Afghanistan drifts towards a closure, on floating wafts of time, on which travel events outside the control of the most powerful; directionless. Sadly, after half the world has fished in its troubled waters, abandonment is on the cards. US President Barack Obama remains unclear which way he is going, both as the guide to American policy and as a president. He has lost his way in the Washington maze, and in the absence of the commander-in-chief, everyone else is suddenly sprung into action — Pentagon, the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, Brennan et al. No, it isn’t the routine Washington functioning where separate voices provide differing nuances, but a superpower in serious disarray. It is important to say this since the super-power drives the agenda, especially so in Afghanistan. All others are bit players swishing on the fringes, at best muddying the already murky.
It will be important what happens in November 2012. If Obama can recreate the magic that brought him into power in the first place — exceedingly difficult now with a baggage of suspect leadership on key issues — or, if Michele Bachmann of the Tea Party can somehow avoid further gaffs and be the miracle, 2014 might just see the end of America in Afghanistan. What might stay shall be a heavy CIA presence and some military in the garb of trainers who will additionally be adept at Special Operations, but the critical mass of the famed American military would have gone back home; sadly bringing to a tame closure another American misadventure. No victors and no losers on the battlefield — that shall remain the judgment on irregular wars. Rick Perry or another Republican just might decide differently but will be hard put to sway too far than what the economic realities of a super-power in decline will dictate.
Where does that leave Afghanistan? In a limbo, I am afraid. There is this great make-believe world that all engaged in Afghanistan are letting prevail on their conscience till it becomes the only reality. This, in more profound terms, is called ‘grand deception’. The ‘escape’ narrative of the United States is that when this great Afghan military is brought into shape, beginning 2011, and the responsibility to save and defend Afghanistan is handed over to this re-discovered symbol of the Afghan pride of yore, Afghanistan and all its subjects will live happily after.
It will take eight or nine billion dollars per annum to finance this symbol of free Afghanistan, composed of half-and-half mix of Pashtuns and the rest; with an overly dominating non-Pashtun officer corps; with a recent history, none too brilliant, still in the process of being equipped and structured and manned; without an air force or a semblance of experience in joint action. The current size of the Afghan economy is around 30 billion dollars and 97 per cent of it is sourced in American money that comes in to sustain the American presence in Afghanistan. With the Americans gone, someone will need to find the money to run this 400,000 strong Afghan army and police. These will be just too many people trained to fire a gun straight. In an environment, where with the Americans present, the appointed Afghan governors must keep the local Taliban commanders in good humour to function as governors, this shall be a telling test to keep such an army together. The adversary — yes, the Taliban and not al Qaeda because that is how the US let the subject morph — on the other hand may just claim victory, simply for never having been vanquished, but with a combat gain of having fought world’s best military for ten or more years. And the unfortunate face of post-America Afghanistan begins to take shape.
The only ray of hope for the post-America structure to sustain is to convert the political set-up into a central pivot which should be inclusive with a broad appeal. This may just delay the inevitable. Gained time just might throw up some options. Remember, though, that Karzai holds his present position after a farcical election with a given understanding that he will not re-contest in 2014; the two-term rule. If a Panjsheri by association, like Abdullah Abdullah, or a non-Pashtun becomes the next choice, the possibility of a gruesome end seems greatly more foreboding. It seems ruthless to state but the real endgame in Afghanistan will begin the day after the Americans leave and it won’t be pretty.
Of essence then, a political structure must include all the estranged Taliban. These include Mullah Omar’s Kandahari Pakhtuns; the Hekmatyar group, and the Haqqanis from the adjoining eastern provinces of Afghanistan. It is more likely that the next year and a half might see a rapprochement of sorts between the US and the first two groups. Why the Haqqani group is being left out in the cold is anyone’s guess. If indeed Haqqani was such a force in Afghanistan why did the US show it the benevolence of exempting it from its long-applied drone campaign in North Waziristan? Why does the full might of the US not interdict the Haqqani elements when they are on their way from Pakistani safe havens to Kabul and back; a long enough geographical distance. An incessant pressure on Pakistan to initiate a third front by neutralising the Haqqani group continues unabated. The difficulty is that such a war does not lend itself to easy conclusions. At least it won’t for Pakistan, even after the Americans have left. With the group numbers hovering around 20,000 it will remain a potent force of estranged Taliban if not woven into the reconciliation mosaic. That remains the only sensible option; else killing even 10,000 will mean an equal number still on the outside, ready to challenge the political make-up in Afghanistan floundering any hopes for stability in Afghanistan and in the region.
Is Pakistan being diabolic by suggesting a different approach? The Pakistani armed forces may still have the capacity to fight another operation but this hapless nation doesn’t. For a tanked-out economy, a fractured society and a fractious polity, such an operation may just prove the last straw.
Many real challenges for both Afghanistan and Pakistan lie ahead. Getting stuck in the Haqqani groove should not be one of them.
Rumana Hussain recently had a chance to spend the month of Ramazan, and also Eid, in Shanghai. Although not very noticeable, there are approximately 60,000 Muslims living in Shanghai, a city of over twenty million. There was a speedy increase in the Muslim population of this city after the Opium War in 1840, after which Shanghai was forced to open up for foreign trade. Islam was first introduced in China in its earliest days through Arab and Central Asian traders. The Chinese Emperor at the time, Yong Hui, who otherwise had no interest in adopting foreign ideas and beliefs, out of respect for the first Muslim mission to China, ordered the building of a mosque in Canton City (Guangzhou). The Memorial Mosque, first built in the seventh century, was entirely rebuilt in 1350 AD, and rebuilt again in 1695 under Emperor Kangzi of the Qing dynasty, after being destroyed in a fire. It is also known as the Great Mosque of Guangzhou. The mosque complex covers an area of about 3,000 square meters and stretches along the north-south axis, in the Chinese fashion. Like its contemporaries at Quanzhou, Hangzhou and Yangzhou, the Great Mosque of Guangzhou is notable for its integration of the local Han building tradition with imported Arab styles
From official estimates of about 200 million religious believers in the country today, 11per cent are said to be Muslims. Within this, the largest community is the 9.8 million Hui Muslims, followed by 8.4 million Uyghurs living in the West of the country. Other Muslim groups include the Dongxiang, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Tatar, Tajik, Uzbek, Salar and Bao’an. The majority of Chinese Muslims are descendents of Iranian, Turkish or Arabian parents who married in China and adopted many Han Chinese customs.
There are about a dozen mosques in Shanghai. The oldest mosque is the Songjiang Mosque, built during the Yuan dynasty (1341-1868). Every Friday, about 35 to 40 stalls are lined up on both sides of the street near the Huxi Mosque. This is perhaps the biggest Muslim food bazaar in the city offering halal foods, and is visited by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. You will see woks of rice, lamb cooked in a variety of ways (lamb kababs, lamb on skewers, lamb broth…), naan in different tastes, shapes and sizes, pulao, beef dumplings, noodles, grilled mutton chops, shashlik and chicken, spices, fresh and dry fruit, also mehndi and kajal from Pakistan!
There are several Uyghur Muslim restaurants in the city serving Xinjiang food. They range from small places with no special ambience to large, crowded restaurants where the dishes served, the music played, and the wall murals are all characteristic of Central Asia. A restaurant called Xibo, serving Xinjiang food, is perhaps the only one of its kind in Shanghai which has a chic and contemporary interior. Muslim eating places in the city remain open all day during Ramazan. An ‘Assalamo Alaikum’ to the owner or Muslim bearers will ensure a big friendly smile and good service.
Beards are not exclusive to the Muslims in China. Very few Chinese men grow beards and/or moustaches. This is perhaps a result of growing western influence as, according to ancient Confucian custom, the Chinese were not supposed to cut their hair or shave their beard in conformity with filial piety. However, many Chinese Muslim men cover their heads with caps, and women with scarves. In most other ways, however, the Chinese Muslims are quite ‘Sinicised’ and have integrated with the Han majority.
Dawood C. M. Ting wrote in ‘Islamic Culture in China’ regarding the adoption of Chinese surnames by Chinese Muslims: “Many Muslims whose names started with the letter M took the surname Ma, partly because Muslims loved horses and the character Ma stands for horses. There is a common saying, ‘Nine Ma in ten Muslims.’ The Chinese surnames Mo, Mai, and Mu have been adopted by Muslims whose names were Mohammad, Mustafa, Murad, Masood. Many Muslims who found no existing common Chinese surname sounding like their names simply used the Chinese character sounding closest to their name, for example, Ta for Dawood and Tahir; Ha for Hasan; Ho for Husain; Ting for Jalaluddin or Shamsuddin…” When in China, do as the Chinese do! http://www.dawn.com/2011/09/25/shanghai-muslims-skewers-and-surnames.html
Throughout the history of Islam in China, Chinese Muslims have influenced the course of Chinese history. Chinese Muslims have been in China for the last 1400 years of continuous interaction with Chinese society. Muslims live in every ...
Mr Modi is a polarising figure, Is India's most controversial and divisive politician emerging as a prime ministerial candidate? Supporters of Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat, believe so. For evidence, they point to his much-hyped three-day, tax-payer-funded hunger strike in an air-conditioned hall for social and religious harmony over the weekend, which ends on Monday. The fast, they believe, enabled him to reach out to the Muslim minority, who bore the brunt of widespread religious riots in the state - following the torching of a passenger train carrying Hindu pilgrims in 2002.
Mr Modi is getting other backers as well. The latest US Congressional Research Service report on India says he is one the likeliest candidates for prime ministership in his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). (The US, by the way denied Mr Modi a visa under a law barring entry for foreign government officials found to be complicit in severe violations of religious freedom.)
No politician in India draws such extreme reactions as Mr Modi does.
