>From: Len Duhl <len-duhl@socrates.Berkeley.EDU>
>
>From: "AMILAnet" <amilanet@amila.org>
>To: "AMILAnet mailing list" <amilanet@amila.org>
>Subject: COMMENTARY: Our Allies, the Despots
>
>-Anti-Terrorism
>By William Saletan
>
>Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2001, at 4:00 p.m. PT
>slate.com
>
>In the war on terrorism, what are we fighting for?
>
>President Bush says we're fighting for democracy, pluralism, and civil
>liberties. Terrorists "hate what they see right here in this chamber: a
>democratically elected government," he declared in his speech to Congress
>last week. "They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of
>speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other. They
>want to overthrow existing governments in many Muslim countries such as
>Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan." Bush concluded, "This is the fight of all
>who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom."
>
>It sounds good, but it doesn't add up. A coalition of governments that
>believe in all these principles can't include Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or
>Jordan. According to the U.S. State Department's latest Human Rights Report,
>all three countries restrict freedom of speech, the press, assembly,
>association, religion, and movement. Jordan is a monarchy propped up by
>security forces that have committed "extrajudicial killings." The Saudi
>royal family "prohibits the establishment of political parties" and enforces
>"a rigorously conservative form of Islam" through "religious police."
>Egyptians "do not have a meaningful ability to change their Government."
>Egyptian security forces "arbitrarily arrest" and "torture" people in the
>name of "combating terrorism."
>
>Are you passionate enough about freedom and democracy to exclude these
>countries from an anti-terrorism coalition? Are you willing to give up Saudi
>cooperation in the detection and destruction of Osama Bin Laden's financial
>network? Are you willing to give up Egyptian intelligence, which informed us
>of Bin Laden's plot to kill Bush in Europe two months ago? Are you willing
>to sever ties with Jordanian security forces, who thwarted Bin Laden's plans
>to massacre tourists in the Middle East two years ago?
>
>No? Would you rather have the help of those countries against Bin Laden than
>push freedom and democracy on them? Then let's take a harder case. According
>to the State Department, Pakistan harbors and supports Muslim extremists
>associated with hijackings and suicide bombings against India. A few years
>ago, we slapped sanctions on Pakistan for testing nuclear weapons. In 1999,
>Gen. Pervez Musharraf seized control of the country in a coup. But now that
>we need Pakistan's help to stage operations in neighboring Afghanistan,
>we're lifting the sanctions and offering substantial economic aid. Is that
>OK with you? Are you willing to tolerate military dictatorship, nuclear
>proliferation, and a faraway proxy terror campaign in order to get
>Pakistan's assistance against Bin Laden?
>
>Does it bother you that 62 percent of Pakistanis, according to a Gallup
>Poll, oppose their dictator's decision to support the United States in this
>conflict-or that only 9 percent of people surveyed by Gallup in 27 Muslim
>nations favor airstrikes against Afghanistan? Does it bother you that the
>Pakistani and Saudi regimes are keeping their collaboration with us as
>secret as possible in order to avoid angering their citizens? We're not just
>ignoring democracy as a goal. We're deliberately circumventing it. Is that
>OK with you?
>
>Maybe we can justify these compromises, and maybe we can't. But we can't
>even have that debate until we stop deceiving ourselves about what we're
>doing. We're not building an alliance for democracy, pluralism, or freedom
>of speech and religion. We're setting aside those principles in order to
>build the broadest possible alliance against terrorism.
>
>We've been here before. Pearl Harbor drove us into an alliance with the
>murderous Josef Stalin against Hitler. The Iron Curtain drove us into an
>alliance against communism. To contain and defeat the Soviet Union, we
>compromised human rights, pluralism, and democracy wherever we thought it
>necessary. We propped up right-wing dictators. We tolerated torture. We
>armed Pakistan. We armed Afghanistan. We armed Bin Laden.
>
>Then communism collapsed, and all the principles we had suppressed while
>fighting it rose to the surface. We sanctioned Pakistan. We denounced
>Afghanistan's religious intolerance. We started talking about human rights
>and the treatment of women.
>
>Then came Sept. 11. A new global menace commanded our attention. Suddenly,
>democracy in Pakistan and women's rights in Saudi Arabia seem expendable.
>The concentrated fear that drove us to anti-fascism and anti-communism is
>driving us to anti-terrorism.
>
>Anti-terrorism, like its predecessors, can't easily be dismissed as immoral.
>Were we wrong to help Stalin defeat Hitler? Were we wrong to help the
>Afghans defeat the Soviets? Such compromises seem clearly worth making when
>one menace gets big enough to outweigh the others and when the others can be
>dealt with once the big one is dead.
>
>The trouble with this kind of absolutism is that it's bounded only by
>itself. Everything hinges on the definition of a single enemy. Once you
>distort the scope or nature of that enemy, your campaign against it runs off
>the rails. Start calling liberals Communists, and anti-communism becomes a
>totalitarian monster. Start calling conservatives fascists, and anti-fascism
>becomes a pretext for purging them from universities.
>
>Anti-terrorism faces the same problem. What counts as terrorism, and what
>doesn't? The question isn't just theoretical. It's on the table right now,
>as the United States weighs the price of adding two new wings to the
>coalition against Bin Laden.
>
>The first wing consists of Iran and Syria, who sponsor terrorist
>organizations other than Bin Laden's. Iran borders Afghanistan and hates the
>Afghan regime. Yesterday, according to the New York Times, a senior Bush
>administration official "suggested that Iran could provide information and
>perhaps crack down on border traffic and any financing that helps Mr. bin
>Laden's organization, Al Qaeda. The official added that the United States
>had not asked Iran to take any specific action like halting the flow of
>weapons and other support to the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon and material
>support to militant Palestinian groups like Hamas." Is that deal kosher? Are
>you willing to look the other way while Iran funds Hezbollah? Are you
>willing to narrow the definition of the enemy to terrorists who have
>directly attacked the United States?
>
>The other wing consists of Russia and China. While Iran and Syria want to
>narrow the definition of terrorism, Russia and China want to broaden it. A
>few days ago, China's foreign ministry suggested that the campaign against
>terrorism should address "separatists" in Tibet and Taiwan. Russian
>President Vladimir Putin called for a "mutual understanding in the sphere of
>fighting international terrorism"-in other words, a free hand for Russia to
>crush rebels in Chechnya. What about the atrocities Russia has committed in
>that war? Never mind, says a senior member of Germany's ruling party:
>"Silence on Chechnya is the price for this new solidarity. And I don't think
>Germany will be the only country to pay it." Will the United States pay that
>price? Will you?
>
>Terrorists are "the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th
>century," Bush argued in his speech to Congress. "By abandoning every value
>except the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism, and
>totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way to where it
>ends, in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies."
>
>Bush is half right. There is a grave, but there is no path. There is only
>anti-fascism and anti-communism, which themselves prevailed by abandoning,
>at crucial moments, every value except the enemy's defeat. With that
>singular focus comes a singular responsibility.
>
>If anti-terrorists twist the definition of terrorism so that they can
>continue to use it while slaughtering civilians in the name of fighting it,
>they'll be the ones who have obliterated every value except the will to
>power. Like Joe McCarthy, they'll become the enemy they set out to defeat.
>They'll be the ones who end up in history's grave. Or worse, they won't.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------
> [ mas'ood cajee - mcajee@hotmail.com ]
>------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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