Author: Jim Rissman

At Commondreams, Ira Chernus explains how the ’60s prepared us to live with the fact that we will never, ever know for sure who was behind the 9/11 attacks. Whoops, I had always thought the counterculture’s primary message was never, ever eat fried food.

Are we to blame the Saudis, the Israelis or the Bushies? Heather Wokusch warns it could be decades before the truth is finally revealed.

At Antiwar, Justin Raimondo points out the Saudi and Israeli theories are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The salient point is that it’s three years later and 9/11 seems ever more shrouded in mystery.

Well, as the seasons they go ’round and ’round, while we’re waiting to see if Raimondo and others can prove Chernus wrong by lifting the fog, there’s plenty of time to consider the question which tends to go unasked, why did nineteen people want to inflict such horrible pain on us? The reasons were pretty clear three years before 9/11, at least to one Jennifer Loewenstein. The following letter was also printed in the Chicago Tribune under the title “A World’s View”:

FOREIGN POLICY IN ARAB NATIONS TIED TO EMBASSY BOMBINGS?
Madison Capital Times, Madison, Wisconsin
Aug 14, 1998

Dear Editor: Americans have every reason to be horrified by the recent terror attacks against U.S. targets in Africa. Nevertheless, a failure to understand the sources of such violence will only hinder efforts to thwart it in the future.

Eight years to the day after the arrival of the U.S. 82nd Airborne division to Saudi Arabia, bombs exploded almost simultaneously at the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Is this a coincidence?

Days after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the United States sought and obtained permission from Saudi King Fahd to station American troops there on the condition that they would leave once the threat of Iraqi aggression had ended. Nevertheless, a U.S. military presence continues to this day – to the dismay of many Saudis, including Crown Prince Abdullah.

Today, comfortable relationships between the United States and King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, and King Hussein of Jordan seem to be taken for granted by our government despite the sentiments of growing numbers of people within these (and other) countries. A careful examination of the reasons why anti-American feeling is on the rise should lead to changes in our foreign policy vis-a-vis these countries.

Apparently, however, where strategic and economic interests are at stake, respect for the integrity and the political climate of independent nations plays a very small role. The consequences of such nationally self-interested behavior could well be dire.

U.S. control over Arab oil, its unconditional alliance with the state of Israel coupled with the failure of the Clinton administration to intervene over the failed Oslo peace accords, crippling seven-year-old economic sanctions imposed upon Iraq – which have been particularly devastating to civilians – and the continued American military presence in Saudi Arabia all weaken friendly sentiments toward the United States, even – and most conspicuously – in our closest allies. If there is a Saudi connection to bombings in East Africa, the warning bells should be heeded in Washington.

Jennifer Loewenstein, Madison

It’s worth mentioning that in a Vanity Fair interview May 9, 2003, when asked what good has come out of the Iraq invasion, Paul Wolfowitz answered

“There are a lot of things that are different now, and one that has gone by almost unnoticed–but it’s huge–is that by complete mutual agreement between the U.S. and the Saudi government we can now remove almost all of our forces from Saudi Arabia. Their presence there over the last 12 years has been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly government. It’s been a huge recruiting device for al Qaeda. In fact if you look at bin Laden, one of his principle grievances was the presence of so-called crusader forces on the holy land, Mecca and Medina. I think just lifting that burden from the Saudis is itself going to open the door to other positive things.”

Unfortunately, the interviewer didn’t ask if that positive was perhaps just a little bit offset by the prospect of keeping tens or hundred of thousands of troops in Iraq for as many as ten years“, its taking as many as 10 years to crush the insurgency.

Note: The Financial Times has called for a US/UK withdrawal from Iraq, with, “ideally,” the US “stating it has no intention of establishing bases” there.

In addition to Ed Kihane’s Plea for the Abducted Iraqi and Italian Bridges to Baghdad aid workers, Voices in the Wilderness has posted a Bridges to Baghdad collection which includes a link to freeourfriends.blogspot which has a petition to sign and a statement of Support from Fallujah.

Meanwhile, hundreds of candlelight vigils are to be held across the country tonight (Thursday) to mourn the
1,000 U.S. SOLDIERS AND TENS OF THOUSANDS OF IRAQIS KILLED United for Peace and Justice indicates. Another sponsor, Win Without War, also mourns the unnecessary loss of 1,000 American lives and many thousands of Iraqi lives. The list of vigil sites is being maintained by MoveOn, click ahead to see if near you there’s a chance to honor the more than 1000 U.S. soldiers who have now been killed in Iraq.

The Forward of August 27 has an interesting pairing of op-ed pieces. In the first, the Jewish weekly expresses its dismay re the Bush administration’s approval of a new Israel settlement construction project. The approval comes at a time when Israel’s attorney general is suggesting it should “recognize the applicability in the territories of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the 1949 treaty on which the world court relied to declare the fence and the settlements illegal.”

For 37 years, “Israel has rejected the treaty as inapplicable to the territories, and Washington, while disagreeing, has looked the other way. Successive administrations have tut-tutted about ‘obstacles to peace,’ but every president has guaranteed Israel the running room to do what it felt it must.” Now, “while Israelis search desperately for a way to disentangle themselves from their neighbors, Washington is offering to assist in deepening the quagmire.”

If The Forward really thinks a sick joke has gone on long enough, the second piece, John Kerry’s pledge of “unwavering support,” should make it very uneasy.

