Plans for massive
bombings against Afghanistan and protracted warfare against a
list of countries (perhaps sixty, according to President Bush)
presumably supporting terrorism or lodging
terrorists.
• The escalation of xenophobia especially
against Arabs, but targeting all immigrants, and this not just
in the US. In Italy the Northern League (part of the coalition
of parties that now govern the country) has already proposed
that all undocumented workers should be treated as potential
terrorists.
• The demonisation of the
anti-globalisation movement, accused of being an enemy of
"western civilisation".
• New, wide-spread
restrictions on civil liberties.
What can we do in
this situation?
Our first task is obviously to stop
the escalation of violence, and mobilise against a US-led war
on Afghanistan or any other country the Bush administration
picks to be a target for its "war" on
"terrorism". We also need to build solidarity with the
Arab and immigrant communities in the US now under attack
physically and ideologically. But these generalised responses,
however correct, are not enough. We must gain a better
understanding of what has happened and why, since any
confusion on this point can have the most serious consequences
for the anti-globalisation movement.
For the Bush
administration is determined to use the hijackings and mass
murders of September 11 as a political opportunity to
transform the definition of dissent here in the US and to
project the US military into the oil-rich former republics of
Soviet Central Asia. A purely generalised politics is doomed
to taking a reactive stance in this historical situation, even
when the Bush administration's contradictions begin to unravel
in the next few weeks.
This essay is inevitably going
to be tentative and hypothetical, given our present lack of
precise knowledge concerning the details of the crimes — even
now, three weeks after September 11, there is public confusion
as to the identities of some of the immediate perpetrators.
Also, my aim is classification and explanation, but not
vilification. The legal and moral facts are enough. The
killings of September 11 constituted one of the worst one-day
massacres in the last decade, probably only those in the first
days of the Rwandan genocide of the Tutsis can rival it in
terms of numbers. The thousands of murders are a major crime
against humanity and, though the immediate perpetrators are
dead, their accomplices, if they had any, should be captured
and prosecuted in the appropriate courts without the US
government committing similar crimes against the humanity of
other countries.
That this last proposition is a matter
of controversy in the US at this moment shows how perilous are
the times we are in!
Oil, Globalisation, and Islamic
Fundamentalism
On a broad level, the events of
September 11, 2001 can be traced back to the economic, social,
and cultural crisis that has developed in North Africa, the
Middle East, and West Asia in the aftermath of the Gulf War
and, prior to it, the accelerating process of globalisation,
starting in the late 1970s.(1)
The first aspect of this
crisis has been the impoverishment of urban workers and
agriculturists in this area, due to Structural Adjustment
Programs (SAPs) and import liberalisation, dating back to
Egypt's "open door" policy that cost the life of Anwar
Sadat and saw the emergence of Islamic fundamentalism as a new
political force.(2)
From the Cairo's "bread
riots" of 1976, to the uprisings in Morocco and Algeria of
1988, both crushed in blood baths, to the more recent anti-IMF
riots in Jordan (and the list is much longer) the difficulties
of merely staying alive for workers has become more and more
dramatic, causing major splits within the capitalist classes
from Morocco to Pakistan as to how to deal with this rebellion
from below (Midnight Notes 1992). A further element of crisis
has been the situation in Palestine. This too was made more
intense by the Gulf War and Israel's response to Palestinian
demands with more settlements, the attempted usurpation of
Jerusalem, and escalating repression.
Regardless of
their actual disposition towards the Palestinians, this
situation has become a cause of great embarrassment for these
ruling classes, revealing, as it does, their duplicity and the
shallowness of their commitment to Islamic
solidarity.
But the most important factor of crisis has
been the hegemonic role of the US in the region, as
exemplified by the devastation of Iraq, the US government's
proprietary relationship to the management of oil resources in
the Middle East, and the building of US bases right in Saudi
Arabia, Islam's most sacred land. On all these counts, deep
divisions have developed within these ruling classes pitting
pro-American governments-often consisting of royal dynasties
in the Arabian Peninsula-against a new generation of
dissidents within their own ranks who, in the name of the
Koran, have accused them of being corrupt, of squandering the
region's resources, of selling out to the US, of having
betrayed Islam, all the while offering an alternative
"social contract" to the working classes of North
Africa, the Middle East and West Asia and using their wealth
to create a multinational network of groups stretching through
every continent and often taking on a life of their
own.