His supporters have much to crow about. Under Mr Modi's stewardship, Gujarat has been enjoying double-digit growth in recent years. Helped by good connectivity, regular electricity, efficient ports and a laissez faire bureaucracy, its humming factories churn out 16% of India's industrial production, and 22% of its exports. Even farm growth is touching double digits. Mr Modi is a man of grandiose ambitions - he plans to set up India's biggest solar energy park and build the world's tallest statue and make Gujarat a hub of international finance. Suitably impressed, The Economist magazine recently called Gujarat 'India's Guangdong', going on to declare that its manufacturing-driven, jobs-intensive economy could be a "vision of India's future".
'Partisan'
Mr Modi's critics insist that he did not do enough to bring the riots under control in 2002. More than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed in the violence, which remains a blot on the chief minister's record. His opponents say he indirectly egged on Hindu mobs who were believed to have led most of the attacks. He denies this. In April, a senior police officer in a sworn statement to the Supreme Court alleged that Mr Modi deliberately allowed the rioting. There have been reports that official records relating to the riots were destroyed "in line with regulations". In 2008, responding to allegations that Mr Modi's government was doing little to bring those responsible to justice, the Supreme Court set up a panel to investigate the riots. Opponents point out that Mr Modi has never apologised for the riots.
But, as commentator Swapan Dasgupta writes, "the more he is vilified and painted as the blood-sucking inheritors of Dracula's mantle, the more he seems to grow from strength to strength". Mr Modi's majoritarian politics and efficient administration, many say, has definitely helped him win two elections on the trot, and he looks a clear favourite to win next year's state polls as well. A win would make him Gujarat's longest running chief minister, with 12 uninterrupted years in power.
But will that be enough to catapult Mr Modi to the national stage, and make him a promising prime ministerial candidate for BJP? Especially when his party is struggling to throw up a credible, nationally accepted leader?
The 60-year-old Mr Modi is still not kosher for most political parties. He still does not appeal to the moderates and Muslims. The emerging Indian middle class may love him for his no-nonsense efficiency, but their votes alone can never win him an election.
In trying to rebrand himself as a formidable national leader and trying to get an image makeover, Mr Modi, many analysts believe, is walking a tightrope. An adverse judicial judgement on his government's role during the riots could irreparably damage his national political ambitions.
Many believe, Mr Modi has shown good political timing in projecting himself at a time when his party needs a national leader. But he has also betrayed a limited political imagination, they say, by going on a copycat hunger strike during a time when India may be already tiring of fasts as an instrument of coercion and political statement.
We take pleasure in introducing you to the Defence Journal. Published monthly from Karachi, the Defence Journal benefits from a long and distinguished pedigree. It has been in continuous operation since the past 27 years and after its acquisition by the Pathfinder group in 1997, its circulation has grown to over 16000 copies per month due to a higher profile and hard-hitting editorials. The Defence Journal has a regular readership in excess of 80,000 mostly due to the in-depth reporting and keenful insight offered by its panel of reporters, journalists,columnists and experts on defence and related issues. The editorial is mostly dedicated to national defence and political scenarios as well as an overlook on theinternational arena and its effect on this region in particular. Defence Journal is the only magazine of its own kind being printed in Pakistan. The Defence Journal has carved a niche for itself amongst the armed forces, government officials, the diplomatic as well as the financial circles and not to mentionthe intelligentsia. Also, complimentary copies of the Defence Journal are available in the Executive lounges of all the major five star hotels and PIA carries copies of the Defence Journal onboard its domestic and international flights enabling us to reach even more people both in and as well as outside of Pakistan. The Defence Journal has also had the distinction of being the Official Supporting Publication of the Defence Expo, IDEAS 2000 and IDEAS 2002 IDEAS 2004. We believe that a strong print medium like the Defence Journal can effectively cater to the needs of advertisers by reaching and influencing a large number of readers. Our readership profile indicates that our readers tend to be very loyal to the magazine and place a great amount of trust in our publication. Potential advertisers can easily capitalize on this goodwill by entering into a contract with us as per the enclosed schedule and tariffs.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is striving for recognition of a fully-fledged Palestinian state at the United Nations against fierce opposition from Israel and the United States. (Reuters).
Here are some of the reasons behind the push as well as some of the possible consequences.
WHY DO THE PALESTINIANS WANT TO GO TO THE UNITED NATIONS?
Abbas says 20 years of U.S.-led peace talks have got nowhere and wants a vote in the United Nations to bestow the Palestinians with the cherished mantle of statehood. However, he recognizes that negotiations with Israel will still be needed to establish a properly functioning state.
Justifying the move, the Palestinians point to the success of a Western-backed, two-year plan to build institutions ready for statehood which they say is now finished.
THE PALESTINIANS WANT RECOGNITION ON 1967 LINES. WHY?
The Palestinian Authority (PA) says placing their state firmly in the context of territory seized by Israel in the 1967 war will provide clear terms of reference and mean Israel will no longer be able to call the land "disputed." Instead, it will make clear it is occupied. Israel fears this will enable Palestinians to start legal proceedings in the International Criminal Court (ICC) against some 500,000 Israelis who live in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
HOW DOES THE U.N. ADMIT NEW MEMBER STATES?
Countries seeking to join the United Nations usually present an application to the U.N. secretary-general, who passes it to the Security Council to assess and vote on. If the 15-nation council approves the membership request, it is passed to the General Assembly for approval. A membership request needs a two-thirds majority, or 129 votes, for approval.
A country cannot join the United Nations unless both the Security Council and General Assembly approve its application.
COULD THE PALESTINIANS JOIN THE U.N.?
In theory, yes. But Washington has made clear it would veto such a request, meaning it has no chance of success. Even if the Palestinians secured a two-thirds majority of votes in the General Assembly, there is no getting around the need for prior approval of the Security Council.
IS "NON-MEMBER STATE" STATUS AN OPTION?
In addition to applying to become a full U.N. member state, the Palestinians could also seek upgraded observer status as a non-member state. That is what the Vatican has. Such status, U.N. envoys say, could be interpreted as implicit U.N. recognition of Palestinian statehood because the assembly would be acknowledging that the Palestinians control an actual state.
The advantage of this option is that it would require only a simple majority of the 193-nation General Assembly, not a two-thirds majority. Abbas said on Friday that more than 126 states already recognize the state of Palestine, meaning he could probably win such a vote with ease.
WHAT WOULD BE THE ADVANTAGE OF THAT?
Besides granting them the all-important title "state," diplomats say it might enable the Palestinians to join the ICC, from which it could pursue legal cases against Israel over the partial blockade of Gaza or the settlements.
ARE THERE ANY DISADVANTAGES FOR THE PALESTINIANS?
There are potential pitfalls. For example, Israel could counter sue the Palestinians in the ICC over missiles fired at it out of Gaza, which is run by the Hamas Islamist group.
Some critics have warned of legal consequences for the Palestinians themselves, arguing the move could jeopardize the rights of refugees in the Palestinian diaspora and the status of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Others have dismissed those arguments.
Also, the U.N. vote will not change things on the ground in the Palestinian territories -- a reality which could further undermine the standing of the Palestinian leadership when the dust settles. Some Israelis have warned disappointment could fuel anti-Israeli violence and even spark a new Intifada. PA officials have dismissed that prospect.
COULD ISRAEL OR WASHINGTON EXACT PUNISHMENT ON THE PA?
Israeli officials have suggested a range of possible measures, including limiting travel privileges for Palestinian leaders seeking to exit the West Bank, halting the transfer of crucial tax revenues to the Palestinians and even annexing West Bank settlement blocs to try to sidestep ICC legal action. Some U.S. officials have warned that they might cut their annual aid to the Palestinian Authority, which runs to some $450 million. It is far from clear if they will enact these threats. Depriving the PA of funds, for example, would rapidly push it to financial collapse, which would provoke instability. In the case of bankruptcy, some leading Palestinians argue that the PA should hand over the keys of the big West Bank cities to Israel and tell it to pay for the on-going occupation.
Another 'Symbolic Victory': Abbas' New Political Gambit
By Ramzy Baroud – Arab News
When Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas decided to go to the United Nations to request the admission of Palestine as a full member, he appeared to have had an epiphany. Had he finally realized that for the past two decades he and his party, Fatah, have gone down a road to nowhere?
That Israel was only interested in him as a conduit to achieve its colonial endeavor in the remaining 22 percent of historical Palestine? That his national project — predicated on the ever elusive “peace process” — achieved neither peace nor justice?
Abbas claims to be serious this time. Despite all US attempts at intimidation (for example, by threatening to withhold funds), and despite the intensifying of Israeli tactics (including the further arming of illegal Jewish settlers to combat possible Palestinian mobilization in the West Bank), Abbas simply could not be persuaded against seeking a UN membership this September.
“We are going to the Security Council. We need to have full membership in the United Nations... we need a state, and we need a seat at the UN,” Abbas told Palestinians in a televised speech on Sept. 16.
For months, Palestinian intellectuals, historians, legal experts and academicians have warned against Abbas’s haphazard, understudied move. Some have argued that if Abbas’ UN adventure is a tactical maneuver, its legal repercussions are too grave a price to pay for little or no returns. If “Palestine” replaces the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) — currently recognized by the UN as the sole representative of the Palestinian people — then Palestinians risk losing the only unifying body they all have in common (its replacement representing only two million Palestinians in the occupied West Bank).
“Most damaging is that this initiative changes our ability as a people to represent the totality of our inalienable rights,” said Abdel Razzaq Takriti, activist and political historian at Oxford University (according to Ma’an news agency, Sept. 3). “The simple act of replacing the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people with a state removes the claims of the PLO to sovereign status as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.”
The PLO, which for decades served as a bulwark of the Palestinian national struggle, continues to exist today, but only in theory. The PA, which was founded in 1994 as a temporary authority to oversee a Palestinian transition to statehood has slowly but decidedly hijacked and undercut PLO institutions.
More, the PA itself has neither legitimacy nor credibility. Whatever remained of the latter was lost during the Israeli war on Gaza and the publishing of the Palestine Papers by Al Jazeera and the Guardian. The papers showed that the very individuals now championing a Palestinian statehood bid at the UN once regularly collaborated with Israel to crack down on Palestinian resistance. They helped Israel undermine Palestinian democracy, isolate democratically-elected Hamas, give away the refugees’ right of return, and worse, deprive Palestinians from any meaningful sovereignty in occupied East Jerusalem.
