American Military Policy is adding up to one thing

12.3.01
You do the math
American military policy is adding up to one thing: World War III


Friday, three items came to my attention that were seemingly unrelated. But they are linked -- not just in the complete disinterest the U.S. media has in each story -- in a very, very bad way.
The first story I experienced personally. For reasons you might imagine, progressives in Seattle now consider November 30 something of a holiday. Two years ago on that day, tens of thousands here sent a triumphant message to the world, that even among pampered Americans there are many of us who will not roll over and play dead for corporate globalization. For months, I helped with the local organizing for those protests -- as well as injecting a rational note into media coverage of it -- and I'm damn proud of it and of my thousands of friends who pulled it off.

Unfortunately, it's an anniversary fraught with significance for our (outgoing) city administration. This year's re-election bid of infamous mayor Paul Schell didn't even survive the primary, and his handling of WTO was a major reason. And the present police chief, who replaced the man forced out by WTO, has had his job security questioned by the incoming mayor.

And, so, like last year, there was trouble here on N30. Last year, an aimless rump march at the end of a long, celebratory day was finally corralled and arrested in its entirety (with all charges later thrown out). This year, organizers were denied a permit by the city -- illegally, as it turns out, because the city lied to the activists' lawyers by claiming that a downtown business group already had a permit for the proposed rally space when it didn't.

After months of court wrangling, on Thursday a federal judge ruled in favor of the protesters' right to assemble, and that should have been that.

Wrong. The city of Seattle decided, courts and all precedent notwithstanding, not to allow the few hundred to protest. A virtually identically sized group (in fact, many of the same people and organizers) had done the same thing with no problem three Fridays previous, on the opening day of WTO's Qatar talks. An ugly confrontation ensured, one that was resolved despite (not because of) aggressive police tactics, by the cool heads and pleas for de-escalation by organizers, peacekeepers, and enraged but not stupid marchers. As a reporter, activist, and organizer I've been going to protests little and big for 25 years, and I have never been physically shoved around so much by cops (and in this case, as an inert, visibly credentialed reporter) as I was on Friday. As protesters finally filed into their downtown park the unambiguous chant rose: "This is what democracy feels like!"

Moreover, a celebratory anarco-punk concert that night, held at a Central District gallery which frequently hosts such shows, was arbitrarily shut down (with no reason given) at 10 p.m. by scores of police in riot gear. That action, also, was clearly illegal and purely done as harassment. (Parenthetically, it was also an incredibly positive day on Friday for cops in Seattle -- the best law and order news I've heard in a long, long time, with the arrest of a suspect in the Green River murders. That doesn't prove guilt, of course, but let us pause for a second in the memory of 49 women whose murders have gone unsolved for 19 years.)

Friday items two and three, less immediate but even more chilling, were e-mailed to me. Number two: the text of a boilerplate "Statement by the President," released last Wednesday by the White House, the sort of very ordinary, National Florist Day-type pronouncement that generally gets zero attention. It runs two paragraphs, the most germane parts of which read:


I congratulate Russia, Kazakhstan, and Oman, and their consortium partners, for the commissioning of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC). U.S. firms, notably ChevronTexaco and ExxonMobil, have played leading roles in this project.
These facilities represent the culmination of years of effort. They are examples to the world that the United States, Russia, and Kazakhstan are cooperating to build prosperity and stability in this part of the world.

The CPC highlights the important progress by countries in the Caspian region in building a transparent and stable environment for international trade and investment. The CPC project also advances my Administration's National Energy Policy by developing a network of multiple Caspian pipelines...

Item three is an utterly essential report in the current issue of the Economist from a reporter in Kabul. He describes searching a house in Kabul, in the wake of the newly departed Taliban, used by a Pakistani NGO, Ummah Rameer-e-Nan, headed by a top Pakistani nuclear scientist with rumored links to the Taliban and Bin Laden. The reporter found exhaustive evidence in the house of serious plans -- either being plotted or imparted to eager students -- to launch "anthrax bombs," helium balloons that would release spores over an American city whether by timed explosion or being blown up by a fighter jet.

The Economist article notes that journalists from around the world were removing valuable evidence from similarly abandoned houses all over Kabul, and asks the reasonable question of where the hell Western intelligence services have been.

Those services, of course, already completely missed September 11's planning, and subsequent security and "anti-terrorist" measures would not have prevented it, either. That's because the most important intelligence information comes on the ground, from people, not satellites or Echelon computers; and Westerners simply have no way to penetrate most of these cells.