As a social program, Islamic fundamentalism has
distinguished itself, in addition to its unmitigated
bolstering of patriarchal rule, for its attempt to win over
the urban populations through the provision of some basic
necessities such as schooling, healthcare, and a minimum of
social assistance. These initiatives were undertaken often in
response to the ending of government subsidies and programs in
these areas which was dictated by the Structural Adjustment
Programs designed by the neo-liberals in the World Bank and
IMF. (3) Thus, for example, it is the Islamic fundamentalist
networks that organise health care and education in the
Palestinian "territories", almost functioning as an
alternative government to the PLO at the grassroots
level.(4)
Over the last decade as the crisis in the
Middle East and internationally has intensified, so has the
antagonism of the Islamic fundamentalist networks against the
US and its domestic supporters in the different Islamic
countries. But this conflict has been stalemated in key
countries in the 1990s. In Algeria, for example, the Islamic
Salvation Front, which grew rapidly after the anti-SAP riots
of 1988 and almost took state power electorally in 1991, was
stopped by a military coup. For the last decade, through a
horrendous civil war where between 60,000 to 70,000 were
killed, the Algerian Islamic fundamentalists have been
decisively weakened by attrition and military repression. In
Egypt, the Mubarak regime has used direct repression as in
Algeria as well a system of microscopic social surveillance.
For "the [Mubarak] government acted to stem the
proliferation of private mosques and associated charitable
foundations and to end their extra-governmental autonomy"
(Faksh 1997: 54). The result has been a major defeat of the
fundamentalism in, perhaps, the second most important Islamic
state. These setbacks have not been dramatically reversed by
fundamentalists seizing state power in Sudan and Afghanistan,
for in both countries they inherited, and have not been able
to end, long-standing civil wars.
But stalemate does
not mean defeat, and there is no doubt that Islamic
fundamentalism continues to have an attraction within the
ruling circles of the wealthiest Islamic nations. This
internal contradiction has created a tangled net of
consequences which are now embarrassing and endangering many
people in the US government and in the governments of the
Middle East. For they have financed and trained the very
generation of dissidents who are now so violently turning
against them. On the one side, a portion of the Middle Eastern
oil revenues has been used to finance assaults on symbols of
the New World Order, because of the divided loyalties of the
Middle Eastern ruling classes; on the other, the US government
has financed and trained many members of this dissident branch
of the Middle Eastern ruling classes in its effort to
destabilise the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
The
governmental and informal financial and military support of
armed Islamic fundamentalists did not end with the Soviet
pullout from Afghanistan in 1989. These militants played
important economic, military and ideological roles that
forwarded US policy against Yugoslavia (in Bosnia and Kosovo)
and against Russia (in Chechnya, Dagestan, Uzbekistan) up
until September 10, 2001. The deal apparently was: do the
dirty work of fighting and destabilising secular communist,
socialist and nationalist regimes in Eastern Europe, Caucasia
and Central Asia and you will get rewarded.
These
"free floating" militants did the US's dirty work for
twenty years, but they obviously increasingly were convinced
that the US had not delivered. They were not given their
proper reward: taking power at the centre of the Islamic
world, the Arabian Peninsula. This complicity and deal-making
is why, perhaps, the Bush administration is so hesitant to do
what would be natural after such a massive intelligence and
security failure attested to by the September 11 crimes: get
rid of the incompetents. That would be difficult, for many of
those who have been brought back in power into George W.
Bush's administration were the ones who were responsible,
during his father's presidency, for the training and financing
of the very organisations they now hunt under the banner of
"terrorism". Therefore, the executive dynasties in both
the US and Saudi Arabia must both be worried about "family
members" who have been compromised by their past connections
to the networks they now claim to be responsible for the
events of September 11. This goes up to the President's
family. For example, the Wall Street Journal (9/28/01)
reported that the President's father works for the bin Laden
family business in Saudi Arabia through the Carlyle Group, an
international consulting firm as do other close associates of
the President like former Secretary of State James
Baker.
The crude and desperate attempts by ideologists
of the Bush administration to somehow connect, in ever more
arcane ways, the anti-globalisation movement with the Islamic
fundamentalists is fuelled by desire to distract public
attention and hide a real anxiety on its side which is summed
up in the question: when will the long list of real
connections between the "terrorist network" the Bush
administration is hunting and its own personnel be revealed?
That is why, perhaps, President Bush harkened back to his
childhood memories of "Wanted Dead or Alive Posters"
(with the emphasis on "DEAD") when speaking of Osama
bin Ladin and his associates. For the administration's
legitimacy would be undermined, if they ever spoke the
truth.
