we know.    And in the hours that followed yesterday's annihilation, I began to  remember those other extraordinary assaults upon  the US and its  allies, miniature now by comparison with yesterday's casualties.  Did not the suicide bombers who killed 241 American  servicemen and  100 French paratroops in Beirut on 23 October 1983,  time their  attacks with unthinkable precision?

 

There were just seven seconds between the Marine  bombing and the destruction of the French three miles away. Then  there were the attacks on US bases in Saudi Arabia, and last  year's attempt ? almost successful it now turns out ? to sink the  USS Cole in Aden. And then how easy was our failure to recognise the  new weapon of the Middle East which neither Americans nor any  other Westerners could equal: the despair-driven, desperate suicide  bomber.

And there will be, inevitably, and quite immorally,  an attempt to obscure the historical wrongs and the injustices  that lie behind yesterday's firestorms. We will be told about  "mindless terrorism'', the "mindless" bit being essential if  we are not to realise how hated America has become in the land of  the birth of three great religions.

 

Ask an Arab how he responds to 20,000 or 30,000  innocent deaths and he or she will respond as decent people should,  that it is an unspeakable crime. But they will ask why we did  not use such words about the sanctions that have destroyed the lives  of perhaps half a million children in Iraq, why we did not rage about  the 17,500 civilians killed in Israel's 1982 invasion of  Lebanon. And those basic reasons why the Middle East caught fire last  September ? the Israeli occupation of Arab land, the dispossession  of Palestinians, the bombardments and state-sponsored executionsŠ  all these must  be obscured lest they provide the smallest  fractional reason for yesterday's mass savagery.    No, Israel was not to blame ? though we can be sure  that Saddam  Hussein and the other grotesque dictators will  claim so ? but the  malign influence of history and our share in its  burden must surely  stand in the dark with the suicide bombers. Our  broken promises,  perhaps even our destruction of the Ottoman Empire,  led inevitably  to this tragedy. America has bankrolled Israel's  wars for so many  years that it believed this would be cost-free. No  longer so. But,  of course, the US will want to strike back against  "world terror'',  and last night's bombardment of Kabul may have been  the opening  salvo. Indeed, who could ever point the finger at  Americans now for  using that pejorative and sometimes racist word  "terrorism''?

 

Eight years ago, I helped to make a television  series that tried to explain why so many Muslims had come to hate the  West. Last night, I remembered some of those Muslims in that film,  their families burnt by American-made bombs and weapons. They  talked about how no one would help them but God. Theology versus  technology, the suicide bomber against the nuclear power. Now we  have learnt what this means.

 

__________________________________________________________________

 

Is the world's favourite hate figure to blame?

 

Osama bin Laden

 

By Robert Fisk

12 September 2001

 

I can imagine how Osama bin Laden received the news  of the atrocities in the United States. In all, I must  have spent five hours listening to him in Sudan and then in the  Afghan mountains, as he described the inevitable collapse of the US,  just as he and his comrades in the Afghan war helped to destroy  the Red Army.

 

He will have watched satellite television, he will  have sat in the corner of his room, brushing his teeth as he always  did, with a mishwak stick, thinking for up to a minute before  speaking. He once told me with pride how his men had attacked the  Americans in Somalia. He acknowledged that he personally knew  two of the Saudis executed for bombing an American military base in  Riyadh. Could he be behind the slaughter in America?    If Mr bin Laden was really guilty of all the things  for which he  has been blamed, he would need an army of 10,000.  And there is  something deeply disturbing about the world's habit  of turning to  the latest hate figure whenever blood is shed. But  when events of  this momentous scale take place, there is a new  legitimacy in  casting one's eyes at those who have constantly  threatened America.

Mr bin Laden had a kind of religious experience  during the Afghan war. A Russian shell had fallen at his feet and, in  the seconds as he waited for it to explode, he said he had a  sudden feeling of calmness. The shell never exploded.  d  The US must leave the Gulf, he would say every 10  minutes. America  must stop all sanctions against the Iraqi people.  America must stop  using Israel to oppress Palestinians. He was not  fighting an  anti-colonial war, but a religious one. His  supporters would gather  round him with the awe of men listening to a  messiah. And the words  they listened to were fearful in their  implications. American  civilians would no more be spared than military  targets. Yet I also  remember one night when Mr bin Laden saw a pile of  newspapers in my  bag and seized them. By a sputtering oil lamp, he  read them,  clearly unaware of the world around him. Was this  really a man who  could damage America?