The scariest lesson in that house in Kabul is not just that the important parts of that particular plot -- the knowledge and will in the brains of the participants -- escaped undetected, as have most members of Al-Qaeda, predictably enough -- but that similar houses unquestionably exist in Cairo, Damascus, Saudi Arabia, Paris, London, maybe even Detroit or Chicago. They're virtually undetectable. And we're not about to bomb Cairo -- let alone Detroit - - to dislodge them.

What do these three completely separate items add up to? The jihad being waged by groups like Al-Qaeda -- one that has been joined by countless scores of thousands more Muslims since the bombing of Afghanistan began -- is a global resistance against the American (and Western) empire. It is a resistance against cultural, economic, and military domination, by people who not only don't like it, but are willing to die, and to avenge the deaths of not just weeks' but centuries' worth of comrades and ancestors, to bring that empire down. And the United States (and the West) have responded in the same fashion to this far deadlier threat that they have to the nonviolent one posed by ordinary, red-blooded U.S. citizens who use placards and marches to oppose those policies of the empire -- by belittling it and trying to stamp it out with muscle; legal niceties be damned.

At home, it was revealed the next day that John Ashcroft wants to formalize what Seattle police are already doing, by lifting restrictions on investigation (and harassment) of groups due to their religious and/or political views. Abroad, the U.S. has continued, even redoubled, those policies of empire by (among many other things) using the conflict to help try to lock up Caspian Sea oil that no more belongs to the U.S., ChevronTexaco, or ExxonMobil than do the oil fields of Saudi Arabia.

The problem, of course, is that my friends here in Seattle aren't going away. Neither are the people who went to Prague, Quebec, Genoa, and the other big global justice protests of the North since November 30, 1999. Instead, as police violence against these demonstrations has grown, so have the numbers of protesters. They have virtually no advocates among mainstream media or politicians, but they -- we -- have something stronger: a belief in freedom.

And if we're not intimidated, what about people watching their countries being incinerated by daisy cutters? Such people will fight back not with signs, but with weapons of mass destruction. If the citizens of Israel, for decades the most fortified and militarized country in the world, are in more fear than ever due to solitary Palestinian men willing to blow themselves up, how winnable is a war against people willing to kill 5,000 -- or far more -- at a time, in a country the size of the U.S., when idiocies like the FBI's questioning of 5,000 Arab and Muslim foreigners aren't about to turn up such plots? Put another way: if there's less clamor opposing war within this country than there is demanding the use of nuclear weapons -- because we've lost 5,000 people -- what of people who've lost millions of their own?

How these three items add up is that the United States, busily crowing that it has just "won" Afghanistan and that war works, has walked straight into the Bin Laden fantasy for World War III, and seems intent on escalating, not escaping, that fate. The prosecution of an American Empire that bombs impoverished Third World countries, locks up their resources for corporate profit, and keeps their -- and probably our -- populations under an iron heel, is escalating before our eyes. That empire isn't loyal to the United States as such; it is much more a war of the world's haves vs. the have-nots, with a few lonely voices on each side begging for sanity.

That's no consolation to those of us in the United States, who are now all targets by virtue of our being here. World War III is coming, and unless the leaders of the United States reverse course and start working for the betterment, not the conquest, of this world, some of the people now reading this column are going to die in that conflagration. Apocalyptic nonsense? Perhaps. Perhaps it'll all work out just fine. But it's much more likely that it won't -- it already hasn't -- and even taking that chance is playing with a fire the likes of which the world has never seen.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Reclaim History!

Things that happened on Dec. 3 that you never had to memorize in school:

1847: Frederick Douglass publishes the first issue of his anti-slavery newspaper, North Star.

1866: Textile strikers win 10-hour work day. Fall River, Mass.

1906: U.S. Supreme Court jails Samuel Gompers and other worker-union organizers for violating an injunction against Buck's Stove & Range Co.

1910: Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) Brotherhood of Timber Workers Union organized.

1935: Mary McLeod Bethune founds National Council of Negro Women.

1946: Beginning of three-day general strike of more than 130,000 workers from 142 AFL unions in Alameda County (Oakland) CA, opposing police brutality and in support of striking Oakland department store workers.

1964: Police arrest 773 to end Free Speech Movement occupation of Sproul Hall on the University of California-Berkeley Campus. A student strike the next day closes the school.

1969: Protesters destroy files at eight New York draft boards.

1984: Industrial accident at the Union Carbide fertilizer plant in Bhopal, India, causes up to 10,000 deaths, 50,000 injuries. U.S. blocks extradition of Union Carbide officials facing criminal prosecution in India.

1990: U.S. Marine Jeff Paterson begins court martial after refusing to board a plane bound to Saudi Arabia as part of the buildup to the Gulf War.

Geov Parrish is a Seattle-based columnist and reporter for Seattle Weekly, In These Times and Eat the State! He writes the weekdaily Straight Shot for WorkingForChange.