Why now and why so desperate?
These
generalised facts concerning the hidden civil war within the
oil producing countries from Algeria to Iran serve to describe
the context of the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the
Pentagon. For I am assuming that the immediate perpetrators of
the attacks were committed to some branch of Islamic
fundamentalism. But these facts do not help us understand why
the attacks took place in September 2001 and why the
resistance to the US took such a desperate form. For these
attacks are symptoms of desperation not of power, as they will
likely lead to a devastating US military response with
predictable results: the destruction of thousands of Islamic
fundamentalist militants along with a tremendous collateral
damage on the people of Afghanistan and many other countries
in North Africa, the Middle East and West Asia. Who on the
ground can survive in such a maelstrom? Indeed, the actual
perpetrators and their accomplices, whoever they are, must
have been very desperate to take such a risk with their own
network and the lives of millions of people of the region. It
is also probable that many (perhaps most) people even in the
most militant Islamic fundamentalist circles object to the
bombings in New York and Washington DC, if not for moral, then
simply for strategic reasons, knowing full well that their
hard-fought for achievements might all go up in smoke as a
result these actions.
Clearly something very important
was in process of occurring that the perpetrators of September
11 needed desperate and inherently uncertain measures to
thwart. What was it? If my hypothesis is right, the source of
this desperation are events at the geographical centre of
Islam, Saudi Arabia, which echoed throughout the Islamic
world.
My view is that the political factors motivating
the mass murder and suicides of September 11 involved the oil
industry and globalisation in the Arabian Peninsula. Here is
the story.
Beginning in 1998 (after the collapse of oil
prices due to the Asian Financial Crisis), the Saudi monarchy
decided, for "strategic reasons", to globalise its
economy and society beginning with the oil sector. The oil
industry had been nationalised since 1975, which means that
foreign investors were allowed to participate only in
?downstream" operations like refining.
But in September
1998 Crown Prince Abdullah met in Washington DC with senior
executives from several oil companies. According to Gawdat
Bahget, "The Crown Prince asked the oil companies'
executives to submit directly to him recommendations and
suggestions about the role their companies could play in the
exploration and development of both existing and new oil and
gas fields" (Bahget 2001: 5). These "recommendations
and suggestions" were then submitted to a Supreme Council
for Petroleum and Mineral Affairs in early 2000 (after being
vetted by the Crown Prince), and, by mid 2000, the Saudi
government began to cautiously respond to them, by ratifying a
new foreign investment law. Under the new law, "tax
holidays are abolished in favour of sweeping reductions in tax
on profits payable by foreign entities, bringing them nearer
to levels that apply to local companies. Wholly owned foreign
businesses WILL HAVE THE RIGHT TO OWN LAND, sponsor their own
employees and benefit from concessionary loans previously
available only to Saudi companies" (Bahgat 2001: 6, my
emphasis) [Note bene: it is obvious why "the right to own
land" would be a red flag for anyone committed to the
sacred character of the Arabian Peninsula.] The Middle Eastern
experts were literally falling over themselves in their effort
to highlight the new Investment Regulation. One described it
in the following words, "Keep your fingers crossed, but it
looks as if Saudi Arabia is abandoning almost seventy years of
restrictive, even unfriendly policy toward foreign
investment" (MacKinnon 2000). This law constituted, in
effect, a NAFTA-like agreement between the Saudi monarch and
the US and European oil companies.
At the same time as
this law was being discussed, a ministerial committee
announced that up to $500 billion of new investments would be
deployed over the next decade to change the form of the Saudi
national economy. $100 billion of this investment was already
promised by foreign oil companies.
In May of 2001 the
first concrete step in this stepped up globalisation process
was concluded when Exxon/Mobil and Royal Dutch/Shell Group led
eight other foreign companies (including Conoco and Enron from
the US) took on a $25 billion natural gas development project
in Saudi Arabia. The financial press noted that the deal would
not be very lucrative in itself, but that "It's part of a
long-term ploy of the oil companies, [which] want ultimately
to get access again to Saudi crude" (LA Times
5/19/2001).
Thus, by the Summer of 2001, the Saudi
monarchy cast the die and then legally, socially and
economically entered the Rubicon of globalisation (but with
its "fingers crossed", undoubtedly). It
"globalised" not because the Saudi Arabian debt was
unmanageable (as was the case with most other countries which
bent to the globalising dictates of the IMF) but because,
faced with a intensifying opposition, the King and his circle
realised that only with the full backing of the US and
European Union could they hope to preserve their rule in the
coming years. In other words, confronted with significant
social problems and an insurrectional element within its own
class that could not be defeated by open confrontation, since
it took on the garb of Islam too, the Saudi Arabian government
seems to have decided that a rehaul of its economy would
defeat its dangerous opposition through attrition and would
further solidify its alliance with US and European capital.
