A special peace vigil will be held on Wednesday, September 10, from 6 p.m. until approximately 6:30, commemorating the tragic attack on the World Trade Centre in New York City, and the many lives lost to conflict these past year two years.

The vigil will be held in front of M.P. Bob Wood's office, at the corner of Main and Ferguson Streets, in downtown North Bay.

The program will include songs, reflections on the last year's events, and a reading. Giant peace cards will be constructed to send to world leaders involved in conflict; please bring your symbols and images of peace and peace-making to add to the card.

"Two Years After 9/11 Attacks, A Report Card", by Haroon Siddiqui

"Cost of Empire': The High Price of US Policies", by Eric Margolis
 
"There's Good Reason to Fear US", by Noam Chomsky

Two Years After 9/11 Attacks, A Report Card

by Haroon Siddiqui
 
On the eve of the second anniversary of Sept. 11, a few things are clear.
 

Terrorism is not only not licked, as the blasts in Bali, Casablanca and Jeddah show. It is thriving where it didn't before, namely in Iraq, as the assassinations of a top United Nations' diplomat, the top Shiite political leader and others testify.

America has already killed at least thrice as many innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq as were murdered in America by the 9/11 terrorists.

Thousands of other innocents have been snared, in the West and across the world, in the wide net cast by the war on terrorism.

America is good at war, disastrous at making or keeping peace.

It is incompetent at managing conquered turf and people. It is appallingly ignorant of foreign cultures, languages and politics.

Its hi-tech spying gizmos are no match for the low-tech evasions of its biggest nemeses: Saddam Hussein, Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden.

Afghanistan remains at the mercy of warlords, bandits and a regrouping Taliban.

Iraq is spinning out of control.

Future historians may study the series of unending disasters unfolding there under American watch for clues as to the rot at the core of the American empire when it was at its zenith.

They might wonder why a nation that mastered technology, food production and the guns and gadgetry of law and order could not provide electricity, water and security to a destitute people.

Only Americans could have managed to turn the initial goodwill of liberated Iraqis into outright hostility, just as the Bush administration turned the worldwide post-Sept. 11 sympathy for America into ill will.

The chaos in Iraq, far worse than in the early years of Vietnam, will continue for the foreseeable future.

While Washington is asking the Security Council for foreign troops, hard cash and a helping hand in humanitarian aid, it wants to retain military and political control of Iraq.

This does not represent a move toward multilateralism, as portrayed. It is a way of having others clean up America's mess, while America keeps the keys to Iraq.

The proposition is not likely to be acceptable, nor should it be, to France, Germany, Turkey, India or Pakistan, which opposed the war in the first place and got insulted and ignored for it.

More important, the United Nations should not be in the business of supplying a fig leaf for an American hegemonic enterprise.

Iraq should be placed under U.N. trusteeship. Paul Bremer, the American ruler of Iraq, should step aside.

America could keep military command so long as its troops form the biggest contingent and its commander reports to a U.N. civilian administrator.

International trusteeship would draw other nations, along with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

It would end the scandal of American corporations friendly to the Bush administration — Bechtel, Halliburton and others — raking in billions of dollars in contracts while Iraqis have little food, no jobs, no incomes.

The war booty does not end there. Americans are pondering the sale of Iraqi state enterprises or future oil revenue in return for a few trinkets now. How would this be different from the theft of native resources by past colonial empires?

A U.N. trusteeship would also free the U.S.-appointed, 25-member Iraqi Governing Council from the taint of being an American puppet. It needs legitimacy to usher in democracy.

But America is unlikely to let go of its territorial possession, the crass and medieval argument being that the one who spilled some blood to conquer it should get to keep it.

If so, the path ahead is clear enough: Immediately invest the needed $60 billion (U.S.) and announce a timetable for the promised handover of Iraq to Iraqis and the staged withdrawal of all foreign troops.

All of the above is only one aspect of the quagmire.

Not only have George W. Bush's claims for invading Iraq turned out to be fraudulent: no nuclear, chemical or biological weapons; no proof of an Iraqi link to Al Qaeda; no hint of any Iraqi capability to attack Israel, let alone America. The domino effect he predicted hasn't materialized, either.

