AlterNet Special

AlterNet:
The Hiroshima Stories We Can't Tell

By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on August 8, 2006

Even though we promptly dubbed the site of the 9/11 attacks in New York City "Ground Zero" - once a term reserved for an atomic blast - Americans have never really come to grips either with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the nuclear age they ushered in.

There can be no question that, as the big bang that might end it all, the atomic bomb haunted Cold War America. In those years, while the young watched endless versions of nuclear disaster transmuted into B-horror films, the grown-ups who ran our world went on a vast shopping spree for world-ending weaponry, building nuclear arsenals that grew into the tens of thousands of weapons.

When the Cold War finally ended with the Soviet Union's quite peaceful collapse, however, a nuclear "peace dividend" never arrived. The arsenals of the former superpower adversaries remained quietly in place, drawn down but strangely untouched, awaiting a new mission, while just beyond sight, the knowledge of the making of such weapons spread to other countries ready to launch their own threatening mini-Cold Wars.

In 1995, fifty years after that first bomb went off over the Aioi Bridge in Hiroshima, it still proved impossible in the U.S. to agree upon a nuclear creation tale. Was August 6, 1945, the heroic ending to a global war or the horrific beginning of a new age? The Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the Hiroshima bomb, and a shattered school child's lunchbox from Hiroshima could not yet, it turned out, inhabit the same exhibit space at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.

Today, while the Bush administration promotes a new generation of nuclear "bunker-busters" as the best means to fight future anti-proliferation wars, such once uniquely world-threatening weapons have had to join a jostling queue of world-ending possibilities in the dreams of our planet's young. Still, for people of a certain age like me, Hiroshima is where it all began. So on this August 6th, I would like to try, once again, to lay out the pieces of a nuclear story that, even after all these years, none of us, it seems, can yet quite tell.

In my story, there are three characters and no dialogue. There is my father, who volunteered for the Army Air Corps at age thirty-five, immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He fought in Burma, was painfully silent on his wartime experiences, and died on Pearl Harbor Day in 1983. Then there's me, growing up in a world in which my father's war was glorified everywhere, in which my play fantasies in any park included mowing down Japanese soldiers, but my dreams were of nuclear destruction. Finally, there is a Japanese boy whose name and fate are unknown to me.

This is a story of multiple silences. The first of those, the silence of my father, was once no barrier to the stories I told myself. If anything, his silence enhanced them, since in the 1950s, male silence seemed a heroic attribute (and perhaps it was, though hardly in the way I imagined at the time). In those years, sitting in the dark with him at any World War II movie was enough for me.

As it turned out though, the only part of his war I actually possessed was its final act, and around this too, there grew up a puzzling silence. The very idea of nuclear destruction seemed not to touch him. Like other school children, I went through nuclear-attack drills with sirens howling outside, while - I had no doubt - he continued to work unfazed in his office. It was I who watched the irradiated ants and nuclearized monsters of our teen-screen life stomp the Earth. It was I who went to the French film Hiroshima Mon Amour, where I was shocked by my first sight of the human casualties of the A-bombing, and to On the Beach to catch a glimpse of how the world might actually end. It was I who saw the mushroom cloud rise in my dreams, felt its heat sear my arm before I awoke. Of all this I said not a word to him, nor he to me.

On his erstwhile enemies, however, my father was not silent. He hated the Japanese with a war-bred passion. They had, he told me, "done things" that could not be discussed to "boys" he had known. Subsequent history - the amicable American occupation of Japan or the emergence of that defeated land as an ally - did not seem to touch him.

His hatred of all things Japanese was not a ruling passion of my childhood only because Japan was so absent from our lives. There was nothing Japanese in our house (one did not buy their products); we avoided the only Japanese restaurant in our part of town; and no Japanese ever came to visit. Even the evil Japanese I saw in war movies, who might sneeringly hiss, "I was educated in your University of Southern California" before they met their suicidal fates were, I now know, regularly played by non-Japanese actors.

In the end, however, I followed my own path to Hiroshima, drawn perhaps to the world my father so vehemently rejected. In 1979, as an editor, I published Unforgettable Fire, the drawings of Hiroshima residents who had lived through that day. It was, I suspect, the first time any sizable number of images of the human damage there made it into mainstream American culture. I visited Japan in 1982, thanks to the book's Japanese editor who took me to Hiroshima - an experience I found myself unable to talk about on return. This, too, became part of the silences my father and I shared.

