Nuclear Thread - 2

[Guest]

THINKING ALOUD Fighting terror, but not like Bush
Sudheendra KulkarniPosted online: Sunday, September 02, 2007 at 0000 hrs Print Email
Related Stories Some Gandhian lessons for the Gandhis
A red tilak on Ben Bernanke’s forehead
The rise and rise of India’s kharabpatis
How young India looks at ‘President’ Pratibha
Presidential politics of cynicism


A shaming, and enduring, image from TV news bulletins last week was that of a policeman in Bhagalpur, Bihar, dragging a petty criminal chained to his motorcycle. Most viewers must have wondered in shock: “How can our police be so brutal? How can they take the law in their own hands?”

They should spare a thought for what is happening in the world, including in India’s own neighbourhood, and how the self-appointed global policeman, US President George Bush, has been behaving. Is his conduct less brutal? Is it less illegal? Decide for yourselves.

In March 2003, the commander-in-chief of the world’s mightiest military force ordered the invasion of Iraq without even caring to get the sanction of the UN Security Council. The invading army carried with it crews of American TV channels for a live telecast of the “Shock and Awe” strategy, which in plain terms meant terrorising and killing innocent civilians.

Bush’s ‘justification’ for the invasion? “Iraq has amassed weapons of mass destruction”. However, not a single WMD was found. “Iraq is a haven for al-Qa’ida terrorists.” This claim, again, was a lie. True, Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator, but who authorised Bush to effect a “regime change” in Baghdad? More than 70,000 Iraqis have been killed in the four-and-a-half years of US occupation, many of them in terrorist attacks triggered by the occupation itself, whose cost so far is nearly 500 billion dollars (Rs 22,50,000 crore).

America’s overall military spending is close to $ 2 billion (Rs 9,000 crore) a day. This, when the living standards of the poor and middle classes in the world’s richest country are worsening by the day.

Now, reportedly, Bush has all but made up its mind to attack Iran. In a speech last week, he raised the spectre of a “nuclear holocaust” in West Asia if Iran gets atomic weapons. He accused Tehran of “exporting terror”, and said, “We will confront this danger before it is too late.” Nearer home, in Afghanistan, the US has been at war for seven years, with no end in sight. Obviously, national sovereignty of smaller countries means little to the rulers in Washington, just as it meant little to the communist rulers of the now-extinct Soviet Union.

Norman Solomon, an American critic of his own country’s military-industrial complex and author of the forthcoming book Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State, writes: “The grisly commerce of killing — whether through carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan or through the deadly shredding of social safety-nets at home — thrives on aggressive war and on the perverse realpolitik of ‘national security’ that brandishes the Pentagon’s weaponry against the world.”

Why have I, who began by mentioning the outrageous behaviour of a Bihar constable, digressed into the conduct of the self-styled global policeman? It’s because, in India, there isn’t sufficient outrage at how he is running amok. Our prime minister has praised him as “the friendliest US President”. Quite a few Hindus think that Bush is fighting ‘jihadi’ terrorism and, therefore, deserves our support. The question is: Is he fighting it, or aiding and abetting it? Does it have less sympathisers and recruits around the world, including in India, after the American invasion of Iraq, or more? Osama bin Laden and his fascist ideology of Islamic domination of the world are undoubtedly a grave threat to everything that India holds dear — religious freedom and plurality, secularism, democracy and the ideal of a non-violent and just order for humanity. But is Bush anywhere close to ending Laden’s power and influence? Or is he pursuing his own imperial agenda? And in the process, is he making America and the rest of the world safer, or more vulnerable?

If you need some more stimuli to think about these questions, read a landmark essay titled The Age of Terror, by Robert Fisk, one of the world’s most acclaimed war correspondents (http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk). His latest book, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, an international bestseller, holds a mirror to all that is going wrong in that explosive part of the world, and whose hot winds are now reaching India. Fisk writes: “It’s always been my view that the people of this part of the Earth . . . want freedom. But they want another kind of freedom — freedom from us. And this we do not intend to give them. Which is why our Middle East presence is heading into further darkness. Which is why I sit on my balcony and wonder where the next explosion is going to be. For, be sure, it will happen. Bin Laden doesn’t matter any more, alive or dead. Because, like nuclear scientists, he has invented the ‘bomb’. You can arrest all of the world’s nuclear scientists but the bomb has been made. Bin Laden created al-Qaeda amid the matchwood of the Middle East. It exists. His presence is no longer necessary.”

After the bomb blasts in Hyderabad and in a dozen different places earlier, as we agonisingly ponder over ‘who’, ‘why’ and ‘how to end this menace’, the one conclusion we should unanimously and urgently come to, in our own national interest, is: Let’s delink India’s war on terror from Bush’s dangerous and counterproductive war on terror.