Because the war will bring even more pain and suffering to millions of innocent people.
Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world. Before the bombing began the World Food Program estimated that famine meant six million in the country needed food aid: now that figure has risen to 7.5 million, with millions facing death from starvation unless aid is increased massively and food convoys can resume. The war will annihilate a country that is already largely destroyed. Because US weapons cannot be targeted to “take out” the guilty and miss the innocent; because the land war will shed the blood of numberless Afghan men, women and children; because George Bush has told the US public that “we will use every necessary weapon of war”; and most of all because the war against terrorism “will likely be sustained for a period of years, not weeks or months” (US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld). The conflict and suffering will not stop with Afghanistan. The US reserves the right to attack any country it regards as harboring terrorists, like Iraq. In an October 7 letter to the Security Council, US ambassador to the United Nations John Negroponte, wrote: “Our inquiry is in its early stages. We may find that our self-defense requires further actions with respect to other organizations and other states.” Former CIA chief James Woolsey is even talking about a two- or three-decade war. Because it will spread, not reduce, terrorism. Terrorists are not born, but made. Made firstly by the appalling poverty and oppression that prevails in countries like Palestine, Pakistan, Iraq and many more. That's what creates a social base for terrorism, which is not an act of individual “evil” or “madness” but a political method. Secondly, because socially progressive forces needed to lead the fight for social and national justice have been destroyed, are weak or simply don't exist, the terrorist response seems the only weapon of resistance left. As a result many, especially young people with no future, feel that terror is the only weapon they have. Even if the Western powers “get” Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, do they seriously think that will have “whipped” terrorism? Until the appalling inequalities and injustices of life in most of the Third World are seriously addressed, terrorism will continue to spring up and Bush's war will only spur more to adopt the terror tactic. That's why an ex-MI5 agent told a recent London rally against the war: “No-one in the intelligence community believes war is the answer to terrorism.” For one thing terrorism is cheap. The airliner attacks of September 11 are estimated to have cost no more than US$200,000 and involved a score or so people. Similar attacks can readily be repeated and the US$30 billion a year the US spends on its intelligence budget is no guarantee Washington will have any more success in stopping them than they did on September 11. Secondly, Islamic fundamentalism has a strong social and political presence across the whole of the Middle East. Even if — especially if — bin Laden and the Taliban are defeated in Afghanistan, fundamentalism will attract more support. UK Guardian commentator Tariq Ali foresees a “Talibanisation” of the Middle East: “A major concern for the overwhelming majority of Pakistanis is that the Taliban, cornered and defeated in their own country, will turn on Pakistan and wreak havoc on its cities and social fabric... The consequences of the Anglo-American war in Afghanistan are likely to be incendiary.” Because it is illegal in international law. To justify its bombing of Afghanistan the US has invoked Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. This gives a state the right to repel an attack until the UN Security Council can take steps to ensure international peace and security. But it does not allow unilateral retaliation once an attack has stopped. As a result, the atrocity of their war on the Afghan people puts Bush, Britain's Blair and Howard on the same moral level as the organizers of the atrocity of September 11. And even as it answers one crime with another. the US has declared itself prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner. There were always alternatives to war. For example, the US rulers didn't think for a minute to submit the evidence of Osama bin Laden's guilt to the US judiciary, seek a warrant for his extradition and prepare to bring him to trial. Of course, it never entered their head to submit evidence against bin Laden to a representative international tribunal, like the General Assembly of the United Nations or the proposed International Criminal Court — no international institutions are going to tell Uncle Sam how to fight terrorism. That's why the US Congress has refused to ratify the 12 UN covenants dealing with terrorism, which would give these agreements the force of law within the US. It's also why the US continues to reject plans for a United Nations special conference on terrorism. None of this is surprising in a government that was itself found guilty by the World Court of acts of state terrorism against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the 1980s and ordered to pay compensation. Washington immediately refused to recognize the jurisdiction of the court. One should mention, however, that the one international expression of support the US did seek for its “war on terrorism”- the resolution on the September 11 attack by the UN Security Council — didn't actually give the US the explicit right to bomb Afghanistan. Even if it had, the bombing of the poorest country in the world by the richest remains a crime against humanity. Because the US rulers are the last people to determine who is and isn't a terrorist. The US administration's idea of who is a terrorist is broad and narrow at the same time. Broad as far as its opponents are concerned. In a May 10 “statement for the record” to various US Senate committees, FBI director Louis J. Freeh roped into his definition a “category of domestic terrorists, left-wing