As for its lack of legitimacy, the matter requires no leaked documents. In fact, Fatah’s refusal to concede to 2006 election results led to the circumstances that exasperated a civil war in Gaza. Gaza’s besiegement (a direct consequence of the elections and the civil war) continues to serve both Israel and the PA equally. The latter is functioning in the West Bank with no popular mandate, Another 'Symbolic Victory': Abbas' New Political Gambit
surviving on international handouts and “security coordination” with the Israeli Army. Even Abbas’s term as a president of the PA has expired.
All of this summons an urgent question: How can an authority that lacks the legal legitimacy as a representative of the Palestinian people take on a role that could change the course of the entire Palestinian national project?
A leaked legal opinion by Oxford University law professor Guy Goodwin-Gill warned of the legal consequences of Abbas’ bid, including the sidelining of the PLO. Goodwin-Gill intended to “flag the matters requiring attention, if a substantial proportion of the people are not to be accidentally disenfranchised.” An equally worrisome issue is the PA’s history of acting in ways that contradict the interests of the Palestinian people. Years of such experience left most Palestinians with significantly less land and greatly reduced rights. On the other hand, a small segment of the Palestinian population prospered. Evidently, the “new rich” of Palestine were all affiliated with the PA, Fatah and the very few on top.
This iniquitous situation would have easily continued were it not for the so-called Arab Spring, which began demolishing the status quo governing Arab countries. Abbas’ corrupt regime was also a member of the ailing Arab political apparatus. Its existence, like others, was propped by American or other Western support. In order to avoid brewing anger in Palestine and the region, the Palestinian leadership was forced to present itself as breaking away from the old paradigm
More, the “the PA feels abandoned by the US which assigned it the role of collaborator with the Israeli occupation, and feels frozen in a “peace process” that does not seek an end goal,” according to Joseph Massad in Al Jazeera. “PA politicians opted for the UN vote to force the hand of the Americans and the Israelis, in the hope that a positive vote will grant the PA more political power and leverage to maximize its domination of the West Bank.”
The reasons behind the PA bid for statehood range between tactical politics (involving Israel and the US) and diverting attention from the PA’s own failures. The elitist politics almost complete discount the Palestinian people. If Palestinians truly mattered to Abbas, he would have started by unifying Palestinian factions, reenergizing (as opposed to stifling) civil society, and setting in motion the process needed to reform the PLO (as opposed to destroying its hard-earned international legitimacy).
“It is evident that Palestine needs newly elected leadership through an inclusive democratic process encompassing all Palestinians, not just those in the West Bank and Gaza Strip,” wrote leading Palestinian historian Salman Abu Sitta in the Middle East Monitor (July 10, 2011). This, in fact, should be the task at hand, not wasting time and energy pursing political gambits, which, at best will only yield symbolic victories.
Indeed, the Palestinian people are fed up with symbolic victories. They may have guaranteed Abbas and his men all the trappings of power, but they have failed to reclaim even one inch of occupied Palestine.
- Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story (Pluto Press, London), available on Amazon.com.
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Statehood versus 'facts on the ground'
If Israel really wants to make peace with Palestinians, why does it reject every Palestinian effort to do so?
By Richard Falk
Even if nothing further were to happen, the proposed Palestinian initiative for statehood, combined with the furious negative responses in Tel Aviv and Washington, has given a much-needed visibility to the ongoing daily ordeal of the Palestinian people, whether living under the rigours of occupation, consigned for decades to miserable refugee camps, or existing in the stressful limbo of exile.
Palestinians are divided as to the wisdom of applying for statehood at the UN [GALLO/GETTY]
The only genuine challenge facing the world community of states and the UN is how to end this ordeal - which has lasted now for 63 years - in a manner that produces a just and sustainable peace. It is the entanglement of geopolitics with this unmet challenge that signifies the moral, legal, and political inadequacy of the contemporary world order.
The Israel-Palestinian conflict, along with the continued presence of nuclear weaponry and the persistence of world poverty, exhibits the failure of international law and morality, as well as of common sense and enlightened realism, to guide the behaviour of leading sovereign states.
In the face of this failure, the frustrations, injustice, and extraordinary suffering experienced by the Palestinian people has come to dominate the moral and political imagination of the world. No issue has generated this level of solidarity among the peoples of the world since the anti-apartheid campaign toppled the racist regime in South Africa more than twenty years ago.
To the surprise of many and the comprehension of few, it is not only Israel that opposes this initiative of the Palestinian Authority (PA). A crucial part of the background is the division among Palestinians as to the wisdom and effects of the statehood initiative at the UN.
Criticism of the bid
Palestinian critics consider the statehood application diversionary and divisive, arguing that it will shrink the dispute to territorial issues, place approximately seven million Palestinian refugees and exile communities in permanent limbo, and allow Israel to treat the outcome of this UN shadow play as the end game in their long effort to transform what was to be a temporary occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank into a condition of permanent, if de facto, annexation.
The question that underlies this debate is whether the diplomatic claim of statehood in this form legitimately represents the Palestinian people in their several dimensions, or merely fulfills, at a price, the ambitions of the PA. In the background is the organisational complexity of the Palestinian community, with the future of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) drawn into question.
Whereas the councils of the PLO include representatives of the Palestinian diaspora, the PA is a political formation intended to address the circumstances of occupation in the post-Oslo period, and has as its primary goal the promotion of the withdrawal of Israeli occupying forces. To carry out this mission it has been seeking with some success (achieving favourable progress reports from the World Bank and IMF) to demonstrate that it possesses the institutional capabilities needed for stable governance, including maintaining security and preventing anti-Israeli activism.
How this sense of political priorities relates to the claims of refugees confined in camps in neighbouring Arab countries, as well as the several million Palestinians living around the world, seems to be the deepest issue dividing the Palestinian people as a whole. A closely related concern, but one that is more widely appreciated, is the refusal of Hamas to lend support to this initiative, despite the fanfare surrounding the unity agreement brokered by Egypt in early June.
What Palestinian opponents of the statehood bid most fear is that the issue of representation will be wrongly resolved from their perspective. This issue of representation lies at the political core of the internal Palestinian struggle to achieve their rights under international law, above all to define the Palestinian "self" that is entitled to self-determination.
There are worries among Palestinians living outside of the occupied territories that the statehood bid, whatever its outcome, will have an adverse spillover effect on the still-unresolved representation issue. In addressing this concern, the non-participation of Hamas in this kind of Palestinian diplomacy cannot be ignored, nor can Hamas be dismissed due to its alleged refusal to accept an Israel that lies within its 1967 borders.
It should be appreciated, without necessarily being accepted as reliable, that Hamas leaders have periodically indicated a willingness to sign onto a long-term coexistence agreement of up to 50 years if Israel withdraws completely to the Green Line that was treated as Israel's border until the 1967 War.
Such an agreement is highly unlikely to overcome genuine Israeli anxieties or correspond to Israeli perceptions of Hamas and its intentions; furthermore, its implementation would thwart Israel's territorial ambitions by requiring the dismantlement of the settlements. At the same time, the realisation that what has been tried has not worked suggests that this admittedly imperfect alternative to negotiations in the search for a sustainable peace should not be unconditionally rejected.
Doesn't Israel want peace?
Against such a background, how can we explain the furious Israeli and US opposition to this Palestinian initiative? Should not Israel and the United States welcome, even encourage, this PA initiative as a way of reducing the conflict to its land-for-peace dimensions, maybe getting rid of the right of return issue once and for all?
Joseph Massad has perceptively analysed the statehood bid as presenting Israel with a win/win situation. Even so, the intensive US efforts to thwart the bid by vetoing or getting a majority to vote against it in the Security Council is easy to understand.
On any question that comes before the UN in which Israeli policy is seriously questioned or its behaviour is subject to criticism, the United States leaps to Israel's defense, regardless of the merits, whenever necessary using its veto power in the Security Council. This has been true during the Obama presidency on UN efforts to censure unlawful settlement expansion, to carry forward the accountability recommendations of the Goldstone Report, or to allow civil society to break the unlawful blockade that has entrapped the people of Gaza for more than four years.
Casting a veto here or working behind the scenes to cobble together a majority, as the respected international law expert Balakrishnan Rajagopal has noted in a recent column in the Huffington Post, is both politically imprudent and unmindful of UN members' responsibility to uphold the legal rights of every political community to enjoy the privileges of statehood if it qualifies as a state.
It is a tribute to the UN that the most important of these privileges is now access to the United Nations system with the status of a sovereign state. It should be observed that another highly-regarded international jurist, John Quigley, in a scholarly book published by Cambridge University Press two years ago, argued that Palestine was already a state from the perspective of international law, and had been so recognised by well over 100 governments.
This diplomatic crusade to block Palestinian statehood also undermines confidence in US claims to serve as a world leader promoting the global public good. This primacy of hard-power geopolitics will raise serious questions about the capacity of the UN to serve as a vehicle for the realisation of global justice and to uphold the basic rights of peoples.
'We the hegemon'
Need we be reminded once again that the inspiring opening words of the UN Charter, "we the peoples", has always given way to "we the governments"? More starkly since the end of the Cold War, as this controversy sadly highlights, it has been replaced by "we the hegemon".
We should by now understand that the United States government does whatever Israel wants it to do, but why does Israel seem to mind so much if the Palestinian initiative were to succeed? After all, even the Netanyahu leadership claims it supports Palestinian statehood and the two-state solution.
And if the Palestinian critics of the PA are even partially correct, would not the further territorialisation of the conflict and its narrowing of the negotiating agenda serve Israeli interests?