The strategy was aimed at reducing the large and growing
unemployment rate among its young citizens, its dependence on
oil exports, and its huge foreign labour force (in 1993 there
were 4.6 million foreign workers out of a total population of
14.6 million; today they are approximately 6-7 million in a
population of about 22-23 million) by "getting the economy
moving again"(5). This required a radical departure from
the clientelistic methods of social control the Saudi monarchy
had used in the past to keep social peace, which was made
possible until recently by its immense oil wealth. But this
wealth is not infinite and indeed was declining on a per
capita basis — for example, GNP per capital fell from
approximately $13,000 to $8,000 from 1983 to 1993 and has
since continued to fall (Cordesman 1997: 64). Inevitably, this
initiative would impact the economic policies of the other oil
producing governments in the region, especially the Gulf
Co-operation Council states — Oman, Qatar, UAE, Bahrain, and
Kuwait.
If it works, this strategy would deal a
decisive blow to the Islamicist opposition, undermining its
ability to recruit converts who would be employed in the upper
echelons of a "globalised economy and society" instead
of being driven to despair by political powerlessness and long
periods of unemployment. But the introduction of foreign
ownership of land and natural resources, backed up by large
investments, and the hiring of more expatriates from Europe
and the US, would force a major social change.(6) The
cat-and-mouse game that the Saudi monarchy had played with the
fundamentalist dissidents (by which the King and his dynasty
claimed to be even more fundamentalist than them) would end.
Whatever hopes the Islamic opposition in the ruling classes of
the Arabian Peninsula had ever harboured of getting their
governments to send the American troops packing and turning
their oil revenues into the economic engine of a resurgent
Islam were facing a historic crisis in the summer of 2001.
Without a major reversal, the Islamic fundamentalist
opposition would have to face the prospect of a total civil
war in their own countries or face extinction. Certain
elements — whether they were individuals or groups, I cannot
know now — of this opposition decided that only a spectacular
action like the September 11 hijackings and destruction of
thousands of people in New York and Washington could turn back
the tide. Perhaps they hoped that if enough turmoil and
uncertainty can be generated by the attacks in the US, they
will generate a strategic US retreat from the Arabian
Peninsula just as the bombing in Lebanon in 1983 lead to the
US pull out there.
We could speculate to what extent
the election of the George W. Bush administration accelerated
the timing of the attack considering that in the eyes of the
world it represents a government not ready to make any sort of
concession, a government even more likely that the one
preceding it, to claim possession of minerals in the Middle
East subsoil, a government ready to break all treaties, to
allow Israel to have its way in Palestine and so
forth.
On the basis of this analysis, then, the
September 11 attacks on New York City and Washington DC were
the "collateral damage" of a struggle over the fate of
oil politics in its heartland: the Arabian Peninsula.
Moreover, in order to test this hypothesis in the coming weeks
we should investigate the developments in the Peninsula, which
will undoubtedly be hidden from sight, more than the sound and
fury that will be directed towards Afghanistan for more
obvious reasons.
The Bush Reaction: A "War" on
"Terrorism" and the US Military Penetration of Central
Asia It is important that we understand the political and
economic aims of the hijackers and their accomplices, but it
will be even more important for us to be clear about the Bush
administration's agenda. For one need not indulge in
conspiracy theories to recognise that the Bush administration
will use the events of September 11 as best as it can to
forward its program (while acknowledging that the shock of the
destruction of lives and property on that day has profoundly
destabilised President Bush's domestic economic and social
agenda).
There are two clear territories which the Bush
administration has strategically used the death and
destruction of September 11 to move on: a conceptual
restructuring of the political horizon and a geo-political
thrust into the former Central Asian republics of the USSR
which became nation states in 1991. These states, especially
Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkenistan, have significant oil
and gas reserves. "The proven and possible energy reserves
in or adjacent to the Caspian region — including at least 115
billion barrels of oil — are in fact many times greater than
those of the North Sea and should increase significantly with
continuing exploration. Such plentiful resources could
generate huge returns for US companies and their shareholders.
