Till now, no bin Laden / The other side of terror

In its unbridled anger, the United States continues to pound Afghanistan back to the Stone Age which is like venting its wrath on the ruins of the Aztec civilization. Afghanistan is virtually a dead country, Kabul a dead city. About the only thing live is a vagabond citizenry bundling its collective rags by the millions to head for the border and escape death from American bombs and missiles. The US is enraged because until now, more than a month from September 11, it cannot find, locate, capture, maim or kill Osama bin Laden.

The rage is understandable. After all, bin Laden is being held responsible for the deaths of about 6000 people in the utterly despicable destruction of Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in what Americans will always remember as "that day of infamy," the historic Siemese twin of the treacherous Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941. The mightiest military force ever assembled with all the technology that can locate a pack of Camel cigarettes a mile away in the dark with infrared lights with satellite assistance cannot find bin Laden.

And so you can understand President George W. Bush’s frustrations, as well as those of his immediate aides Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice. They expected a sweep of Afghanistan in just a matter of days. Now they are talking about a month or so, a year or so, and only God knows what they will say a week, a month from now. I wish they would stop saying they have now "complete control of the air" over Afghanistan and can bomb day and night. That’s a big laugh. The Taliban couldn’t even send up a single fighter plane to challenge a pilotless drone, much less anti-aircraft weaponry that could reach the height of US attack bombers.

So what do we make of the whole thing?

This. The Americans and their government have the absolute right to go after the terrorists that downed Twin Towers and the Pentagon, hound them, root them out and flush them, get them running, get them "dead or alive" in the Texas twang of George Bush. The American way of life, all that the Statue of Liberty stands for, the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, the Declaration of Human Rights, a multi-ethnic, multiracial society built up over the generations, should fight for itself and not cower in the face of international terrorism. America has a lot to be proud about. It’s still the melting pot or the salad bowl, if you please. Even some leaders of the CPP-NPA revolution ran to and sought shelter in America when things got hot here as they did when Ferdinand Marcos declared martial rule September 1972. That was somewhat funny because all along they had been denouncing and fighting "American imperialism."

That’s the positive. Now for a look into the negative.

America needs a strong, broad-based, multicultural coalition to win this war against the terrorists. The focus, repeated again and again, is that this is not a war against Islam, not a war against Muslims, but only against Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organization, believed to have masterminded the attack on Twin Towers and the Pentagon. But as those "smart bombs" and missiles devastate cities and towns in Afghanistan, innocent civilians are killed, by Taliban count about 300. Result? The world of Islam begins to rise in an angry flood, and tens of thousands of Muslims all over the world scream jihad (holy war) against America.

Can the coalition hold? I don’t believe it can.

The weakest link in the chain, many believe, is Pakistan. With the passage of each hour, President Pervez Musharraaf finds his hold on the Pakistani citizenry getting more tenuous. In Karachi, Islamabad, Quetta, Peshawar, the dam has broken. Out of that crumbling dam, the Pakistanis on ground level swear at Musharraf, swear at America, demand a halt to the bombing of Afghanistan – or else. In Istanbul, Tehran, Nairobi, Cairo, and yes in Palestinian-occupied areas in the Middle East, believe it or not even in Saudi Arabia where the royal family has long been in American’s pocket, and yes in Muslim Mindanao, America now finds that Islam in the main has risen full-bodied and full-throated, many acclaiming Osama bin Laden a hero.

This is now a civilization war, or close to being one, laying waste the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 long before the Napoleonic wars. This treaty gave bone, muscle and spinal column to the nation-state. This brings us all back to what Prof. Samuel Huntington recorded as "the confrontation at the Vienna Human Rights Convention between the West, led by US Secretary of State Warren Christopher denouncing ‘cultural relativism’ and a coalition of Islamic and Confucian states rejecting ‘Western universalism’."

Another Western savant or prophet was Canadian statesman and former prime minister Lester Pearson who underscored the "resurgence and vitality of non-Western societies. It would be absurd to imagine that these new political societies coming to birth in the East will be replicas of those with which we in the West are familiar with. The revival of these ancient civilizations will take new forms." And Pearson, one of the wisest men of the West in the post-WW2 period, declared even before Huntington did: "The most far-reaching problems arise no longer between nations within a single civilization but between civilizations themselves."

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Enough said again.

What I find alarming, as we gasp for air, are the latest statements of US leaders. In seeking to reassure America that everything is all right, that they have taken all the measures to crush the terrorists and Osama bin Laden, "bring them to justice, or bring justice to them, and justice will be done", "Go about your daily lives and be happy again" are (unwittingly?) they are scaring America even more. A few anthrax cases are being given all the publicity, despite absence of credible evidence they are terrorist-related. And, anthrax aside, Americans can expect terrorism to strike again (100 percent, according to one government statement), this time maybe with even more casualties or fatalities. Freedom of the press is being curtailed.

George W. Bush puts on a wry, cowboy smile, saying "Let’s do this one for the Gipper", the nickname of the legendary US football coach who died at the height of his fame, a mix of bravado and fear – mostly fear of the unknown. Bush knows that as this ghostly, ghastly war goes on, there eventually will be American troop casualties and each body bag brought home will be a hundred knife stabs into the heart of America. Much more than 50,000 US soldiers died in Vietnam, a war Charles de Gaulle warned America couldn’t win because they were fighting "the wrong war, at the wrong time, in the wrong place," and he added for good measure, "with the wrong weapons." It was a guerilla war America couldn’t win.

And then again, while the great part of me sides with America, land I may not love but often admire, I have serious second thoughts.

Who defines what terrorism is? Who decides what nation, group, organization, faction, sect or whatnot is guilty or not guilty of committing terrorism? This is a large grey area I have been shuffling across. In this area there is no such thing as ultimate virtue ranged against ultimate evil, non-terror against terror, the good against the bad. I had deliberately from the outset not cudgeled America for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which destroyed over 220,000 lives on the instant. This was war, I told myself, and war was the excusable mast of skull and bones, in the name of preserving civilization. Was it really? Was it not terror on the ugliest, most horrendous scale?

And then again what right did America have to wage war on Vietnam? Was it not simply to take over from French colonization to perpetuate the white man’s domination over Asia? And did not American soldiers resort to naked terror? Like the extermination of innocent women, children, and cringing old men and women in My Lai? And for every My Lai, there were probably five or six others unreported, except that in My Lai, Seymour Hersh, an intrepid American journalist, saw everything and reported it?

And how about the massacre of more than 50,000 Filipinos in Samar in 1901 by American troops who, on the orders of Gen. Jacob Smith, ordered that Samar be turned into a "howling wilderness" because 500 Filipino rebels with bolos attacked Company C of the 9th US Infantry, killed 54 Yankees, when the bells of Balangiga church rang to reveal their presence? Wasn’t that terror on a scale much greater than what happened to Twin Towers and the Pentagon?

Is it terror when it happens to Americans and not terror when the Americans inflict it? And now they are puzzled and perplexed why much of the non-Western world "hate us so much." Probably in the middle of it all is the war in the Middle East, where Israel is on one side supported, protected and financed by America, and Palestine and Islam on the other.

As they say, this is the "poisoned well" in the impending clash of civilizations.