Some believe the Israeli government is stalling negotiations so that they can create irreversible 'facts on the ground' [GALLO/GETTY]
This interpretation seems reinforced by Mahmoud Abbas' reassurances that PA security forces will prevent any Palestinian violence targeting Israelis, that the path to direct negotiations is more open than ever, and that this initiative in no way is meant to challenge the legitimacy of the Israeli state. Since the events of the Arab Spring, Israel has shown almost no capacity to act in support of its real interests in the region, as exemplified by its botched relations with Turkey and Egypt, and perhaps this response at the UN is just one more illustration. Such an explanation cannot be ruled out, but there are more sinister interpretations that seem more plausible given Israel's overall pattern of behaviour.
By insisting that only "direct negotiations" can produce statehood Israel is providing itself with a gold-plated pretext for refusing to negotiate at all for years to come. Netanyahu almost comically suggested that the delay could last 60 years. And for what reason? Another line of explanation gives the settler leadership its own veto power, and it has already vowed to carry out provocative "sovereignty marches" into the West Bank during the UN discussions.
In this conflict, time has never been static, or neutral. Each extra day of occupation, refugee status and involuntary exile, in effect, lengthens a prison sentence imposed on the entirety of the Palestinian people. This is bad enough, but, in addition, Israel has taken consistent advantage of the passage of time to expand its unlawful settlements, alter the demographics of East Jerusalem in its favour, build a separation wall found to be a violation of international law by a vote of 14 to 1 in the World Court, and to isolate Gaza from the rest of the Palestinian territories and the world.
'Creating facts on the ground'
During the Oslo peace process that gave rise to the mantra of direct negotiations or nothing, Israel has more than doubled the settlement population, and steadfastly refuses to impose even a temporary freeze on expansion in the West Bank during negotiations, and has never been willing even to consider a freeze on settlement construction in East Jerusalem.
Israeli leaders talk openly, even boast, about "creating facts on the ground", more discreetly referred to by Hillary Clinton as "subsequent developments", and more realistically understood as the ratification of massive illegality. Such a political posture exposes the lie beneath an Israeli claim of a commitment to "direct negotiations" as a path to peace. Direct negotiations for almost 20 years have brought the parties no closer to peace, and arguably have had as their main effect the undermining of the conditions for a sustainable two-state solution.
What direct negotiations have done is to buy time for Israel's unacknowledged ambitions and to calm international criticisms of this prolonged and cruel occupation.
Unfortunately, however the diplomatic confrontation unfolds, little is likely to be resolved. The charade of direct negotiations remains on the table. Parties on all sides ignore the revelations of the Palestine Papers, published a few months ago by Al Jazeera English, that showed beyond reasonable doubt that even the supposedly more moderate Olmert government of Israel seemed totally disinterested in a resolution of the conflict, even in the face of repeated PA concessions on fundamental issues made in confidential backroom talks at the highest levels.
Add to this the mockery of fairness that arises from allowing the United States to play the role of intermediary, the "honest broker" in such negotiations. Imagine trying to settle a marriage breakup by asking the elder brother of the wealthy husband to arbitrate a fight over assets with his penniless wife. How could such a framework ever hope to achieve peace that is just and sustainable? And what seems deeply flawed in theory has been shown to be even worse in practice. The parties are further from peace than ever: Palestinian rights and expectations have been continuously shrunk as time passes, and the occupation helps to consolidate a permanent Israeli presence.
Gallows humour
In the end, these questions of tactics and principle bearing on the right of self-determination need to be resolved by the Palestinian people.
Neither Israel, the United States, nor even the United Nations can displace this fundamental Palestinian responsibility for selecting a road that they believe will lead to peace with justice. But it is a display of gallows humour to expect most Palestinians to look with favour at the resumption of peace talks under the framework that has been used since the Oslo framework was agreed upon in 1993.
It has repeatedly demonstrated the futility of direct negotiations, especially given the continuing refusal of Israel to make even the most minimal gestures of real commitment, such as suspending settlement expansion indefinitely and dropping their deal-breaking insistence on being confirmed as "a Jewish state", a claim that flies in the face of the presence in Israel of a Palestinian minority numbering more than 1.5 million.
If Israel is to retain its claim to be a democratic state, it must not insist on such an exclusivist formal identity. There is no way for claims of ethnic or religious exclusivity to be reconciled with the legal, moral, and political promise of human rights that have become the main signifiers of legitimate government at this time in history.
Richard Falk is Albert G Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Research Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has authored and edited numerous publications spanning a period of five decades. His most recent book is Achieving Human Rights (2009).
He is currently serving his fourth year of a six-year term as a United Nations special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
UN recognition of 'Palestine' is: a) The Greatest! b) The Worst! or c) Meh!
Editorials and opinion pieces span the gamut of views on the Palestinian Authority's United Nations statehood bid.
Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas is pressing forward with plans to ask the United Nations to recognize "Palestine" as an independent state this week, leading to a diplomatic flurry in New York the likes of which are rarely seen.President Obama has promised to veto the Palestinian move in the UN Security Council, which will throw the matter to the General Assembly, which is likely to grant the PA enhanced standing there, though isn't able to deliver the full recognition that Mr. Abbas says he craves.
Israeli officials have descended on New York in a last ditch attempt to head off the vote.
Knesset Member Danny Danon, who belongs to the Likud party, is there, urging US politicians to support his desire that Israel annex the West Bank and push its Palestinian population centers onto Jordan (with Gaza to be given to Egypt in his plan), and Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry is scheduled to appear with Mr. Danon later today. Fox News reports that Governor Perry's speech is expected to include the following lines: "We are indignant that certain Middle Eastern leaders have discarded the principle of direction negotiations between the sovereign nation of Israel and the Palestinian leadership. And we are equally indignant that the Obama administration's Middle East policy of appeasement has encouraged such an ominous act of bad faith."
In fact, Abbas doesn't feel appeased at all. His aides say he feels backed into a corner by continued Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank and the failure of the US in the past 18 years since the Oslo Accords were signed to prevent the inexorable march of new facts on the ground.
Ahead of this weeks fireworks, here is some recent opinion on what's going on.
Avi Shlaim, a University of Oxford scholar of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict argues in a roundup of opinion at Al Jazeera that recognition may be the best way forward for establishing a Palestinian state.
"The bid for statehood is not changing anything on the ground, but in the international arena. It will change the terms of the debate and tilt the balance of power internationally against Israel and in favor of Palestinians. It is mainly a symbolic act. It will change the dynamic in a very symbolic way," he says. "Why are Israel and the US so hysterical about the UN bid if it doesn’t make a difference? They are hysterical about it because until now, for the past 20 years, they have had everything their way. There was the American-sponsored peace process, which was leading nowhere slowly, and Israel was carrying on with its expansionist agenda and pretending to be involved in a peace process. Now this has ended."
Gershon Baskin, writing in the Jerusalem Post, largely agrees that this could be a positive step and says Israel, if it responds well, has little to fear.
"The Palestinians are going to the United Nations because they have lost faith (just as Israel has) in the ability to create their state and reach independence through negotiations with Israel without clear terms of reference for an agreement," Mr. Baskin writes. "The Palestinians are going to the UN because they have learned from Israel’s own experience. Israel’s birth certificate was issued in the United Nations (just as the same resolution issued the Palestinian’s certificate of birth). In May 1948 David Ben Gurion unilaterally declared independence. This was an act of defiance not only against the Arab states that rejected it militarily, but also against many friendly states, including the United States which advised against it... They are going to the United Nations in order to preserve what might be the very last chance to have a two states for two peoples solution to this conflict."
The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, meanwhile, presented likely General Assembly approval (the Obama administration has promised to veto the bid in the Security Council) in apocalyptic terms and urged the US to close the Palestinian representative office in Washington and defund the United Nation's in response.
"A vote at the UN won't create a Palestinian state and will likely retard the creation of one, perhaps for years. It won't remove any Israeli settlements from the West Bank and might well give Jerusalem reason to accelerate the pace of construction. It could also lead Israel to take various punitive measures against the Palestinians, including freezing tax transfers worth about $100 million a month. The US Congress might follow by cutting off the $600 million in annual aid to the Palestinians," the Journal said. "What Palestinians seek out of a U.N. vote isn't an affirmation of their right to a state, but rather another tool in their perpetual campaign to harass, delegitimize and ultimately destroy Israel. "We are going to complain that as Palestinians we have been under occupation for 63 years," (Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud) Abbas said the other day. That's another way of saying that the "occupation," in Mr. Abbas's view, began with the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, and not with Israel's takeover of the West Bank and Gaza after a war that threatened Israel's existence in 1967."
Ali Abunimah, a pro-Palestinian activist and author, sees the UN vote as a dangerous and distracting waste of time.
"Most discussions of the UN bid pit Israel and the United States on one side, fiercely opposing it, and Palestinian officials and allied governments on the other. But this simplistic portrayal ignores the fact that among the Palestinian people themselves there is precious little support for the effort," he writes. "The opposition, and there is a great deal of it, stems from three main sources: the vague bid could lead to unintended consequences; pursuing statehood above all else endangers equality and refugee rights; and there is no democratic mandate for the Palestinian Authority to act on behalf of Palestinians or to gamble with their rights and future."
Most Palestinians wonder what would actually change 'on the ground' if the UN grants Palestine statehood.
By Lori A. Allen
Palestinians differ about whether the bid for statehood will change the situation 'on the ground'
For the past few weeks, a world of analysts and academics has been fretting and strutting hypotheses about the PLO's state-declaring endeavors at the UN. Across the pages of esteemed broadsheets, verbally diarrhetic blogs, and well-crafted op-ed sites, they bandy questions about the political and legal fall-out of this manoeuvre.
Will it be a declaration of a "state"? Or something that may quack and waddle like a state but doesn't have quite enough feathers to fly like a state?
With its focus on the 1967 borders, has the Palestinian Authority (PA) finally fully succumbed to the revocation of refugee rights and reparation? Will the US veto the proposal for Palestinians' full UN membership on the grounds that it is "counterproductive", revealing, yet again, that they are not an "honest broker"? Can their credibility in the Middle East dwindle yet further?
Some of these ponderous queries have been resolved with the September 16 speech by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who said, "we are going to the United Nations to request our legitimate right, obtaining full membership for Palestine in this organisation". And now the rightness or wrongness of that decision has sparked a new round of words, both of support and condemnation.
