The Age of the Warrior: Selected Writings

If there is one thing that enrages the Arab world about the United States government – apart from its betrayal of the principles of the peace process, its unconditional support for Israel, its enthusiasm for sanctions that are killing thousands of Iraqi civilians and its continued presence in Saudi Arabia – it is the administration’s habit of telling Arabs how much it loves them.

Before every air strike, the President assures his future victims how much he admires them. Ronald Reagan told the Libyan people that America regarded them as friends – then he unleashed his bombers on Tripoli and Benghazi. George Bush waffled on about Iraq’s history as the birthplace of civilisation and America’s friendship for ordinary Iraqis – before bombing every town and city in Iraq. And this week, as his missiles had just left their ships in the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf, there was Bill Clinton telling the people of the Middle East that Islam was one of the world’s great religions.

As my Beirut grocer put it to me yesterday – his smile as crooked as his message – ‘it’s good of Mr Clinton to tell me about my religion. It’s always nice to be informed that religion doesn’t condone murder. Thank you, Mr Clinton.’ My grocer was not being polite. Clinton’s admonition from the White House – ‘no religion condones the murder of innocent men, women and children’ – came across in the Middle East as patronising as well as insulting, coming as it did from a man who is embroiled in a sex scandal. ‘That filthy man’ is how he was called by an Egyptian over the phone to me yesterday, although the Arabs have not grasped the complexities of Mr Clinton’s adventures with Miss Lewinsky (mercifully, there is no word for ‘oral sex’ in Arabic).

What was immediately grasped in the region yesterday, however, was the ease with which the Americans could once again choose an enemy without disclosing any evidence for his guilt and then turn journalists and television commentators into their cheerleaders. ‘I was so sickened by the constant use of the word “terrorism” that I turned to French radio,’ a Palestinian acquaintance told me at midday. ‘And what happened? All I heard in French was “terroristes, terroristes, terroristes”.’ He was right. Almost all the reporting out of America was based on the accuracy of the ‘compelling evidence’ – so “compelling” that we haven’t been vouchsafed a clue as to what it is – that links Osama bin Laden to the ferocious bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Several times yesterday, I had to interrupt live radio interviews to point out that the journalists in London and Washington were adopting the US government’s claims without question.

The plots in which bin Laden is now supposed to have been involved, according to the Americans, are now taking on Gone with the Wind proportions. Bin Laden, we are told, was behind not only the US embassy bombings, but also the earlier bombing of US troops in Dhahran, anti-government violence in Egypt, the 1993 New York bombing of the World Trade Center, and now – wait for it – an attempt to kill the Pope. Is this really conceivable? The fact that all this was taken at face value by so many reporters probably says as much about the state of journalism as it does about American paranoia.

The use of the word ‘terrorist’ – Arabs who murder the innocent are always ‘terrorists’ but Israeli killers who slaughter twenty-nine Palestinians in a Hebron mosque or assassinate their prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, are called ‘extremists’ – is only part of the problem. ‘Terrorist’ is a word that avoids all meaning. The who and the how are of essential importance. But the ‘why’ is something the West usually prefers to avoid. Not once yesterday – not in a single press statement, press conference or interview – did a US leader or diplomat explain why the enemies of America hate America. Why is bin Laden so angry with the United States? Why – not just who and how – but why did anyone commit the terrible atrocities in Africa?

Clearly, someone blew up the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam. They may have been suicide bombers, but they must have known that they were slaughtering the innocent. Their deeds were wicked. But they were not, as one US diplomat called them, mindless. Whether or not bin Laden was involved, there was a reason for these dreadful deeds. And the reason almost certainly lies with US policy – or lack of policy – towards the Middle East. ‘How can America protect its embassies?’ a US radio station asked me last week. When I suggested it could adopt fairer policies in the region, I was admonished for not answering a question about ‘terrorism’.

