Did We Walk Into Osama's Trap?

by Randolph T. Holhut

Libya, Panama, Iraq, Sudan and Yugoslavia have all seen U.S. ordinance fall upon their soil in the past two decades, raining death and destruction mostly upon the people with the least to do with the battles we were fighting.

Now it's Afghanistan's turn. Osama bin Laden, this year's poster child for evil, must be exterminated. To exterminate him, many innocents will die.

"War in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children," historian Howard Zinn recently wrote for The Progressive. "War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times."

An air war on Afghanistan is easy. The Taliban has little weaponry or infrastructure befitting a modern military power. The ground war, if it happens, promises to be much more difficult. The brutal weather and inhospitable terrain are the Taliban's greatest ally in this fight.

Robert Fisk, who writes for the London paper, The Independent, has been covering the Middle East for decades and is one of the few Western reporters who have interviewed bin Laden. His take on the situation is simple. President Bush has walked into a trap -- the trap of retaliation.

Fisk wrote on Sept. 16 that the Sept. 11 attacks were "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 U.S. military is preparing."

A couple of years ago, bin Laden told Fisk that his goal is to overthrow every pro-American regime in the Middle East -- Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and the other Persian Gulf states -- and the catalyst for the uprising would be an assault on an Arab nation by the U.S. The Russians got mauled in Afghanistan by getting bogged down in a war without end; a constant cycle of retaliation that bled that nation dry and accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But Fisk believes the more apt analogy is Israel's war with the Palestinians, first in Lebanon and now on the West Bank. Hezbollah fighters and the Israelis traded bombardments for almost 18 years until Israel finally withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000. On the West Bank, we've seen a steady stream of retaliation from Palestinians and Israelis that have left thousands dead or maimed over the past year of the second Intifata.

Fisk maintains the Middle East is a "vast place of terror and injustice," and part of the reason why is "America's failure to act with honor 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 principle supporter -- all these are intimately related to the society that produced the Arabs who plunged America into an apocalypse of fire."

Fisk said the U.S. looked the other way in 1982 when the Israeli Army, led by Ariel Sharon, invaded Lebanon at the cost of nearly 18,000 lives. The U.S. didn't flinch when Israel's Phalangist militia allies massacred 1,800 people in a three-day orgy of rape and murder in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. That massacre, which was carried out with Sharon's blessings, began on Sept. 16, 1982, almost 19 years to the day of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.

But our backing of Israel during these horrific atrocities was only the start of the Lebanon tragedy. The battleship New Jersey shelled Lebanon in 1983 and we were shocked when suicide bombers retaliated by first blowing up our embassy and later the Marine barracks in Beirut. After the death of 241 Marines, the U.S. to quietly withdraw from Lebanon and let Israel do the rest of the dirty work.

In the 1980s, the U.S. spent more than $2 billion to train and arm the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan, including bin Laden, to kill the Russians. We armed Iraq so they could kill Iranians, and secretly armed Iran so they could kill Iraqis. We propped up corrupt dictatorships and monarchies in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, and fought the Persian Gulf War on their behalf when Iraq became our enemy. And the U.S. is the world's top arms dealer, with the Middle East countries we support among our best customers.

None of these facts excuses the attacks of Sept. 11, but this nation cannot ignore them in the conduct of this new war. Our conduct in the Middle East has indeed been less than honorable and has been more motivated by a desire to keep oil flowing to the industrialized world than a desire to help establish and maintain true freedom and democracy in any of the nations in the region save for Israel.

President Bush said we are not at war with the Afghan people, and to prove that, we made a big show of airdropping tens of thousands of packaged meals. That's good, except there are at least 7.5 million Afghans that are starving and the bombing has disrupted the existing aid programs. With winter just a couple of weeks away, the prospect of millions of civilian deaths becomes greater.

In his Oct. 11 news conference, Bush made repeated references regarding the need to bring the "evildoers" to "justice." But the war has little to do with justice, and everything to do with the extension of American military power into one of the volatile regions on earth. As for making the world safer, I wouldn't bet on it. With each day the war goes on, the likelihood of more terrorist attacks increases.

"President Bush says this is a war between good and evil. You are either with us or against us," Fisk wrote on Oct. 9 after the bombing began. "But that's exactly what bin Laden says. Isn't it worth pointing this out and asking where it leads?"

Absolutely. This, and many other questions, are not being asked as the U.S. risks blundering into World War III. We need to start asking them now.