James
Storage is cool
This is a transcript of the speech my father gave to U3A, I thought some might be interested.
Whose war on whose terrorism?
12 August 2002
Eleven months ago 4 passenger aircraft took off from the east coast of the United States, with enough fuel to take them to California. Teams of dedicated men, acting to a plan, seized them. Like Kamikaze pilots, they used their aircraft as missiles, destroyed the World Trade Centre, damaged the Pentagon and killed over 3000 people. 911 the Americans call this terrible event.
The world changed after 911, in so far as it was agenda setting: it led governments to focus on issues which they had irresponsibly neglected for many years. I see this as positive.
Four categories of neglected threats have suddenly become a priority, under the chilling label of a War on Terror.
9 11 showed us first that many everyday activities of modern life place great destructive potential in the hands of individuals. Not only are airplanes potential missiles - trucks, vehicles and machinery of all kinds are potential killing machines. Factories and storage facilities for many industrial chemicals are potentially bombs and/or sources of poison gas and other killers. Big buildings, bridges and crowded sporting facilities are all potential traps, in which thousands of people are at risk. This is not news. Remember the industrial accident at Bhopal in India that killed 2000 people by gas, the accident in the Mt Blanc tunnel and the bomb Timothy Mcveigh made out of fertilizer and killed 400 people in Oklahoma City.
The very things which make us wealthier, longer lived and ore powerful than our parents are also dangerous. And we have not, to date, taken appropriate precautions.
Secondly, if aircraft and oil refineries are potential weapons and a threat, how about real weapons? During the Cold War many kinds of weapons of mass destruction were developed and built. The population at large, and the governments of the world, were rightly terrified at the very existence of these means of destruction. They made a big effort to curb the multiplication and spread of these weapons. They had a number of partially effective regimes in place and more measures in the pipeline. But then, with peace, attention drifted from these war-related issues, the effort slackened off. But this was folly. If you don’t want cities destroyed you should not maintain the means of destroying cities. If you do not want all the surging capabilities of biotechnology to yield new forms of plague you should take appropriate preventive steps. A small number of governments are making WMD - we should not have relaxed efforts to make them stop. It is not very easy, it is not cheap but we have a vast reservoir of experience and success at arms control: it is doable, it certainly deserves our best efforts. All it that is lacking today is commitment by governments.
The third challenge to our security and especially to our sense of security is the greatly enhanced movement of people around the world. When the twin office towers in NY were destroyed, almost half the people killed were not Americans : foreigners working in the US. Likewise the terrorists were foreigners and the issues which motivated their terrible deed are rooted outside the USA. All over the world, people are moving on a scale completely unprecedented. We Australians think we are remarkable in that one in five of us was born outside this country. In the Ivory Coast the proportion is one in four – elsewhere it is higher. We worry about some 10,000 boat people. In Germany and Italy they have asylum seekers by the hundreds of thousands. In Iran by the million. We feel threatened by an influx of culturally alien, unskilled people or far too competitive people. This is a major public concern from Borneo to California, to Eastern China, to Denmark, and many other places. It periodically boils over into violence and political extremism.
Reactionaries cry: 'stop the influx, send them home.' No-one has found a way of doing this - without a level of violence, bloodshed and human misery that I hope we could not stomach. Instinctively xenophobic populations, all over the world, feel threatened - while the "invisible hand" of economic forces both pushes people out of their own country and pulls them into others. The influx enriches the receiving nations economically, culturally, genetically and demographically – but we don’t like having them in our midst. It is a major challenge for the decades ahead: it demands far more concerted attention than it has received. It is far too serious an issue to be left to the politicians to play football with.