For what really lies at the root of Arab reaction to the US attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan is that they come when America’s word has never been so low; when the Arab sense of betrayal has never been greater. America’s continued military presence in Saudi Arabia, its refusal to bring Israel to heel as it continues to build Jewish settlements on Arab land in violation of the Oslo agreement, its almost lip-smacking agreement to continue sanctions which are clearly culling the civilian population of Iraq; Arab fury at this catastrophe is one reason why a normally compassionate people responded with so little sympathy to the bombing of the US embassies. After all this, being lectured by Mr Clinton and then bombed by him was like getting a kick in the teeth from a man who has already stabbed you in the back.

Bin Laden or not, it is a fair and fearful bet that the embassy bombings were organised by – or at the least involved – Arabs. And the culprits should be found and brought to justice. But Cruise missiles do not represent due process, as Mr Clinton knows all too well. Talk of a massive ‘international terrorist conspiracy’ is as exotic as the perennial Arab belief in the ‘international Zionist conspiracy’. Bin Laden is protected in Afghanistan by the Taliban. But the Taliban are paid, armed and inspired by Saudi Arabia. And Saudi Arabia is supposed to be America’s best friend in the Gulf, so close an ally that US troops are still stationed there (which is, of course, bin Laden’s grouse). Could it be that powerful people in Saudi Arabia, a fundamentalist and undemocratic state if ever there was one, support bin Laden and share his desire for a ‘jihad’ against America? This is one question the Americans should be asking.

Bin Laden himself was obsessed for many months with the massacre of Lebanese civilians by the Israelis at the UN base at Qana in southern Lebanon in April 1996. Why had Clinton not condemned this ‘terrorist act’, he asked. (In fact, Bill Clinton called it a ‘tragedy’, as if it was some form of natural disaster – the Israelis said it was a ‘mistake’ but the UN concluded it wasn’t). Why had the perpetrators not been brought to justice, bin Laden wanted to know? It is odd now to compare bin Laden’s words with those of Bill Clinton just forty-eight hours ago. They talked much the same language. And now their language has grown far more ferocious. ‘The United States wants peace, not conflict,’ Clinton said. He is likely to find little peace in theMiddle East for the rest of his presidency.

The Independent, 22 August 1998

Brace yourself for Part Two of the War for Civilisation

It needed my old Irish journalist colleague Vincent Browne to point out the obvious to me. With a headache as big as Afghanistan, reading through a thousand newspaper reports on the supposed ‘aftermath’ of the Afghan war, I’d become drugged by the lies. Afghan women were free at last, ‘our’ peacekeeping force was on its way, the Taliban were crushed. Anti-American demonstrations in Pakistan had collapsed – we’ll forget my little brush with some real Afghans there a couple of weeks ago. Al-Qaeda was being ‘smoked out’ of its cave. Osama bin Laden was – well, not captured or even dead; but – well, the Americans had a videotape, incomprehensible to every Arab I’ve met, which ‘proves’ that our latest monster planned the crimes against humanity in New York and Washington.

So it needed Vincent, breathing like a steam engine as he always does when he’s angry, to point to the papers in Gemma’s, my favourite Dublin newsagents. ‘What in Christ’s sake is going on, Bob?’ he asked. ‘Have you seen the headlines of all this shite?’ and he pulled Newsweek from the shelf. The headline: ‘After The Evil’. ‘What is this biblical bollocks?’ Vincent asked me. Osama bin Laden’s overgrained, videotaped face stared from the cover of the magazine, a dark, devilish image from Dante’s circles of hell. When he captured Berlin, Stalin announced that his troops had entered ‘the lair of the fascist beast’. But the Second World War has nothing on this.

So let’s do a ‘story-sofar’. After Arab mass-murderers crashed four hijacked aircraft into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania, a crime against humanity which cost more than 4,000 innocent lives, President Bush announced a crusade for infinite ‘justice’ – later downgraded to infinite freedom – and bombed Afghanistan. Using the gunmen and murderers of the discredited Northern Alliance to destroy the gunmen and murderers of the discredited Taliban, the Americans bombed bin Laden’s cave fortresses and killed hundreds of Afghan and Arab fighters, not including the prisoners executed after the Anglo–US–Northern Alliance suppression of the Mazar prison revolt.