 

If the shadow of the Middle East falls over  yesterday's destruction, then who else could produce such  meticulously timed assaults? The rag-tag Palestinian groups that used  to favour hijacking are unlikely to be able to produce a  single suicide bomber. Hamas and Islamic Jihad have neither the  capability nor the money that this assault needed. Perhaps the groups  that moved close to the Lebanese Hizbollah in the 1980s, before the  organisation became solely a resistance movement. The bombing of  the US Marines in 1983 needed precision, timing and infinite  planning. But Iran, which supported these groups, is more involved in  its internal struggles. Iraq lies broken, its agents more  intent on torturing their own people than striking at the the US.

 

So the mountains of Afghanistan will be  photographed from satellite and high-altitude aircraft in the coming days, Mr  bin Laden's old training camps highlighted on the overhead  projectors in the Pentagon. But to what end? For if this is a war it  cannot be fought like other wars. Indeed, can it be fought at all  without some costly military adventure overseas? Or is that what  Mr bin Laden seeks above all else?

 

They can run and they can hide. Suicide bombers are here to stay

 

 By Robert Fisk

 

 13 September 2001

 

 Not long before the Second World War, Stanley Baldwin, who

 was Britain's Prime Minister, warned that "the bomber will

 always get through". Today, we can argue that the suicide

 bomber will always get through. Maybe not all of them. We

 may never know how many other hijackers failed to board

 domestic flights in the United States on Tuesday morning, but

 enough to produce carnage on an awesome, incomprehensive

 scale. Yet still we have not begun to address this

 phenomenon. The suicide bomber is here to stay. It is an

 exclusive weapon that belongs to "them" not us, and no

 military power appears able to deal with this phenomenon.

 

 Partly because of the suicide bomber, the Israelis fled

 Lebanon. Specifically because of a suicide bomber, the

 Americans fled Lebanon 17 years earlier. I still remember

 Vice-President George Bush, now George Bush Senior, visibly

 moved amid the ruins of the US Marine base in Beirut, where

 241 American servicemen had just been slaughtered. "We are

 not going to let a bunch of insidious terrorist cowards, shake

 the foreign policy of the United States," he told us. "Foreign

 policy is not going to be dictated or changed by terror." A few

 months later, the Marines upped sticks and ran away from

 Lebanon, "redeployed" to their ships offshore.

 

 Not long ago, I was chatting to an Indian soldier, a veteran of

 Delhi's involvement in the Sri Lanka war now serving with the

 UN in southern Lebanon. How did the Tamil suicide bombers

 compare those of the Lebanese Hizbollah I asked him? The

 soldier raised his eyebrows. "The Hizbollah has nothing on

 those guys," he said. "Just think, they all carry a suicide

 capsule. I told my soldiers to drive at 100 miles an hour on the

 roads of Sri Lanka in case one of them hurled himself into the

 jeep." The Hizbollah may take their inspiration from the

 martyrdom of the prophet Hussain, and the Palestinian suicide

 bombers may take theirs from the Hizbollah.

 

 But there is no military answer to this. As long as "our" side

 will risk but not give its lives (cost-free war, after all, was partly

 an American invention) the suicide bomber is the other side's

 nuclear weapon. That desperate, pitiful phone call from the

 passenger on her way to her doom in the Boeing 767 crash on

 the Pentagon told her husband that the hijackers held knives

 and box-cutters. Knives and box-cutters; that's all you need

 now to inflict a crashing physical defeat on a superpower. That

 and a plane with a heavy fuel load.

 

 But the suicide bomber does not conform to a set of identical

 characteristics. Many of the callow Palestinian youths blowing

 themselves to bits, with, more often than not, the most

 innocent of Israelis, have little or no formal education. They

 have poor knowledge of the Koran but a powerful sense of fury,

 despair and self-righteousness to propel them. The Hizbollah

 suicide bombers were more deeply versed in the Koran, older,

 often with years of imprisonment to steel them in the hours

 before their immolation.

 

 Tuesday's suicide bombers created a precedent. If there were

 at least four on each aircraft, this means 16 men decided to kill

 themselves at the same time. Did they all know each other?