Finally, as the Cold War ended some twelve years ago, war between nations became much rarer that it had been within living memory. Wars continued to occur but within states – Chechnya is part of Russia: it is no one else’s business; We can all wash our hands of the conflict in Sri Lanka, in Algeria: they are civil wars and, with the end of the Cold War we don't have a dog in that fight (as President Clinton said of the Balkans). But if there are people from war-torn countries resident and traveling all over the world, if Australian companies are involved in the affairs of Bougainville and Mali, in short if we live, as we do, interdependently on a rapidly globalising planet and if moreover the daily means of our economic activity are potential weapons and we permit the existence of weapons of mass destruction - then we all have a stake in every conflict everywhere. Never before has it been so true that no nation is safe from troubles in other countries, and all such troubles are likely to have external dimensions.
So let us not recoil and avert our eyes but look at the simmering conflicts around the world. There are nasty guerilla wars in Peru, Chechnya, Azerbaijan, Kashmir, Sri Lanka etc. Two key facts stand out: every one of them feeds on a deeply felt grievance; in addition each one is organised and led.
Some of the grievances which are a prerequisite for such wars are obscure: at least not many people in Australia know enough of the local history of remote places to understand the causes for which so many Tamils, Azeris, Chehchens or even Acheh separatists are prepared to kill and die. Each of these situations needs study, to understand the underlying problem and then enough political will to redress or otherwise manage it. In most cases, inadequate economic development is a big part of the problem, along with corrupt, ineffective and at times needlessly brutal government. Some, on the other hand are very well known. Whatever else may be true or controversial about the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, the world knows that the central problem is Israeli expropriation of Palestinian land: Israeli settlements now take up 40% of the occupied west bank (which is already much smaller than the land recognized by the UN and the US as Palestinian). The world knows that while Pakistan and India fight over Kashmir, (and China occupies 20% of it) what the Kashmiris want is independence from all three, none of whom shows any interest in their well-being. No doubt some of the grievances are less legitimate than these; but for decades the world has tolerated gross injustices.
A sense of grievance, if deep enough, can make people ready to kill and die for a cause – but they still need to be organised. The leaders of these movements are not typically individuals driven by despair to desperate acts. They are calculating individuals with agendas. As the Israeli army has been saying this month, when Hamas sends an intoxicated teenager to blow himself up in an Israeli bus or school, the Hamas leadership do not imagine that this will make Israel withdraw from occupied territory or stop mistreating the Palestinian population. Their rational calculation is that it will cause Israel to retaliate brutally and that the resultant outrage amongst Palestinians will give Hamas more support, wider allegiance. Whenever war is waged from within a civilian population against an army the result is inevitable: the army will attack the civilian population. Even the virtuous British did this in Northern Ireland. There is a lot of romanticism about the People’s War – make no mistake: it always involves a deliberate decision by its promoters to use the people as shields, very often to invite attacks upon them in support of political or personal ambitions. And these personal ambitions are not just vainglory or a lust for power. Guerilla movements by definition involve outlawry – in most cases the perpetrators do not stop at outlawry for political purposes. In Bosnia, the Congo, and elsewhere guerilla movements fighting for allegedly noble causes have become extortionists, gun runners and drug dealers on such a scale as to overwhelm their political ”missions”. Not only do they murder and oppress the locals: they are a seat of infection for other countries. And we have done very little about it.
So how did governments react, when these issues were brutally dragged to the top of their agendas on 11 September 2001?
First of all, knee jerk, pavlovian reaction of politicians whenever anything hits the headlines : how can we exploit this for political advantage? George W Bush seized his chance, deployed the well known, despicable, techniques of populist intoxication to build his popularity and political power. Our home grown bonsai Bush did much the same on an appropriately miniature scale. The word intoxication means adding poison. Ariel Sharon stirred up the Palestinian war and got American support for the removal of Arafat. The Philippine government saw the opportunity to get American help in repressing its Muslim insurgents. Tony Blair saw a chance to improve British influence in Washington. The Chinese government sought international acquiescence for its repression of the Uighurs. That remarkable man Putin made a bid for intimacy with the US. Other governments such as Indonesia’s scrambled ineffectively for cover: I wasn’t there and it was two other fellows.