To make a story thus far, would seem relatively simple. Two generations face each other across the chasm of a war and an act that divided them. It is the story we all know. And yet, there is my third character and third silence - the Japanese boy who drifted into my consciousness after an absence of almost four decades only a few years ago. I no longer remember - I can't even imagine - how he and I were put in contact sometime in the mid-1950s. Like me, my Japanese pen-pal must have been eleven or twelve years old. If we exchanged photos, I have no memory of his face, nor does a name come to mind. If I can remember half-jokingly writing my own address at that age ("New York City, New York, USA, Planet Earth, the Solar System, the Galaxy, the Universe"), I can't remember writing his. I already knew by then that a place called Albany was the capital of New York State, but New York City still seemed to me the center of the world. In many ways, I wasn't wrong.

Even if he lived in Tokyo, my Japanese pen-pal could have had no such illusions. Like me, he had undoubtedly been born during World War II. Perhaps in his first year of life he had been evacuated from one of Japan's charred cities. For him, that disastrous war would not have been a memory. If he had gone to the movies with his father in the 1950s, he might have seen Godzilla (not the U.S. Air Force) dismantle Tokyo and he might have hardly remembered those economically difficult first years of American occupation. But he could not at that time have imagined himself at the center of the universe.

I have a faint memory of the feel of his letters; a crinkly thinness undoubtedly meant to save infinitesimal amounts of weight (and so, money). We wrote, of course, in English, for much of the planet, if not the solar-system-galaxy-universe, was beginning to operate in that universal language which seemed to radiate from my home city to the world like the rays of the sun. But what I most remember are the exotic-looking stamps that arrived on (or in) his letters. For I was, with my father, an avid stamp collector. On Sunday afternoons, my father and I prepared and mounted our stamps, consulted our Scott's Catalog, and pasted them in. In this way, the Japanese section of our album was filled with that boy's offerings; without comment, but also without protest from my father.

We exchanged letters - none of which remain - for a year or two and then who knows what interest of mine (or his) overcame us; perhaps only the resistance boys can have to writing letters. In any case, he, too, entered a realm of silence. Only now, remembering those quiet moments of closeness when my father and I worked on our albums, do I note that he existed briefly and without discussion in our lives. He existed for both of us, perhaps, in the ambiguous space that silence can create. And now I wonder sometimes what kinds of nuclear dreams my father may have had.

For all of us in a sense, the Earth was knocked off its axis on August 6, 1945. In that one moment, my father's war ended and my war - the Cold War - began. But in my terms, it seems so much messier than that. For we, and that boy, continued to live in the same world together for a long time, accepting and embroidering each other's silences.

The bomb still runs like a fissure, but also like an attracting current - a secret unity - through our lives. The rent it tore in history was deep and the generational divide, given the experiences of those growing up on either side of it, profound. But any story would also have to hold the ways, even deeper and harder to fathom, in which we lived through it all together in pain, hatred, love, and most of all silence.

In this sixty-first year after Hiroshima, a year charged with no special anniversary meaning at all, perhaps we will think a little about the stories we can't tell, and about the subterranean stream of emotional horror that unites us, that won't go away whether, as in 1995, we try to exhibit the Enola Gay as a glorious icon or bury it deep in the Earth with a stake through its metallic heart. For my particular story, the one I've never quite been able to tell, there is a Japanese boy who should not have been, but briefly was, with us; who perhaps lives today with his own memories of very different silences. When I think of him now, when I realize that he, my father, and I still can't inhabit the same story except in silence, a strange kind of emotion rushes up in me, which is hard to explain.

Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch.com, is co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture.

© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/40001/

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Megachurches Court Cool to Attract Teens

By Courtney E. Martin, AlterNet
Posted on August 8, 2006

Five suburban kids - three boys, two girls - sit at a circular table in a cafe eating gooey chocolate chip cookies and responding frequently to one another with the all-encompassing "totally." All of the signs of adolescence are there - the pimples, the flirty giggles, and yes, the angst. One of the girls leaps up from the table and rushes off, shouting over her shoulder, "I just need some time to digest!" The remaining girl shrugs both her eyebrows and shoulders in the guys' direction coquettishly, then runs after her friend. The guys immediately bow their heads and begin praying like crazy.