America is more hated than before the war. Anti-American Islamists, not secular liberals, have made record gains in elections in Kuwait and Pakistan.

The promised quid-pro-quo of peace in Iraq leading to peace on the Arab-Israeli front is a mirage. The notion that beating down Arabs on one front would cow them on the other has proven to be as false, as predicted.

Bush's road map for peace is not likely to succeed any more than previous Israeli or American plans, so long as both countries remain preoccupied with the tragic loss of innocent Israeli lives but not the far greater loss of innocent Palestinian lives. The failed search for more pliant leaders, such as Mahmoud Abbas, are no substitute for ending the 36-year occupation.

Bush pledged not to turn the war on Muslim terrorists into a war on Muslims. But he has allowed his cabal of neo-conservative zealots to engineer what is widely seen by Muslims as a clash of civilizations.

They see in the policies of the Bush administration, as well as in the public discourse of a pandering media and subservient academics, that Arabs, Muslims and Islam are routinely demonized in the racist terminology of collective guilt, cultural and religious deformities and genetic proclivities. They see Muslim nations subjected to a double standard.

Syria is accused, as was Iraq, of developing chemical and biological weapons. A back channel through which Damascus was providing Washington with useful intelligence on suspected terrorists has been closed.

Iran is accused, as was Iraq, of harboring terrorists, when, in fact, it has been tracking and arresting suspects, and in the case of Saudi captives, deporting them to their native land. An Iranian-American back channel in Geneva has been suspended. The rhetorical warfare against Iran over its nuclear intentions stands in contrast to the sensible diplomatic track being pursued with North Korea.

Neither the Syrian dictatorship nor the hardliners who control power in Iran deserve any sympathy. But American criticisms of them have little to do with the human rights or democratic aspirations of Syrians or Iranians.

Prejudice against Iran has also clouded American judgment in Iraq. The assassinated Ayatollah Muhammad Baqer al-Hakim, now being eulogized as a moderate, was mostly shunned because he was backed by Iran.

Bush promised democracy for Arabs. But his administration has been eroding American democratic values at home.

There's the McCarthy-esque treatment of critics, from Bill Maher to the Dixie Chicks to Susan Sarandon.

There's the continued incarceration of 680 unnamed people at Guantanamo Bay, and of an undisclosed number of others in secret locations abroad, without charge or access to counsel, in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

There are the secret arrests, prosecutions and deportations from America of hundreds of Muslims, mostly poor Pakistanis, virtually none of whom had any terrorist connection. They were made sacrificial lambs to Attorney-General John Ashcroft's god of revenge.

Canadians smug about our resistance to American over-reactions were jolted recently with the arrest of 20 Pakistanis here, on seemingly paranoiac suspicions of terrorist intent.

No question that 9/11 shifted the balance between civil liberties and security in favor of the latter. It is better to be safe than sorry. But such dragnets have not caught terrorists while the real ones have been expanding their evil deeds across continents.

The war on terrorism has one more unsavory aspect: America's partnership with several repressive regimes, including undemocratic Muslim ones.

Some, such as Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia, have been sub-contracted the work of torture. Indonesia and the Philippines have been given millions of dollars to co-operate in the battle against terrorism. They are now using the American support to crack down on separatist movements with genuine grievances. Russia has been given a free hand in Chechnya in return for dropping any opposition to American bases in Central Asia.

America became a great nation through a combination of military and economic might and democratic values. The Bush administration has squandered the moral part of that potent combination.

Haroon Siddiqui is the Star's editorial page editor emeritus. His column appears Thursdays and Sundays.

Copyright 1996-2003. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited

'Cost of Empire': The High Price of US Policies

by Eric Margolis
 
Two years after the Sept. 11 suicide attacks on the United States, this earthshaking event remains clouded by mystery and misunderstanding.

Was al-Qaida behind the operation? Most likely, but not for certain. Secretary of State Colin Powell promised a white paper proving al-Qaida's guilt. It never came.

A tape that surfaced in late 2001 purporting to show Osama bin Laden gleefully chortling over the attacks, was seen by many in the Arab and Muslim world as a crude fake.