 Unlikely. Or did one of them know all the rest? For sure, they

 were educated. If the Boeing which hit the Pentagon was being

 flown by men with knives (presumably, the other three aircraft

 were too) then these were suicide bombers with a good

 working knowledge of the fly-by-wire instrument panel of one of

 the world's most sophisticated aircraft.

 

 I found it oddly revealing when, a few hours later, an American

 reporter quizzed me about my conviction that these men must

 have made "dummy runs", must have travelled the same

 American Airlines and United Airlines scheduled flights many

 times. They would have to do that at least to check the X-ray

 security apparatus at airports. How many crew, the average

 passenger manifest, the average delays on departure times.

 They needed to see if the cabin crew locked the flight deck

 door. In my experience on US domestic flights this is rare.

 Savage, cruel these men were, but also, it seems, educated.

 

 Like so many of our politicians who provide us with the same

 tired old promises about hunting down the guilty and, Mr Blair's

 contribution yesterday, "dismantle the machine of terror". But

 this misses the point. If the machinery is composed of knives

 and box-cutters, Mr Blair is after the wrong target. Just as

 President Ronald Reagan was in the hours before he ordered

 the bombing of Libya in 1986. "He can run, but he can't hide,"

 he said of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. But Colonel Gaddafi

 could hide, and he is still with us.

 

 Instead of searching for more rogue states, President George

 W Bush's reference to those who stand behind the bombers

 opens the way for more cruise missiles aimed at Iraq or

 Afghanistan, or wherever he thinks the "godfathers of terrorism

 may be". The Americans might do better to find out who taught

 these vicious men to fly a Boeing 767.

 

 Which Middle East airlines train their pilots for this aircraft?

 Indeed which nations are generous in their pilot-training

 schemes for Third World countries? I recall one of Iran's best

 post-revolutionary helicopter pilots telling me he was given a full

 course on the Bell Augusta (the Vietnam-era gunship) by the

 Pakistan air force, which itself paid retired American pilots to

 teach them.

 

 And if Osama bin Laden is behind the New York massacre, it's

 worth remembering one of his aims: not just to evict the US

 from the Middle East but to overthrow the Arab regimes loyal to

 Washington.

 

 Saudi Arabia was top of the list when I last spoke to him, but

 President Hosni Mubarak's Egypt and Jordan, ruled by King

 Abdullah II, were among his other enemies. He would keep

 talking about how the Muslims of these nations would rise up

 against their corrupt rulers. A slaughter by the US in retaliation

 for the New York and Washington bloodbaths might just move

 the Arab masses from stubborn docility to the point of

 detonation.

 

 Within the region, the suicide bomber is now admired. Not

 because he is a mass killer but because something invincible,

 something untouchable, something that has always dictated

 the rules without taking responsibility for the results, has now

 proved vulnerable. It was the same when the first suicide

 bombers struck in Lebanon.

 

 The Lebanese could scarcely believe that Israeli soldiers could

 die on this scale. The Israeli army of song and legend had been

 brought low. So, too, the reaction when the symbols of

 America's pride and power were struck. The vile, if small,

 Palestinian "celebrations" were a symptom of this, albeit

 unrepresentative. They matched the "bomb Baghdad into the

 Dark Ages" rhetoric we heard from the American public a

 decade ago.

 

 In the Middle East, Arabs now fear America will strike them

 without waiting for proof, or act on the most flimsy of evidence.

 For it is as well to remember how the US responded to the

 1983 Marine bombings. The battleship USS New Jersey fired

 its automobile-sized shells into the Chouf Mountains, killing a

 couple of Syrian soldiers and erasing half a village. The arrival

 of US naval craft off the American East Coast yesterday was a

 ghostly replay of this impotent event.

 

 But to this day, the Americans have never discovered the

 identity of the man who drove a truck-load of explosives into the

 Beirut Marine compound. That was in another country, in

 another time. Today's suicide bombers are a different breed.

 Nurtured in whatever despair or misery or perhaps even

 privilege, in 2001, the suicide bomber came of age.

 

The lesson of history: Afghanistan always beats its

 invaders

 

 By Robert Fisk

 

 14 September 2001

 

 On the heights of the Kabul Gorge, they still find ancient belt

 buckles and corroded sword hilts. You can no longer read the

 insignia of the British regiments of the old East India Company

 but their bones ­ those of all 16,000 of them ­ still lie

 somewhere amid the dark earth and scree of the most

 forbidding mountains in Afghanistan. Like the British who came

 later, like the Russians who were to arrive more than a century

 afterwards, General William Elphinstone's campaign was

 surrounded with rhetoric and high principles and ended in

 disaster. George Bush Junior and Nato, please note.