Ha’aretz columnists Gideon Levy and Meron Benvenisti also think that the Attorney General Mazuz’s recommendation re recognizing the applicabilty of the Geneva Convention is significant. While it apparently doesn’t agree, the New York Times does lament Bush’s “support for a major expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.” And in this context it offers acceptance speech advice, “If Mr. Bush is going to speak seriously about terrorism tonight, he also needs to talk about Israel.” But again, what about “Mr. Kerry?”

Michael Moore doesn’t mention Israel in his USA Today acceptance speech advice offering, “it’s show time” so let’s gush over the Bush daughters for five paragraphs. Linda Stasi has a strong protest piece in the New York Post, but I don’t think she realizes just how much of a burden Moore has become. It’s not surprising that Bush has surged to a double digit lead.

I was watching TV the other night and saw a new episode of the Verizon Wireless commercial, you know the one I mean, a guy with a cell phone at his ear repeatedly asks “Can you hear me now?” as he moves from spot to spot in the swamp, or desert, or city. And now, or plastic tent, which is where the new one takes place. It features veteran Palestinian detainee Abed al-Ahmar. What’s that, you haven’t seen it yet? Well then, click here.

In a late-breaking development, Israel has demanded that Verizon pull the al-Ahmar ad because it “aids, abets, glorifies and/or trivializes terrorism.”

Action Item

As Uri Avnery mentions, the settlers “have at their disposal almost unlimited amounts of money, provided by American Jewish millionaires and Christian fundamentalists.” One of the millionaires is Irving Moskowitz, whose casino license application is pending before California’s Gambling Control Commission. An effort is under way to stopmoskowitz.

Zbigniew Brzezinski points to two Bush administration “blunders” which have “precipitate[d] the increasingly intense hatred for the US, not only in the Middle East but in the Islamic world at large.” In both instances, it “adopted a stance that was not only unilateral and lacking international support but was perceived by the Muslims of the region as violently repressive, lacking in fairness and justified mainly by stretching or distorting the truth.”

The first of these “Bush” blunders was the invasion of Iraq in March, 2003; the second was the “unqualified support” for Israel’s “violent dismantling of the Palestinian Authority” a year earlier.

Yes, Bush referred to “Sharon as ‘a man of peace,'” but it was an almost unanimous Congress that took the lead in endorsing “Operation Defensive Shield.” As Mary McGrory put it, Republican Whip Tom Delay “cleaned up the floor with his unaccustomed allies, the liberals.” In the senate, “Democratic leader Tom Daschle announced the restiveness among his horses, who were hot to trot for Israel.”

Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions considers that congressional vote one of the “good reasons” the Sharon government has for “believ[ing] it has defeated the Palestinians once and for all.”

Russ Feingold and the late Paul Wellstone, liberal darlings here in the Midwest, were among the “hot to trot.” So were John Edwards and of course John Kerry, who recently expressed his pride in having “co-sponsored a resolution expressing solidarity with Israel” when it had just “dismantle[d] the Palestinian infrastructure.”

While Brzezinski’s piece is welcome, he undercuts his credibility by glossing over the fact that the whole political establishment is a blunderer and in particular that Anyone But Bush is proud to be a blunderer.

In related matters, I’m proud I haven’t seen “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Here’s a chance to “Urge Michael Moore to make his next film about the US and Israel.” And here’s one to support the Presbyterian divestment initiative.”

Over the weekend of August 12-13, 2000, as the delegates to the Democratic National Convention gathered in Los Angeles, the US and the UK conducted two airstrikes against the southern Iraq town of Samawa. Two people were killed and 19 injured in the first, in which several homes and a warehouse used to store supplies purchased under the U.N. oil-for-food program were hit, according to Iraq. In the second, a train station and several homes were damaged and several people were injured.

On Thursday, August 17, the day Gore accepted the nomination, US jets bombed air defense sites in northern Iraq, according to the US military.

Making convention week a perfect recapitulation of the Clinton administration’s eight-year aggression was the release on Tuesday, the 15th, of a U.N.-commissioned report titled The Adverse Consequences of Economic Sanctions on the Enjoyment of Human Rights (“The Bossuyt Report”). Regarding Iraq, it found that the 10 years of U.N. sanctions driven by the U.S. and U.K. “ have produced a humanitarian disaster comparable to the worst catastrophes of the past decades…

“The sanctions regime against Iraq is unequivocally illegal under existing international humanitarian law and human rights law. Some would go as far as making a charge of genocide,” as it has “as its clear purpose the deliberate infliction on the Iraqi people of conditions of life (lack of adequate food, medicines, etc.) calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

A month earlier, Danny Muller of Voices in the Wilderness had provided some amusement for Gore when he asked him about the sanctions at a campaign stop.

John Nichols, assisstant editor of Madison’s Capital Times and Washington correspondent for The Nation, is such an antiwar, antiBush stalwart that almost half of the 200 columns he’s written for the CT since January 1, 2003 have contained the word “Iraq.” Nichols wrote three columns about the 2000 convention, each of them gushing over Senator Russ Feingold (aka “Diogenes”) for “taking a hard line on soft money.” No “Iraq” to be found during recapitulation week.

Like Nichols, the brunt of the antiwar movement loathes Bush for first “stealing” the election and then cynically manipulating the 9/11 attacks in order to invade Iraq. Never mind how laughable the idea that Gore deserved to be president, never mind that 9/11 might not have been there to exploit if Clinton/Gore Middle East policy had evinced a bit of decency.

Yes, what the Bush administration is doing is intolerable, but every once in a while the antiwar movement should take a break from its loathing and ask itself how, for the most part, it tolerated what the Clinton administration did.