Bin Laden's demands threaten both the west and its client states
Guardian,Tuesday October 9, 2001
"Let there be no moral ambiguity," thundered Tony Blair a few days ago, even as he was gladly having thrust upon him deeply ambiguous contingency plans for another round of Anglo-American target-practice. This time they will be aiming, not at illegally fabricated no-fly zones over hungry Iraq, but at a population that is hungrier still. The people on the receiving end must rank, by any real (rather than Machiavellian) moral standard, as the most frightened, dispossessed and put-upon mass of civilians anywhere in the world.
In a replay of the same "humanitarian" scenario meted out to the Iraqis 10 years ago, the US and British are throwing bombs with one hand and food parcels with another. It is a shameful attempt to neutralise what history will show to have been nothing more than a military act of pure revenge that cleans up no "swamp" .
In any case, the spin-doctors are not winning this round. Across the world, there has been a cathartic release of pent-up silences from people who, for too long, had been stunned into the belief that politics had reached a dead end, in a world where history was supposed to have come to a close. Where political and social rights - the rights of children or of women, environmental rights - are swept under the carpet of globalisation, to be pulled out, one by one and for a mere, flickering second, when and whenever expedient. Which brings us to Tony Blair's speech last week to the Labour party conference.
Gifted with the ability to form full sentences, and pronounce foreign names with far more felicity than his friend in the White House, the British prime minister set himself the tub-thumping task of haranguing us with the shape of things to come. The new world order he promised (yet another one to be cooked up from a tried and tested Bush family recipe) is to be a delectable thing, where good will triumph and suffering, particularly that of women, will be blown out of the water - with the help of British submarines, as it now transpires.
But Mr Blair's neatly-timed defence of Afghan women, who have suffered every conceivable setback in their lives since western democracies took a keen interest in their country, cannot but remind one of Lord Cromer, a late 19th century British colonial ruler in Egypt, and his sudden and mythical transformation into a feminist. An enthusiastic oppoment of the British suffragettes, Cromer pledged to liberate the women of Egypt from the clutches of religious bigotry, at a time when he was seeking to crush an Islamist movement murderously set against British rule in Egypt. How times have changed!
But from the other side of the divide, the language of Osama bin Laden's fiery speech, broadcast on Sunday night, is also reminiscent of words uttered a century ago or more. Again and again, from 1905 onwards in Iran, in far-flung provinces of the Ottoman empire, and elsewhere across an exploited and colonised Muslim world, violent revolutionaries called for the dismantling of local despotisms, with their inextricable ties to foreign vested interests.
In a determined attempt to pin all the blame for the recent terrorist outrages on one man - thereby giving him, in the eyes of thousands of desperate people, heroic Lone Ranger status and giving themselves the easy task of flogging a dead donkey in response - the US and Britain ignore a simple fact at their peril.
Few Muslims worldwide applaud the terror that left several hundred of their own co-religionists maimed or dead, along with all the innocent others. But the vast majority of Muslims want to see the following, and see it soon: a Palestinian state that has East Jerusalem as its capital; an end to the punitive sanctions that have killed more than a million people in Iraq; and the total removal of US military bases in the birthplace of Muhammad.
Perhaps Osama bin Laden, who has yet to claim responsibility for the September 11 attacks and who may be no more than a convenient figurehead to go after, is wanted dead or alive most of all for communicating so unequivocally those three dangerous demands. Dangerous only because they go against every western vested interest, whether in the new world order or the old.
Dangerous, too, because they go against the vested interests of most of the clapped-out regimes of the bitterly-divided and compromised Muslim world, where human rights, civic liberties and democratic movements are brutally and comprehensively repressed, whether by secular authoritarian regimes, or by monarchic or religious ones.
