When the Rabbits Get a Gun

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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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