And secondly, some governments started doing effective sensible things – and a few inappropriate ones. As always, mainly the American government. Churchill said: "you can always rely on the United States to do the right thing - once they have exhausted every other possibility." That is cruel and unfair. What is true is that the US has not only greater resources, it has a greater willingness to act decisively than do most other governments. But it is not infallible. Also it gives prominence in its rhetoric to high principles, more so than most other governments - but at times forgets its principles. The Americans increased security at their airports to something closer to the standards we have long been used to in Australia and elsewhere. They decreed that the doors to the crew compartments of airliners should be lockable and secure – as they should always have been. They flocked to volunteer for emergency rescue services, to donate blood and to do many other such good, community minded things. They also, less admirably, deployed armed air marshals and took to treating all Arabs and Muslims with suspicion and incarcerated many people on suspicion or for interrogation in defiance of long standing American principles of justice. On the international scene they moved in on the home base of the perpetrators of 911, demolished the Taliban (good riddance) and greatly weakened Al Qaeda (good again). Rather deftly they got the government of Pakistan (the main sponsor of the Taliban and a major promoter of terrorist movements) to sharply curtail its involvement with the violent Islamist tendency. They got many governments to start taking action against the money flows of terrorists organisations (inevitably a number of legitimate entities, including charitable relief organisations, got caught in the net). They looked again at the problem of the security of the ex-weapon nuclear material in Russia and the unemployed WMD technicians there. Having spent US $4.5 Billion mitigating this problem over the last 10 years they now proposed to spend another 10 Billion over the next decade and asked their G8 partners to match that sum: typically Canada said yes, the Europeans and Japan ran for cover. They have started looking again at the measures for monitoring the world's biotechnology to guard against its misuse (which the world community had accepted but the present administration had rejected after lobbying by some advocates of US industry). The US doubled its economic aid program. And so on – a lot of good, overdue things. Accompanied by a number of excesses, mistakes, collateral damage and friendly fire casualties.
But all in all a very patchy and incomplete response to the four agenda items presented by 911. And nothing but bombast - “axis of evil” and Lenin’s motto ”those who are not with us are against us” for the really difficult issues.
Let me mention only four of those:
What is to be done about Iraq? George Bush Senior stopped his troops after 100 hours. Partly because, against all military advice, he had got the Iraqis out of Kuwait with very few American casualties and no political catastrophes. When he is ahead, a clever gambler pockets his gains and goes home. But also because the Saudis and the Turks and all the other Middle Eastern allies were saying “in the name of Allah, do not destroy Saddam Hussein’s power”. If he is weakened, the Kurds will
establish a Kurdish state in the North, the Sunni majority will take power in the South and we Sufis will have sectarian unrest in all our countries. That is still true today. Saddam was forced to accept weapons inspectors: he did everything to frustrate them but they destroyed a lot of what was left of his WMD arsenal. Finally he threw them out and the world did not react effectively. The US proposed a cleverer sanctions regime: France and Russia vetoed it. So what now, apart from bombast about regime change? No one – except for a few immoral politicians - would want a war on Iraq. No one knows how to cope with the aftermath. Everyone knows that attacking an Arab state – however evil its ruler - while tolerating Israel's excesses in Palestine and its nuclear weapons would have far reaching, if uncertain, consequences.
Generalising the Iraqi case: ten years ago it was fashionable to advocate Humanitarian Intervention when governments treated their own subjects too harshly. It was done in Kosovo. Are we now going to do it whenever they allow their territory to be used as a base for activities that hurt us? And if the defy international arms control regimes? Or are we going to find a better alternative than war to tolerating the intolerable?
What is to be done about the global movement of people, which is totally out of control and causing such resentment? Are we going to sacrifice our economic wellbeing to xenophobic instincts and our basic humanity to the kind of repressive measures that would be necessary? Or are we going to teach ourselves, not only tolerance of racial and cultural differences but actual mutual respect and human solidarity? And how do we do that, when it goes against the grain and unscrupulous politicians can always get on by playing the other card?
And as for the dangers of daily life and the potential terrorists amongst us - how much freedom are we going to surrender in the quest for security?
I don’t like the label, “War on Terror” but don’t ask for whom the bell tolls: it is our war on our terror.