The 9/11 attacks were planned in Germany and Spain, not Afghanistan, by young men, mostly Saudis, who were educated and westernized.

Afghanistan's Taliban regime, until four months before 9/11 a recipient of U.S. aid, had nothing to do with the attacks, but did provide a base for al-Qaida, which numbered only 300 members. Most of the "terrorists" in Afghanistan cited by the U.S. were actually independence fighters from neighboring Central Asia. Taliban refused to hand bin Laden, a national hero of the 1980s anti-Soviet war, to the U.S. without proof of his guilt in 9/11, which the U.S. declined to provide.

This allowed far right neo-conservatives to seize control of U.S. national security policy. They immediately launched the invasion of Afghanistan and began preparing war against Iraq. There's now evidence both invasions, intended to seize major oil regions, were being planned long before 9/11.

President George Bush was widely regarded pre-9/11 as a hapless, rather comical figure enmeshed in the Enron scandal. The savage assaults transformed him into a savior on a white horse, bathed in praise by the fawning U.S. media.

The Bush administration created a firestorm of jingoism, war fever, and national hysteria that quickly obscured its failure to protect the nation from an attack that Mideast observers, including this column, had predicted was coming.

Disparate bands of extremists

Bush declared a war on terrorism and dispatched U.S. armed forces to attack Muslim mischief-makers around the globe. This, however, was not a real war, but rather a police action against disparate bands of violent anti-American extremists determined to drive U.S. political and economic influence from their lands, and aid the struggle in Palestine.

Declaring "war on terrorism" made no more sense than declaring war on evil.

Few Americans understand their nation became a modern imperial power after World War II, or that it had recreated in the Mideast a modern version of the British Empire - the American Raj. Most were simply unaware, or uncaring, that their governments had been overthrowing regimes, assassinating foreign leaders, promoting dictatorships and waging undeclared wars on foreign nations since the late 1940s.

Fewer understood the U.S. was de facto ruler of Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf states, and overlord of Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Washington kept highly repressive feudal or military dictatorships in power in all these nations that advanced Washington's strategic interests and brutally crushed all opponents. Most Americans were unaware that Israel was fighting Palestinians with U.S.-supplied arms, financed by U.S. taxpayers, or that in the eyes of most Mideasterners, and all extremists, Israel and the United States had become indistinguishable.

Osama bin Laden kept tirelessly repeating this theme, calling for revolution against the American Mideast Raj and its Arab vassal rulers. That, far more than truck bombs, was bin Laden's real threat to U.S. interests. Interestingly, bin Laden recently predicted he will shortly die a martyr.

The ghastly 9/11 attacks were what Imperial Britain called the "cost of empire." Angry, fanatical natives would strike back, using any means to punish the high-tech empire seeking to rule them.

Britain had Maxim guns; America, terrifying B-52s.

Bush's knee-jerk military response to essentially political problems, an historic blunder, has left the U.S. mired in deepening guerrilla wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, costing over $7 billion US monthly and growing numbers of American casualties.

Heavy bombing of Afghanistan prior to 9/11, what ever-wrongheaded neo-cons say should have been done, would not have prevented 9/11. Having alert security guards at Boston airport would have. The attacks of 9/11 might have been averted by proper coordination between FBI and CIA, and if Bush's astoundingly inept national security staff had done its job.

Instead, Attorney General John Ashcroft, today the self-appointed scourge of Muslim malefactors, actually cut anti-terrorism spending just before 9/11.

Nothing can excuse the sickening barbarity of the 9/11 attacks. But nothing should excuse America's pre-attack delusions of Olympian immunity from the ills of the outside world, some caused by U.S. policies.

Nor America's casual indifference to the death of 500,000 Iraqi children caused by a cruel U.S.-imposed embargo. Nor the bulldozing of Palestinian shanty towns, without realizing that at some point enraged recipients of U.S. geo-strategic discipline would bite back. Nor the risk of aircraft attacks.

This writer was aboard a hijacked Lufthansa A310 in 1993 when the air pirate warned the FBI he would crash the jumbo jet into New York's Wall Street.

