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The war
against terrorism is a fraud. After
three weeks' bombing, not a single
terrorist implicated in the attacks on
America has been caught or killed in
Afghanistan.
Instead,
one of the poorest, most stricken
nations has been terrorised by the
most powerful - to the point where
American pilots have run out of
dubious "military" targets
and are now destroying mud houses, a
hospital, Red Cross warehouses,
lorries carrying refugees.
Unlike the
relentless pictures from New York, we
are seeing almost nothing of this.
Tony Blair has yet to tell us what the
violent death of children - seven in
one family - has to do with Osama bin
Laden.
And why
are cluster bombs being used? The
British public should know about these
bombs, which the RAF also uses. They
spray hundreds of bomblets that have
only one purpose; to kill and maim
people. Those that do not explode lie
on the ground like landmines, waiting
for people to step on them.
If ever a
weapon was designed specifically for
acts of terrorism, this is it. I have
seen the victims of American cluster
weapons in other countries, such as
the Laotian toddler who picked one up
and had her right leg and face blown
off. Be assured this is now happening
in Afghanistan, in your name.
None of
those directly involved in the
September 11 atrocity was Afghani.
Most were Saudis, who apparently did
their planning and training in Germany
and the United States.
The camps
which the Taliban allowed bin Laden to
use were emptied weeks ago. Moreover,
the Taliban itself is a creation of
the Americans and the British. In the
1980s, the tribal army that produced
them was funded by the CIA and trained
by the SAS to fight the Russians.
The
hypocrisy does not stop there. When
the Taliban took Kabul in 1996,
Washington said nothing. Why? Because
Taliban leaders were soon on their way
to Houston, Texas, to be entertained
by executives of the oil company,
Unocal.
With
secret US government approval, the
company offered them a generous cut of
the profits of the oil and gas pumped
through a pipeline that the Americans
wanted to build from Soviet central
Asia through Afghanistan.
A US
diplomat said: "The Taliban will
probably develop like the Saudis
did." He explained that
Afghanistan would become an American
oil colony, there would be huge
profits for the West, no democracy and
the legal persecution of women.
"We can live with that," he
said.
Although
the deal fell through, it remains an
urgent priority of the administration
of George W. Bush, which is steeped in
the oil industry. Bush's concealed
agenda is to exploit the oil and gas
reserves in the Caspian basin, the
greatest source of untapped fossil
fuel on earth and enough, according to
one estimate, to meet America's
voracious energy needs for a
generation. Only if the pipeline runs
through Afghanistan can the Americans
hope to control it.
So, not
surprisingly, US Secretary of State
Colin Powell is now referring to
"moderate" Taliban, who will
join an American-sponsored "loose
federation" to run Afghanistan.
The "war on terrorism" is a
cover for this: a means of achieving
American strategic aims that lie
behind the flag-waving facade of great
power.
The Royal
Marines, who will do the real dirty
work, will be little more than
mercenaries for Washington's imperial
ambitions, not to mention the
extraordinary pretensions of Blair
himself. Having made Britain a target
for terrorism with his bellicose
"shoulder to shoulder" with
Bush nonsense, he is now prepared to
send troops to a battlefield where the
goals are so uncertain that even the
Chief of the Defence Staff says the
conflict "could last 50
years".
The
irresponsibility of this is
breathtaking; the pressure on Pakistan
alone could ignite an unprecedented
crisis across the Indian
sub-continent. Having reported many
wars, I am always struck by the
absurdity of effete politicians eager
to wave farewell to young soldiers,
but who themselves would not say boo
to a Taliban goose.
In the
days of gunboats, our imperial leaders
covered their violence in the
"morality" of their actions.
Blair is no different. Like them, his
selective moralising omits the most
basic truth. Nothing justified the
killing of innocent people in America
on September 11, and nothing justifies
the killing of innocent people
anywhere else.
By killing
innocents in Afghanistan, Blair and
Bush stoop to the level of the
criminal outrage in New York. Once you
cluster bomb, "mistakes" and
"blunders" are a pretence.
Murder is murder, regardless of
whether you crash a plane into a
building or order and collude with it
from the Oval Office and Downing
Street.
GRIEF:
A father weeps over his dead son after
the bombs blunder in Kabul
If Blair
was really opposed to all forms of
terrorism, he would get Britain out of
the arms trade. On the day of the twin
towers attack, an "arms
fair", selling weapons of terror
(like cluster bombs and missiles) to
assorted tyrants and human rights
abusers, opened in London's Docklands
with the full backing of the Blair
government.
Britain's
biggest arms customer is the medieval
Saudi regime, which beheads heretics
and spawned the religious fanaticism
of the Taliban.
If he
really wanted to demonstrate "the
moral fibre of Britain", Blair
would do everything in his power to
lift the threat of violence in those
parts of the world where there is
great and justifiable grievance and
anger.
He would
do more than make gestures; he would
demand that Israel ends its illegal
occupation of Palestine and withdraw
to its borders prior to the 1967 war,
as ordered by the Security Council, of
which Britain is a permanent member.
He would
call for an end to the genocidal
blockade which the UN - in reality,
America and Britain - has imposed on
the suffering people of Iraq for more
than a decade, causing the deaths of
half a million children under the age
of five.
That's
more deaths of infants every month
than the number killed in the World
Trade Center.
There are
signs that Washington is about to
extend its current "war" to
Iraq; yet unknown to most of us,
almost every day RAF and American
aircraft already bomb Iraq. There are
no headlines. There is nothing on the
TV news. This terror is the
longest-running Anglo-American bombing
campaign since World War Two.
The Wall
Street Journal reported that the US
and Britain faced a
"dilemma" in Iraq, because
"few targets remain".
"We're down to the last
outhouse," said a US official.
That was two years ago, and they're
still bombing. The cost to the British
taxpayer? £800 million so far.
According
to an internal UN report, covering a
five-month period, 41 per cent of the
casualties are civilians. In northern
Iraq, I met a woman whose husband and
four children were among the deaths
listed in the report. He was a
shepherd, who was tending his sheep
with his elderly father and his
children when two planes attacked
them, each making a sweep. It was an
open valley; there were no military
targets nearby.
"I
want to see the pilot who did
this," said the widow at the
graveside of her entire family. For
them, there was no service in St
Paul's Cathedral with the Queen in
attendance; no rock concert with Paul
McCartney.
The
tragedy of the Iraqis, and the
Palestinians, and the Afghanis is a
truth that is the very opposite of
their caricatures in much of the
Western media.
Far from
being the terrorists of the world, the
overwhelming majority of the Islamic
peoples of the Middle East and south
Asia have been its victims - victims
largely of the West's exploitation of
precious natural resources in or near
their countries.
There is
no war on terrorism. If there was, the
Royal Marines and the SAS would be
storming the beaches of Florida, where
more CIA-funded terrorists, ex-Latin
American dictators and torturers, are
given refuge than anywhere on earth.
There is,
however, a continuing war of the
powerful against the powerless, with
new excuses, new hidden agendas, new
lies. Before another child dies
violently, or quietly from starvation,
before new fanatics are created in
both the east and the west, it is time
for the people of Britain to make
their voices heard and to stop this
fraudulent war - and to demand the
kind of bold, imaginative non-violent
initiatives that require real
political courage.
The other
day, the parents of Greg Rodriguez, a
young man who died in the World Trade
Center, said this: "We read
enough of the news to sense that our
government is heading in the direction
of violent revenge, with the prospect
of sons, daughters, parents, friends
in distant lands dying, suffering, and
nursing further grievances against us.
"It
is not the way to go...not in our
son's name."
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