 

 Indeed, if there is one country ­ calling it a nation would be a

 misnomer ­ that the West should avoid militarily, it is the tribal

 land in which Osama Bin Laden maintains his obscure

 sanctuary. Just over two decades ago, I found out what it was

 like to be on an invasion army in that breathlessly beautiful,

 wild, proud plateau. Arrested by the Russian Parachute

 Regiment near the Salang Tunnel, I was sent with a Soviet

 convoy back to Kabul. We were ambushed, and out of the

 snowdrifts came the Afghans, carrying knives. An air strike and

 the arrival of Soviet Tadjik troops saved us. But the mighty Red

 Army had been humbled before men who could not write their

 own names and whose politics were so remote that a mujahid

 fighter would later insist to me that London was occupied by

 Russian troops.

 

 Back in 1839 we British were also worried about the Russians.

 General Elphinstone lead an East India Company army of

 16,500 ­ along with 38,000 followers ­ into Afghanistan,

 anxious to put an end to Dost Mohamed's flirtation with the

 Tsar, took Kandahar and entered Kabul on 30 June with the

 first foreign force to occupy the city in modern times. Dost

 Mohamed ­ the British Superpower of the time knew how to

 deal with recalcitrant natives ­ was dispatched to exile in India,

 but the Afghans were not prepared to be placed under British

 tutelage. To garrison a foreign army in Kabul was folly, as

 Elphinstone must have realised when, on 1 November, 1840, a

 British official, Alexander Burns, was hacked to pieces by a

 mob in the souk and his head impaled on a stake. A

 300-strong British unit in the field fled for its life back to Kabul.

 And when Dost Mohamed's son turned up, leading an Afghan

 army of 30,000, Elphinstone was doomed.

 

 He bartered his freedom in return for a safe passage back to

 the British fort in Jalalabad, close to the Indian frontier. It was

 one of the coldest winters on record and with few supplies,

 virtually no food and false promises of safety, he led his army ­

 their columns 10 miles in length ­ out into the frozen

 desolation of the Kabul Gorge. The camp followers were left by

 the wayside; contemporary records describe Indian women

 attached to the British army's colonial force, stripped naked,

 starving, raped and knifed by Afghan tribesmen, their corpses

 left in the snow. Elphinstone had long since given up trying to

 protect them. Yet each new foray down the chasm of the Kabul

 Gorge ­ I was to see the remains of a Russian convoy littered

 across the same track almost 140 years later ­ led to further

 ambushes and massacres.

 

 Elphinstone secured the safety of himself, a few officers and a

 party of English ladies. The last British guardsmen were cut

 down on the heights, surrounded by thousands of Afghans,

 firing to the last round, the company commander dying with the

 Union flag wrapped around his waist. Days later, the last

 survivor of the massacres, galloping his exhausted horse

 Jalalabad was attacked by two Afghan cavalry. Hacking them

 away from him, he broke his sword, Hollywood-style, on one of

 the men. But with his horse dying beneath him, he reached the

 British fort. It was to date the greatest defeat of British arms in

 history.

 

 The British clung to Afghanistan as if it was a jewel in the

 crown. Under the Treaty of Gandamak, the Amir Yakub Khan

 could rule Kabul and a British embassy would be opened in the

 city. But within months, in 1879, the residency was under

 siege, its few occupants fighting ­ once more ­ to the last

 man. With the embassy on fire, the handful of Britons inside

 made repeated forays into the ranks of the Afghans. "When

 charged,'' a later British account would claim, "the Afghan

 soldiers ran like sheep before a wolf". But within hours, the

 British were fighting from the burning roof of the residency,

 slashed to bits with swords, stripped and their bodies burned.

 The Consul, born to a French father and an Irish mother, was

 Major Sir Pierre Louis Napoleon Cavagnari, KCB, CSI. A British

 journalist with the Kabul Field Force found a few scorched

 bones in the residency yard; they included, no doubt, Sir

 Pierre's remains.

