Bush & Blair's War: Lurching Toward Catastrophe  
 

Seumas Milne
Thursday October 11, 2001
The Guardian

There is an eerie familiarity about the scenes being played
out every night, as the United States and Britain launch
wave after wave of bombing and cruise missile attacks on
Afghanistan. The grinning marine on the USS Enterprise,
promising "to destroy a lot of things over there"; the RAF
corporal, showing off his "We came, we saw, we kicked ass"
T-shirt; the daily military briefings with their
before-and-after images of destruction; the sombre excuses
offered for civilian casualties and other forms of
"collateral damage"; the cheerleaders' untiring comparison
of the enemy with the Nazis and the war's opponents with
appeasers - they almost seem routine.

Perhaps that is scarcely surprising, as we've been here
before, again and again. This is the fifth time since Tony
Blair became prime minister that Britain and the US have
taken military action - though not always together - without
an explicit United Nations mandate: in Iraq, Yugoslavia,
Sudan, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan. In four cases, the
attacks have consisted overwhelmingly or exclusively of
aerial bombardments; in three, the targets have been Muslim
states - all have been more or less impoverished and none of
those under attack has been able to offer anything but token
resistance. In the case of Iraq, major assaults - such as
the four-day Desert Fox operation nearly three years ago -
have only punctuated what has been a 10-year regime of
relentless bombing raids and grinding economic sanctions.

>From such a perspective, this conflict did not begin last
Sunday or on September 11, but a decade ago, when the
pattern of wars against developing countries under the new
world order was established by the first President Bush in
his campaign to drive Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. It was
then that US troops were first sent to Saudi Arabia and the
devastation of Iraq began - two of the three festering
Muslim grievances cited by Osama bin Laden in his broadcast
describing the New York and Washington atrocities as America
tasting "what we have tasted".

But none of the Anglo-American onslaughts since 1991 can
match the cruel absurdity of this week's bombing of one of
the poorest and most ruined countries in the world by the
planet's richest and most powerful state, assisted as ever
by its British satrap. For all the earnest assurances about
pinpoint targeting, the civilian death toll is already
mounting, including the incineration of four employees of
the UN's mine-clearing agency by a cruise missile as they
lay sleeping in a Kabul suburb. The almost comical futility
of the military overkill was epitomised by General Richard
Myers, US Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, who declared
yesterday that "we now have air supremacy over Afghanistan".

But this is also potentially by far the most perilous of all
the western wars since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The
case against the campaign now being waged against
Afghanistan - with the explicitly stated prospect that it
may be widened in future - does not primarily hinge on its
dubious legality, lack of UN involvement or absence of
convincing evidence of responsibility for the September 11
attacks.

The most serious objections are, first, that by triggering
large-scale refugee movements and interrupting food
supplies, the war is turning an existing humanitarian crisis
into a disaster, which will cause the deaths of many more
than were slaughtered in the World Trade Centre, for no
remotely proportional gain. Second, whatever success is
achieved in killing or capturing Bin Laden and his
supporters or forcing the Afghan theocrats from power, there
is no reason to believe that that will stamp out
anti-western terrorism, even by the al-Qaida networks, which
operate across the world without assistance from their
Taliban friends. In other words, it won't work.  Finally,
and most dangerously, the entire "crusade" in defence of
civilisation, as Bush the younger so sensitively described
his campaign, shows every sign of creating a political
backlash throughout the Muslim world and spawning even more
terrorist attacks, rather than curbing them.

Few of those pressing for the alternative of legal,
diplomatic and security action are the pacifists they are
caricatured to be. But while Bin Laden is fast developing
popular cult status across the Middle East, Bush and Blair
have turned themselves into recruiting sergeants for
al-Qaida and militant Islamism - and increased the
likelihood of a cycle of revenge and retaliatory
violence. The longer the campaign goes on and the wider it
spreads, the greater the risk that many Middle Eastern
governments dearest to the west will be consigned to
oblivion. If the aim of the war launched last Sunday is to
put an end to terrorism, it makes no sense. But if, as some
in the US clearly want, this campaign becomes the vehicle
for achieving wider US strategic objectives - in Iraq,
central Asia or elsewhere - it risks a catastrophe.

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