http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/091504A.shtml When the Rabbits Get a Gun
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 15 September 2004
Dead and injured Iraqi civilians on Haifa Street, Baghdad, after a
U.S. helicopter attack.
(Photo: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad / Getty Images)
This is the comforting fiction: Osama bin Laden is a monster who
sprang whole from the fetid mire. He had no childhood, no influences,
no education, no experiences to form his view of the world. He did not
exist, and then he did, a vessel into which the universe poured the
essence of evil. It is a simple, straightforward story of a man who
hates freedom and kills for the pure joy of feeling innocent blood
drip from his fingers.
This is the fairy tale by which children are put to bed at night.
As frightening and terrifying as bin Laden may be, it is a comfort to
imagine him as having been chiseled from the dust. The fiction of his
existence, absent of detail, makes him unique, a singular entity not
to be replicated. Osama bin Laden becomes truly scary only when the
actual context of his life is made clear, where he is from, what he
has seen, and why those things motivated him to do what he does.
Osama bin Laden becomes truly scary when the realization comes
that he is not unique, not singular, not an invention of the universe.
He becomes truly scary when the realization comes that there are
millions of people who have seen what he has seen, who feel what he
feels, and why. He becomes truly scary when the realization comes that he is a creation of the last fifty years of American foreign and
economic policy, and that he has an army behind him created by the
same influences. Simply, Osama bin Laden becomes truly scary when the realization comes that he can be, and has been, and continues to be, replicated.
Osama bin Laden, after being educated at Oxford University,
learned how to kill effectively while working as an agent of American
Cold War policy in Afghanistan. He was a helpful American ally
throughout the 1980s as a ruthless and wealthy warrior against the
Soviet Union. It was the desire of the American government to deliver
to the Soviets their own Vietnam, to arrange a hopeless military
situation which would demoralize the Soviet military and bleed that
nation dry.
Osama bin Laden played the part of the Viet Cong, and he was good
at it. With the help of the American government, he was able to create
an army of true believers in Afghanistan. Our government believed that
if one bin Laden was good, a hundred would be better, and a thousand better again, in the fight against the Soviets. So strong was this
group America helped to create that it became known as 'The Base.'
Translated into the local dialect, 'The Base' is known as al Qaeda.
Osama bin Laden learned something else besides the art of killing
while he was working as an ally of the United States. He learned that
given enough time, enough money, enough violence, enough perseverance,
and enough fellow warriors, a superpower can be brought to its knees
and erased from the book of history.
Bin Laden was at the center of one of the most important events of
the 20th century: The fall of the Soviet Union. Political pundits like
to credit Reagan and the senior Bush for the collapse of that regime,
but out in front of them, in the mountains of Afghanistan, was Osama
bin Laden and al Qaeda, the sharp end of our sword, who did their job
very well. Today, the United States faces this group and its leader,
armed with their well-learned and America-taught lessons: How to kill
massively and how to annihilate a superpower.
Osama bin Laden learned a few other things before he became the
monster under our collective bed. When Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein
began to make his move against Kuwait, bin Laden was outraged. Hussein
was a despised name on the lips of bin Laden and his followers; here
was an unbelieving heretic who spoke the words of Allah, a self-styled
Socialist who pretended piety, a ruthless dictator who killed every
Islamic fundamentalist he could get his hands on.
Osama bin Laden went to King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, home of the
holiest sites of Islam. The royal family was not to be found anywhere
on bin Laden's list of friends at the time. A shrewd observer of local
politics, bin Laden knew that the Saudi government enjoyed having the
Palestinians living in squalor, bereft of homeland and hope, because
it distracted the fundamentalists within Saudi Arabia from focusing on
the inequities within their own country. With the crooking of a single
oil-rich finger, the Saudi royals could solve the Palestinian problem.
Their refusal to do so fed bin Laden's rage, for in his mind, they
were aiding and abetting what he saw as an intolerable Israeli apartheid.
Bin Laden asked Fahd to help him resurrect the army that fought
with him against the Soviets so that he could fight Saddam Hussein.
Here again is an irony of the times: As in the 1980s, Osama bin Laden
was spoiling for a fight against an enemy of the United States - for
his own purposes, to be sure, but it is difficult to avoid a shake of
the head when considering all of the recent rhetoric about a
Saddam/Osama alliance.
Fahd turned bin Laden down, and allowed the American military to
set up bases in Saudi Arabia for use in what became known as Operation
Desert Storm. According to the version of Islam practiced by bin
Laden, it is rank heresy to allow soldiers from an infidel army to
occupy the land of Mecca and Medina. Bin Laden learned from this that
regimes in the Middle East which claim fealty to Islam, but which in
fact act at the behest of the Unites States, were not to be trusted.
The royal family of Saudi Arabia joined the list of bin Laden's
enemies, along with the United States, Saddam Hussein, and Israel.
It was Israel, proxy of the Unites States, which taught Osama bin
Laden what could be considered the final, irrevocable lesson of his
life. In April of 1996, Israel began a military action against Beirut
and southern Lebanon called Operation Grapes of Wrath. "It is quite
obvious," wrote Israeli writer Israel Shahak at the time, "that the
first and most important Israeli aim to be established in the 'Grapes
of Wrath' is to establish its sovereignty over Lebanon - to be
exercised in a comparable manner to its control over the Gaza Strip."
