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For
the last ten days, media headlines in Ireland about
America have been dominated by Richard Clarke and
the 9-11 investigation -- most recently, the flap
over the White House refusal to allow National Security
Advisor Condoleezza Rice to testify under oath. Until
today that is – they have now bowed to pressure
and she will be allowed to testify in public. And
already the Net is awash with speeches she was supposed
to have made on the very date of September 11. She
never made them….she was hiding in a bunker.
She would have been arguing that the main threat to
the US was coming from missiles…from ‘rogue’
states such as Iraq, North Korea and Libya….on
the very day that the United States suffered the most
devastating attack since the 1941 bombing of Pearl
Harbour. Let us remind ourselves that Condoleezza
Rice was Bush Sr.’s “Russian expert”.
Before that she was on the Board of Chevron –
a company with countless accusations for ‘malpractices’
and human rights violations in Africa. She never saw
perestroika and post Gorbachev capitalist restructuring
coming…she never saw Al-Qaeda…. so don’t
just blame George. He deserves fully the type of advisors
his backers recruited – they surround him and
he has to live with them.
Remember
this moment well, because for the next seven months,
as we will be inundated with stories touting the Bush
Administration's fine record in preventing terrorism,
this scenario says oceans about and outlines well
Bush’s actual priorities. As if to underscore
how disinterested the White House -- or our tunnel-visioned
media -- is in understanding terror, a vast escalation
of the threat to America and to Europe occurred last
week. Quick -- can you name it? After one day, the
threat virtually evaporated from our newscasts; nothing
I read or heard has been linked to it or was followed
with an analysis as to the efficacy of Bush and Blair’s
War on Terror.
That
"War" has been and remains less than serious
about actually preventing terror or doing anything
about the causes underlying it. One proof is the invasion
of Iraq, which, whatever its actual motives, had nothing,
zip, nada to do with addressing the threat posed by
Al-Qaeda and kindred Islamic fundamentalist groups.
And now, we have the converse: a reminder of where
the source of terror really lies, and how little has
been done to address it.
If
the United States and the EU is to be serious about
stemming fundamentalist hatred of the West, and subsequently
the motivation of millions to wage holy war against
the ‘infidels’, there is truly only one
place to start. That place is Israel, the American
client state that has kept Palestinians under an increasingly
brutal military occupation for 37 years and counting.
And the Sharon government's assassination last week
of Hamas founder and spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed
Yassin marked a critical escalation in Arab and Islamic
bitterness toward not just Israel, but America and
the West in general.
The
pragmatic effects of the Yassin assassination cannot
be in doubt. Israel's policy of assassinating figures
it claims are associated with Palestinian suicide
bombings is flagrantly illegal, and has drawn the
condemnation of every major leader in the world, save
one. Even Tony Blair condemned the killing of Yassin;
George W. Bush spoke volumes by his solitary refusal
to be more than "troubled" by it.
Hamas
is a controversial but also extremely popular group
in the Arab world, not least because despite the well-publicized
activities of its military wing, the group has its
roots as a religious and social organization -- providing
help to Palestinians impoverished by Israel's occupation
in a way that Yassar Arafat's Palestinian Authority
never did. But Yassin -– a blind, quadriplegic
old man whose power came entirely from his words,
not his swagger -- has now been elevated to martyrdom
by his death at the hands of Israel. Any qualms about
his group's terror tactics are now forgotten in the
Arab world where it is taken for granted that such
an escalation in Israeli tactics could not have occurred
without at least tacit approval from Washington.
With
Yassin's death, the gloves have come off. For years,
the groups waging a war of terror against Israel have
studiously avoided U.S. and European targets. As much
as America was hated for its indulgence of Israeli
brutality, this ‘moderation’ was recognition
that Washington was the only conceivable entity with
enough leverage over the Israeli government to bring
it to the table for any kind of negotiation to end
the bloodshed. Despite its bankrolling of and diplomatic
cover for Israel's abuses, America has been one of
the Palestinians' only slivers of hope.
That
hope is gone, vanished in the same crater as the body
of Yassin and the other men and children killed in
the attack against him. For the first time, the military
wing of Hamas has now vowed to exact revenge against
not only Israel, but America. Al-Qaeda and a host
of other terror groups also listed the U.S. as a particular
target in response to the Yassin assassination. The
number of terror groups determined to strike at the
United States and Europe has just vastly expanded.
It
didn't have to happen, of course. But the peace process
that Bill Clinton tried to bring to fruition in his
last days in office has been callously punted by George
Bush. Under Bush and Colin Powell, the government
of Ariel Sharon, the most bellicose in modern Israeli
history, has had free license to commit one provocation
after another in its response to the current Palestinian
intifada. In the wake of 9-11, when Islamic public
opinion towards America matters a great deal and the
fate of the Palestinians matters to the Islamic public
more than any other political issue, it's hard to
find anyone in the Islamic world who doesn't consider
Bush and Sharon to be a single, two-headed monster.
Had
Bush even lifted an occasional finger to restrain
Sharon or advance the peace process, the terror threat
might not be so great today. Hopefully it won't have
to be investigated some day by some other post-tragedy
panel. George Bush's failure of diplomacy and common
sense is there for all to see. The Spanish understand
well now the effects of that failure. As corpses of
US marines are thrown to the dogs in Iraq, the British
media tell us that London came might close to emulating
Madrid. And another unexploded device on the Madrid/Toledo/Seville
train line I hear as I write these lines. Who’s
next?
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