Robert Fisk 61

Nine years, two wars, hundreds of thousands
dead – and nothing learnt
by Robert Fisk
The Independent
11 September 2010


Did 9/11 make us all go mad? How fitting, in a weird, crazed way, that the
apotheosis of that firestorm nine years ago should turn out to be a crackpot
preacher threatening another firestorm with a Nazi-style book burning of the
Koran. Or a would-be mosque two blocks from "ground zero" – as if 9/11 was
an onslaught on Jesus-worshipping Christians, rather than on the atheist
West.

But why should we be surprised? Just look at all the other crackpots spawned
in the aftermath of those international crimes against humanity: the
half-crazed Ahmadinejad, the smarmy post-nuclear Gaddafi, Blair with his
crazed right eye and George W Bush with his black prisons and torture and
lunatic "war on terror". And that wretched man who lived – or  lives still –
in an Afghan cave and the hundreds of al-Qa'idas whom he  created, and the
one-eyed mullah – not to mention all the lunatic cops and  intelligence
agencies and CIA thugs who failed us all – utterly – on 9/11  because they
were too idle or too stupid to identify 19 men who were going  to attack the
United States. And remember one thing: even if the Rev Terry  Jones sticks
with his decision to back down, another of our cranks will be  ready to take
his place.

Indeed, on this grim ninth anniversary – and heaven spare us next year from
the 10th – 9/11 appears to have produced not peace or justice or democracy
or human rights, but monsters. They have prowled Iraq – both the Western and
the local variety – and slaughtered 100,000 souls, or 500,000, or a million;
and who cares? They have killed tens of thousands in Afghanistan; and who
cares? And as the sickness has spread across the Middle East and then the
globe, they – the air force pilots and the insurgents, the Marines and the
suicide bombers, the al-Qa'idas of the Maghreb and of the Khalij and of the
Caliphate of Iraq and the special forces and the close air support boys and
the throat-cutters – have torn the heads off women and children and the old
and the sick and the young and healthy, from the Indus to the Mediterranean,
from Bali to the London Tube; quite a memorial to the 2,966 innocents who
were killed nine years ago. All in their name, it seems, has been our
holocaust of fire and blood, enshrined now in the crazed pastor of
Gainesville.

This is the loss, of course. But who's made the profit? Well, the arms
dealers, naturally, and Boeing and Lockheed Martin and all the missile lads
and the drone manufacturers and F-16 spare parts outfits and the ruthless
mercenaries who stalk the Muslim lands on our behalf now that we have
created 100,000 more enemies for each of the 19 murderers of 9/11. Torturers
have had a good time, honing their sadism in America's black prisons – it
was appropriate that the US torture centre in Poland should be revealed on
this ninth anniversary – as have the men (and women, I fear) who perfect the
shackles and water-drowning techniques with which we now fight our wars. And
– let us not forget – every religious raver in the world, be they of the Bin
Laden variety, the bearded groupies in the Taliban, the suicide
executioners, the hook-in the arm preachers, or our very own pastor of
Gainesville.

And God? Where does he fit in? An archive of quotations suggests that just
about every monster created in or after 9/11 is a follower of this quixotic
redeemer. Bin Laden prays to God – "to turn America into a shadow  of
itself", as he told me in 1997 – and Bush prayed to God and Blair  prayed –
and prays – to God, and all the Muslim killers and an awful lot of  Western
soldiers and Dr (honorary) Pastor Terry Jones and his 30 (or it may  be 50,
since all statistics are hard to come by in the "war on terror")  pray to
God. And poor old God, of course, has had to listen to these prayers  as he
always sits through them during our mad wars. Recall the words  attributed
to him by a poet of another generation: "God this, God that,  and God the
other thing. 'Good God,' said God, 'I've got my work cut out'."  And that
was just the First World War...

Just five years ago – on the fourth anniversary of the twin
towers/Pentagon/Pennsylvania attacks – a schoolgirl asked me at a lecture in
a Belfast church whether the Middle East would benefit from more religion.
No – less religion! – I howled back. God is good for contemplation, not for
war. But – and here we are driven on to the reefs and hidden rocks which our
leaders wish us to ignore, forget and cast aside – this whole bloody mess
involves the Middle East; it is about a Muslim people who have kept their
faith while those Westerners who dominate them – militarily, economically,
culturally, socially – have lost theirs. How can this be, Muslims ask?
Indeed, it is a superb irony that the Rev Jones is a believer while the rest
of us – by and large – are not. Hence our books and our documentaries never
refer to Muslims vs Christians, but Muslims versus "The West".

And of course, the one taboo subject of which we must not speak – Israel's
relationship with America, and America's unconditional support for Israel's
theft of land from Muslim Arabs – also lies at the heart of this terrible
crisis in our lives. In yesterday's edition of The Independent, there was a
photograph of Afghan demonstrators chanting "death to America".  But in the
background, these same demonstrators were carrying a black banner  with a
message in Dari written upon it in white paint. What it actually said  was:
"The bloodsucking Zionist government regime and the Western  leaders who are
indifferent [to suffering] and have no conscience are again  celebrating the
new year by spilling the red blood of the Palestinians."

The message is as extreme as it is vicious – but it proves, yet again, that
the war in which we are engaged is also about Israel and "Palestine".  We
may prefer to ignore this in "the West" – where Muslims  supposedly "hate us
for what we are" or "hate our democracy"  (see: Bush, Blair and a host of
other mendacious politicians) – but this  great conflict lies at the heart
of the "war on terror". That is  why the equally vicious Benjamin Netanyahu
reacted to the atrocities of 9/11  by claiming that the event would be good
for Israel. Israel would now be  able to claim that it, too, was fighting
the "war on terror", that  Arafat – this was the now-comatose Ariel Sharon's
claim – is "our  Bin Laden". And thus Israelis had the gall to claim that
Sderot, under  its cascade of tin-pot missiles from Hamas, was "our ground
zero".