Despite the cushy chairs and mainstream decor, this is not Starbucks. This is New Life Church - some say the most politically influential site of evangelism in the nation. Kids come to this megachurch on the outskirts of northern Colorado Springs not only to be saved but also to sip mocha lattes. They come, sometimes in the thousands, to this megamall of worship to praise Jesus, not through quiet, mannered prayer, but through the gut-vibrating baseline of the three electric guitars that begin services. In the words of the lead singer, who sports flip flops with his white button-down shirt and gelled, hipster hair, the kids come because: "God, you are so awesome!"

God's "awesomeness" aside, I came here to understand what it is that churches like New Life are doing so successfully to appeal to teenagers. Generation Y (of which I am a part) is notorious for its dependence on nonhierarchical, virtual communities: music downloading sites, YouTube, Wikipedia and the big momma, MySpace. When it comes to the real world, we are largely apolitical, unorganized and skeptical of authority - as evidenced from books like Robert Putnam's 2000 bestseller Bowling Alone and Jean Twenge's more recent Generation Me.

In dramatic contrast, the National Association of Evangelicals, whose 45,000 churches and 30 million believers make up the nation's most powerful religious lobbying group, continues to successfully recruit teenagers into its fold.

In this climate of isolation and cynicism, how have evangelical megachurches like New Life gained such a strong youth following? And more importantly, what can progressives - feminists, democrats, civil rights defenders - learn from their methodology? "The left" is looking a little winded, a little wrinkled and a lot in trouble if it doesn't figure out how to appeal to a youth accustomed to MTV, MP3s and incentives. After spending one long Sunday evening at the New Life Church, I had a better sense of how the evangelical right pulls it off.

The Christian rock band played about five songs, showered in red, white and pink state-of-the-art lighting and periodic rolling clouds from the fog machine. Teenagers knelt down, stood in the aisles with their hands raised and rocked out at the foot of the stage, singing along; the lyrics of each song were projected on three giant television screens. One young woman spontaneously choreographed some kind of contemporary praise dance off in a corner, mixing Twyla Tharp modern with the Harlem shake as the spirit moved her. The lights were very dim, as if to visually indicate to every insecure 14-year-old around that, for once, no one was watching or judging.

It makes perfect sense - teenagers are naturally emotional, bent on constructing their own unique individuality and deathly afraid of being judged for both. The angsty lyrics and dramatic delivery mirrors their internal world, but the dark, to-each-their-own vibe is in direct contrast to the cruel, external world.

Eventually the music faded into a soundtrack as a young pastor took the stage and translated the idea of God's glory for his "American Idol" audience: "We ask that you would make God famous in our city." Worship Pastor Ross Parsley, in his boot-cut jeans, short strawberry blond hair with pronounced sideburns, delivered his sermon from a Smartphone, throwing in frequent references to Hollywood movies. In fact, over the course of his 30-minute sermon he compared God's glory to the red pill in "The Matrix," the ring in the "Lord of the Rings," and, yes, the lion in "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe." God's wrath, he explains, is like the melting face in Indiana Jones.

When he asked "Does anyone remember the First Commandment?" and was met with only nervous giggles, he didn't miss a beat before responding: "Bueller? Bueller?" - a reference to the famous '80s movie "Ferris Bueller's Day Off."

Though Pastor Ross does sprinkle in some classic Valley Girl language (using "like" as a noun and referring to Obed-Edom as an "obscure dude”), he doesn't talk down to his following. He incorporated words like "behooves" and "arbiters" and phrases like "geopolitical woes," which seemed to send the message that, yes, he is one of them, but no, he doesn't consider them stupid. At one point he drew a parallel between one of the Philistines and the government, saying under his breath, "Maybe he consulted our Congress on passing the buck."

Though I would guess that many, if not most, of the teenagers in the crowd have no clue what he is referencing, they laugh knowingly; they felt part of an insider's club of people who "get it." This delicate mix of pop and politics makes kids feel cool and righteous - not wonky, out of touch or nerdy.

And just when his sermon was skirting the edge of patronizing, Pastor Ross got tough: "WWJD bracelets and Christian contemporary music don't entitle you to the glory," he said. "Cut the garbage - we must humble ourselves. Every one of us has to do something." The teenagers in the audience nod their heads in dramatic agreement, some raise their open palms, one pounds his fist into his thigh a few times.