 

 Ironically, one of Elphinstone's successors was visiting the site

 of the 1842 massacre in 1880 when he heard that his army ­

 this was the Second Afghan War ­ had been attacked in a

 remote semi-desert called Maiwand where the 30th Bombay

 Infantry was fighting off thousands of ghazi warriors who were

 charging suicidally at British cannon and Egyptian colonial

 troops. Savage in their assaults, waving green Islamic banners

 and utterly heedless of their own lives ­ and the word "suicidal"

 is not used loosely here ­ they threw themselves among the

 British.

 

 We were to conduct a military inquiry into the disaster that

 followed and now, in the fragile, yellowing pages of the Indian

 British Army's Intelligence Branch report we can find chilling

 evidence of what this meant. Captain Wainwaring was to recall

 how "the whole of the ground to the left of the 30th Native

 Infantry, and between it and the Grenadiers, was covered with

 swarms of ghazis and banner-men. The ghazis were actually in

 the ranks of the Grenadiers, pulling the men out and hacking

 them down with their swords ...''. A young Afghan woman ­ all

 we know is that her name was Malaleh ­ feared that the

 tribesmen might withdraw and so tore off her veil, holding it

 above her head as a flag and charging at the Grenadiers

 herself. She was shot down by British rifle fire. But the British

 fled. In all, they lost 1,320 men including 21 officers, along with

 1,000 rifles and at least 600 swords.

 

 The Great Game was supposed to be about frontiers ­ about

 keeping a British-controlled Afghanistan between the Indian

 Empire and the Russian border ­ but it was a history of

 betrayals. Those we thought were on our side turned out to be

 against us. Until 1878, we had thought the Amir Sher Ali Khan

 of Kabul was our friend, ready to fight for the British Empire ­

 just as a man called Osama bin Laden would later fight the

 Russians on "our" behalf ­ but he forbade passage to British

 troops and encouraged the robbery of British merchants.

 

 He had "openly and assiduously endeavoured ... to stir up

 religious hatred against the English,'' our declaration of war had

 announced on 21 November, 1878. The Amir's aiding and

 abetting of the murder of the British Embassy staff was "a

 treacherous and cowardly crime, which has brought indelible

 disgrace upon the Afghan people,'' Sir Frederick Roberts

 announced in 1879 when, yet again, the British had occupied

 Kabul. The Amir's followers "should not escape ... penalty and

 ... the punishment inflicted should be such as will be felt and

 remembered ... All persons convicted of bearing a part [in the

 murders] will be dealt with according to their deserts.'' It was an

 ancient, Victorian warning, a ghostly preamble to the words we

 have been hearing from President Bush ­ and, indeed, Mr Blair

 ­ in the last 48 hours.

 

 The Russians were to endure their 10 years of Calvary exactly

 a century later, though in truth it was the Afghans who suffered

 a virtual genocide under the Soviets. Osama bin Laden, who

 had himself escaped several murder attempts by Russian

 agents, survived. Perhaps Vladimir Putin who is being asked to

 subscribe to the West's new battle for "democracy and liberty''

 against the forces of darkness might remind Mr Bush just how

 painful Russia's military adventure in Afghanistan proved to be.

 Perhaps we could all go back to the history books before

 suggesting ­ and the idea of such an adventure is clearly being

 dreamed of in Washington ­ that the Great Game should be

 taken up once more.    

 

THE INDEPENDENT

http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=9

4254

Sunday, 16 September 2001

 

Bush is Walking into a Trap

 

ROBERT FISK

 

Retaliation is a trap. In a world that was supposed to have

learnt that the rule of law comes above revenge, President Bush

appears to be heading for the very disaster that Osama bin Laden

has laid down for him. Let us have no doubts about what happened

in New York and Washington last week. It was a crime against

humanity. We cannot understand America's need to retaliate

unless we accept this bleak, awesome fact. But this crime was

perpetrated - it becomes ever clearer - to provoke the United

States into just the blind, arrogant punch that the US military

is preparing.

 

Mr bin Laden - every day his culpability becomes more apparent -

has described to me how he wishes to overthrow the pro-American

regime of the Middle East, starting with Saudi Arabia and moving

on to Egypt, Jordan and the other Gulf states. In an Arab world

sunk in corruption and dictatorships - most of them supported by

the West - the only act that might bring Muslims to strike at

their own leaders would be a brutal, indiscriminate assault by

the United States. Mr bin Laden is unsophisticated in foreign

affairs, but a close student of the art and horror of war. He

knew how to fight the Russians who stayed on in Afghanistan, a

Russian monster that revenged itself upon its ill-educated,

courageous antagonists until, faced with war without end, the

entire Soviet Union began to fall apart.