American firms have already acquired 75 percent of
Kazakhstan's mammoth Tengiz oil field, which is now valued at
more than $10 billion (Kalicki 2001: 121). These
countries, along with the former and present Caucasian
republics, form the southern border of Russia's "Near
Abroad" which the US has been aiming to penetrate
militarily for some time both for immediate economic purposes
and for the ultimate goal of disintegrating Russia itself into
a set of pliable statelets.
The minute President Bush
named Osama bin Ladin as "the prime suspect" and
"his" camps in Afghanistan as the training ground for
the terrorists that destroyed the Twin Towers every diplomatic
move aimed at setting up forward military bases and fly-over
rights to attack bin Ladin also doubles as a tool for the US
military occupation of Central Asia itself. After all, we are
being told equivocally by the administration both that bin
Ladin is the centre of the evil and that even his capture
("DEAD or alive") will not end the threat of terrorism
from that quarter. Therefore, the military campaign against
both bin Ladin and terrorism (we are assured) will be quite
prudential and take months, even years to accomplish. Perhaps
the most damaging thing that might happen to this double-edged
US government campaign would be for bin Ladin and his circle
to depart from the scene while leaving behind a
well-documented history of their involvement with the US
government over the last twenty years! The recognition that
this US war against Osama bin Ladin and his supporters in the
Taliban government is also a way to realise one of the main
post-Communist goals of US foreign policy was immediately
apparent to analysts of the oil industry and critics of the
NATO war in Yugoslavia after September 11. The new "Great
Game", aka "the war for oil and destabilisation in
Central Asia" reading of the Bush administration's moves,
was easily documented because much of the relevant material
required for this interpretation had been researched in 1999
when many were trying to understand the motivations of the
Clinton administration's involvement in the war against
Yugoslavia above and beyond its ostentatiously decried (sic)
(and newly found) concern for Kosovars' human rights (cf. for
example, (Chossudovsky 2001), (Federici and Caffentzis 2000),
(Talbot 2000)). It became clear then that one of the reasons
the US attacked Yugoslavia (one of the few remaining Russian
allies in Europe) was to impress on the Russians that it will
use all of its might to discourage them from interfering with
its investments in Caucasia and Central Asia. It is now a
foregone conclusion that anyone interested in understanding
Afghan-centred aspects of the Bush administration will have to
take into account the "oil factor" (especially given
the direct involvement of many members of the Bush
administration in the oil companies that are heavily invested
in this area).
This is not to say that this
geo-political thrust into Central Asia was high up on the Bush
administration's agenda prior to September 11. The expansion
of drilling rights within the US was one of its first
oil-related initiatives and preoccupied it throughout the
summer of 2001. Indeed, Jan Kalicki, a "point man" in
the Clinton administration on Central Asian oil, wrote an
article for the September/October 2001 Foreign Affairs
complaining about Bush's back sliding in Central Asia. After
detailing the Clinton administration's accomplishments, he
fretted that they "are now at risk of unravelling due to
inadequate attention from the Bush administration and
restrictive US policies. In contrast to the Clinton
administration's vigorous support of Caspian energy
initiatives, the Bush team seems to have placed those issues
on the back burner" (Kalicki 2001: 130). Kalicki ended his
article with the following words: "For the US to squander
its past success and future potential in the region through
complacency and inattention would be a serious mistake".
He is undoubtedly now pleased by the swift end of Bush's
"complacency and inattention" to Central Asia after
September 11 and welcomes a return to oil business as usual
there.
There is another territory that the Bush
administration forcefully moved into after September 11 that
is more abstract, but perhaps even more important for our
movement. It is the territory of words. By declaring the
piracy, murders and devastation in New York City, Washington
DC and Western Pennsylvania on September 11 an "act of
war" and the start of its own "war on terrorism",
the Bush administration is attempting to restructure the
conceptual future of humanity for many years to come. By
imposing a false dichotomy — you must approve my policies or
you are on the terrorists' side — on the moral conscience of
majority of people on the planet who are stunned, frightened
and disgusted by the mass murder of September 11, it hopes to
take these consciences hostage, using the thousands dead in
New York and Washington as talismans. This moral hocus pocus
will fail in the long run, of course, because the
overwhelmingly large number of people on this planet do not
fit into the "us" versus "them" model that
Bush's war configuration of September 11 requires. Most
reject, heart and soul, both futures offered by either
capitalist globalisation or its desperate Islamic militant
opponents. There will be, in the meantime, innumerable
attempts by the administration to equate dissent from the Bush
policies as complicity in, or condoning of, or indifference to
the dead of September 11.