Whose war on whose terrorism?
12 August 2002
Eleven months ago 4 passenger aircraft took off from the east coast of the United States, with enough fuel to take them to California. Teams of dedicated men, acting to a plan, seized them. Like Kamikaze pilots, they used their aircraft as missiles, destroyed the World Trade Centre, damaged the Pentagon and killed over 3000 people. 911 the Americans call this terrible event.
The world changed after 911, in so far as it was agenda setting: it led governments to focus on issues which they had irresponsibly neglected for many years. I see this as positive.
Four categories of neglected threats have suddenly become a priority, under the chilling label of a War on Terror.
9 11 showed us first that many everyday activities of modern life place great destructive potential in the hands of individuals. Not only are airplanes potential missiles - trucks, vehicles and machinery of all kinds are potential killing machines. Factories and storage facilities for many industrial chemicals are potentially bombs and/or sources of poison gas and other killers. Big buildings, bridges and crowded sporting facilities are all potential traps, in which thousands of people are at risk. This is not news. Remember the industrial accident at Bhopal in India that killed 2000 people by gas, the accident in the Mt Blanc tunnel and the bomb Timothy Mcveigh made out of fertilizer and killed 400 people in Oklahoma City.
The very things which make us wealthier, longer lived and ore powerful than our parents are also dangerous. And we have not, to date, taken appropriate precautions.
Secondly, if aircraft and oil refineries are potential weapons and a threat, how about real weapons? During the Cold War many kinds of weapons of mass destruction were developed and built. The population at large, and the governments of the world, were rightly terrified at the very existence of these means of destruction. They made a big effort to curb the multiplication and spread of these weapons. They had a number of partially effective regimes in place and more measures in the pipeline. But then, with peace, attention drifted from these war-related issues, the effort slackened off. But this was folly. If you don’t want cities destroyed you should not maintain the means of destroying cities. If you do not want all the surging capabilities of biotechnology to yield new forms of plague you should take appropriate preventive steps. A small number of governments are making WMD - we should not have relaxed efforts to make them stop. It is not very easy, it is not cheap but we have a vast reservoir of experience and success at arms control: it is doable, it certainly deserves our best efforts. All it that is lacking today is commitment by governments.
The third challenge to our security and especially to our sense of security is the greatly enhanced movement of people around the world. When the twin office towers in NY were destroyed, almost half the people killed were not Americans : foreigners working in the US. Likewise the terrorists were foreigners and the issues which motivated their terrible deed are rooted outside the USA. All over the world, people are moving on a scale completely unprecedented. We Australians think we are remarkable in that one in five of us was born outside this country. In the Ivory Coast the proportion is one in four – elsewhere it is higher. We worry about some 10,000 boat people. In Germany and Italy they have asylum seekers by the hundreds of thousands. In Iran by the million. We feel threatened by an influx of culturally alien, unskilled people or far too competitive people. This is a major public concern from Borneo to California, to Eastern China, to Denmark, and many other places. It periodically boils over into violence and political extremism.
Reactionaries cry: 'stop the influx, send them home.' No-one has found a way of doing this - without a level of violence, bloodshed and human misery that I hope we could not stomach. Instinctively xenophobic populations, all over the world, feel threatened - while the "invisible hand" of economic forces both pushes people out of their own country and pulls them into others. The influx enriches the receiving nations economically, culturally, genetically and demographically – but we don’t like having them in our midst. It is a major challenge for the decades ahead: it demands far more concerted attention than it has received. It is far too serious an issue to be left to the politicians to play football with.
Finally, as the Cold War ended some twelve years ago, war between nations became much rarer that it had been within living memory. Wars continued to occur but within states – Chechnya is part of Russia: it is no one else’s business; We can all wash our hands of the conflict in Sri Lanka, in Algeria: they are civil wars and, with the end of the Cold War we don't have a dog in that fight (as President Clinton said of the Balkans). But if there are people from war-torn countries resident and traveling all over the world, if Australian companies are involved in the affairs of Bougainville and Mali, in short if we live, as we do, interdependently on a rapidly globalising planet and if moreover the daily means of our economic activity are potential weapons and we permit the existence of weapons of mass destruction - then we all have a stake in every conflict everywhere. Never before has it been so true that no nation is safe from troubles in other countries, and all such troubles are likely to have external dimensions.