groups, [who] generally profess a revolutionary socialist doctrine and view themselves as protectors of the people against the “dehumanising effects' of capitalism and imperialism”. In the wake of September 11, US State Department spokesperson Richard Boucher said of the chances of a Sandinista victory in the coming Nicaraguan presidential elections: “We have serious concerns about the Sandinistas' history of confiscating properties without compensation, destroying the economy and maintaining links with those who support terrorism.” Yet as far as convicted terrorists at the other end of the political spectrum go, various US administrations have been very reluctant to use the “t” word and rather compassionate in their practical dealings with them. Another problem with letting the US decide who is a terrorist is that for Washington today's “terrorists” were in many cases their “freedom fighters” of yesteryear. Saddam Hussein himself took part in a 1963 CIA-backed Baath party coup against the then president of Iraq, Abdul-Karim Kassem, guilty in Washington's eyes of being soft on “communism”. The Taliban are the most blatant example of this sort of flip-flop. These “freedom fighters” against the Soviet Union were funded to the tune of US$6 billion between 1978 and 1992, and by 1987 they were receiving 65,000 tonnes of weaponry a year from the US alone. While their brutally reactionary fundamentalism was turned against the pro-Soviet People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan government, they were “patriots” in the eyes of former US secretary of state Zbigniew Brzezinski. It was only when their anti-communist Frankenstein turned against its US makers that the Taliban became “terrorist”. Because it will undermine our democratic rights and civil liberties. The horrors of September 11 were a godsend to all those who want to tighten state and police controls. Legislation already passed by the US Senate will allow police and secret service agencies increased surveillance and interrogation powers. These include the power to hold foreigners suspected of being terrorists for up to seven days without charge, the right to impose “roving wiretaps” instead of taps on specific phone numbers, and the power to subpoena internet providers to provide email transmission records of suspected terrorists. Even senators who voted for this bill expect that it will face constitutional challenge in the courts. More broadly, the lynch mob mood being created by Bush (“You are either with us or against us”) is making even the most timid expressions of dissent suspect. Being “soft on terrorism” is becoming a sin as mortal as being “soft on communism” during the Cold War. So hysterical is the atmosphere that anti-globalization activists have been scared into calling off demonstrations and US officials like Colin Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice have pressured US and Arabic-language TV networks not to give coverage to bin Laden. Because it will deepen racism and xenophobia. Across the Western world, the burning down of mosques and assaults on people of Middle Eastern appearance have exploded since the September 11 attacks. In the US, all immigrants have come under suspicion, with September 11 bringing an end, for example, to all talk of an amnesty for the millions of undocumented Mexican immigrants. While Western leaders have condemned these attacks, the “war on terrorism” and all the talk in the popular press about “Osama bin Laden cells” and “terrorist infiltrators among asylum seekers” can only heighten fear and hatred of Muslim and Arab peoples. It deliberately puts pressure on these communities to behave as super-patriots to place themselves above suspicion. Much more eloquent than the crocodile tears of Bush and Blair is the actual policy of exclusion, discrimination and repression against asylum seekers and refugees practiced by Western governments. Its constant message is that “we” — the mainly white, law-abiding citizens of the West — are under threat from “illegals” and “ethnic mafias” when the truth is that the vast majority of asylum seekers are victims of Western policy such as support for Israel's war on the Palestinians and the criminal blockade of Iraq. At a supposedly more “intellectual” level, the September 11 attacks are being interpreted by some as an opening shot in a new “clash of civilizations” or as evidence of “Islamic methods of warfare” against which the “democratic” West must do everything to defend itself. This is the language of the medieval Crusades dressed up for the 21st century, and is the mirror image of the language of jihad (holy war). Bush's self-righteous fundamentalism of “God Bless America” and “standing tall against the evil doers” must deepen the appeal in the Arabic-speaking and Middle Eastern world of the bin Laden fundamentalist version of Islam. Because it rests on an alliance which includes some of the worst state terrorists. Bush's war is built on an alliance with some of the nastiest people on the planet. They include: · Pakistani dictator General Pervaiz Musharraf, who overthrew an elected government, was even rapped on the knuckles by Bill Clinton for human rights abuses, but has been transformed overnight from coup-leader into “president”; · Islam Karimov, the boss of Uzbekistan, who keeps 7000 political prisoners in jail and wants to solve his bankrupt country's economic crisis by laying an oil pipeline across Afghanistan to a Pakistan port; · Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose troops reduced the rebel ex-Soviet republic of Chechnya to a wasteland and whose secret service is strongly suspected of bombing Moscow apartment blocks in order to scapegoat “Chechen terrorists” before the last Russian presidential elections; · The butcher generals of Turkey, who in their campaign against the Kurdish people have banned the speaking of the Kurdish language and killed 30,000 over the last decade; · The hyper-rich Saudi ruling family, whose religious police taught the Taliban all they