These attempts at
intimidation and equation of dissent with terrorism will
eventually fail, largely due to their own contradictions. We
did not have wait too long for these contradictions to reveal
themselves. After all, high officials of the Bush
administration financed, armed and trained the now decried
"terrorist network" of Islamic militants, not the
anti-globalisation movement! Moreover, the semantic strain
between Bush's "war" description of September 11
immediately ran into conflict with the way that these acts are
being considered by the relevant authorities, the NYC Police
Department, the courts, the insurance companies and the FBI.
These acts are being investigated as crimes. Suspects are
being questioned, material witnesses who might flee are being
kept in prison, the sites of the crashed airliners are being
treated as crime scenes and are being searched for evidence.
The suspects are not classified as prisoners of war, they are
being treated as potential criminals with rights to counsel.
Nor are the insurance companies using their "acts of
war" loopholes to stop payment of claims.
You might
say, "Crime or war, is this is not just a semantic
quibble?" On the contrary, the way in which these events
are described is a "life and death" decision. For the
description of an event has implicit in it many moral and
practical consequences, some obvious and other
unforeseen.
There are important differences between
crime and war. Thus, a crime is an action done in violation of
a state's laws (though not necessarily on its territory) by
particular agents. Once a crime has been committed, the
sequential consequences of investigation, indictment,
apprehension, trial and then, perhaps, conviction and
punishment are rather clear and are ruled over by an
elabourate set of rules, laws and institutions. Most
importantly, this sequence is built to be an inherently finite
structure, which might, however, by accident, never come to a
conclusion (e.g., when the agent responsible for the crime is
never apprehended). That is why it is particularly revealing
that the first name of the US government used to refer to its
effort to apprehend the accomplices of the hijackers and many
other allied terrorists was "Operation Infinite
Justice". One of the great virtues of Justice is that it
is finite and aims to bring an end to a harm done.
Consequently, "infinite" justice can not be
justice.
War, on the other hand, is an inherently
infinite structure (what we in the US now call, "open
ended", and what one 19th century theorist of war called,
"total") which might, however, by accident, come to an
end, say, with a peace treaty or the annihilation of one or
both of the opposing warring parties. But it need not.
Moreover, the rules of prosecuting war are always open to
question, since they are largely the result of agreements of
states which are not at war but which might, as matter of
defending their sovereignty, use their sovereignty to declare
these rules null and void for themselves in the midst of
war.
Why did the high ranking members of the Bush
administration chose "war" not "crime" in the
hours after the crashes? At first glance this decision might
have been rooted in the particular aspects of the events
themselves. First, the quantitative dimension of the one-day
killing and deliberate property destruction is unprecedented
in recent US history. Second, the immediate perpetrators died
committing the acts (one wonders what would have been the
response if the immediate perpetrators had survived and were
on the loose). Their collective suicide opened the logical
possibility that they planned September 11 by themselves and
that the people who supported them did not even know that they
had such an audacious and risky idea in mind. Under these
circumstances, if the event was categorised as a crime, then
it would be a crime without living culprits — a consequence
that could hardly be palatable to many in or out of the Bush
administration. Finally, the choice of targets was
symbolically aimed at the central economic, military and, if
speculation concerning the destination of the fourth plane is
accurate, political sites of the US The hijackers seemed to
think of themselves as heroic warriors striking at the heart
of the US and Bush agreed with their self-description. So the
spectacular logic of hijackers was echoed by the Bush
administration in its first assessment of these acts as acts
of war.
But there are other, more general reasons for
the Bush administration personnel's choice of words, I
believe. They concluded very early on that the hijackers were
not some sort of nihilistic group deciding, a la "Fight
Club", to go to their deaths in an abstract blaze of
glorious horror nor were they representatives of the
home-grown militia movement (as the perpetrators of the
Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 proved to be). Though the
September 11 perpetrators left no formal proclamation that
accompanied their act, the Bush administration saw that it was
a political action and it was part of US government's ongoing
struggle against dissidents in Saudi Arabia and other Middle
Eastern nations which it been carrying out since the Gulf War
to keep its military and economic presence in the oil fields
of the Arabian Peninsula. Since the word "war" captures
the sense of a grand struggle (even though it is normally
reserved for confrontations of nations), and since the Bush
administration is committed to keeping and/or increasing
control of the oil resources of that geographical arc from
Saudi Arabia to Kazakhstan, "war" felt to them to be
the obvious word to use in this context. The prominent members
of Bush administration might then see these acts in a poetic
sense to genuinely be acts in a struggle they are individually
and vigorously engaged in, and so it would be quite natural
for them to express themselves in such a language (after all,
George W. Bush, National Security Advisor Rice and Vice
President Chaney were deeply and directly involved in the oil
industry in the recent past).