Over teas, araks, and social networking sites, regular people are also debating the proposal. It seems to me that their critiques articulate more precisely the fundamental issues of representative government and the real meaning of statehood. Two questions are especially important:
Question one
What gives the PA or the PLO the right to bid for UN membership for a state led by those who do not have the mandate of the majority of the people?
"I've never voted in an election for Mahmoud Abbas. Who says he represents me?"
"I've never voted in an election for Mahmoud Abbas. Who says he represents me?" a busy working mom from a Beirut refugee camp said to me yesterday. "If I'd voted for him, I'd have to respect his decisions. But I've never voted in any election."
Palestinian refugees outside the occupied Palestinian territory, who are disenfranchised in every sense of the word, have never had the chance to choose their representatives. Neither in their host countries, nor in their historic homeland of Palestine. Not in Lebanon, not in Jordan. Not in Syria, where Palestinian refugees "have the same duties and responsibilities as Syrian citizens other than nationality and political rights."
Question two
What kind of state is bidding for this UN membership?
Many Palestinians in the West Bank are also dismissive of the UN bid. With some well-placed scare quotes, a friend from Ramallah expressed his sarcastic disdain over Facebook: "What do we need from a 'State' as we have a 'president' and 'security forces' and 'cabinet(s)'. So, we have everything." A smiley-face, and then a frowny-face emoticon followed, in case I did not grasp his full pess-optimist, satirical meaning.
But I think I did. In the West Bank he lives with a PA "president" whose legal mandate within the confines of the occupied Palestinian territory ran out in January 2009, (or January 2010, by some accounts). My Facebook friend lives in a place where "security forces" might be better labelled "insecurity forces".
They have become the object of fear, leading many to watch what they say in public, or adopt a suspicious silence once common in places like the German Democratic Republic or today's Syria. As a West Bank university professor described the situation to me, state-building in Palestine is being undertaken in a way that focuses on "the power part of the state but not the state. Building the regime not the citizens." And the "cabinet(s)" of the West Bank and Gaza Strip are led by rival parties, severely hampering their oversight powers.
Is this the state most Palestinians want or deserve?
There are also many Palestinians who have supported and celebrated the demand for full UN membership. It is important symbolically to have their rights to sovereignty recognised internationally. And it could be important practically if they were allowed to bring cases directly to the International Criminal Court. But regardless of the outcome of the UN vote on September 23, most Palestinians will remain under occupation in the West Bank, under occupation and full siege in the Gaza Strip, marginalised in refugee camps across the Arab world, and in ghettos in Israel as well as Europe.
Even if the UN votes for statehood, many Palestinians believe that Israel will still control the occupied territories
Small but real answers
While all the official analysts and intellectuals comment on the mysterious motives and obscure strategies of official politicians, some other Palestinians are trying to build a state in other, less remarked upon ways. And unlike the Palestinian leadership, they have some kind of long-term strategy, still vague though it may be.
"Yes, we want a state, but it has to be the right state that fits our people."
Young woman from a Beirut refugee camp
"Yes, we want a state, but it has to be the right state that fits our people," a young woman from that same Beirut refugee camp explained to me. And a first step to ensuring a state that fits, that means something for all Palestinians, is ensuring that Palestinians know who they are, what they stand for, and that all Palestinians count. This young woman sees her work with an oral history project as being a fundamental element of state-building. Gathering the stories of old people and protecting the heritage of Palestinians is a means to preserving their identity as a people, and their right to all of historic Palestine.
Maybe a state needs a united nation before they can make use of the United Nations.
My Facebook friend in the West Bank has also been working for a state. In cooperation with Palestinians dispersed throughout the region, they are developing a website that will offer Palestinians a "virtual state" online that presents information on all the villages that used to be Palestine, village names and why they were named thus, even the tools that people used to use in their daily life. The "virtual state" that these grass-roots ethnographers are assembling, unlike the make-believe state that Abbas heads, will be available to Palestinians wherever they have internet.
Projects like these are happening all over. Another is a camp youth center that brings young refugees out of their cantonised isolation to discuss together what democracy and human rights really mean to them - to build their own vision of a state in which they will want to take part.
Of course, none of these state projects offer services, sovereignty or security. But they are attempts to protect a Palestinian identity that includes recognition of all Palestinians.
Lori Allen is Lecturer of Contemporary Middle Eastern Politics and Society in the Deptartment of Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
Suppression of one's own crimes is virtually ubiquitous among powerful states, at least those that are not defeated. Noam Chomsky
We are approaching the 10th anniversary of the horrendous atrocities of September 11, 2001, which, it is commonly held, changed the world. On May 1, the presumed mastermind of the crime, Osama bin Laden, was assassinated in Pakistan by a team of elite US commandos, Navy SEALs, after he was captured, unarmed and undefended, in Operation Geronimo.
A number of analysts have observed that although bin Laden was finally killed, he won some major successes in his war against the US. "He repeatedly asserted that the only way to drive the US from the Muslim world and defeat its satraps was by drawing Americans into a series of small but expensive wars that would ultimately bankrupt them," Eric Margolis writes. "'Bleeding the US,' in his words. The United States, first under George W Bush and then Barack Obama, rushed right into bin Laden’s trap ... Grotesquely overblown military outlays and debt addiction ... may be the most pernicious legacy of the man who thought he could defeat the United States” - particularly when the debt is being cynically exploited by the far right, with the collusion of the Democrat establishment, to undermine what remains of social programs, public education, unions, and, in general, remaining barriers to corporate tyranny.
That Washington was bent on fulfilling bin Laden’s fervent wishes was evident at once. As discussed in my book 9-11, written shortly after those attacks occurred, anyone with knowledge of the region could recognise “that a massive assault on a Muslim population would be the answer to the prayers of bin Laden and his associates, and would lead the US and its allies into a ‘diabolical trap’, as the French foreign minister put it”.
The senior CIA analyst responsible for tracking Osama bin Laden from 1996, Michael Scheuer, wrote shortly after that “bin Laden has been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war on us. [He] is out to drastically alter US and Western policies toward the Islamic world”, and largely succeeded: “US forces and policies are completing the radicalisation of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since the early 1990s. As a result, I think it is fair to conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden’s only indispensable ally.” And arguably remains so, even after his death.
The first 9/11
Was there an alternative? There is every likelihood that the Jihadi movement, much of it highly critical of bin Laden, could have been split and undermined after 9/11. The “crime against humanity”, as it was rightly called, could have been approached as a crime, with an international operation to apprehend the likely suspects. That was recognised at the time, but no such idea was even considered.
In 9-11, I quoted Robert Fisk’s conclusion that the “horrendous crime” of 9/11 was committed with “wickedness and awesome cruelty”, an accurate judgment. It is useful to bear in mind that the crimes could have been even worse. Suppose, for example, that the attack had gone as far as bombing the White House, killing the president, imposing a brutal military dictatorship that killed thousands and tortured tens of thousands while establishing an international terror centre that helped impose similar torture-and-terror states elsewhere and carried out an international assassination campaign; and as an extra fillip, brought in a team of economists - call them “the Kandahar boys” - who quickly drove the economy into one of the worst depressions in its history. That, plainly, would have been a lot worse than 9/11.
Unfortunately, it is not a thought experiment. It happened. The only inaccuracy in this brief account is that the numbers should be multiplied by 25 to yield per capita equivalents, the appropriate measure. I am, of course, referring to what in Latin America is often called “the first 9/11”: September 11, 1973, when the US succeeded in its intensive efforts to overthrow the democratic government of Salvador Allende in Chile with a military coup that placed General Pinochet’s brutal regime in office. The goal, in the words of the Nixon administration, was to kill the “virus” that might encourage all those “foreigners [who] are out to screw us” to take over their own resources and in other ways to pursue an intolerable policy of independent development. In the background was the conclusion of the National Security Council that, if the US could not control Latin America, it could not expect “to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world”.
The first 9/11, unlike the second, did not change the world. It was “nothing of very great consequence”, as Henry Kissinger assured his boss a few days later.
These events of little consequence were not limited to the military coup that destroyed Chilean democracy and set in motion the horror story that followed. The first 9/11 was just one act in a drama which began in 1962, when John F Kennedy shifted the mission of the Latin American military from “hemispheric defense” - an anachronistic holdover from World War II - to “internal security”, a concept with a chilling interpretation in US-dominated Latin American circles.
In the recently published Cambridge University History of the Cold War, Latin American scholar John Coatsworth writes that from that time to “the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of non-violent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites”, including many religious martyrs and mass slaughter as well, always supported or initiated in Washington. The last major violent act was the brutal murder of six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, a few days after the Berlin Wall fell. The perpetrators were an elite Salvadorean battalion, which had already left a shocking trail of blood, fresh from renewed training at the JFK School of Special Warfare, acting on direct orders of the high command of the US client state.
The consequences of this hemispheric plague still, of course, reverberate.
From kidnapping and torture to assassination
All of this, and much more like it, is dismissed as of little consequence, and forgotten. Those whose mission is to rule the world enjoy a more comforting picture, articulated well enough in the current issue of the prestigious (and valuable) journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. The lead article discusses “the visionary international order” of the “second half of the twentieth century” marked by “the universalisation of an American vision of commercial prosperity”. There is something to that account, but it does not quite convey the perception of those at the wrong end of the guns.
The same is true of the assassination of Osama bin Laden, which brings to an end at least a phase in the “war on terror” re-declared by President George W Bush on the second 9/11. Let us turn to a few thoughts on that event and its significance.
On May 1, 2011, Osama bin Laden was killed in his virtually unprotected compound by a raiding mission of 79 Navy SEALs, who entered Pakistan by helicopter. After many lurid stories were provided by the government and withdrawn, official reports made it increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law, beginning with the invasion itself.
There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 79 commandos facing no opposition - except, they report, from his wife, also unarmed, whom they shot in self-defense when she “lunged” at them, according to the White House.