know about the total degradation of women, public executions and hand-chopping and how to run a totally rigged judicial system; · The present Israeli government of Ariel Sharon, who helped mastermind the slaughter of 1700 Palestinians in the camps of Sabra and Shatilla during the Israeli occupation of Lebanon in the early 1980s, and; · The “Northern Alliance”, which Human Rights Watch has found guilty of “indiscriminate aerial bombardment and shelling, direct attacks on civilians, summary executions, rape, persecution on the basis of religion or ethnicity, the recruitment and use of children as soldiers, and the use of antipersonnel landmines”. According to the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, the very thought of a return to power by the Northern Alliance has “plunged our people into a horrific concern and anxiety in fear of re-experiencing the dreadful happenings” of their last rule over southern parts of the country. Because, at bottom, it's a war for global US interests. Bush's “war against terrorism” is the most open-ended war ever declared. So long as there is a group or nation in the world that the US calls “terrorist” or a state to accuse of harboring terrorism, then Washington has a pretext for war. This makes the “war against terrorism” a perfect cover for the US to use its military power to pursue its economic and political ends. The US has been encountering stiff opposition to its global economic agenda — trade “liberalization”, defense of corporate patent “rights”, ditching of social and environmental standards, along with the right to station the US military in every part of the world and build whatever weapons it pleases. Now, exploiting the grief and anger of the American people, Washington has grabbed the terrorist attacks as a chance to turn the tables on its rivals and impose a new number one priority that favors US interests on world politics. As a result, what we now face is not a short war of retaliation against bin Laden and the Taliban but an ongoing campaign, one which aims to re-launch the neo-liberal offensive and reassert US dominance in all spheres. Central to the US agenda is the expansion of its military power. Firstly, all the objections to Bush's National Missile Defense program can now be swept aside — obviously a nation that is charged with defense of freedom against terrorism needs every weapon it can lay its hands on. The coming boost in US military spending, which will include such items as a global bomber based on space-shuttle technology, will give the US first-strike nuclear capacity. It will be aimed not, of course, against Afghanistan, but against its actual and emerging economic rivals, in particular China, which will be drawn into an exhausting arms race. If the US succeeds in imposing the “war against terrorism” as the most important priority, it will tighten its grip on the vast oil deposits of Central Asia and the Caucusus. It will also: · Reduce the need to manufacture special excuses for intervening against popular struggles — pretexts like the “war on drugs”, the flimsy rationale for Plan Colombia whose real aim is to crush the Colombian popular and guerrilla movements. In the future the job can largely be done by “revelations” of a “terrorist threat” and some sinister references to anthrax; · Be useful in confronting the European Union in those areas where economic rivalry is intense — particularly in the Middle East and Arabic-speaking world (Europe has been strengthening economic links with countries like Libya and Iraq). Washington is moving to include some Middle Eastern states in its anti-terrorist alliance while outlawing others and pressuring its European rivals to do likewise; · Be turned against old enemies like Cuba and Vietnam, and any other Third World country resisting US plans for the planet. Already stories are appearing in the US media of Cuba's alleged capacity to wage biological warfare, as a result of its biotechnology research. The ultra-right Miami Cuban exile community is calling on its friend Bush to include Havana on the Pentagon's terrorist target list; · Have a useful weapon against its newest enemy — the global anti-corporate movement. The global justice movement has been winning broad sympathy among working people and is causing increasing anxiety among the leaders of the major industrial powers. As the victim of a terrible terrorist attack Washington is now able to present its agenda for the world as a defense of human rights and democracy-it has acquired a new “Evil Empire” against which to lead the mission for freedom. The message is that the US must remain strong to defend us all against the terrorists, and that the global justice movement can only weaken the defense of the central pillar of Western civilization. Because the only way to eliminate terrorism is to strike at its roots. We believe in and fight for the free, mass, democratic struggle of the oppressed people in defense of their own interests. For example, it's up to the Afghan people — and not the present imperialist unholy alliance — to free themselves of the Taliban, bin Laden and the Northern Alliance. But we understand why young Palestinians feel so enraged and desperate that they are willing to destroy themselves and other people in suicide bombings. To eliminate terrorism we have to eliminate the conditions that drive people to terrorist acts. We have to fight for policies for global justice, and to accomplish this, we must: 1. Stop arming dictatorial regimes. 2. Stop training the troops of repressive regimes. 3. Stop fostering “friendly” terrorist groups. 4. Increase untied humanitarian aid to the Third World. 5. Demand that the US ratify UN conventions against terrorism and abide by international law. 6. Make the UN Security Council representative of and accountable to the UN General Assembly, and remove the veto power of the permanent members. 7. Lift the blockade of the Iraqi people and support consistent implementation of UN resolutions, especially on Palestine. From the Socialist Alliance | 