The production of the bin Laden videotape – utterly convincing evidence of his guilt to the international press, largely, if wilfully, ignored by the Muslim world – helped to obscure the fact that Mr Evil seemed to have disappeared. It also helped to airbrush a few other facts away. We could forget that US air strikes, according to statistics compiled by a New Hampshire university professor, have now killed more innocent Afghans than the hijackers killed Westerners and others in the World Trade Center.* We could forget that Mullah Omar, the mysterious leader of the Taliban, has also got away. We could ignore the fact that, save for a few brave female souls, almost all Afghan women continued to wear the burqa. We could certainly close our eyes to the massive preponderance of Northern Alliance killers represented in the new UN-supported, pro- Western government in Kabul. We could clap our hands when a mere fifty Royal Marines arrived in Afghanistan this weekend to support a UN-mandated British-led ‘peace’ force of only a few thousand men who will need the Kabul government’s permission to operate in the city and which, in numbers, will come to about one-third of the complement of the British army destroyed in the Kabul Gorge in 1842. The ‘peace’ force thinks it will have to defend humanitarian aid convoys from robbers and dissident Taliban. In fact, it will have to fight off the Northern Alliance mafia and drug-growers and warlords, as well as the vicious guerrillas sent out to strike them by bin Laden’s survivors. If nothing else, the Taliban made the roads and villages of Afghanistan safe for Afghans and foreigners alike. Now, you can scarcely drive from Kabul to Jalalabad.

* Professor Marc W. Herold, ‘A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan: A Comprehensive Accounting’ (Revised March 2002). (http://www.cursor.org/stories/civiliandeaths. htm)

Presumably, the CIA will let us pay the Alliance mobsters for their war in Afghanistan. One of the untold stories of this conflict is the huge amount of money handed out to militia leaders to persuade them to fight for the US. When Taliban members changed sides for an Alliance payment of $250,000 and then attacked their benefactors, we all dwelt on their treachery. None of us asked how the Alliance – which didn’t have enough money to pay for bullets a few weeks earlier – could throw a quarter of a million bucks at the Taliban in the middle of a fire-fight. Nor how the Pashtun tribal leaders of Kandahar province are now riding around in brand-new four-wheel-drives with thousands of dollars to hand out to their gunmen. I wasn’t surprised to read that a Somali warlord is now offering his cash-for-hire services to the US for the next round of the War for Civilisation.

Fortunately for us, the civilian victims of America’s B-52s will remain unknown in their newly dug graves. Even before the war ended, around 3,700 of them – not counting Mullah Omar’s and bin Laden’s gunmen – had been ripped to pieces in our War for Civilisation. A few scattered signs of discontent – the crowd that assaulted me two weeks ago, for example, outraged at the killing of their families – can be quickly erased from the record.

It is obviously perverse to note that I haven’t met a single ordinary Muslim or, indeed, many Westerners – Pakistani, Afghan, Arab, British, French, American – who actually believe all this guff. Let’s just remember that the new Kabul government is as committed to support ‘Islam, democracy, pluralism [sic] and social justice’ as George W. Bush is to Good and the Destruction of Evil. Roll on next year, and don’t worry about bin Laden – he may be back just in time to participate in Part Two of the War for Civilisation.

The Independent, 22 December 2001

By the autumn of 2007, thousands of Western troops had been fought to a standstill outside Kandahar by a resurgent Taliban. Hamid Karzai’s Afghan ‘government’ controlled little more than its own ministries in Kabul as dozens of suicide bombers assaulted, Iraq-style, his forces and those of his Western allies.

The pit of desperation

A few days ago, Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia* called upon the ‘conscience’ of the American people to help the Palestinians. The Emir of Qatar went one step further in sel-fabasement. The Arabs, he said – and he apologised for using the word – had to ‘beg’ the United States to use its influence on the Israelis. Truly, when such words are uttered, it is the very pit of Arab desperation. Beg? Conscience? Washington may still turn down Ariel Sharon’s request to break all relations with Yasser Arafat, but President Bush has long ago forgotten his ‘vision’ of a Palestinian state – produced when he needed Arab acquiescence in the bombardment of Afghanistan but swiftly buried once it had served its purpose – and Arafat’s role now is to remember his job: to protect Israel from his own people.

