october 2004
illustration:Andrea-Koupal
The pattern is global, but the causes are local
William Pfaff IHT
Thursday, September 09, 2004
Templates of terrorism
PARIS Terrorism and the measures adopted against it acquire reciprocal momentum that is all but impossible to stop once a certain threshold has been crossed. That threshold was crossed in Russia last week, with potentially enormous consequences for civil liberties in that country, for civil peace in the Caucasus and possibly for the existing peaceful relationship between Russia and America.
This is why issues of nationalism, irredentism and religion - the usual motives for terrorist outrages - are so desperately dangerous. Ignored or misinterpreted, assigned to spurious international causes,
they can do immense damage. They have to be dealt with in their natural dimensions.
There is a competitive auction in terrorism. Righteously misdirected reactions to terrorism contribute to the dynamics of the terrorist interaction, reinforcing the next outrage, which is constructed to be more horrible than the retaliation suffered for the last one. This is an escalation of terror in which neither side can prevail since the possibilities are unlimited - as demonstrated at Beslan in North Ossetia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has mistakenly (or culpably) assigned an international cause to his crisis. He has followed George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon in identifying his national problem as "international terrorism." This is not true. Putin's terrorism problem is specific to him and to Russia. America's terrorism problem is specific to the United States, its past, its foreign relationships and its policies. Israel's is a matter of Israel's relationship with the Palestinians.
The source of terrorism in Russia since the late 1990s has been the ethnic nationalist uprising in Chechnya that Russian authorities have brutally been trying to stop.
Today there certainly are international reinforcements fighting for the Chechens, and there are increasing numbers of radical Islamic teachers and clerics in the Caucasus. Like Iraq, the region has
become a battlefront in the war of Islamic radicals against the infidels. But to hold them responsible for what has happened in Chechnya is like insisting that "regime remnants and foreign terrorists" are the only ones doing the fighting in Iraq.
The affairs retain their national causes, and the only hope of solution remains national. But once the terrorist action-reaction auction begins, it is al mostimpossibletostop.Russiahasalready invaded Chechnya twice to "end terrorism," but terrorism simply got worse. Ariel Sharon's entire career has consisted in failed attempts to solve Israel's problem of national existence by brute destruction
of what he considers its enemies. The United States invaded Afghanistan and overturned the Taliban government, but the terrorists took to the hills and the country is in political and social pieces. And now there is Iraq.
If the terrorist auction has a tangible value, such as an independent Chechnya (if that is what the Beslan terrorists wanted: nobody has yet said what they wanted, assuming that they wanted anything tangible), there is no solution except to give it to them. Everyone knows how to solve the tangible and national part of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. An acceptable compromise of their national claims was agreed to long ago. The clash of eschatological expectations between some Israelis and some Palestinians is what continues to make that solution impossible.
The religious fanatic has no tangible goal to be satisfied. He - or she, as we increasingly find - wants paradise and the destruction of heretics. For such a person, the terrorism auction has no earthly limit.
Putin has made a second internationalized interpretation of the Beslan massacre. He implied in his address on Saturday that U.S. activity in Georgia, and elsewhere in the Caucasus, is partly behind
separatist forces there and is part of an American effort to disarm Russia as a nuclear power and otherwise weaken it.
The collapse of the USSR in 1991 had left Russia defenseless, he said. It had once been invulnerable, with unsurpassed power to protect its frontiers. Now, "we have shown ourselves to be weak, and the weak get beaten." The implication was obvious.
Could Putin do anything now other than promise resistance, power, security, repression? Politically, probably not. Is what he said going to do any good? Again, the answer is no. Moscow, and Bush's Washington and Sharon's Jerusalem, have to prove their "resolve"; they can't be seen as "pitiful, helpless giants." Yet until they tell the truth to themselves, or their countrymen tell it to them, that is just what they are.