It was not. Israel's battle with the Palestinians is a ghastly caricature of
our "war on terror", in which we are supposed to support the last  colonial
project on earth – and accept its thousands of victims – because  the twin
towers and the Pentagon and United Flight 93 were attacked by 19  Arab
murderers nine years ago. There is a supreme irony in the fact that one
direct result of 9/11 has been the stream of Western policemen and spooks
who have travelled to Israel to improve their "anti-terrorist expertise"
with the help of Israeli officers who may – according to the United Nations
– be war criminals. It was no surprise to find that the heroes who gunned
down poor old Jean Charles de Menezes on the London Tube in 2005 had been
receiving "anti-terrorist" advice from the Israelis.

And yes, I know the arguments. We cannot compare the actions of evil
terrorists with the courage of our young men and women, defending our lives
– and sacrificing theirs – on the front lines of the 'war on terror".  There
can be no "equivalence". "They" kill innocents  because "they" are evil.
"We" kill innocents by mistake.  But we know we are going to kill innocents
– we willingly accept that we are  going to kill innocents, that our actions
are going to create mass graves of  families, of the poor and the weak and
the dispossessed.

This is why we created the obscene definition of "collateral damage".  For
if "collateral" means that these victims are innocent, then "collateral"
also means that we are innocent of killing them. It was not our wish to kill
them – even if we knew it was inevitable that we would. "Collateral"  is our
exoneration. This one word is the difference between "them"  and "us",
between our God-given right to kill and Bin Laden's  God-given right to
murder. The victims, hidden away as "collateral"  corpses, don't count any
more because they were slaughtered by us. Maybe it  wasn't so painful. Maybe
death by drone is a more gentle departure from this  earth, evisceration by
an AGM-114C Boeing-Lockheed air-to-ground missile  less painful, than death
by shards from a roadside bomb or a cruel suicider  with an explosive belt.

That's why we know how many died on 9/11 – 2,966, although the figure may be
higher – and why we don't "do body counts" on those whom we  kill. Because
they – "our" victims – must have no  identities, no innocence, no
personality, no cause or belief or feelings;  and because we have killed
far, far more human beings than Bin Laden and the  Taliban and al-Qa'ida.

Anniversaries are newspaper and television events. And they can have an
eerie  habit of coalescing together to create an unhappy memorial framework.
Thus  do we commemorate the Battle of Britain – a chivalric episode in our
history  – and the Blitz, a progenitor of mass murder, to be sure, but a
symbol of  innocent courage – as we remember the start of a war that has
torn our  morality apart, turned our politicians into war criminals, our
soldiers into  killers and our ruthless enemies into heroes of the
anti-Western cause. And  while on this gloomy anniversary the Rev Jones
wanted to burn a book called  the Koran, Tony Blair tried to sell a book
called A Journey. Jones said the  Koran was "evil"; Britons have asked
whether the Blair book should  be classified as "crime". Certainly, 9/11 has
moved into fantasy  when the Rev Jones can command the attention of the
Obamas and the Clintons  and the Holy Father and the even more Holy United
Nations. Whom the gods  would destroy...

11 Sep 2001 
The World Trade Centre and the Pentagon are hit by aeroplanes hijacked  by
al-Qa’ida terrorists. George Bush says that America will stand with  “all
those who want peace and security in the world”.

7 Oct 2001

The US and Britain launch air strikes against Afghanistan.

13 Nov 2001

The Northern Alliance liberates Kabul from the rule of the Taliban.

11 Jan 2002

The first prisoners arrive at Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

9 Jan 2003

Top UN weapons inspector Hans Blix tells reporters that “we have now been
in [Iraq] for some two months and? we haven't found any smoking guns”.

15 Feb 2003

Protests are held across the world against impending war in Iraq.

20 Mar 2003

US-led coalition launches invasion of Iraq.

9 Oct 2003

Toppling of statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad is taken as symbol of
coalition  triumph.

11 Mar 2004

A series of bombs explode within minutes of each other on four commuter
trains  in Madrid, killing 191 people and wounding a further 1,841.

29 Apr 2004

Photographs emerge showing the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers at
Abu Ghraib,  inflaming anti-US feeling.

2 Oct 2004

Video footage appears of British hostage Kenneth Bigley being beheaded by  Iraqi militants.

2 Nov 2004

Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh is murdered after making a film about
violence against  women in Islamic societies.

7 Jul 2005

Four suicide bombers kill 52 passengers and injure almost 800 others in a
series of attacks on London’s transport network.

30 Sep 2005

A series of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohamed are published in a Danish
newspaper. The pictures are reprinted elsewhere amid widespread outrage and
violent  protests in the Muslim world.

30 Dec 2006

Saddam Hussein is hanged in northern Baghdad for crimes against humanity.

21 Sep 2009 
A leaked report by Gen Stanley McChrystal, commander of US forces, suggests
that  the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan could be lost within a year
unless  there are significant increases in troops.

29 Nov 2009

A ban on building minarets is voted in by the Swiss public, reflecting a
hostile  attitude to the country’s rising Muslim minority.

21 Jan 2010 
43 per cent of Americans say they feel some negative prejudice towards
Muslims, according to a poll by Gallup.

1 Sep 2010

At the end of a month in which 295 civilians were killed by violence, Barack
Obama declares that the US combat mission in Iraq is at an end.

LINK: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-nine-years-two-wars-hundreds-of-thousands-dead-ndash-and-nothing-learnt-2076450.html
Sonja Karkar
Editor
Australians for Palestine
http://www.australiansforpalestine.com