A plausible reconstruction of the events is provided by veteran Middle East correspondent Yochi Dreazen and colleagues in the Atlantic. Dreazen, formerly the military correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, is senior correspondent for the National Journal Group covering military affairs and national security. According to their investigation, White House planning appears not to have considered the option of capturing bin Laden alive: “The administration had made clear to the military's clandestine Joint Special Operations Command that it wanted bin Laden dead, according to a senior US official with knowledge of the discussions. A high-ranking military officer briefed on the assault said the SEALs knew their mission was not to take him alive.”
The authors add: “For many at the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency who had spent nearly a decade hunting bin Laden, killing the militant was a necessary and justified act of vengeance.” Furthermore, “capturing bin Laden alive would have also presented the administration with an array of nettlesome legal and political challenges”. Better, then, to assassinate him, dumping his body into the sea without the autopsy considered essential after a killing - an act that predictably provoked both anger and skepticism in much of the Muslim world.
As the Atlantic inquiry observes, “The decision to kill bin Laden outright was the clearest illustration to date of a little-noticed aspect of the Obama administration's counterterror policy. The Bush administration captured thousands of suspected militants and sent them to detention camps in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay. The Obama administration, by contrast, has focused on eliminating individual terrorists rather than attempting to take them alive.” That is one significant difference between Bush and Obama. The authors quote former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who “told German TV that the US raid was ‘quite clearly a violation of international law’ and that bin Laden should have been detained and put on trial”, contrasting Schmidt with US Attorney General Eric Holder, who “defended the decision to kill bin Laden although he didn't pose an immediate threat to the Navy SEALs, telling a House panel ... that the assault had been ‘lawful, legitimate and appropriate in every way’".
The disposal of the body without autopsy was also criticised by allies. The highly regarded British barrister Geoffrey Robertson, who supported the intervention and opposed the execution largely on pragmatic grounds, nevertheless described Obama’s claim that “justice was done” as an “absurdity” that should have been obvious to a former professor of constitutional law. Pakistan law “requires a colonial inquest on violent death, and international human rights law insists that the ‘right to life’ mandates an inquiry whenever violent death occurs from government or police action. The US is therefore under a duty to hold an inquiry that will satisfy the world as to the true circumstances of this killing.”
Robertson usefully reminds us that:
“[I]t was not always thus. When the time came to consider the fate of men much more steeped in wickedness than Osama bin Laden - the Nazi leadership - the British government wanted them hanged within six hours of capture. President Truman demurred, citing the conclusion of Justice Robert Jackson that summary execution 'would not sit easily on the American conscience or be remembered by our children with pride ... the only course is to determine the innocence or guilt of the accused after a hearing as dispassionate as the times will permit and upon a record that will leave our reasons and motives clear.’”
Eric Margolis comments that “Washington has never made public the evidence of its claim that Osama bin Laden was behind the 9/11 attacks”, presumably one reason why “polls show that fully a third of American respondents believe that the US government and/or Israel were behind 9/11”, while in the Muslim world skepticism is much higher. “An open trial in the US or at the Hague would have exposed these claims to the light of day,” he continues, a practical reason why Washington should have followed the law.
In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects”. In June 2002, FBI head Robert Mueller, in what the Washington Post described as “among his most detailed public comments on the origins of the attacks”, could say only that “investigators believe the idea of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon came from al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan, the actual plotting was done in Germany, and the financing came through the United Arab Emirates from sources in Afghanistan”.
What the FBI believed and thought in June 2002 they didn’t know eight months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know) to permit a trial of bin Laden if they were presented with evidence. Thus, it is not true, as President Obama claimed in his White House statement after bin Laden’s death, that “[w]e quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda”.
There has never been any reason to doubt what the FBI believed in mid-2002, but that leaves us far from the proof of guilt required in civilised societies - and whatever the evidence might be, it does not warrant murdering a suspect who could, it seems, have been easily apprehended and brought to trial. Much the same is true of evidence provided since. Thus, the 9/11 Commission provided extensive circumstantial evidence of bin Laden’s role in 9/11, based primarily on what it had been told about confessions by prisoners in Guantanamo. It is doubtful that much of that would hold up in an independent court, considering the ways confessions were elicited. But in any event, the conclusions of a congressionally authorised investigation, however convincing one finds them, plainly fall short of a sentence by a credible court, which is what shifts the category of the accused from suspect to convicted.
There is much talk of bin Laden's “confession”, but that was a boast, not a confession, with as much credibility as my “confession” that I won the Boston marathon. The boast tells us a lot about his character, but nothing about his responsibility for what he regarded as a great achievement, for which he wanted to take credit.
Again, all of this is, transparently, quite independent of one’s judgments about his responsibility, which seemed clear immediately, even before the FBI inquiry, and still does.
Crimes of aggression
It is worth adding that bin Laden’s responsibility was recognised in much of the Muslim world, and condemned. One significant example is the distinguished Lebanese cleric Sheikh Fadlallah, greatly respected by Hizbollah and Shia groups generally, outside Lebanon as well. He had some experience with assassinations. He had been targeted for assassination: by a truck bomb outside a mosque, in a CIA-organised operation in 1985. He escaped, but 80 others were killed, mostly women and girls as they left the mosque - one of those innumerable crimes that do not enter the annals of terror because of the fallacy of “wrong agency”. Sheikh Fadlallah sharply condemned the 9/11 attacks.
One of the leading specialists on the Jihadi movement, Fawaz Gerges, suggests that the movement might have been split at that time had the US exploited the opportunity instead of mobilising the movement, particularly by the attack on Iraq, a great boon to bin Laden, which led to a sharp increase in terror, as intelligence agencies had anticipated. At the Chilcot hearings investigating the background to the invasion of Iraq, for example, the former head of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency MI5 testified that both British and US intelligence were aware that Saddam posed no serious threat, that the invasion was likely to increase terror, and that the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan had radicalised parts of a generation of Muslims who saw the military actions as an “attack on Islam”. As is often the case, security was not a high priority for state action.
It might be instructive to ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos had landed at George W Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic (after proper burial rites, of course). Uncontroversially, he was not a “suspect” but the “decider” who gave the orders to invade Iraq - that is, to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country and its national heritage, and the murderous sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region. Equally uncontroversially, these crimes vastly exceed anything attributed to bin Laden.
To say that all of this is uncontroversial, as it is, is not to imply that it is not denied. The existence of flat earthers does not change the fact that, uncontroversially, the earth is not flat. Similarly, it is uncontroversial that Stalin and Hitler were responsible for horrendous crimes, though loyalists deny it. All of this should, again, be too obvious for comment, and would be, except in an atmosphere of hysteria so extreme that it blocks rational thought.
Similarly, it is uncontroversial that Bush and associates did commit the “supreme international crime” - the crime of aggression. That crime was defined clearly enough by Justice Robert Jackson, Chief of Counsel for the United States at Nuremberg. An “aggressor,” Jackson proposed to the Tribunal in his opening statement, is a state that is the first to commit such actions as “[i]nvasion of its armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of the territory of another State ...” No one, even the most extreme supporter of the aggression, denies that Bush and associates did just that.
We might also do well to recall Jackson’s eloquent words at Nuremberg on the principle of universality: “If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”
It is also clear that announced intentions are irrelevant, even if they are truly believed. Internal records reveal that Japanese fascists apparently did believe that, by ravaging China, they were labouring to turn it into an “earthly paradise”. And although it may be difficult to imagine, it is conceivable that Bush and company believed they were protecting the world from destruction by Saddam’s nuclear weapons. All irrelevant, though ardent loyalists on all sides may try to convince themselves otherwise.
We are left with two choices: either Bush and associates are guilty of the “supreme international crime” including all the evils that follow, or else we declare that the Nuremberg proceedings were a farce and the allies were guilty of judicial murder.
The imperial mentality and 9/11
A few days before the bin Laden assassination, Orlando Bosch died peacefully in Florida, where he resided along with his accomplice Luis Posada Carriles and many other associates in international terrorism. After he was accused of dozens of terrorist crimes by the FBI, Bosch was granted a presidential pardon by Bush I over the objections of the Justice Department, which found the conclusion “inescapable that it would be prejudicial to the public interest for the United States to provide a safe haven for Bosch”. The coincidence of these deaths at once calls to mind the Bush II doctrine - “already … a de facto rule of international relations”, according to the noted Harvard international relations specialist Graham Allison - which revokes “the sovereignty of states that provide sanctuary to terrorists”.
Allison refers to the pronouncement of Bush II, directed at the Taliban, that “those who harbour terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves”. Such states, therefore, have lost their sovereignty and are fit targets for bombing and terror - for example, the state that harbored Bosch and his associate. When Bush issued this new “de facto rule of international relations”, no one seemed to notice that he was calling for invasion and destruction of the US and the murder of its criminal presidents.
None of this is problematic, of course, if we reject Justice Jackson’s principle of universality, and adopt instead the principle that the US is self-immunised against international law and conventions - as, in fact, the government has frequently made very clear.
It is also worth thinking about the name given to the bin Laden operation: Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound that few seem able to perceive that the White House is glorifying bin Laden by calling him “Geronimo” - the Apache Indian chief who led the courageous resistance to the invaders of Apache lands.
The casual choice of the name is reminiscent of the ease with which we name our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Blackhawk … We might react differently if the Luftwaffe had called its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy”.
The examples mentioned would fall under the category of “American exceptionalism”, were it not for the fact that easy suppression of one’s own crimes is virtually ubiquitous among powerful states, at least those that are not defeated and forced to acknowledge reality.
Perhaps the assassination was perceived by the administration as an “act of vengeance,” as Robertson concludes. And perhaps the rejection of the legal option of a trial reflects a difference between the moral culture of 1945 and today, as he suggests. Whatever the motive was, it could hardly have been security. As in the case of the “supreme international crime” in Iraq, the bin Laden assassination is another illustration of the important fact that security is often not a high priority for state action, contrary to received doctrine.
