A Year of the War on Terror

by Alexander Cockburn

The Taliban are out of power, and Afghan peasants are free to grow opium poppies again. The military budget is up. The bluster war on Iraq is at full volume. On the home front, the war on the Bill of Rights is at full tilt, though getting less popular with each day as judges thunder their indignation at the unconstitutional dictates of Attorney General John Ashcroft, a man not high in public esteem.

On this latter point we can turn to Merle Haggard, the bard of blue collar America, the man who saluted the American flag more than a generation ago in songs such as "The Fighting Side of Me" and "Okie from Muskogee." Haggard addressed a concert crowd in Kansas City, Mo., a few days ago in the following terms: "I think we should give John Ashcroft a big hand ... (pause) ... right in the mouth!" He went on to say, 'the way things are going, I'll probably be thrown in jail tomorrow for saying that, so I hope ya'll will bail me out."

The terrorists in those planes a year ago nourished specific grievances, all available for study in the speeches and messages of Osama bin Laden. They wanted U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia. They saw the United States as Israel's prime backer and financier in the oppression of Palestinians. They railed against the sanctions grinding down upon the civilian population of Iraq.

A year later, the troops are still in Saudi Arabia, U.S. backing for Sharon is more ecstatic than ever, and scenarios for a blitzkrieg against Saddam Hussein mostly start with a saturation bombing campaign that will plunge civilians in Iraq back into the worst miseries of 1991.

Terror springs from the mulch of desperation. We live in a world where about half the population of the planet, 2.8 billion people, live on less than two dollars a day. The richest 25 million people in the United States receive more income than the two billion poorest people on the planet.

Across the past year, world economic conditions have mostly gotten worse, nowhere with more explosive potential than in Latin America, where Peru, Argentina and Venezuela all heave in crisis.

Is the world impressed with America's commander-in-chief? The answer is, mostly no. But wars need leaders, and for George Bush it's been a wobbly slide downhill from the terse defiance of that first emergency joint session of Congress to the strange on-again, off-again proclamations about an attack on Iraq.

Can anything stop these proclamations from being self-fulfilling? Another real slump on Wall Street would certainly postpone it, just as a hike on energy prices here if war does commence will give the economy a kidney blow when it least needs it.

How could an attack on Iraq be construed as a blow against terror? The administration abandoned early on, probably to its subsequent regret, the claim that Iraq was complicit on the attacks of Sept. 11. Aside from the Taliban's Afghanistan, the prime nation that could be blamed was Saudi Arabia, point of origin for so many of the al Qaeda terrorists on the planes.

Would an attack on Iraq be a reprisal? If it degraded Saudi Arabia's role as prime swing producer of oil, if it indicated utter contempt for Arab opinion, then yes. But does anyone doubt that if the Bush administration does indeed topple Saddam Hussein and occupy Baghdad, this will be truly a plunge into the unknown, a plunge which would fan to white heat the embers of Islamic radicalism that crested as long ago as 1989, and amid whose decline the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were far more a coda than an overture.