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What is an appropropriate response?
Political and philosophical considerations after the attack on the Word Trade Center

Reaping the whirlwind

George Galloway
The Guardian
Wednesday September 12, 2001

Remember, remember the 11th of September. The most dastardly fireworks the
world has ever seen will never be forgotten, either in the United States or the
rest of the world. The massive loss of civilian life - office workers, school
children, hijacked airplane passengers, emergency workers - represents an
unconscionable river of blood, shed by an enemy attack on US soil for the first
time since Pearl Harbour, and is nothing less than a series of atrocities.
Uncomfortably for Americans, and for ourselves given the umbilical cord which
seems to connect our foreign and military policies, the fact is that their loss
and the massive attack on the US state itself which caused it will be, privately
or publicly, the subject of celebration in many parts of the world.

In Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and other countries whose
populations are in sympathy with those who have been under remorseless US
bombardment, people will consider the US to have had to swallow some of their
own medicine.  After all, they will say, cruise missiles, apache helicopter
gunships, F16s, smart bombs, depleted uranium bombs and all the other US
ordinance visited by American forces or their Israeli allies on "rogue states"
paid scant regard to the fate of the civilians amongst whom they exploded. When
an American official yesterday said there had been "an act of war carried out by
madmen", many could recognise the sentiments very well.  But who has belled the
cat? Who possesses the motive and the ability to carry out an attack of this
gravity? This is the question which now grips us.

When Israel, America's auxiliary, assassinated Abu Ali Mustafa, the political
leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, in Ramallah a few
weeks ago, they used an American missile fired from a US-supplied helicopter
gunship. Amidst the wreckage, the slain leader's
comrades vowed revenge against not just Israel but its supplier. Speculation
that the PFLP - no stranger to well-coordinated guerrilla actions, as the
orchestral destruction of civilian airliners in Jordan's 1970 Black September
showed - was responsible for this bloody September is inevitable. But the sheer
scale and professionalism of this crime points away from them. They are a
Damascus-based hole-in-the-corner group whose worldwide network long ago
atrophied.
The former western protege Osama bin Laden, recruited, armed and initially
financed by the US to bleed the Russian bear white with his "mujahedeen", is a
much more likely culprit. Bin Laden has the money, the messianic fervour, the
worldwide network and, as the embassy bombs in Nairobi and Dares Salaam
demonstrated, the logistical capability for such an operation. He is already
under sentence of death, a warrant which was almost carried out when President
Clinton launched a blizzard of cruise missiles on a base in the Afghan
mountains first built for Bin Laden with CIA dollars. He fears nothing,
believing his place in Paradise is already booked. He also has men and materiel
in the US.

Today's Taleban, the protectors of Bin Laden, are the sons of those US and
UK-supported holy warriors once eulogised for their role in defeating the USSR.
They in turn are protected by the military government of General Musharaf, the
self-declared president of Pakistan. The Pakistani military have long enjoyed
the largesse of the Pentagon and the State Department - the same departments
still smouldering from enemy attack.  On the first weekend of this month I
attended, as a guest speaker, the vast convention of the Islamic Society of
North America, many millions strong - they claim 7m Muslim adherents in the US
alone. Thirty thousand people attended the Chicago convention, most of them
second generation US citizens who, but for their Islamic garb, were
indistinguishable from other young people in the American patchwork quilt.
Drinking Coke, driving Chevvies, chewing gum. And nursing their wrath.  The
vast majority of those attending were non-violent religious people, well
mindful of the total Islamic injunction against the targeting of civilians in
times of conflict. But many were brimful of bitterness at the US role in the
world, especially its responsibility for the slaughter of the innocents in Iraq
- more than a million dead, most of them children - through sanctions and almost
constant bombardment, along with the diplomatic financial and military blank
cheque drawn on the US government and in the hands of Ariel Sharon.

Earlier this year, speaking in the House of Commons against the son of star
wars national missile defence, I said that the danger to the US lay not in the
chimera of "rogue states" launching intercontinental ballistic missiles at the
world's only superpower, but in the terrorist's bomb in the boot of his
American car, the chemical weapon unloaded on the longshore of the East River,
the little man with the big rage ready to trade his life for many of theirs. 
Tony Blair was right to abandon his TUC speech and return to Downing Street and
the closing down of the London Stock Exchange was no over-reaction. When the US
flag burns in the dust of third world street demonstrations, our own is usually
not far behind. So closely has Mr Blair tied us to the sinews of the US war
machine, it is inconceivable that some representative of the enragŽs of the
earth is not planning revenge on us.

Although the paraphernalia of Guy Fawkes night seems essentially trivial, in
truth it marks nearly 400 years on the earthshaking importance of the blow the
conspirators sought to deal the state from the bowels of Westminster. A
terrible vengence against Fawkes's fellow believers followed. This challenge,
to the hitherto untrammelled ability of the US to deal out death and
destruction and a pax americana, is why this bloody September too will be
always remembered. When the flames are dampened down and the dust from this day
which shook the world settles, we will find that, though the US has legions of
enemies in the world, it will turn out to have sustained this devastating wound
from the enemy within.

George Galloway is Labour Member of Parliament for Glasgow Kelvin and a
columnist for the Scottish Mail on Sunday

Reference:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4254831,00.html