September 12th, 2001
Robert D.
Richards
Yesterday is a day that will live in infamy. But the state of the world didn’t change yesterday, it only made itself evident. This is a new experience for most of my friends who barely remember the Gulf War, and whom true evil has never touched. I am writing this dialogue mostly for them, because as new adults they will be puzzled and will question things about the past and the future. My opinions are stated here mostly for them to absorb and consider as they try to make sense out of what has happened.
Well we are all glued to the media
today, and will be tomorrow, and life goes on, but in a number of ways the
world will never be the same. Unfortunately it usually takes an
unprecedented tragedy to wake people up to real threats, natural or manmade,
that's been apparent throughout history, but what's changed is the immediate
and global knowledge that technology has made possible. One thing that
has changed from previous times of world crisis is the technology of
information. The Internet has created a
virtual open society, though of course even this technology is repressed in
totalitarian regimes like China and most of the Middle East. But like the ham radio technology prevalent
during the old world wars, people will broadcast information, some true, some
false, but overall it will give a vague, but uncensored, true picture of what
is happening. Today no bandit can hide
from CNN, whose broadcasts tend to catalyze western world opinion. Because of this, although the overall future
is uncertain, the immediate future is clear…
We will see a devastating response. Look at the political landscape of the Middle East; it will soon change as dramatically as the skyline of New York. My initial fears that the attack was a precursor to something much larger against the state of Israel are fading, but not gone. I am still holding my breath. If the road of responsibility leads back to Saddam Hussein, and/or Iran, with a complex soup of religious, territorial and personal motives, and I suspect that it does, the political complexity increases many fold and the threat to world peace becomes much more serious. Syria, Iran and Libya, traditionally not allies of the US, have condemned the attacks, but Iraq is one of the few countries that I cannot find an official statement of condolence and condemnation from. Of course what is prevalent in the media are statements from the state-run Iraqi media which in fact seem to be gloating over the attacks, saying things like “what happened in the United States yesterday is a lesson for all tyrants, oppressors and criminals”; and “The American cowboys are reaping the fruit of their crimes against humanity”. I do not speak Arabic and the English translations of Iraqi Arabic newspapers are not reliable, so I will have to assume for now that there is in fact no official remorse for the tragedy coming from the government of Iraq. Interestingly, I did discover that today’s headlines of the Iraqi News Agency do not mention the US attack. The headline today is “Iraq Shoots Down US Spy Plane”… the article says: “The plane was coming from Kuwaiti territory and it was used to provide the American enemy with information concerning our installations, vital sites and our air-defense formations”. That’s it.
In looking at the Iranian News this morning, the headlines feature their holy leader, President Mohammad Khatami, condemning the “kamikaze terrorist attacks” in the United States and expressed his deep sorrow and sympathy with the American nation.
Now the ruling party of Afghanistan, the Taliban, which is safeguarding the suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, has also strongly condemned the attacks and has issued statements of condolence and condemnation, but at the same time they have discounted that Osama is responsible, stating that he is basically under state arrest and cannot carry out such well-organized attacks. They are of course worried about an attack by the US, and have said that would be a “big mistake”.
Bin Laden is an exiled Saudi Arabian millionaire who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and later declared holy war against Israel, the United States and U.S.-backed secular regimes in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim nations. He is suspected to be the kingpin in a network of a dozen or so global terrorist organizations. He has technology know-how, a hideout and military training camps in Afghanistan, is personally rich, but the source of his military funding is not clear. It is likely not the poor country of Afghanistan. Again, my attention for the answer turns to Iraq.
Right now the culprit is being conveyed as a rogue Islam fundamentalist madman. He apparently claims complete innocence. Yeah right. But no one man can wage an act of war of this magnitude against another country without a sophisticated and well-funded operation. Afghanistan is a poor country. I suspect that the wealth behind the operation goes far beyond this, and that the agenda of hatred goes beyond that of one man.
Does the road of terror lead back to Saddam Hussein and his personal mission of vengeance against the United States? I think we will find that it does. The world is focused on an individual for the murders right now, much like the world was focused on Lee Harvey Oswald after the Kennedy assassination, but time revealed a much deeper and more sophisticated villain behind the action. As with any crime, what you need is a motive and the means. In Hussein’s case the motive is clear: revenge. If the mechanism is by way of financing a maniacal patsy named Bin Laden with a self–professed holy war already being waged against the US, then he has the means.
I found this cry in the dark on the Internet from one renegade Iraqi:
Dear American
My heart goes for the victims and their families... but don't tell me that
America will go after whoever behind it.
I assure you if there is a middle eastern link to those attacks, then search
for Saddam...The (well informed and positioned) in your country have known for
along time that Saddam is using the stupid Bin Ladden to get back at the
country who led the 1991 coalition..Just think about it friend
One thing that most of my friends will not be familiar with is the divisiveness and counter intelligence of misinformation that will saturate the media: truth is the first casualty of war, and you must take everything that is said in context and with a careful view to motive, agenda and source.