On April 13, an ambulance driver named Abbas Jiha was rushing
patients to a hospital in Sidon. Civilians caught in the crossfire of
'Grapes of Wrath' begged him to take them to Sidon, and so he squeezed
his wife, his four children and ten others into his ambulance. An
Israeli helicopter targeted his ambulance and fired two missiles. The
ambulance was blasted sixty feet into the air, and Jiha was thrown
clear. When he made it back to the remains of his rig, he found his
nine year old daughter, his wife, and four others dead within the
flaming wreckage.
On April 18, the small village of Qana was flooded with some 800
refugees from the fighting who were seeking protection from UN forces
there. At about two in the afternoon, the village came under
bombardment by Israeli 'proximity shells' - antipersonnel weapons
which explode several meters above the ground and shower anyone below
with razor-sharp shrapnel. The result was a massacre, a blood-drenched
scene of shredded humanity.
Robert Fisk, the most decorated and reputable journalist in
Britain, was there. "It was a massacre," he wrote. "Israel's slaughter
of civilians in this 10-day offensive - 206 by last night - has been
so cavalier, so ferocious, that not a Lebanese will forgive this
massacre. There had been the ambulance attacked on Saturday, the
sisters killed in Yohmor the day before, the 2-year-old girl
decapitated by an Israeli missile four days ago. And earlier
yesterday, the Israelis had slaughtered a family of 12 - the youngest
was a four-day-old baby - when Israeli helicopter pilots fired
missiles into their home."
These stories barely made a dent in the American press in 1996,
but were widely reported at length by both European and Middle Eastern
media outlets. Photographs of headless babies and slaughtered
civilians reached far and wide, inflaming a region already filled with
rage against Israel and America. From this time on, Osama bin Laden
used Qana as a rallying cry against what he called the Israeli-United
States alliance. The rest, as they say, is history.
Osama bin Laden is a damned murderer of innocents, with thousands
of notches in his belt. His actions are indefensible by any measure.
Yet to dismiss him as something other than the creation of his
experiences, to categorize him as some unique freak whose motivations
are beyond comprehension, is to deny the most important dilemma that
faces our world. Monsters are not born. They are made.
On Sunday, September 12, 2004, a large crowd of Iraqi civilians
came under fire from U.S. attack helicopters on Haifa Street in
Baghdad. An American Bradley Fighting Vehicle had been attacked and
destroyed by 'insurgents' fighting the ongoing occupation of their
country, and the civilians - after more than a year of deprivation and
violence which came on the heels of a decade of deprivation and
violence - were dancing on top of and beside the vehicle. 13 of them
were killed and dozens more wounded. A reporter from the UK Guardian
named Ghaith Abdul-Ahad was there, and was wounded in the attack.
"One of the three men piled together," wrote Abdul-Ahad, "raised
his head and looked around the empty streets with a look of
astonishment on his face. He then looked at the boy in front of him,
turned to the back and looked at the horizon again. Then he slowly
started moving his head to the ground, rested his head on his arms and
stretched his hands towards something that he could see. It was the
guy who had been beating his chest earlier, trying to help his
brother. He wanted help but no one helped. He was just there dying in
front of me. Time didn't exist. The streets were empty and silent and
the men lay there dying together. He slid down to the ground, and
after five minutes was flat on the street."
The survivors of this attack, like the survivors of Qana, were
probably not terrorists before the fire came raining down. It is a
safe bet they are now, after seeing what they have seen, willing to
trade their lives to see Americans die. They have seen the massacre of
civilians, and so believe that civilians are fair game in this
dirtiest of wars. They are monsters now, not born, but made.
The story of the 20th century Middle East is one of American
action. We created Saddam Hussein, and then twice attacked him,
leaving nearly two million civilians dead in the process. We created
the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and bent our policies towards defending
that house of cards and its precious oil. We created the Shah of Iran,
then lost him, and propped up Hussein to checkmate our failure. We
created Israel, a nation that has become our front line against the
hostilities we manufactured in the region through our relentless
military and economic meddling, and supported them militarily and
financially as they committed acts of barbarism. We have paid great
lip service to the plight of the Palestinians, but have always
deferred to Israel.
More recently, we invaded Iraq on the pretext of destroying
weapons of mass destruction which, according to recent comments by
Secretary of State Powell, do not actually exist. We accused Saddam
Hussein of collaborating with bin Laden, and of being involved in
9/11, despite the fact that bin Laden has wanted Hussein dead for
years. We killed over 10,000 Iraqi civilians. We raped and tortured
Iraqi men, women and children in the dungeons of Abu Ghraib. All of
our poor history in the region has been distilled into that one
nation, a place that now manufactures bin Laden allies by the truckload.
We created Osama bin Laden. We taught him to kill, we showed him
how to destroy a superpower, and we gave him a face-first lesson in
American interventionism in his back yard. Whatever predispositions
towards violence and murder existed in him when he was born became
honed, refined and perfected as he watched our government storm the
policies, rulers and innocent people of the Middle East like so many
rabbits. We have created millions more like him.
We are learning now that the game isn't much fun when the rabbits
get a gun.
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and international
bestseller of two books - 'War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want
You to Know' and 'The Greatest Sedition is Silence.'
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