But perhaps the most
important reason for use of the word "war" is that it
gives the Bush administration the right to exercise
extraordinary powers both domestically and internationally.
Consider how "the war on drugs" has been so effectively
used to justify interventions in countries as varied as
Colombia, Panama and Afghanistan while the dimensions of the
legal and penal counter-revolution in the US perpetrated under
the banner of "the war on drugs" is staggering to this
day. One hesitates to contemplate what a parallel
intensification of an unbounded "war on terrorism" will
do to the prison populations and civil liberties of the
US.
Looking Back Carefully
The events of
September 11 and their consequences have been a tremendous
blow against the anti-globalisation movement, since it has
given the governments all over the planet the opportunity to
close public spaces and to repress dissent from whatever
source in the interests of "public safety". In order to
regain the initiative we must understand our situation: the
anti-globalisation movement is in a struggle against both the
supranational agencies of globalisation, which are now draping
themselves in US flags, and the dissident rulers-in-the-wings
of the Middle East, who drape themselves in Islamic flags and
want a better world-class deal for themselves and their
"followers". To begin to move again we must free
ourselves to resee our own past in order to understand our
future in this context.
But the horror of the September
11 events have frozen many minds, as it was meant to do. A
first step in liberating ourselves mentally is to ask
questions and to imagine an alternative reality. Could it have
been different? Was there another historical possibility that
did not lead to the murder of thousands of people in New York
and Washington? We are often told that thinking
counterfactually is a vain exercise and, like Orpheus in
Hades, we should not look back, otherwise we will lose the
future. But if Orpheus did look back at Eurydice, carefully,
he might have saved both her and later himself.
Let us
remember our own story. From Seattle in November 1999 to Genoa
in July 2001, the anti-globalisation movement expressed in the
First World the recognition that the supranational agencies
(IMF, World Bank, WTO, G8) which claimed to deal with the
economic and political problems of humanity are illegitimate
on two counts: (a) they have failed to solve these problems
(e.g., the Third World debt has increased dramatically since
the Debt Crisis of the early 1980s) and (b) they have no
democratic responsibility to humanity (e.g., the IMF and World
Bank are largely controlled by their largest shareholders: the
US, Japan and the EU countries). The anti-globalisation
movement which had started in the mid-1980s with the
resistance against structural adjustment in the countries of
the Third World had finally surfaced in the streets of the
First.(7)
The anti-globalisation movement challenged
these supranational agencies in a non-violent manner to change
their course and to democratise themselves before it was too
late. It asked them to look carefully into the face of the
world and make a dramatic gesture, e.g., cancelling the whole
Third World debt. The Seattle demonstrations in November 1999
and those that followed were so important as we look back
because they brought the demands of the Third World into the
streets of the First. They showed that the interests of the
poor and dispossessed of Asia, Africa and the Americas were
taken seriously enough in Europe and North America that
hundreds of thousands of people were willing to risk arrest,
beatings and torture to project these interests as well as
their own into the precincts of the powerful. At the very
least, these demonstrations were able to stop the
supranational agencies from causing further damage by passing
new rules and regulations.
But that was the problem:
though the anti-globalisation movement was able to block or
disrupt their meetings, the supranational agencies stonewalled
the movement's positive demands. Neither massive debt
cancellation, nor fairer trade provisions nor a "Marshall
Plan for the World" nor the abolition of the World Bank
and IMF were launched in response to the movement's efforts
(whatever the debates within the movement about the
effectiveness of these demands). On the contrary, the economic
and political crises caused by globalisation have intensified
in the last two years. Moreover, the official response to the
movement has become increasingly violent and repressive. This
violence reached a climax in Genoa in July with the police's
shooting of Carlo Guiliani, their maiming and torture of
hundreds of protesters, and their beating of thousands of
others.
At this moment, we must ask the question: What
would have happened if, instead of this repression, there was
a decision to cancel all Third World debt at the Genova G8
meetings in July 2001? Imagine.
There were, however,
not only two forces in confrontation in 2001 — the circle of
globalising capitalists and the anti-globalisation movement
consisting of thousands of peasant, worker, feminist,
environmental and human rights groups across the planet —
there was a third: the military Islamic fundamentalist,
representing with arms the political demands of the dissident
members of the Islamic ruling class This group was and is
committed to mortal violence, patriarchy and reassertion of
the Islamic ruling class's control of the energy resources of
their region from Algeria to Indonesia against the claims of
the transnational oil companies. It stepped into the vacuum of
despair the stalemate between the anti-globalisation and the
supranational agencies of globalisation inevitably generated,
driven by its own crisis as outlined above.