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. He is the author of numerous bestselling political works, including 9-11: Was There an Alternative? (Seven Stories Press), an updated version of his classic account, just being published this week with a major new essay - from which this post was adapted - considering the 10 years since the 9/11 attacks.
A version of this piece was originally published on TomDispatch.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Did 9/11 really change the world?
By Barnaby Phillips inAmericas
How much difference did 9/11 really make to our world? At the time, it seemed like everything had changed. For the many thousands of people in the United States personally affected by those heinous acts, life would never be the same again.
For millions of people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the consequences have been traumatic and profound. In many other countries, from Britain to Nigeria, from Indonesia to Spain, from Uganda to Russia, innocent people have become victims of acts of terror.
Governments have responded in various ways, and sometimes those responses have been clumsy, cruel and counter-productive. These are all very important events. But have they really changed the world for decades to come?
Here’s a list, off the top of my head, of global events and trends in the past decade that many people would argue are more important than 9/11, "the War on Terror" and the activities of al-Qaeda.
1) The rise of China as an economic superpower.
2) Likewise, the rise of India.
3) Brazil, Turkey and a whole host of other countries are coming up not so far behind.
4) Related to above, the relative economic decline of the West, (by which I mean the United States and Europe), symbolised by the financial crisis of 2008, and the ongoing crisis in the eurozone.
5) The complete failure of all of the world’s leading powers to take action to prevent, or even mitigate, the effects of climate change.
And here are two more possibles, that I’m tempted to put on the list:
6) The amazing spread of social networking like Facebook and Twitter.
7) The Arab Spring.
An interesting piece from Reuters looks at the same issues. The author, Peter Apps, reaches similar conclusions, although he argues that America and Britain’s economic problems, and hence their decline in global influence, are, at least in part, a consequence of the wars they decided to wage in reaction to 9/11.
This blog, in the Financial Times, also makes the point that 9/11 seems much less important now than it did at the time.
Of course, the sensible answer to the question I posed at the top of this blog is "it’s too early to tell". That, famously, is what the Chinese Communist leader Zhou Enlai is said to have responded when asked for his assessment of the French Revolution. So, if it’s too soon to reach a conclusion on something that happened in 1789, it would be very reckless to make definitive pronouncements about something that happened as recently as 2001.
As Martin Wolf points out in the FT blog, if al-Qaeda were able to stage an attack involving nuclear weapons, our assessment of the long-term significance of 9/11 would change, and radically.
Thankfully, that has not happened yet. So, a very tentative conclusion on the 10th anniversary of that terrible day, is that it did not change the world quite as much as we thought it might. But like Zhou Enlai, we'll have to wait and see.
That was the motion under debate on Wednesday night in New York City, as the Intelligence Squared Debate series brought experts from inside and outside the government to try and convince the audience that it is either time to declare the open-ended war against "terrorism" over, or that doing so would cripple the US government’s ability to protect its citizens.
It’s a question that, with the killing of Osama bin Laden, the revolutions in the Arab world, the imminent US withdrawal from Iraq and the beginning of a US troop drawdown in Afghanistan, is in the air in the US. Ten years on from the September 11, 2001, attacks that prompted the US Congress to authorise the use of “all necessary and appropriate force” against those deemed to have planned, or aided in planning, the attacks, there is a sense that it may be time for the US, both as a government and as a nation, to walk away from a definition of war that remains open-ended.
Debating for the motion were Peter Bergen, a national security analyst with first-hand experience of reporting on armed groups and the author of several books on the subject, and Juliette Kayyem, who has served under the Obama administration in the Department of Homeland Security at the federal level and fulfilled a similar role at the state-level.
Against them stood Michael Hayden, the former director of the US Central Intelligence Agency (2006-2009) and the National Security Agency (1999-2005), and Richard Falkenrath, a homeland security adviser to then-US President George W Bush (2001-2003) and former deputy commissioner for counter-terrorism for the New York Police Department (2006-2010).
Bergen, a man who even his opponents conceded has an “encyclopaedic knowledge of the operational details of terrorist groups”, opened proceedings with the view that maintaining the current rhetoric regarding a ‘War on Terror’ “masks other problems”, such as managing the rise of China and maintaining geopolitical stability in other regions and conflicts that are not directly related to "terrorism" as it has come to be known in US political discourse.
For him, the focus of the war needs to be narrowed so that it looks only at al-Qaeda – a group he argued was “on its last legs”, citing a lack of organisation and reach. He also asserted that the group had not been able to launch a major international attack since the July 2006 bombings in London (a claim that victims of attacks by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb and al-Qaeda affiliates in Iraq may well dispute).
“Three hundred people die every year in their bath tubs in the United States,” Bergen said, comparing that to the “far lower” number of US citizens killed by al-Qaeda, on average, every year. “And we’re not afraid of bath tubs.”
Bergen argued that al-Qaeda had “lost the battle of ideas” in the Middle East, and that the revolutions in the Arab world, which have occurred by and large without any reference to the ideology of al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden, were proof of the group’s declining influence.
Bergen’s point, then, was that al-Qaeda’s abilities had been degraded to the point where the large US counterterrorism and intelligence operations being run against them could be pulled back from the war-footing they have been on for the last 10 years, allowing US national security policy to be based on a broader range of concerns rather than on a “grandiose … all-encompassing approach” against “anyone who says the word ‘jihad’”.
Kayyem, Bergen’s partner in the debate, though, seemed to be making an altogether different, and more sociological, point. The former Obama administration official argued that what was required after 10 years was a change of “mindset”; that not just the government but the citizens of the United States needed to change their ideology on how to deal with "Islamic fundamentalism".
Moreover, she argued that as far as the government was concerned, this had already happened, with the evolution of a counterterrorism approach that was less over-arching than in the initial years of the war. What needed to happen, however, was for more elements of the “dark side” of the immediate response to the 9/11 attacks (e.g. military tribunals, arbitrary detention, wiretapping and a “disdain for the judiciary”) to be abandoned in favour of a US security apparatus that is more focused and less diffuse.
For Kayyem, the time for the "War on Terror" has come and gone, and it is time to step away from a language that puts the country into a “war mentality”, and for the nation to move towards a political space where it would be acceptable (“not political suicide”, to use Kayyem’s words) to declare the "War on Terror" over.
It’s a compelling point, but not one which Hayden and Falkenrath were willing to engage with.
One needs to define the debate “precisely, not in terms of a squishy mindset or set of feelings”, Falkenrath countered.
For Hayden and Falkenrath, this debate was not about ideologies, political atmospherics or discourse: it was about repealing the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), passed on September 18, 2001, against those deemed responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
This, of course, they deemed to be a dangerous and unnecessary course of action that would remove certain tools and abilities from the US’s efforts against militant groups deemed to be a threat to it.
“With the perpetrators of 9/11 still at large, we still need this law,” argued Falkenrath, who added that the debate was not about whether the law was “misused” in the early years of the Bush presidency. For him, there was no harm in keeping the law in place, and no benefit to be gained from shelving it, as it would no longer allow the US president to take whatever actions he or she deemed necessary in order to strike at groups considered a threat to the US.
Hayden, moreover, argued that the law did not broaden the scope of the war too much; in contrast, he asserted that it was focused on fighting al-Qaeda, rather than other groups (such as Hezbollah, who he named). He stressed that if the law was shelved, then it would raise troubling legal questions for events like the killing of Osama bin Laden – an event that he argued should have occurred exactly as it did, without consideration for Bin Laden’s Miranda rights.
For Hayden, abandoning the law would mean that the Miranda rights would have to be made more malleable across the board, rather than simply denied to certain people, which had broader implications for civil liberties than what he described as the limited, focused infringements of those liberties under the "War on Terror" laws.
The question of Miranda rights provided for what was, for this non-US member of the audience, a fairly uncomfortable moment when Falkenrath, Hayden’s partner, suggested that abandoning the AUMF would mean that if the US found Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s new leader, soldiers would have to read him rights rather than shoot him on the spot.
Rather than eliciting a silence, that statement drew giggles from those across the packed auditorium. A wink and a nod, then, that this audience, at least, was comfortable with the idea of killing al-Zawahiri rather than pursuing him in a US or International Criminal Court.
Finally, asked what conditions the side against the motion would set for ending the war at some later point, Hayden said that he had no concrete notion of what that would be, and that “we’ll recognise it when we see it”, a suggestion that Falkenrath said he saw no harm in.
After a lively debate, with plenty in the way of both anecdotal flippancy and historical context, the audience was asked to vote on whether or not they had changed their minds on the motion (the Intelligence Squared debates are judged based not on the absolute numbers for and against the motion in question, but on voting both before and after the arguments to determine how many switched sides as a result of the debate).
The winners?
Hayden and Falkenrath, who went up 15 percentage points by the end of the debate, as against Kayyem and Bergen’s five per cent (11 per cent remained undecided). Tellingly, however, this still meant that the absolute numbers stood at 46 per cent for the motion, and 43 per cent against.
The US and NATO war in Afghanistan is in its tenth year, yet many fear the Taliban is poised to return to power. Despite surges in US troops in Afghanistan, the Taliban is stronger now than it was ten years ago.
In addition to the American secret prisons in Afghanistan, long-standing complicity with Afghan organs that torture detainees - a fact acknowledged by the US at least as early as 2009 in a cable obtained by Wikileaks and finally prompting a NATO ban on prisoner transfers three days ago - have made farcical international programs begin programs preaching the rule of law in the country.
Similarly, the irony of the International Monetary Fund's recent prodding to urge Kabul to collect more tax revenue was not lost on Afghan parliamentarians who pointed to the treaty with the US that exempts American contractors from paying taxes on their vast profits in Afghanistan, thereby depriving the treasury of tens of millions of dollars.
Much of this is glossed as "Afghan corruption" in our media when it is instead a story of collusion inevitably justified by pointing to the greater evils of the enemy.
This same moral certainty has guided Washington in its belated and still largely dismissive approach to a negotiated political settlement to the war. The keywords "reconciliation" and "reintegration" have been little more than invitations for the insurgents to surrender.