So let us not recoil and avert our eyes but look at the simmering conflicts around the world. There are nasty guerilla wars in Peru, Chechnya, Azerbaijan, Kashmir, Sri Lanka etc. Two key facts stand out: every one of them feeds on a deeply felt grievance; in addition each one is organised and led.
Some of the grievances which are a prerequisite for such wars are obscure: at least not many people in Australia know enough of the local history of remote places to understand the causes for which so many Tamils, Azeris, Chehchens or even Acheh separatists are prepared to kill and die. Each of these situations needs study, to understand the underlying problem and then enough political will to redress or otherwise manage it. In most cases, inadequate economic development is a big part of the problem, along with corrupt, ineffective and at times needlessly brutal government. Some, on the other hand are very well known. Whatever else may be true or controversial about the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, the world knows that the central problem is Israeli expropriation of Palestinian land: Israeli settlements now take up 40% of the occupied west bank (which is already much smaller than the land recognized by the UN and the US as Palestinian). The world knows that while Pakistan and India fight over Kashmir, (and China occupies 20% of it) what the Kashmiris want is independence from all three, none of whom shows any interest in their well-being. No doubt some of the grievances are less legitimate than these; but for decades the world has tolerated gross injustices.
A sense of grievance, if deep enough, can make people ready to kill and die for a cause – but they still need to be organised. The leaders of these movements are not typically individuals driven by despair to desperate acts. They are calculating individuals with agendas. As the Israeli army has been saying this month, when Hamas sends an intoxicated teenager to blow himself up in an Israeli bus or school, the Hamas leadership do not imagine that this will make Israel withdraw from occupied territory or stop mistreating the Palestinian population. Their rational calculation is that it will cause Israel to retaliate brutally and that the resultant outrage amongst Palestinians will give Hamas more support, wider allegiance. Whenever war is waged from within a civilian population against an army the result is inevitable: the army will attack the civilian population. Even the virtuous British did this in Northern Ireland. There is a lot of romanticism about the People’s War – make no mistake: it always involves a deliberate decision by its promoters to use the people as shields, very often to invite attacks upon them in support of political or personal ambitions. And these personal ambitions are not just vainglory or a lust for power. Guerilla movements by definition involve outlawry – in most cases the perpetrators do not stop at outlawry for political purposes. In Bosnia, the Congo, and elsewhere guerilla movements fighting for allegedly noble causes have become extortionists, gun runners and drug dealers on such a scale as to overwhelm their political ”missions”. Not only do they murder and oppress the locals: they are a seat of infection for other countries. And we have done very little about it.
So how did governments react, when these issues were brutally dragged to the top of their agendas on 11 September 2001?
First of all, knee jerk, pavlovian reaction of politicians whenever anything hits the headlines : how can we exploit this for political advantage? George W Bush seized his chance, deployed the well known, despicable, techniques of populist intoxication to build his popularity and political power. Our home grown bonsai Bush did much the same on an appropriately miniature scale. The word intoxication means adding poison. Ariel Sharon stirred up the Palestinian war and got American support for the removal of Arafat. The Philippine government saw the opportunity to get American help in repressing its Muslim insurgents. Tony Blair saw a chance to improve British influence in Washington. The Chinese government sought international acquiescence for its repression of the Uighurs. That remarkable man Putin made a bid for intimacy with the US. Other governments such as Indonesia’s scrambled ineffectively for cover: I wasn’t there and it was two other fellows.