 

The Chechens learnt this lesson. And the man responsible for so

much of the bloodbath in Chechnya - the career KGB man whose

army is raping and murdering the insurgent Sunni Muslim

population of Chechnya - is now being signed up by Mr Bush for

his "war against people''. Vladimir Putin must surely have a

sense of humour to appreciate the cruel ironies that have now

come to pass, though I doubt if he will let Mr Bush know what

happens when you start a war of retaliation; your army - like

the Russian forces in Chechnya - becomes locked into battle with

an enemy that appears ever more ruthless, ever more evil.

 

But the Americans need look no further than Ariel Sharon's

futile war with the Palestinians to understand the folly of

retaliation. In Lebanon, it was always the same. A Hizbollah

guerrilla would kill an Israeli occupation soldier, and the

Israelis would fire back in retaliation at a village in which a

civilian would die. The Hizbollah would retaliate with a

Katyusha missile attack over the Israeli border, and the

Israelis would retaliate again with a bombardment of southern

Lebanon. In the end, the Hizbollah - the "centre of world

terror'' according to Mr Sharon - drove the Israelis out of

Lebanon.

 

In Israel/Palestine, it is the same story. An Israeli soldier

shoots a Palestinian stone-thrower. The Palestinians retaliate

by killing a settler. The Israelis then retaliate by sending a

murder squad to kill a Palestinian gunman. The Palestinians

retaliate by sending a suicide bomber into a pizzeria. The

Israelis then retaliate by sending F-16s to bomb a Palestinian

police station. Retaliation leads to retaliation and more

retaliation. War without end.

 

And while Mr Bush - and perhaps Mr Blair - prepare their forces,

they explain so meretriciously that this is a war for "democracy

and liberty'', that it is about men who are "attacking

civilisation''. "America was targeted for attack,'' Mr Bush

informed us on Friday, "because we are the brightest beacon for

freedom and opportunity in the world.'' But this is not why

America was attacked. If this was an Arab-Muslim apocalypse,

then it is intimately associated with events in the Middle East

and with America's stewardship of the area. Arabs, it might be

added, would rather like some of that democracy and liberty and

freedom that Mr Bush has been telling them about. Instead, they

get a president who wins 98 per cent in the elections

(Washington's friend, Mr Mubarak) or a Palestinian police force,

trained by the CIA, that tortures and sometimes kills its people

in prison. The Syrians would also like a little of that

democracy. So would the Saudis. But their effete princes are all

friends of America - in many cases, educated at US universities.

 

I will always remember how President Clinton announced that

Saddam Hussein - another of our grotesque inventions - must be

overthrown so that the people of Iraq could choose their own

leaders. But if that happened, it would be the first time in

Middle Eastern history that Arabs have been permitted to do so.

No, it is "our'' democracy and "our'' liberty and freedom that

Mr Bush and Mr Blair are talking about, our Western sanctuary

that is under attack, not the vast place of terror and injustice

that the Middle East has become.

 

Let me illustrate what I mean. Nineteen years ago today, the

greatest act of terrorism - using Israel's own definition of

that much misused word - in modern Middle Eastern history began.

Does anyone remember the anniversary in the West? How many

readers of this article will remember it? I will take a tiny

risk and say that no other British newspaper - certainly no

American newspaper - will today recall the fact that on 16

September 1982, Israel's Phalangist militia allies started their

three-day orgy of rape and knifing and murder in the Palestinian

refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila that cost 1,800 lives. It

followed an Israeli invasion of Lebanon - designed to drive the

PLO out of the country and given the green light by the then US

Secretary of State, Alexander Haig - which cost the lives of

17,500 Lebanese and Palestinians, almost all of them civilians.

That's probably three times the death toll in the World Trade

Centre. Yet I do not remember any vigils or memorial services or

candle-lighting in America or the West for the innocent dead of

Lebanon; I don't recall any stirring speeches about democracy or

liberty. In fact, my memory is that the United States spent most

of the bloody months of July and August 1982 calling for

"restraint".

 

No, Israel is not to blame for what happened last week. The

culprits were Arabs, not Israelis. But America's failure to act

with honour in the Middle East, its promiscuous sale of missiles

to those who use them against civilians, its blithe disregard

for the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi children under

sanctions of which Washington is the principal supporter - all

these are intimately related to the society that produced the

Arabs who plunged America into an apocalypse of fire last week.

