Counter Terrorism

I originally wrote this on Thursday as a rection to a Talk of the Nation guest on NPR and a friend encouraged me to post it. Life was crazy and I didn\'t get to it until now, and I\'ve added quite a bit. Hopefully it is still powerful. Now the U.S. is said to be bombing Afghanastan. There is serious talk of using nuclear weapons, and warheads have been moved. My main point was that the U.S. needs to take issues of social justice into account in its foreign policy as the only way to counter terrorism. Bombing and incitng rebellion will only intensify the hatred of America felt in the Mid East. Most Iraqis did not support Sadaam Hussein until the Gulf War. The War and its subsequent sanctions have stenghtened a despot, and will be an even greater gift to the Taliban. How will bombing th poorest people on earth make anyone like us? Especially when there is no proof who committed these acts--the 19 dead hijackers have not even been positively identified. Why are we letting George W. Bush to send our generation to die in an unwinnable foreign war?

I was born in 1979, the year the USSR invaded Afghanastan. I do not remember Vietnam, but I am not so ignorant to not make the obvious connections. Even pro-war politicos are comparing the Congressional resolution authorizing war to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. I can\'t be the only person in the world who knows that the Gulf of Tonkin attack was staged, a fake, a lie. I can\'t help thinking of it as the Pentagon tells obvious lies: the fourth plane was trying to attack the White House (which has snipers on the roof) or Air Force One (all planes are grounded when the president flies flanked by F-16s, and a Boeing 767 couldn\'t catch Air Force One anyways). Sadaam Hussein did it. The evidence against Bin Laden is not so damning. This is not his M.O. and cost ten times as much as the first WTC bombing or the bombings of U.S. embassies and the USS Cole. There is no evidence against Afghanastan. What is their motive?

For the past week the Bush administration and highly paid terrorism \"experts\" such as L. Paul Brenner on every news program on TV and radio has said the people who committed these atrocities--\"these people\"--hate America and everything it stands for; freedom, liberty, women\'s suffrage, and the free market have all been named. The main problem with this is that we don\'t know who is behind \"these people.\" Nineteen men died in the hijackings and 35 have been arrested but no one has been charged with the crimes. The Administration has blamed everyone from Osama bin Laden to the Taliban to Sadaam Hussein with absolutely NO PROOF!

One thing \"these people\" all have in common is that they are from nations negatively impacted by U.S. foreign policy and neoliberalism (which is not the same as freedom, democracy, and/or capitalism). I doubt that any person or peoples hate freedom or democracy, but I believe strongly that many hate U.S. economic policies, including capitalism; capitalism and democracy are not the same and should not be equivocated. Afghanistan is the poorest country in the world. Pakistan, Iraq, Bangladesh, and other states mentioned in the
investigations are not far behind. Many Americans have a higher annual income than these countries\' entire GNP, much of which is used to pay debt to the U.S., the richest nation in the history of the world.

The poorest one fifth of the world makes less than one dollar a day. The poorest one third (2 billion or 2,000,000,000 people) has no access to clean water, and the middle third only has some access. In the U.S. we drink more soda than water, although we have over 200 brands of bottled water in addition to clean water in every home. Monsanto, Bechtel, and Coca-Cola are buying water treatment systems with the help of the World Bank to deny even more free access to WATER. I threw out water this morning because it had been sitting on the stove. There was nothing wrong with it. It just looked gross to me. We water grass and trees in American deserts, but stand on questionably moral high ground when it comes to giving water to people who live in or near deserts. The people
affected by this do not hate freedom or liberty. They hate not having enough to eat and drink. They hate sewing our athletic shoes all day, but going home barefoot and hungry.

Like most Americans, I am overweight and have nearly 20 pairs of shoes and more clothes than can fit in my closet. How does that look to someone without food, clothing, or water? They don\'t envy my right to vote, which the Bush machine\'s usurpation of the national election did more to damage than any bombings could. They envy and resent my wealth, and I am not wealthy by American standards. I am at the bottom third of the richest nation in the world. I still make more in a year than citizens of many impoverished nations will make in a lifetime. I will not die of AIDS, contract malaria or polio or tuberculosis or leprosy or the measles, and if I do it will not be life threatening. If I lived in Africa or Asia, these diseases would be a daily threat. The attacks on the WTC and Pentagon were not attacks on liberty and freedom. They were attacks on the McWorld described by Benjamin Barber in \"Jihad Vs. McWorld.\" They are attacks on Monsanto patenting wheat and corn and tomato seeds and Basmati rice, McDonalds destroying the rain forest, and our SUVs and aerosol sprays making it impossible to breathe all over the world.

I had to go to the emrgency room Thursday night because of an asthma attack. While not the high point of my week, a person in Afghanastan who has no access to simple medicines and equipment would die. Steam and steroids are not available in most of the world. While our insurance industry is FUBAR\'d, a child in San Francisco, Oakland, or Richmond, which has the highest asthma rate in the Bay Area, can get treatment at any emergency room. That is not true in Asia or Africa.

Afghanastan, Pakistan, and India have the highest rates of polio and leprosy in the world. I have never seen anyone with either of these diseases, and was vaccinated against polio and many others as an infant. The vaccinations cost less than one dollar. For $6 billion dollars, much less than the cost of a war, the United States could wipe out polio by giving a shot to every single human being. For another $6 billion every single person could be vaccinated for malaria. The Bush Administration would rather dump DDT. For far less money, we could give clean water to every human being and ensure that all have enough to eat. If your child was starving or dehydrated or feverish or crippled, would you follow G.W. Bush, who couldn\'t gain American support before this, or a radical religious leader?

Hamas runs the only schools, clinics and day cares available to many Palestinian children, especially in the West Bank. It is no coincidence that they have popular support. It is also no coincidence that Hamas, like the Taliban, was started by U.S. and Israeli security forces

Ecological and economic devastation is not necessary for freedom and liberty. Attacks on a system that wreaks such havoc are not attacks on freedom. The best counter-terrorism efforts the United States can make are not bombing the poorest nations in the world or fighting a long and protracted war against an army that beat back the Soviets. Counter terrorism should involve building up communities all over the world so that every human being can have enough to drink and eat, and access to simple vaccines and antibiotics patented and sold by U.S. pharmaceutical companies. Merck pharmaceuticals and Phillip Morris tobacco are two of the few companies unscathed by recent market fluctuations. This is not raising American esteem in the world. Give every child a home, a meal, and a flu shot, and see how much her parents hate freedom or the U.S.