RE: [pf] very good Robert Fisk article, 16 Sep in the Independent (UK)

At 12:36 17/9/2001 +1000, Clinton Fernandes .-.-.@deakin.edu.au sent-on
(with title: "Re: [pf] la vie continue") a very good 16 Sept. article by
Robert Fisk, in the Independent (UK).

· I found it hard to read, with end-of-lines all over the place.

· It's available at:

http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=94254
  and has:

  Bush is walking into a trap
      16 September 2001
Retaliation is a trap. In a world that was supposed to have learnt that the
rule of law comes above revenge, President Bush appears to be heading for
the very disaster that Osama bin Laden has laid down for him. Let us have
no doubts about what happened in New York and Washington last week. It was
a crime against humanity. We cannot understand America's need to retaliate
unless we accept this bleak, awesome fact. But this crime was perpetrated –
it becomes ever clearer – to provoke the United States into just the blind,
arrogant punch that the US military is preparing.
 ...
  Mr bin Laden is ... a close student of the art and horror of war. He knew
how to fight the Russians who stayed on in Afghanistan, a Russian monster
that revenged itself upon its ill-educated, courageous antagonists until,
faced with war without end, the entire Soviet Union began to fall apart.
  I doubt if [Vladimir Putin] will let Mr Bush know what happens when you
start a war of retaliation; your army – like the Russian forces in Chechnya
– becomes locked into battle with an enemy that appears ever more ruthless,
ever more evil.
  But the Americans need look no further than Ariel Sharon's futile war
with the Palestinians to understand the folly of retaliation. In _Lebanon_,
it was always the same. A Hizbollah guerrilla would kill an Israeli
occupation soldier, and the Israelis would fire back in retaliation at a
village in which a civilian would die. The Hizbollah would retaliate with a
Katyusha missile attack over the Israeli border, and the Israelis would
retaliate again with a bombardment of southern Lebanon. In the end, the
Hizbollah – the “centre of world terror” according to Mr Sharon – drove the
Israelis out of Lebanon.
  In _Israel/Palestine_, it is the same story. An Israeli soldier shoots a
Palestinian stone-thrower. The Palestinians retaliate by killing a settler.
The Israelis then retaliate by sending a murder squad to kill a Palestinian
gunman. The Palestinians retaliate by sending a suicide bomber into a
pizzeria. The Israelis then retaliate by sending F-16s to bomb a
Palestinian police station. Retaliation leads to retaliation and more
retaliation. War without end.
 ...
  Nineteen years ago today, the greatest act of terrorism – using Israel's
own definition of that much misused word – in modern Middle Eastern history
began. Does anyone remember the anniversary in the West? How many readers
of this article will remember it? I will take a tiny risk and say that no
other British newspaper – certainly no American newspaper – will today
recall the fact that on 16 September 1982, Israel's Phalangist militia
allies started their three-day orgy of rape and knifing and murder in the
Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila that cost 1,800 lives. It
followed an Israeli invasion of Lebanon – designed to drive the PLO out of
the country and given the green light by the then US Secretary of State,
Alexander Haig – which cost the lives of 17,500 Lebanese and Palestinians,
almost all of them civilians. That's probably three times the death toll in
the World Trade Centre. Yet I do not remember any vigils or memorial
services or candle-lighting in America or the West for the innocent dead of
Lebanon ...
  America's failure to act with honour in the Middle East, its promiscuous
sale of missiles to those who use them against civilians, its blithe
disregard for the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi children under
sanctions of which Washington is the principal supporter – all these are
intimately related to the society that produced the Arabs who plunged
America into an apocalypse of fire last week.
  America's name is literally stamped on to the missiles fired by Israel
into Palestinian buildings in Gaza and the West Bank. Only four weeks ago,
I identified one of them as an AGM 114-D air-to-ground rocket made by
Boeing and Lockheed-Martin at their factory in Florida

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sent-on by David.

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