From: specialaffinity@yahoo.com
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The Greed Factor
By David J. Sirota & Jonathon Baskin
Web Exclusive: 09.15.04
In 1992, the Republican Party launched a vicious assault against Bill Clinton for traveling overseas and speaking out against his country’s foreign policy during the Vietnam War. It was the beginning of a strategy to demean the national-security credentials of the Democratic Party. Now, twelve years later, Vice President Dick Cheney has updated the tactic, hammering those who question George W. Bush’s prosecution of the war on terror and impugning John Kerry’s commitment to national security. His rhetoric has been so vitriolic, he actually suggested last week that a Kerry presidency would mean "we will get hit again" by terrorists.
Beyond blatantly mischaracterizing Democrats’ positions on defense, these shameless attacks serve to distract from the vice president’s own proclivity for undermining American foreign policy. The record shows that over the last decade, Cheney was willing first to do business with countries on the U.S. government’s terror list, then to travel abroad and condemn U.S. counter-terrorism policy when it got in his way. In the process, Cheney proved repeatedly he could be trusted to put Halliburton’s bottom line ahead of his country’s national security.
As Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush, Cheney helped lead a multinational coalition against Iraq and was one of the architects of a post-war economic embargo designed to choke off funds to the country. He insisted the world should “maintain sanctions, at least of some kind,” so Saddam Hussein could not “rebuild the military force he’s used against his neighbors.”
But less than six years later, as a private businessman, Cheney apparently had more important interests than preventing Hussein from rebuilding his army. While he claimed during the 2000 campaign that, as CEO of Halliburton, he had “imposed a ‘firm policy’ against trading with Iraq,” confidential UN records show that, from the first half of 1997 to the summer of 2000, Halliburton held stakes in two firms that sold more than $73 million in oil production equipment and spare parts to Iraq while Cheney was in charge. Halliburton acquired its interest in both firms while Cheney was at the helm, and continued doing business through them until just months before Cheney was named George W. Bush’s running mate.
Perhaps even more troubling, at the same time Cheney was doing business with Iraq, he launched a public broadside against sanctions laws designed to cut off funds to regimes like Iran, which the State Department listed as a state sponsor of terrorism. In 1998, Cheney traveled to Kuala Lumpur to attack his own country's terrorism policies for being too strict. Under the headline, “Former US Defence Secretary Says Iran-Libya Sanctions Act ‘Wrong,’” the Malaysian News Agency reported that Cheney “hit out at his government" and said sanctions on terrorist countries were "ineffective, did not provide the desired results and [were] a bad policy.”
Two years later, Cheney traveled to another country to demand America weaken restrictions on doing business with Iran’s petroleum industry, despite Clinton administration warnings that Iranian oil revenues could be used to fund terrorism. “We're kept out of [Iran] primarily by our own government, which has made a decision that U.S. firms should not be allowed to invest significantly in Iran,” he told an oil conference in Canada. “I think that's a mistake.”
Now new reports suggest Cheney’s desire to do business with Iran may have amounted to more than words. Details of Halliburton’s activities in Iran have been investigated by the Treasury Department and were recently forwarded to the U.S. attorney in Houston. Such an action is taken only after Treasury finds evidence of ‘serious and willful violations’ of sanctions laws. Halliburton already admits one of its subsidiaries “performs between $30 [million] and $40 million annually in oilfield service work in Iran.” Why is this record important in the current presidential debate? Because as Cheney barnstorms around the country touting the Bush administration’s record, his years at Halliburton indicate he is willing to put other priorities before America’s national security. Even as Iran built ties to terrorists and worked to develop a nuclear weapon, Cheney insisted corporations must do “business in countries that may have policies that the U.S. does not like.” His reasoning? “The good Lord didn't see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratic regimes friendly to the United States.”
Such comments contrast sharply with the Republicans’ message at their national convention. Far from embodying lofty ideals of “freedom” and “democracy,” Cheney’s record depicts a man governed by greed. As the election nears, that poses an important question to all Americans: Are we really comfortable with this person -- and this ideology -- shaping U.S. policy in an age of global terror?
David Sirota is the Director of Strategic Communications at the American Progress Action Fund. Jonathan Baskin is the Fund’s research assistant.
Copyright © 2004 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: David J. Sirota, "The Greed Factor", The American Prospect Online, Sep 15, 2004.
Forwarded by John Richardson :news-report-owner@wiretapped.com