Contrasts of conflict

Campaigning journalist JOHN PILGER says last week's atrocity was a response to years of American terrorism, while novelist FREDERICK FORSYTH insists that the West must get tough in this new kind of war.

John Pilger

IF the September 11 attacks on America have their source in the Islamic world, who can be really surprised? Two days earlier, eight people were reported killed in southern Iraq when British and American planes bombed civilian areas. Not a word appeared in the mainstream media in Britain.

An estimated 250,000 Iraqis, according to the Health Educational Trust in London, died during and in the immediate aftermath of the slaughter known as the Gulf War. This never touched public consciousness in the West.

At least a million civilians, half of them children, have since died in Iraq as a result of a siege imposed by the United States and Britain. In Palestine, the enduring illegal occupation by Israel would have collapsed long ago were it not for American military and economic backing.

In Pakistan and Afghanistan, the mujahadeen, which gave birth to the fanatical Taliban, was largely the creation of the West. As John Cooley points out in his definitive Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism: "It was only Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's British government which supported the jihad with full enthusiasm." Osama bin Laden, now "America's most wanted man", was given "full reign" in Afghanistan.

Far from being the world's predominant terrorists, the Islamic peoples have been its victims - principally, the victims of American fundamentalism, a crusade whose power, in all its forms, military, strategic and economic, is the greatest source of terrorism on earth.

This fact is censored from the Western media, whose "coverage" at best minimises Western culpability.

The willingness to kill large numbers of non-Americans in pursuit of its "interests" has long been a feature of US policy, which has long rested on a foundation of state terrorism.

The list is voluminous. Taken at random from recent memory: the homicidal "fire zones", including the use of chemical weapons, that claimed as many as 50,000 civilian lives every year in Vietnam; the bombing of Cambodia in the early 1970s, the equivalent of five Hiroshimas, that killed 600,000 people; the secret supply of equipment and weapons to Suharto's genocidal army in East Timor that reduced the population by a third.

For George Bush to say, in the wake of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, that war has been declared on America is rich. During my lifetime, America has waged war against much of humanity.

The eagerness of Bush and Blair to use military force, and its inevitable gratuitous slaughter of innocents, will reinforce terrorism and nurture a new generation of suicidal killers.

Denis Halliday, the assistant secretary general of the United Nations who resigned over the Anglo-American imposed embargo of Iraq, told me: "We are likely to see the emergence of those who may well regard Saddam Hussein as too moderate and too willing to listen to the West.

"Such is the desperation of people, whose children are dying in their thousands every month and who are bombed almost every day by American and British planes."

In these surreal days, there is one truth. Nothing justified the killing of innocent people in America and nothing justifies the killing of innocent people in Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere.

There are deeper roots to all this, which made the atrocities in America almost inevitable. It is not only the rage and grievance of Islamic peoples against Western actions in the Middle East and south Asia.

Since the end of the cold war, America and its lieutenants, principally Britain, have flaunted their wealth and power while the divisions imposed on most human beings by them and their agents have grown as never before.

There are those who may ask what this has to do with images of exploding hi-jacked aircraft and crumbling skyscrapers? If you travel among the impoverished majority of humanity, you understand that it has everything to do with it.

Frederick Forsyth

ON a bright spring morning in 1948, a regiment of Soviet tanks rolled out of the surrounding woods and blocked the three highways from West Germany to the encircled city of west Berlin. With this single act, the Cold War began.

Last Tuesday, in a blaze of fire, death and devastation, the second Cold War began. There are similarities.

Both were not started by the forces of Western civilisation, but were deliberately visited on the West by brutal and ruthless dictatorships. For terrorism is indeed precisely that - a creed based on the use of conscienceless and cruel force to achieve a political goal, and a creed which clothes itself in self-righteousness.

The Cold War was fought on numerous fronts - propaganda, economic pressures and sanctions, defectors, diplomacy, covert co-operations, information-gathering, espionage, secret operations and the occasional discreet 'termination' of life in a dark alley. The new war will be fought in much the same way, because it is the only way.

An enormous amount that I see around me today invokes a sense of deja-vu. But there is, of course, one huge difference. Then the opponent was visible, had a territory, a capital city, a government, armed forces, an economy. Today, the enemy is multi-faced, scattered through more than 40 countries, covert, underground and clandestine.

However, these are the enemy's only advantages - secrecy and invisibility. All the other advantages lie within the West, and we would be foolish to under-estimate our own strengths.

But that said, our vulnerability lies in our own openness, that lets people enter and leave our homelands in freedom, buy and sell, speak and write, rent a flat and turn it into a bomb factory.

Our main Achilles heel is our natural squeamishness. That, I fear, will have to go, as the Americans say, on the backburner until the war is won. There are two things we can start to do right now. They will cost nothing more than money and inconvenience, both a lot better than death. We have to tighten up our security precautions. The terrorists of September 11 did what they did with mere knives. An armed sky-marshal would have taken them down with a few accurate shots. This will now have to be the rule.

Our second recourse, without delay, will be to close down the haven-states unless, with our help and co-operation, they destroy terrorist hide-outs, funds, training grounds, recruiting schools and structures in their midst. This is not as hard as it looks, but it is going to involve some very rough diplomacy.

It will involve creating the concept of the outcast state. Few countries really want to be told that, from Monday, no airliner will take off from its capital, nor land there from the outside world. No ship will depart with exports, nor dock with imports. There will be no embassies, and government propaganda will be beamed at your people from offshore in the local language.

Most haven-states of today, Afghanistan excluded, are ruled by elites who like to live high off the hog while shielding terror groups. Such a total cut-off of their good life would be an awful price to pay for protecting a few terrorists.

And we will need to use proxies. There are millions out there who hate the terror-masters. Afghanistan is a case in point. There is ample evidence - four million voluntary exiles - that the bulk of the population does not want to live as the Taliban decrees. There is a resistance army, that of the assassinated Shah Massoud. They have the men and the will to liberate their land. They lack weapons and air strike back-up. We have both.

The fox is never more vulnerable than when he has been forced to break cover and cross the open field, in daylight, not the darkness he prefers. The terrorist is the same.