 

America's name is literally stamped on to the missiles fired by

Israel into Palestinian buildings in Gaza and the West Bank.

Only four weeks ago, I identified one of them as an AGM 114-D

air-to-ground rocket made by Boeing and Lockheed-Martin at their

factory in - of all places - Florida, the state where some of

the suiciders trained to fly.

 

It was fired from an Apache helicopter (made in America, of

course) during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, when

hundreds of cluster bombs were dropped in civilian areas of

Beruit by the Israelis in contravention of undertakings given to

the United States. Most of the bombs had US Naval markings and

America then suspended a shipment of fighter bombers to Israel -

for less than two months.

 

The same type of missile - this time an AGM 114-C made in

Georgia - was fired by the Israelis into the back of an

ambulance near the Lebanese village of Mansori, killing two

women and four children. I collected the pieces of the missile,

including its computer coding plate, flew to Georgia and

presented them to the manufacturers at the Boeing factory. And

what did the developer of the missile say to me when I showed

him photographs of the children his missile had killed?

"Whatever you do," he told me, "don't quote me as saying

anything critical of the policies of Israel."

 

I'm sure the father of those children, who was driving the

ambulance, will have been appalled by last week's events, but I

don't suppose, given the fate of his own wife - one of the women

killed - that he was in a mood to send condolences to anyone.

All these facts, of course, must be forgotten now.

 

Every effort will be made in the coming days to switch off the

"why'' question and concentrate on the who, what and how. CNN

and most of the world's media have already obeyed this essential

new war rule. I've already seen what happens when this rule is

broken. When The Independent published my article on the

connection between Middle Eastern injustice and the New York

holocaust, the BBC's 24-hour news channel produced an American

commentator who remarked that "Robert Fisk has won the prize for

bad taste''. When I raised the same point on an Irish radio talk

show, the other guest, a Harvard lawyer, denounced me as a

bigot, a liar, a "dangerous man'' and - of course - potentially

anti-Semitic. The Irish pulled the plug on him.

 

No wonder we have to refer to the terrorists as "mindless''. For

if we did not, we would have to explain what went on in those

minds. But this attempt to censor the realities of the war that

has already begun must not be permitted to continue. Look at the

logic. Secretary of State Colin Powell was insisting on Friday

that his message to the Taliban is simple: they have to take

responsibility for sheltering Mr bin Laden. "You cannot separate

your activities from the activities of the perpetrators,'' he

warned. But the Americans absolutely refuse to associate their

own response to their predicament with their activities in the

Middle East. We are supposed to hold our tongues, even when

Ariel Sharon - a man whose name will always be associated with

the massacre at Sabra and Shatila - announces that Israel also

wishes to join the battle against "world terror''.

 

No wonder the Palestinians are fearful. In the past four days,

23 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank and Gaza, an

astonishing figure that would have been front-page news had

America not been blitzed. If Israel signs up for the new

conflict, then the Palestinians - by fighting the Israelis -

will, by extension, become part of the "world terror'' against

which Mr Bush is supposedly going to war. Not for nothing did Mr

Sharon claim that Yasser Arafat had connections with Osama bin

Laden.

 

I repeat: what happened in New York was a crime against

humanity. And that means policemen, arrests, justice, a whole

new international court at The Hague if necessary. Not cruise

missiles and "precision'' bombs and Muslim lives lost in revenge

for Western lives. But the trap has been sprung. Mr Bush -

perhaps we, too - are now walking into it.

 

--

Published on Sunday, September 16, 2001 in the Independent/UK

 

Bush is Walking Into a Trap

 

by Robert Fisk

 

Retaliation is a trap. In a world that was supposed to have learnt that

the rule of law comes above revenge, President Bush appears to be heading

for the very disaster that Osama bin Laden has laid down for him. Let us

have no doubts about what happened in New York and Washington last week.

It was a crime against humanity. We cannot understand America's need to

retaliate unless we accept this bleak, awesome fact. But this crime was

perpetrated  it becomes ever clearer  to provoke the United States into

just the blind, arrogant punch that the US military is preparing.