All the flag-waving and heart-rending survivor interviews that will mark this week's 9/11 anniversary should not - but, of course, will - obscure the painful truth: the faux-macho Bush administration was asleep while on guard; it refuses to accept responsibility for its dereliction of duty; and continues to mislead Americans about the real causes of 9/11.

Copyright © 2003, CANOE, a division of Netgraphe Inc.

There's Good Reason to Fear US

by Noam Chomsky
 
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
 

However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.

On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."

For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.

Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.

Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. Those who accept elementary moral standards have some work to do to show that the United States and Britain were justified in bombing Afghans to compel them to turn over people suspected of criminal atrocities, the official reason given when the bombings began.

Then, in September, 2002, the most powerful state in history announced a new National Security Strategy, asserting that it will maintain global hegemony permanently.

Any challenge will be blocked by force, the dimension in which the United States reigns supreme.

At the same time, the war drums began to beat to mobilize the population for an invasion of Iraq.

And the campaign opened for the mid-term congressional elections, which would determine whether the administration would be able to carry out its radical international and domestic agenda.

The final days of 2002, foreign policy specialist Michael Krepon wrote, were "the most dangerous since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis," which historian Arthur Schlesinger described, reasonably, as "the most dangerous moment in human history."

Krepon's concern was nuclear proliferation in an "unstable nuclear-proliferation belt stretching from Pyongyang to Baghdad," including "Iran, Iraq, North Korea and the Indian subcontinent."

Bush administration initiatives in 2002 and 2003 have only increased the threats in and near this unstable belt.

The National Security Strategy declared that the United States, alone, has the right to carry out "preventive war" — preventive, not pre-emptive — using military force to eliminate a perceived threat, even if invented or imagined.

Preventive war is, very simply, the "supreme crime" condemned at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals.

From early September, 2002, the Bush administration issued grim warnings about the danger that Saddam Hussein posed to the United States, with broad hints that Saddam was linked to Al Qaeda and involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. The propaganda assault helped enable the administration to gain some support from a frightened population for the planned invasion of a country known to be virtually defenseless— and a valuable prize, at the heart of the world's major energy system.

Last May, after the putative end of the war in Iraq, President Bush landed on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and declared that he had won a "victory in the war on terror (by having) removed an ally of Al Qaeda."

But Sept. 11, 2003, will arrive with no credible evidence for the alleged link between Saddam and his bitter enemy Osama bin Laden. And the only known link between the victory and terror is that the invasion of Iraq seems to have increased Al Qaeda recruitment and the threat of terror.

The Wall Street Journal recognized that Bush's carefully staged aircraft-carrier extravaganza "marks the beginning of his 2004 re-election campaign," which the White House hopes "will be built as much as possible around national security themes."

If the administration lets domestic issues prevail, it is in deep trouble.

Meanwhile, bin Laden remains at large. And the source of the post-Sept. 11 anthrax terror is unknown — an even more striking failure, given that the source is assumed to be domestic, perhaps even from a federal weapons lab.

The Iraqi weapons of mass destruction are still missing, too.

For the second 9/11 anniversary and beyond, we basically have two choices. We can march forward with confidence that the global enforcer will drive evil from the world, much as the president's speech writers declare, plagiarizing ancient epics and children's tales.

Or we can subject the doctrines of the proclaimed grand new era to scrutiny, drawing rational conclusions, perhaps gaining some sense of the emerging reality.

The wars that are contemplated in the war on terror are to go on for a long time.

"There's no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland," the president announced last year.

That's fair enough. Potential threats are limitless. And there is strong reason to believe that they are becoming more severe as a result of Bush administration lawlessness and violence.

We also should be able to appreciate recent comments on the matter by Ami Ayalon, the 1996-2000 head of Shabak, Israel's General Security Service, who observed that "those who want victory" against terror without addressing underlying grievances "want an unending war."

The observation generalizes in obvious ways.

The world has good reason to watch what is happening in Washington with fear and trepidation.

The people who are best placed to relieve those fears, and to lead the way to a more hopeful and constructive future, are the people of the United States, who can shape the future.

Author Noam Chomsky is a political activist and professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Copyright 1996-2003. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited