A slaughter of innocents
[ US Crusade Home ] [ News and Views Board ] September 16, 2001
By Donna Yawching
I WOULD not want to be an Arab (or an Arab-American) in the USA today—or, for that matter, for the next year, maybe longer. Already regarded by many mainstream Americans with a side-glance of suspicion, this is one ethnic group that's going to find the famed "American melting-pot" very hot in the months to come, whatever may turn out to be the truth about Tuesday's mind-boggling mayhem. Americans, like anyone else, are human; and liberalism usually pales when revenge and paranoia appear on the scene.
Tuesday's attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon are the stuff of which revenge and paranoia are made, and perhaps justifiably so. But even as my heart constricts at the sight of scenarios worthy of Dante's Inferno, even as I try not to imagine what it must have felt like to make the decision to jump out of a window 80 storeys up, or to be looking out from a high-rise tower and see a jet plane coming straight at you—even as I cringe at all of this unimaginable pain, my mind turns with even greater foreboding to the future slaughter of innocents that is sure to follow.
The US has already made it clear that the perpetrators of Tuesday's "bombings" (for lack of a better word) will not go unscathed—and their version of "unscathed" will make Basdeo Panday's melodramatic use of the word absolutely laughable. What this will undoubtedly translate into—since, of course, the Americans have no doubt in their own minds as to who was responsible—is massive bombing attacks on one or more Arab states, probably all the ones that the US regards as inherently hostile.
Officials, including the President, have already made it clear that they intend to wreak vengeance not only on the terrorists who masterminded the attack, but also on the "countries that harbour them". Afghanistan, for sure, can expect "retribution" (which may already have started, though the White House is denying this), and the event will probably be used as a good excuse to beat up on Iraq as well. Even Libya, with America's old bugbear Moammar Gaddafi, may come in for some licks, just to make sure they get the message.
It's easy to bomb a country when you've bestowed upon it the status of "evil empire" (as the US has done to Iraq, among others; and as Tuesday's terrorists clearly did to America itself); but what this inevitably means is thousands and thousands of dead innocents. We had them at the World Trade Center this week, and we are going to have them, multiplied a hundredfold, in the Arab world very, very soon.
Despite all the talk of Tuesday being "an act of war", the accepted conventions of war, such as the Geneva Convention, will be trampled upon and left in tatters as the outraged American eagle swoops in to retaliate. The thousands upon thousands of soon-to-be-dead Arab citizens, most of whom have probably never even heard of Osama bin Laden, will be described in sanitary military terms as "collateral damage". It's been done before. What will not be emphasised, in contrast to Tuesday's emotional news coverage, is that these dead and dying Arabs are people too; and their anguish no less real.
What I'm about to say next will probably be misinterpreted, so I will tread carefully. First, let me stress that I like America. I like Americans. I admire them for their cheerful good-nature, their strong individualism, their essential decency, their undaunted determination in all things great and small, and their insistence on excellence rather than mediocrity.
This is a country that has literally pulled itself up by its bootstraps to become a model for, and the envy of, the vast majority of world nations; it is the greatest democracy in the world. But even as I admire the country, and the people, I do not admire America's foreign policy, which is usually self-centred, overbearing and opportunistic.
It is America's inherent disdain of anything non-American (not simply a vicious Muslim hatred of democracy or freedom, as President Bush would have it) that caused Tuesday's attack. Put simply and brutally, from the point of view of much of the Arab world, America had it coming: the schoolyard bully has finally been kicked in the balls. This is why they danced in the streets in Palestine.
Spoon-fed as we are in T&T by CNN's version of world news, we do not realise that America is not automatically everybody's superhero: for many Arab and even African states, Uncle Sam is Dr Evil personified. Whether or not they are right, the fact remains that they have not come to this conclusion in a vacuum.
From the Arab point of view, America is as big a terrorist as Osama bin Laden—indeed, it should be noted that bin Laden himself was once an American terrorist, backed by the CIA to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. The 1991 Gulf War (which killed vast numbers of Iraqis that we never heard about and certainly never saw on TV) caused him to turn against America: Arab blood being thicker than water.
A columnist from Britain's Guardian newspaper points out: "Since 1991, American-led sanctions against Iraq and the effects of depleted uranium (bombs) have killed one million children. Since the Palestinian uprising started last September, American Apache helicopters, F-16s and M-16 rifles have been responsible for killing 700 Palestinians and injuring 25,000 more... As it waves the flag of democracy in one hand, Washington pours billions of dollars into upholding totalitarian regimes in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, among others, to make sure its people are prevented from exercising their collective will."
This is not interpretation, these are facts. And history has shown that the Americans themselves are no strangers to stomach-turning brutality against civilians: atom bombs in Hiroshima, napalm against village children in Vietnam, the My Lai massacre, the bombs that continue to be dropped on Iraq ten years after the Gulf War ended. Innocent Americans may have died on Tuesday; but America itself is no innocent. It may be significant that while Americans have been asking themselves repeatedly how this horrible event could have happened, I have yet to hear anyone ask why.
The big question now is whether America's righteous, if somewhat hypocritical anger, should be allowed to embroil the rest of the world in the prospect of another Great War. Because make no mistake about it, that is what looms. And no-one, guilty or innocent, would then remain unscathed.[ SEPTEMBER HOMEPAGE ]