On the
basis of looking back carefully, then, I conclude that we in
the anti-globalisation movement must not be caught between the
huge bombs of Bush and the smaller bombs of Islamic
fundamentalism or be the grass trampled by the lopsided
struggle between the giant and the small elephants. For at the
moment, at least, our movement is the only one capable of
leading an escape from the hellish dialectic of homicide and
suicide that the forces of global capital and the perpetrators
of the September 11 massacres have launched into
oblivion.
Looking Forward
According to my
hypothesis, then, not only have thousands of people in NYC and
Washington DC been killed as pawns in a power struggle in the
ongoing "oil wars" of the Middle East, the attack on
the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon has brought us back to
the political structure that prevailed during the Cold War;
that is, a structure where we in the anti-globalisation
movement have to confront both sides, since neither side
represents the interests of working people in any part of the
world. The Islamic Fundamentalists' misogynous treatment of
women — culminating with the politics of open enslavement
embraced by the Talibans — the autocratic way in which Sharia
Law has been imposed on many unwilling citizens; the atrocity
of the punishments inflicted on those who break it (including
capital punishment); and the chauvinistic brand of Islam
imposed at all social levels by self-proclaimed Islamic
fundamentalist governments like Sudan's and Afganistan's — all
speak unequivocally on this point.
In this context, the
priority of the anti-globalisation movement is to offer an
anti-war, anti-patriarchal alternative to the deadly politics
of the fundamentalists and their globalising adversaries by
showing that we can address the issues that have lead to this
situation:
• Control of natural resources. Why should
the US and Europe claim possession of the resources if the
world as it they were their birth-right? How can the
population of North America and Europe continue to be blind to
the social cost of the oil they put in their cars, and the
economic and social inequities built upon it?
• The
construction of a Palestinian homeland. For how long will
generations of Palestinians have to grow up in refugee camps
with nothing to hope for and the burning, unquenchable anger
of the terrible injustice done to them — an injustice
reaffirmed with every new Israeli settlement in what was once
their land?
• The politics of WB/IMF. Can we afford a
globalisation program that reduced the people of vast regions
to refugees, paupers, and immigrants? Can we allow a world
where the majority are displaced from their lands, their basic
means of survival, and are forced to migrate across the world
in a new diaspora resembling the slave trade?
Further,
it is crucial that the anti-globalisation movement begin to
build a connection with the Middle East — by addressing its
more urgent demands. For it is plausible that had this process
been more advanced it would been far more difficult for the
perpetrators of the September 11 massacre to portray all the
people in the US as enemies of Islam, and by the same token it
would be more difficult now for the US government to
contemplate indiscriminate bomb attacks on nations in North
Africa, the Middle East and West Asia. This making of
connections will present many difficulties, logistic and
otherwise; but a starting point is to make a connection with
the immigrant Middle Eastern and West Asian communities in our
own countries. The crucial point is to avoid the situation
that prevailed during the Cold War, when for half a century
the Russian working class and the workers of North America and
Europe had nearly no contact, except sporadically, through the
mediation of communist parties with the result that by the
1990s, even the seemingly most militant among the Soviet
Union's workers-the miners — could be fooled by
"experts" from the AFL-CIO into accepting
privatisation, as happened in the last days of the Soviet
Union.
The power of the anti-globalisation movement is
in its potential to build a real, not simply ideological,
political struggle of the world's working people against the
plans of globalising capitalism. Farmers from India, trade
unionists from Canada, students from Europe marched, talked
and organised together in the great anti-globalisation events
of the last two years. This increasing unification of people
across barriers of all kinds — geographical, religious,
gender, political — has challenged the agendas of both the
Islamic fundamentalists and the capitalist globalisers. The
suicidal attack on Washington and New York and the Bush
administration's response, therefore, also are attacks on the
anti-globalisation movement because they both are calculated
to bring increasing divisiveness and despair within a
planetary working class that was beginning to see, articulated
in both words and images, an alternative non-violent,
non-chauvinist, non-racist, and non-sexist reality taking
shape. It is crucial that we do not let the war drums and
increasing restrictions on civil liberties and the freedom to
move across borders succeed in erasing the movement's
organising achievements."