To complicate matters further, you will hear a lot about this being the precursor to the Christian prophecy of Armageddon. You will hear Nostradamus and Christ and their followers being quoted. And you will hear fears that we are heading into a Third World War. I am not saying that is not possible. But it is unlikely. The terror in the world today is not so much a clash of titans, as it was in the 60's, but more like the prevalence of pirates in the 1600's. The motive and technology is different but the analogy is somewhat valid. You have hoodlums on the rampage hiding out and striking unpredictably. They keep moving and it is hard to determine where they are or where they will strike next. But they're downfall is that they are a common enemy to everyone, so once the world has had enough, it injects a universal effort of eradication. The problem today is that of socio-economic networks. The pirates of today that threaten world peace, like the ones who struck out yesterday, are not isolated enclaves living on some ship in a hidden bay of a Caribbean island or a fjord of the Spanish coastline, they are well funded organizations with economic, political and religious networks that span the planet. They are more like a festering disease in the human body than a stinging wasp that can be swatted. In this I mean that unfortunately the cure may be more lethal than the disease, and certainly more painful.
And here is the larger problem -- whatever stability that has been established in the complex religious-political agenda of the Middle East has been formulated by the "old-guard"; statesman of the old world order who are now aging and dying. New generations don't know the history. They don't know the agendas. They innocently presume safety and rationality and have no experience with the motive of evil, whether the motive is based on scripture, revenge or personal power. And the tyrants of tomorrow will take advantage of this. Historically one of the most moderate control rods of the Middle East, King Hussein of Jordan, known as the “King of Peace”, died from cancer in 1999. The Palestinian 'moderate' Yasser Arafat is aging and visibly suffering from some disease, generally held to be neurological, and on top of that the young Palestinians he ostensibly represents have been shown on global television celebrating the attack. The reality may not be true but that is the perception, and perception is everything. The old guard is going, but not taking the old troubles with them.
In addition, Iran and Iraq have been steadfastly acquiring weapons of mass destruction over the last couple of decades. Iraq has of course been under scrutiny since the Gulf War, but Iran, under less scrutiny, has been acquiring nuclear and chemical-weapons technology from Russia and China. Even Germany has sold Iran submarines, so you have a landlocked power acquiring marine based weapons, ironically from the country that brought submarine warfare its infamy.
The Taliban of Afghanistan are religious leaders with major issues with the west, but very little means. They can consort and give sanctuary to terrorists but they cannot enact much destruction beyond their borders.
Saddam Hussein is a local hoodlum with significant local military might bent on world domination for his own personal aggrandizement. He has no divine agenda or theocracy behind his motives. He has an agenda of personal glory and a deep-seated personal hatred of the United States. His biggest weapon is time; time for the west to become complacent and for the old guard to die out, and time for the recruitment of young Muslim militant idealists who he brainwashes to fit his agenda. He allies himself with those who despise the US, particularly the Palestinians. He is a relatively young dictator, one who has already survived several changes of US leadership. And he is sly.
The leaders of Iran however are different. They too are local hoodlums but with self-declared divine right. This is where the principle global danger resides. The world today, and especially the western moderates, including Canada, tends to look on all regimes as valid sovereignties, irrespective of how they came to be or operate. The western tolerance for ‘multiculturalism’, a veiled evil in itself wrapped in gooey ‘humanitarian’ platitudes, leads to complacency and a sense of false security with the world order, and is typically brought to the light only when a spectacular event occurs that wakes people up to that idea that something must be fundamentally wrong.
I cannot get to the true root of the problem without threatening people’s belief system, so that is something that requires a whole other dialogue, otherwise the effort here will be redirected to a discussion of subjective philosophy, and that may be the most important discussion but it is one that has to be addressed on a much larger scale. Let me simply say for now that one of the things that’s wrong with the world is the failure to recognize and destroy evil before it becomes a global threat. The policy in recent years has more so been that of monitoring and containment, allowing the disease to live as long as it remains localized. If medical science used the same strategy, the human body would not live long. Cancer, to be beaten, has to be completely destroyed.
The challenge is how do you do that in a “free” society. How do you uphold the governing democratic laws of “free speech” and individual sovereignty and at the same time apply suppression to those individuals who would threaten the system upon which the laws are based? Internally, democracies typically allow people to say what they want but not “do” what they want, though the line is usually drawn at actual verbal or written threats. But short of that, if someone wants to espouse the virtue of child pornography, spousal abuse or treason against the state, they are typically allowed to do so, as long as they don’t “act” on what they are saying. That would then be considered illegal. This tolerance for contrasting philosophy is then extended to foreign states and individuals who proclaim ideas radically different from the democratic west, and they do so veiled in the safety of the west’s tolerance for their views under the shroud of cultural diversity. If you hear a powerful and compelling hoodlum clearly proclaim his philosophy, motive and goal at an early age, you can expect that he will spend a lifetime trying to achieve it.
If you look at history you will see an incubation period for military and political tyrants. Typically it appears to me to be about 20 years. Hitler became leader of his party in 1921, rose to political power ten years later, and waged world war ten years after that. Saddam Hussein came to power in 1979, and immediately launched into war with Iran. He invaded Kuwait ten years after that, until he was beaten into submission by the United States, who chose to stop short of destroying him, breaking one of the fundamental rules of war (never leave your enemy wounded, either make him your friend or kill him). Now it’s ten years later. Has the time come for Saddam Hussein’s ultimate military move? The next few weeks and months will tell the story.
And no doubt the above appraisal will have to be revised as the true story unfolds….