A new Taliban?
Meanwhile, the Taliban have evolved into a force with a cogent nationalist agenda combining an anti-colonial defense of Afghan sovereignty and Islam with promises of economic development, accountable government, and non-aggression on the world stage and have hinted at being open to power-sharing.
Ideologically hostile to compromise with a movement it scarcely understands, Washington, by contrast, appears bent on military victory - and on an Afghanistan home to plenty of US bases in a strategically critical region.
Yet with 2014 looming, the latest counterinsurgency tricks look like little more than the rearranging of chairs on the Titanic, with a dysfunctional Afghan political system tailor-made for another decade of civil war.
Robert D. Crews is an Associate Professor of History and Director of the Centre for Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies at Standford University. He is co-editor (with Amin Tarzi) of The Taliban and Politicised the Crisis of Afghanistan and author of For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia. http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/09/20119911945391549.html
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Let's forget 9/11
If we have any respect for history or humanity, we should remove 9/11 from our collective consciousness. By Tom Engelhardt
Let's bag it.
I'm talking about the tenth anniversary ceremonies for 9/11, and everything that goes with them: the solemn reading of the names of the dead, the tolling of bells, the honouring of first responders, the gathering of presidents, the dedication of the new memorial, the moments of silence. The works.
Let's just can it all. Shut down Ground Zero. Lock out the tourists. Close "Reflecting Absence", the memorial built in the "footprints" of the former towers with its grove of trees, giant pools, and multiple waterfalls before it can be unveiled this Sunday. Discontinue work on the underground National September 11 Museum due to open in 2012. Tear down the Freedom Tower (redubbed 1 World Trade Center after our "freedom" wars went awry), 102 stories of "the most expensive skyscraper ever constructed in the United States". (Estimated price tag: $3.3bn.) Eliminate that still-being-constructed, hubris-filled 1,776 feet of building, planned in the heyday of George W Bush and soaring into the Manhattan sky like a nyaah-nyaah invitation to future terrorists. Dismantle the other three office towers being built there as part of an $11bn government-sponsored construction programme. Let's get rid of it all. If we had wanted a memorial to 9/11, it would have been more appropriate to leave one of the giant shards of broken tower there untouched.
Ask yourself this: ten years into the post-9/11 era, haven't we had enough of ourselves? If we have any respect for history or humanity or decency left, isn't it time to rip the Band-Aid off the wound, to remove 9/11 from our collective consciousness? No more invocations of those attacks to explain otherwise inexplicable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and our oh-so-global war on terror. No more invocations of 9/11 to keep the Pentagon and the national security state flooded with money. No more invocations of 9/11 to justify every encroachment on liberty, every new step in the surveillance of Americans, every advance in pat-downs and wand-downs and strip downs that keeps fear high and the homeland security state afloat.
The attacks of September 11, 2001 were in every sense abusive, horrific acts. And the saddest thing is that the victims of those suicidal monstrosities have been misused here ever since under the guise of pious remembrance. This country has become dependent on the dead of 9/11 - who have no way of defending themselves against how they have been used - as an all-purpose explanation for our own goodness and the horrors we've visited on others, for the many towers-worth of dead in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere whose blood is on our hands.
Isn't it finally time to go cold turkey? To let go of the dead? Why keep repeating our 9/11 mantra as if it were some kind of old-time religion, when we've proven that we, as a nation, can't handle it - and worse yet, that we don't deserve it?
We would have been better off consigning our memories of 9/11 to oblivion, forgetting it all if only we could. We can't, of course. But we could stop the anniversary remembrances. We could stop invoking 9/11 in every imaginable way so many years later. We could stop using it to make ourselves feel like a far better country than we are. We could, in short, leave the dead in peace and take a good, hard look at ourselves, the living, in the nearest mirror.
Ceremonies of hubris
Within 24 hours of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the first newspaper had already labelled the site in New York as "Ground Zero". If anyone needed a sign that we were about to run off the rails, as a misassessment of what had actually occurred that should have been enough. Previously, the phrase "ground zero" had only one meaning: It was the spot where a nuclear explosion had occurred.
The facts of 9/11 are, in this sense, simple enough. It was not a nuclear attack. It was not apocalyptic. The cloud of smoke where the towers stood was no mushroom cloud. It was not potentially civilisation-ending. It did not endanger the existence of our country - or even of New York City. Spectacular as it looked and staggering as the casualty figures were, the operation was hardly more technologically advanced than the failed attack on a single tower of the World Trade Center in 1993 by Islamists using a rented Ryder truck packed with explosives.
A second irreality went with the first. Almost immediately, key Republicans like Senator John McCain, followed by George W Bush, top figures in his administration, and soon after, in a drumbeat of agreement, the mainstream media declared that we were "at war". This was, Bush would say only three days after the attacks, "the first war of the twenty-first century".
Only problem: It wasn't. Despite the screaming headlines, Ground Zero wasn't Pearl Harbor. Al-Qaeda wasn't Japan, nor was it Nazi Germany. It wasn't the Soviet Union. It had no army, nor finances to speak of, and possessed no state (though it had the minimalist protection of a hapless government in Afghanistan, one of the most backward, poverty-stricken lands on the planet).
And yet - another sign of where we were heading - anyone who suggested that this wasn't war, that it was a criminal act and some sort of international police action was in order, was simply laughed (or derided or insulted) out of the American room. And so the empire prepared to strike back (just as Osama bin Laden hoped it would) in an apocalyptic, planet-wide "war" for domination that masqueraded as a war for survival.
In the meantime, the populace was mustered through repetitive, nationwide 9/11 rites emphasising that we Americans were the greatest victims, greatest survivors, and greatest dominators on planet Earth. It was in this cause that the dead of 9/11 were turned into potent recruiting agents for a revitalised American way of war.
From all this, in the brief mission-accomplished months after Kabul and then Baghdad fell, American hubris seemed to know no bounds - and it was this moment, not 9/11 itself, from which the true inspiration for the gargantuan "Freedom Tower" and the then-billion-dollar project for a memorial on the site of the New York attacks would materialise. It was this sense of hubris that those gargantuan projects were intended to memorialise.
On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, for an imperial power that is distinctly tattered, visibly in decline, teetering at the edge of financial disaster, and battered by never-ending wars, political paralysis, terrible economic times, disintegrating infrastructure, and weird weather, all of this should be simple and obvious. That it's not tells us much about the kind of shock therapy we still need.
Burying the worst urges in American life
It's commonplace, even today, to speak of Ground Zero as "hallowed ground". How untrue. Ten years later, it is defiled ground and it is we who have defiled it. It could have been different. The 9/11 attacks could have been like the Blitz in London in World War II. Something to remember forever with grim pride, stiff upper lip and all.
And if it were only the reactions of those in New York City that we had to remember, both the dead and the living, the first responders and the last responders, the people who created impromptu memorials to the dead and message centres for the missing in Manhattan, we might recall 9/11 with similar pride. Generally speaking, New Yorkers were respectful, heartfelt, thoughtful, and not vengeful. They didn't have prior plans that, on September 12, 2001, they were ready to rally those nearly 3,000 dead to support. They weren't prepared at the moment of the catastrophe to - as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld so classically said - "Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."
Unfortunately, they were not the measure of the moment. As a result, the uses of 9/11 in the decade since have added up to a profile in cowardice, not courage, and if we let it be used that way in the next decade, we will go down in history as a nation of cowards.
There is little on this planet of the living more important, or more human, than the burial and remembrance of the dead. Even Neanderthals buried their dead, possibly with flowers, and tens of thousands of years ago, the earliest humans, the Cro-Magnon, were already burying their dead elaborately, in one case in clothing onto which more than 3,000 ivory beads had been sewn, perhaps as objects of reverence and even remembrance. Much of what we know of human prehistory and the earliest eras of our history comes from graves and tombs where the dead were provided for.
And surely it's our duty in this world of loss to remember the dead, those close to us and those more removed who mattered in our national or even planetary lives. Many of those who loved and were close to the victims of 9/11 are undoubtedly attached to the yearly ceremonies that surround their deceased wives, husbands, lovers, children, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters. For the nightmare of 9/11, they deserve a memorial. But we don't.
If September 11 was indeed a nightmare, 9/11 as a memorial and Ground Zero as a "consecrated" place has turned out to be a blank check for the American war state, funding an endless trip to hell. They have helped lead us into fields of carnage that put the dead of 9/11 to shame.
Every dead person will, of course, be forgotten sooner or later, no matter how tightly we clasp their memories or what memorials we build. In my mind, I have a private memorial to my own dead parents. Whenever I leaf through my mother's childhood photo album and recognise just about no one but her among all the faces, however, I'm also aware that there is no one left on this planet to ask about any of them. And when I die, my little memorial to them will go with me.
This will be the fate, sooner or later, of everyone who on September 11, 2001, was murdered in those buildings in New York, in that field in Pennsylvania, and in the Pentagon, as well as those who sacrificed their lives in rescue attempts, or may now be dying as a result. Under such circumstances, who would not want to remember them all in a special way?
It's a terrible thing to ask those still missing the dead of 9/11 to forgo the public spectacle that accompanies their memory, but worse is what we have: repeated solemn ceremonies to the ongoing health of the American war state and the wildest dreams of Osama bin Laden.
Memory is usually so important, but in this case we would have been better off with oblivion. It's time to truly inter not the dead, but the worst urges in American life since 9/11 and the ceremonies which, for a decade, have gone with them. Better to bury all of that at sea with bin Laden and then mourn the dead, each in our own way, in silence and, above all, in peace.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's as well as The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The United States of Fear (Haymarket Books), will be published in November.
In 1998, Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri declared war on the US, outlining a philosophy of the clash of civilizations which legitimised attacks on the West - both soldiers and civilians. In the US, a group of politicians, who were to become known as the Neocons, believed they too had a moral duty to change the world. Both groups found their opportunity in the attacks of 9/11 and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. But both were to see their dreams perish with the increasing human cost of these wars and the reality that ideologies without popular support cannot change the world.
