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Why they attack us
By Samuel Francis
| "We're at war," the young
waitress, her voice catching, informed me when I first heard of the
terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon this week.
She was hardly the only one. "America at war," the Washington
Times' lead editorial pronounced the next day. "It's WAR,"
screamed its editorial cartoon. A "new kind of war has been declared
on the world's democracies," the Wall Street Journal's editorial
pontificated. "The War Against America" was the subject of the
New York Times editorial. "A state of war," the Washington Post
called it. "This is war," pronounced columnist Charles
Krauthammer. "They were acts of war," confirmed the President of
the United States. Well, it probably is – except that, even as everyone
from waitresses to the president was declaring war or howling for it,
nobody was exactly sure who we were at war with. The usual suspect was the
shadowy Osama bin Laden, though some experts said the attacks didn't fit
his profile, and even if we were sure, no one seemed able to say how we
should wage the war, how we could win it, or what would constitute
victory. Mainly, what most Americans wanted to do – entirely
understandably – was to blow the hell out of somebody or something. No
doubt, in time, we will. But the blunt truth is that the United States has
been at war for years – at least a decade, since we launched a war
against Iraq in 1991, even though Iraq had done absolutely nothing to harm
the United States or any American. Our bombing attacks on Iraq certainly
caused civilian casualties, and if they were not deliberate, nobody
beating the war drums at the time felt much regret for them. For ten
years, we have maintained economic sanctions on Iraq that have led to the
deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, and we have repeatedly
bombed it whenever it failed to abide by standards we imposed on it. Under
Bill Clinton, we again launched bombing raids against civilians – once
against so-called "terrorist training camps" supposedly under
bin Laden's control in Afghanistan and at the same time against a
purported "chemical weapons factory" in Sudan that almost
certainly was no such thing. The attacks just happened to occur on the
same day as Monica Lewinsky's grand jury testimony that she had engaged in
sex with the president. "This is unfortunately the war of the
future," Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said in justifying the
U.S. raids, officially launched in retaliation for terrorist attacks on
American embassies. Later the same year, Mr. Clinton ordered (but later
countermanded) yet more missile attacks on Iraq – the day after the
Paula Jones sex scandal was settled in court. Later, yet again, Mr.
Clinton ordered more bombings in Iraq the day before Congress was
scheduled to vote on his impeachment. Then there are the Balkans, where
the United States has waddled forth to war for no compelling reason, and
where it has also slaughtered civilians with its unprovoked bombings. In
all the buckets of media gabble about the terrorist attacks in New York
and Washington, not once have I heard any journalist ask any expert the
simple question, "Why did the terrorists attack us?"There is, of
course, an implicit answer to the unasked question: It's because the
terrorists are "evil"; they "hate democracy"; they are
"fanatics," "barbarians" and "cowards."
Those, of course, are answers that can satisfy only children. Some day it
might actually dawn on someone in this country that the grown-up but
unwelcome answer is that the terrorists attacked us because they were
paying us back for what we started. Let us hear no more about how the
"terrorists" have "declared war on America." Any
nation that allows a criminal chief executive to use its military power to
slaughter civilians in unprovoked and legally unauthorized attacks for his
own personal political purposes can expect whatever the
"terrorists" dish out to it. If, as President Bush told us this
week, we should make no distinction between those who harbor terrorists
and those who commit terrorist acts, neither can any distinction be made
between those who tolerate the murderous policies of a criminal in power
and the criminal himself. The blunt and quite ugly truth is that the
United States has been at war for years – that it started the war in the
name of "spreading democracy," "building nations,"
"waging peace," "stopping aggression," "enforcing
human rights," and all the other pious lies that warmongers always
invoke to mask the truth, and that it continued the war simply to save a
crook from political ruin. What is new is merely that this week, for the
first time, the war we started came home – and all of a sudden,
Americans don't seem to care for it so much.Samuel Francis is a nationally
syndicated columnist. He can be contacted at Error! Bookmark not defined. q |
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