From his office in Ramallah, surrounded by Israeli tanks, Arafat fantasises about his derring-do during Israel’s 1982 siege of West Beirut, but it is diffficult to underestimate the degree of shame with which many Palestinians now regard him. Last Christmas, Arafat insisted that he would march to Bethlehem to attend church services. But when the Israelis refused him permission, he merely appeared on Palestinian television and preposterously claimed that Israel’s refusal was a ‘crime’ and an act of ‘terrorism’. Why, the Arabic daily Al Quds al-Arabi asked, was there no explanation for this ‘bizarre and incomprehensible’ performance by Arafat? Why did he not march out of Ramallah with the Christian clerics who had come to give their support until physically stopped by Israeli troops in front of the television cameras? The more he talks about Israel’s ‘terrorism’, the less we examine his own record of corruption, cronyism and brutality.

* Now King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

In the meantime, Israel’s own mythmaking goes on apace. In New York, Shimon Peres announces the presence of Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon and the arrival of 8,000 long-range missiles for Hizballah; now there hasn’t been an Iranian militiaman in Lebanon for fifteen years, and the ‘new’ missiles don’t exist* – but this nonsense is reported in the US media without the slightest attempt to check the facts. The latest whopper came from Sharon.† He regretted, he said, that he had not ‘liquidated’ Arafat during the 1982 siege of Beirut, but there had been an agreement not to do so. This is rubbish; during the siege, Israeli jets five times bombed the buildings in which Sharon, then Israel’s defence minister, believed Arafat to be hiding, on two occasions destroying whole apartment blocks – along, of course, with all the civilians living in them – only minutes after Arafat had left. Again, Sharon’s untrue version of history was reported in the American press as fact.

Indeed, all the participants in the Middle East conflict are now engaged in a game of self-deception, a massive and fraudulent attempt to avoid any examination of the critical issues that lie behind the tragedy. The Saudis want to appeal to America’s ‘conscience’, not because they are upset at Arafat’s predicament but because fifteen of the 11 September hijackers were themselves Saudis. Sharon’s attempt to join in the ‘war against terror’ – the manufacturing of non-existent Iranian enemies in Lebanon, for example, along with some very real enemies in the West Bank and Gaza – is a blatant attempt to ensure American support for his crushing of the Palestinian intifada and for the continuation of Israel’s colonisation of Palestinian land.

* By 2006, however, mythmaking had become reality: the Hizballah then had many more than 8,000 rockets in Lebanon.

† Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon suffered a massive stroke on 4 January 2006 and was still on life support in February 2008.

Similarly, Mr Bush’s messianic claim that he is fighting ‘evil’ – ‘evil’ now apparently being a fully-fledged nation-state – and that America’s al-Qaeda enemies hate America because they are ‘against democracy’ is poppycock. Most of America’s Muslim enemies don’t know what democracy is – they have certainly never enjoyed it – and their deeds, which are indeed wicked, have motives. Mr Bush knows – and certainly his secretary of state, Colin Powell, does – that there is an intimate link between the crimes against humanity of 11 September and the Middle East. After all, the killers were all Arabs, they wrote and spoke Arabic, they came from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Lebanon. This much we are allowed to reflect upon.

But the moment anyone takes the next logical step and looks at the Arab world itself, we tread on forbidden territory. For any analysis of the current Middle East will encounter injustice and violence and death, often the result – directly or indirectly – of the policies of the United States and its regional allies (Arab as well as Israeli). At this point, all discussion must cease. Because if America’s own involvement in the region – its unconditional support for Israel, its acquiescence in the Jewish colonisation of Arab land, the sanctions against Iraq that have killed so many tens of thousands of children – and the very lack of that democracy that Bush thinks is under attack suggest that America’s own actions might have something to do with the rage and fury that generated the mass murders of 11 September, then we are on very dangerous territory indeed.

