Seumas Milne

Thursday October 11, 2001

The Guardian

There is an eerie familiarity about the scenes being played out

every night, as the United States and Britain launch wave after

wave of bombing and cruise missile attacks on Afghanistan. The

grinning marine on the USS Enterprise, promising "to destroy a

lot of things over there"; the RAF corporal, showing off his "We

came, we saw, we kicked ass" T-shirt; the daily military

briefings with their before-and-after images of destruction; the

sombre excuses offered for civilian casualties and other forms of

"collateral damage"; the cheerleaders' untiring comparison of the

enemy with the Nazis and the war's opponents with appeasers -

they almost seem routine.

Perhaps that is scarcely surprising, as we've been here before,

again and again. This is the fifth time since Tony Blair became

prime minister that Britain and the US have taken military action

- though not always together - without an explicit United Nations

mandate: in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Sudan, Sierra Leone and

Afghanistan. In four cases, the attacks have consisted

overwhelmingly or exclusively of aerial bombardments; in three,

the targets have been Muslim states - all have been more or

less impoverished and none of those under attack has been able

to offer anything but token resistance. In the case of Iraq, major

assaults - such as the four-day Desert Fox operation nearly

three years ago - have only punctuated what has been a 10-year

regime of relentless bombing raids and grinding economic

sanctions.

From such a perspective, this conflict did not begin last Sunday

or on September 11, but a decade ago, when the pattern of wars

against developing countries under the new world order was

established by the first President Bush in his campaign to drive

Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. It was then that US troops were

first sent to Saudi Arabia and the devastation of Iraq began - two

of the three festering Muslim grievances cited by Osama bin

Laden in his broadcast describing the New York and

Washington atrocities as America tasting "what we have

tasted".

But none of the Anglo-American onslaughts since 1991 can

match the cruel absurdity of this week's bombing of one of the

poorest and most ruined countries in the world by the planet's

richest and most powerful state, assisted as ever by its British

satrap. For all the earnest assurances about pinpoint targeting,

the civilian death toll is already mounting, including the

incineration of four employees of the UN's mine-clearing agency

by a cruise missile as they lay sleeping in a Kabul suburb. The

almost comical futility of the military overkill was epitomised by

General Richard Myers, US Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, who

declared yesterday that "we now have air supremacy over

Afghanistan".

But this is also potentially by far the most perilous of all the

western wars since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The case

against the campaign now being waged against Afghanistan -

with the explicitly stated prospect that it may be widened in

future - does not primarily hinge on its dubious legality, lack of

UN involvement or absence of convincing evidence of

responsibility for the September 11 attacks.

The most serious objections are, first, that by triggering

large-scale refugee movements and interrupting food supplies,

the war is turning an existing humanitarian crisis into a disaster,

which will cause the deaths of many more than were

slaughtered in the World Trade Centre, for no remotely

proportional gain. Second, whatever success is achieved in

killing or capturing Bin Laden and his supporters or forcing the

Afghan theocrats from power, there is no reason to believe that

that will stamp out anti-western terrorism, even by the al-Qaida

networks, which operate across the world without assistance

from their Taliban friends. In other words, it won't work. Finally,

and most dangerously, the entire "crusade" in defence of

civilisation, as Bush the younger so sensitively described his

campaign, shows every sign of creating a political backlash

throughout the Muslim world and spawning even more terrorist

attacks, rather than curbing them.

Few of those pressing for the alternative of legal, diplomatic and

security action are the pacifists they are caricatured to be. But

while Bin Laden is fast developing popular cult status across the

Middle East, Bush and Blair have turned themselves into

recruiting sergeants for al-Qaida and militant Islamism - and

increased the likelihood of a cycle of revenge and retaliatory

violence. The longer the campaign goes on and the wider it

spreads, the greater the risk that many Middle Eastern

governments dearest to the west will be consigned to oblivion. If

the aim of the war launched last Sunday is to put an end to

terrorism, it makes no sense. But if, as some in the US clearly

want, this campaign becomes the vehicle for achieving wider US

strategic objectives - in Iraq, central Asia or elsewhere - it risks

a catastrophe.