Mr bin Laden  every day his culpability becomes more apparent  has

described to me how he wishes to overthrow the pro-American regime of the

Middle East, starting with Saudi Arabia and moving on to Egypt, Jordan and

the other Gulf states. In an Arab world sunk in corruption and

dictatorships  most of them supported by the West  the only act that might

bring Muslims to strike at their own leaders would be a brutal,

indiscriminate assault by the United States. Mr bin Laden is

unsophisticated in foreign affairs, but a close student of the art and

horror of war. He knew how to fight the Russians who stayed on in

Afghanistan, a Russian monster that revenged itself upon its ill-educated,

courageous antagonists until, faced with war without end, the entire

Soviet Union began to fall apart.

 

The Chechens learnt this lesson. And the man responsible for so much of

the bloodbath in Chechnya  the career KGB man whose army is raping and

murdering the insurgent Sunni Muslim population of Chechnya  is now being

signed up by Mr Bush for his "war against people''. Vladimir Putin must

surely have a sense of humor to appreciate the cruel ironies that have now

come to pass, though I doubt if he will let Mr Bush know what happens when

you start a war of retaliation; your army  like the Russian forces in

Chechnya  becomes locked into battle with an enemy that appears ever more

ruthless, ever more evil.

 

But the Americans need look no further than Ariel Sharon's futile war with

the Palestinians to understand the folly of retaliation. In Lebanon, it

was always the same. A Hizbollah guerrilla would kill an Israeli

occupation soldier, and the Israelis would fire back in retaliation at a

village in which a civilian would die. The Hizbollah would retaliate with

a Katyusha missile attack over the Israeli border, and the Israelis would

retaliate again with a bombardment of southern Lebanon. In the end, the

Hizbollah  the "center of world terror'' according to Mr Sharon  drove the

Israelis out of Lebanon.

 

In Israel/Palestine, it is the same story. An Israeli soldier shoots a

Palestinian stone-thrower. The Palestinians retaliate by killing a

settler. The Israelis then retaliate by sending a murder squad to kill a

Palestinian gunman. The Palestinians retaliate by sending a suicide bomber

into a pizzeria. The Israelis then retaliate by sending F-16s to bomb a

Palestinian police station. Retaliation leads to retaliation and more

retaliation. War without end.

 

And while Mr Bush  and perhaps Mr Blair  prepare their forces, they

explain so meretriciously that this is a war for "democracy and liberty'',

that it is about men who are "attacking civilization''."America was

targeted for attack,'' Mr Bush informed us on Friday, "because we are the

brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.'' But this is

not why America was attacked. If this was an Arab-Muslim apocalypse, then

it is intimately associated with events in the Middle East and with

America's stewardship of the area. Arabs, it might be added, would rather

like some of that democracy and liberty and freedom that Mr Bush has been

telling them about. Instead, they get a president who wins 98 per cent in

the elections (Washington's friend, Mr Mubarak) or a Palestinian police

force, trained by the CIA, that tortures and sometimes kills its people in

prison. The Syrians would also like a little of that democracy. So would

the Saudis. But their effete princes are all friends of America  in many

cases, educated at US universities.

 

I will always remember how President Clinton announced that Saddam Hussein

another of our grotesque inventions  must be overthrown so that the people

of Iraq could choose their own leaders. But if that happened, it would be

the first time in Middle Eastern history that Arabs have been permitted to

do so. No, it is "our'' democracy and "our'' liberty and freedom that Mr

Bush and Mr Blair are talking about, our Western sanctuary that is under

attack, not the vast place of terror and injustice that the Middle East

has become.

 

Let me illustrate what I mean. Nineteen years ago today, the greatest act

of terrorism  using Israel's own definition of that much misused word  in

modern Middle Eastern history began. Does anyone remember the anniversary

in the West? How many readers of this article will remember it? I will

take a tiny risk and say that no other British newspaper  certainly no

American newspaper  will today recall the fact that on 16 September 1982,

Israel's Phalangist militia allies started their three-day orgy of rape

and knifing and murder in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and

Shatila that cost 1,800 lives. It followed an Israeli invasion of Lebanon

designed to drive the PLO out of the country and given the green light by

the then US Secretary of State, Alexander Haig  which cost the lives of

17,500 Lebanese and Palestinians, almost all of them civilians. That's

probably three times the death toll in the World Trade Center Yet I do not

remember any vigils or memorial services or candle-lighting in America or

the West for the innocent dead of Lebanon; I don't recall any stirring

speeches about democracy or liberty. In fact, my memory is that the United

States spent most of the bloody months of July and August 1982 calling for

"restraint".