And oddly, the Arab regimes go along with all this. The Arab people do not – they know full well what lies behind the dreadful deeds of 11 September – but the leadership has to pretend ignorance. It supports the ‘war on terrorism’ and then asks – begs – America to recognise a difference between ‘terrorism’ and ‘national resistance’. The Saudis wilfully ignore the implications of their own citizens’ involvement, howling instead about a ‘Jewish conspiracy’ against Saudi Arabia. Arafat says he supports the ‘war on terrorism’ and then – let us not kid ourselves – permits his acolytes to try a gun-running operation on the Karine A.* And Sharon, hopelessly unable to protect his people from the cruel Palestinian suicide bombers, concentrates on presenting the intifada as ‘world terror’ rather than the nationalist uprising that it represents. After all, if it’s about nationalism, it’s also about Israeli occupation and, like American policy in the region, that is not to be discussed.

At the end of next month, the Arab presidents and princes are to hold a summit in Beirut. They will issue ringing declarations of support for the Palestinians and almost equally earnest support for a war against ‘terrorism’. They cannot criticise US policy, however outrageous they believe it to be, because they are almost all beholden to it. So they will appeal again to America’s conscience. And they will do what the Emir of Qatar did a few days ago. They will beg. And they will get nothing.

The Independent, 14 February 2002

At the March 2002 Arab summit in Beirut, Saudi Arabia offered Israel recognition by the Arab states, including peace agreements and normalisation, in return for an Israeli withdrawal from all Arab territories occupied in the 1967 war, a ‘just solution’ to the Palestinian refugee problem and recognition of a sovereign and independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel rejected the proposal. Washington showed no interest.

* The Karine A , a 4,000-ton freighter, was stopped at sea by the Israeli navy on 3 January 2002. Israel claimed that it was carrying 50 tons of weapons for Arafat’s Palestinian Authority in Gaza.

The lies leaders tell when they want to go to war

In the aftermath of the 9/11 assaults on the US, Israel tried to bind its continuing colonial war with Yasser Arafat’s Palestinians into the same narrative. Israeli diplomats referred to Arafat – transmogrified from ‘superterrorist’ to ‘superstatesman’ under the Oslo agreement – as ‘our bin Laden’ in the hope that Americans would see Israel’s conflict with its colonised Arabs as part of the same battle against ‘terrorism’ that George W. Bush thought he was fighting.

How much longer can Ariel Sharon pretend that he’s fighting in the ‘war against terror’? How much longer are we supposed to believe this nonsense? How much longer can the Americans remain so gutlessly silent in the face of a vicious conflict which is coming close to obscuring the crimes against humanity of 11 September? Terror, terror, terror. Like a punctuation mark, the word infects every Israeli speech, every American speech, almost every newspaper article. When will someone admit the truth: that the Israelis and Palestinians are engaged in a dirty colonial war which will leave both sides shamed and humiliated?

Just listen to what Sharon has been saying in the past twentyfour hours. ‘Arafat is an enemy. He decided on a strategy of terror and formed a coalition of terror.’ That’s pretty much what President Bush said about Osama bin Laden. But what on earth does it mean? That Arafat is actually sending off the suicide bombers, choosing the target, the amount of explosives? If he was, then surely Sharon would have sent his death squads after the Palestinian leader months ago. After all, Sharon’s killers have managed to murder dozens of Palestinian gunmen already, including occasional women and children who get in the way.

The real problem with Arafat is that he has a lot in common with Sharon: old, ruthless and cynical; both men have come to despise each other. Sharon believes that the Palestinians can be broken by military power. He doesn’t realise what the rest of the world learned during Sharon’s own 1982 siege of Beirut: that the Arabs are no longer afraid. Once a people lose their fear, they cannot be re-inoculated with fear. Once the suicide bomber is loose, the war cannot be won. And Arafat knows this. No, of course he doesn’t send the bombers off on their cruel missions to restaurants and supermarkets. But he does know that every suicide bombing destroys Sharon’s credibility and proves that the Israeli leader’s promises of security are false. Arafat is well aware that the ferocious bombers are serving his purpose – however much he may condemn them in public.

But he – like Sharon – also believes his enemies can be broken by fire. He thinks that the Israelis can be frightened into withdrawing from the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem. Ultimately, the Israelis probably will have to give up their occupation. But the Jews of Israel are not going to run or submit to an endless war of attrition. Even if Sharon is voted out of power – a prospect for which many Israelis pray – the next Israeli prime minister is not going to negotiate out of fear of the suicide bomber.