Since the shocking and horrible event’s in NY almost a week ago. We have been watching world history unfold. In the face of such a gruesome act with such terrible and tragic consequences it is interesting to notice the language of the various statements made by “world leaders”. There is no reason to envy President G.W. Bush the situation he is landed in. He is the leader of the most formidable world power in human history. It is completely unparalleled in sheer brute military force. It must be extremely frustrating for such a power to be so thoroughly humiliated as the US has been this last week.
Millions of soldiers, aircraft carriers, warplanes etc, yet no one to use this formidable power on. No territory to “bomb back to the stone age”. Afghanistan has already been bombed back to the stone age for 20 years now, and there is hardly anything to bomb but a few measly houses in the ruined capital Kabul. Of course the vast majority of the Afghan population has nothing to do with Bin Laden, and the majority have absolutely no sympathy for the Taliban sect which currently have the upper hand in the country. Several million Afghans are in refugee camps in Pakistan and other neighboring countries because of the totally destroyed infrastructure within Afghanistan and the Taliban regime. I talked to an aid worker who was in Afghanistan in May, and he was working in an internal refugee camp where the sole source for food came from western aid organizations.
These foreign workers has now had to leave and it will mean death by starvation for thousands of people. Put in a larger perspective, I don’t want to diminish the horrible tragedy and the suffering of the people who died in New York and their loved ones, still I am afraid that compared to the everyday life of the New Yorker, it is more or less a picnic compared to what the population of Afghanistan has had to endure the last 20 years, and it will continue to endure for many years to come.
Now let us presume that the US want to devastate the Afghan pile of rubble to yet smaller fragments of stone. Let us say they manage to kill a few more Afghans. That will be just exactly what the terrorists and everyone who hates the US all over the Muslim world wants. Why? Well, what do you think the answer will be?
I have no doubt that it will be a nuclear device obliterating some big US city. So what can Bush and the US do? Well, they might want to sit down and try to remove the very reasons so many Muslims hate America. They might have to reconsider their rather one eyed support of their allies the “holy land”. They might have to consider that “freedom” is something that doesn’t just apply to Americans and West Europeans but to other people as well.
As I said, terror has it’s own logic. It follows it with a mind numbing predictability.
We have observed it in the middle east for a long time. The Palestinians blow up some Jews and the Jews blow up about 10 times as many Palestinians. (That seem to be because Jews are much more worth than Palestinians), just as the freedom of people from Chile, Nicaragua, etc isn’t worth shit if it isn’t the exact same as the US concept of freedom.
And so it continues. But now we can of course all rest easy, because the President of the worlds only superpower have promised us on TV, that he and God, will obliterate all “evildoers” and bad guys from the face of the earth forever.
All I can say is Wowsers!!!
Take care,
Norm.