And secondly, some governments started doing effective sensible things – and a few inappropriate ones. As always, mainly the American government. Churchill said: "you can always rely on the United States to do the right thing - once they have exhausted every other possibility." That is cruel and unfair. What is true is that the US has not only greater resources, it has a greater willingness to act decisively than do most other governments. But it is not infallible. Also it gives prominence in its rhetoric to high principles, more so than most other governments - but at times forgets its principles. The Americans increased security at their airports to something closer to the standards we have long been used to in Australia and elsewhere. They decreed that the doors to the crew compartments of airliners should be lockable and secure – as they should always have been. They flocked to volunteer for emergency rescue services, to donate blood and to do many other such good, community minded things. They also, less admirably, deployed armed air marshals and took to treating all Arabs and Muslims with suspicion and incarcerated many people on suspicion or for interrogation in defiance of long standing American principles of justice. On the international scene they moved in on the home base of the perpetrators of 911, demolished the Taliban (good riddance) and greatly weakened Al Qaeda (good again). Rather deftly they got the government of Pakistan (the main sponsor of the Taliban and a major promoter of terrorist movements) to sharply curtail its involvement with the violent Islamist tendency. They got many governments to start taking action against the money flows of terrorists organisations (inevitably a number of legitimate entities, including charitable relief organisations, got caught in the net). They looked again at the problem of the security of the ex-weapon nuclear material in Russia and the unemployed WMD technicians there. Having spent US $4.5 Billion mitigating this problem over the last 10 years they now proposed to spend another 10 Billion over the next decade and asked their G8 partners to match that sum: typically Canada said yes, the Europeans and Japan ran for cover. They have started looking again at the measures for monitoring the world's biotechnology to guard against its misuse (which the world community had accepted but the present administration had rejected after lobbying by some advocates of US industry). The US doubled its economic aid program. And so on – a lot of good, overdue things. Accompanied by a number of excesses, mistakes, collateral damage and friendly fire casualties.
But all in all a very patchy and incomplete response to the four agenda items presented by 911. And nothing but bombast - “axis of evil” and Lenin’s motto ”those who are not with us are against us” for the really difficult issues.
Let me mention only four of those:
What is to be done about Iraq? George Bush Senior stopped his troops after 100 hours. Partly because, against all military advice, he had got the Iraqis out of Kuwait with very few American casualties and no political catastrophes. When he is ahead, a clever gambler pockets his gains and goes home. But also because the Saudis and the Turks and all the other Middle Eastern allies were saying “in the name of Allah, do not destroy Saddam Hussein’s power”. If he is weakened, the Kurds will
establish a Kurdish state in the North, the Sunni majority will take power in the South and we Sufis will have sectarian unrest in all our countries. That is still true today. Saddam was forced to accept weapons inspectors: he did everything to frustrate them but they destroyed a lot of what was left of his WMD arsenal. Finally he threw them out and the world did not react effectively. The US proposed a cleverer sanctions regime: France and Russia vetoed it. So what now, apart from bombast about regime change? No one – except for a few immoral politicians - would want a war on Iraq. No one knows how to cope with the aftermath. Everyone knows that attacking an Arab state – however evil its ruler - while tolerating Israel's excesses in Palestine and its nuclear weapons would have far reaching, if uncertain, consequences.
Generalising the Iraqi case: ten years ago it was fashionable to advocate Humanitarian Intervention when governments treated their own subjects too harshly. It was done in Kosovo. Are we now going to do it whenever they allow their territory to be used as a base for activities that hurt us? And if the defy international arms control regimes? Or are we going to find a better alternative than war to tolerating the intolerable?
What is to be done about the global movement of people, which is totally out of control and causing such resentment? Are we going to sacrifice our economic wellbeing to xenophobic instincts and our basic humanity to the kind of repressive measures that would be necessary? Or are we going to teach ourselves, not only tolerance of racial and cultural differences but actual mutual respect and human solidarity? And how do we do that, when it goes against the grain and unscrupulous politicians can always get on by playing the other card?
And as for the dangers of daily life and the potential terrorists amongst us - how much freedom are we going to surrender in the quest for security?
I don’t like the label, “War on Terror” but don’t ask for whom the bell tolls: it is our war on our terror.