You can't buy "cool" - teenagers know that all to well. They respect a big brother-figure who is giving them the straight dope that you can't buy "glory" either. And what's more, this is action-oriented. Pastor Ross warned that "you never know what blessing you might miss" if you sit idly by. This God - albeit a definitively Republican, homo-hating, pro-life God - wants you to stop talking and start doing.

After Pastor Ross finished, Senior Pastor Ted Haggard, who consults with President Bush once a week and masterminded the New Life movement, took the stage and gave his protege a warm greeting. They both sat on tall stools for the Q&A. Pastor Ted encouraged his congregants to ask questions "regarding anything at all." He called on people by their first names and answered their diverse inquiries with what I can only describe as a frightening mix of damnation and Dr. Phil. One moment he was describing young people possessed by the devil writhing on the ground like snakes at a Mississippi gather, the next he explained, "The moment that I feel that God is using me to judge and punish, I hit the prayer closet fast to negotiate." I looked around at the teenagers, wondering if they were as confused as I was. They looked similarly bewildered. Some of them were even covertly text messaging their friends.

But he ended with a comforting idea: "God loves those who wrestle with him." The New Life Church has made God a man to both fear and love, a classic example of what George Lakoff calls the "strict father" model. For the New Life Church, worship is both a mandate and an individual expression, contemporary culture is both an evil and a celebration. But unlike the brand of confusion produced by electoral politics that promises a "stronger America" or health care for all, New Life Church promises concrete rewards. Both pastors spoke often about the payoff for those who are faithful; Pastor Ted even referred to "the toys" that those who pray will undoubtedly receive, holding up Sam Walton of the Wal-Mart fortune as the quintessential example.

For teenagers, unlike aging adults, the ultimate reward is not yet heaven — it is being "cool,” being entertained, being inspired. The teenspeak-talking evangelists assure these insecure kids that if they pray hard enough, they will not only be loved, but rich. Unlike the hell that is junior high, at New Life, they are resolutely on the side of the powerful and popular.

As Pastor Ross looked around at the nodding, foot-tapping teenagers filling the stadium seating, he triumphantly shouted, "We are growing the church young!" Unless progressives can figure out a way to reach that same audience, I fear he is right.

Courtney E. Martin's book, "Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters," will be published by Simon & Schuster's Free Press in April 2007.

© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/39427/

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Was Hezbollah a Legitimate Target?

By Stephen Zunes, Foreign Policy in Focus
Posted on August 8, 2006

The Bush administration and an overwhelming bipartisan majority of Congress have gone on record defending Israel's assault on Lebanon's civilian infrastructure as a means of attacking Hezbollah “terrorists.” Unlike the major Palestinian Islamist groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah forces haven't killed any Israeli civilians for more than a decade. Indeed, a 2002 Congressional Research Service report noted, in its analysis of Hezbollah, that “no major terrorist attacks have been attributed to it since 1994.” The most recent State Department report on international terrorism also fails to note any acts of terrorism by Hezbollah since that time except for unsubstantiated claims that a Hezbollah member was a participant in a June 1996 attack on the U.S. Air Force dormitory at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.

While Hezbollah's ongoing rocket attacks on civilian targets in Israel are indeed illegitimate and can certainly be considered acts of terrorism, it is important to note that such attacks were launched only after the U.S.-backed Israeli assault on civilian targets in Israel began July 12. Similarly, Hezbollah has pledged to cease such attacks once Israel stops its attacks against Lebanon and withdraws its troops from Lebanese territory occupied since the onset of the latest round of hostilities. (The Hezbollah attack on the Israeli border post that prompted the Israeli assaults, while clearly illegitimate and provocative, can not legally be considered a terrorist attack since the targets were military rather than civilian.)

Indeed, the evolution of this Lebanese Shiite movement from a terrorist group to a legal political party had been one of the more interesting and hopeful developments in the Middle East in recent years.

Like many radical Islamist parties elsewhere, Hezbollah (meaning “Party of God”) combines populist rhetoric, important social service networks for the needy, and a decidedly reactionary and chauvinistic interpretation of Islam in its approach to contemporary social and political issues. In Lebanese parliamentary elections earlier last year, Hezbollah ended up with fourteen seats outright in the 128-member national assembly, and a slate shared with the more moderate Shiite party Amal gained an additional twenty-three seats. Hezbollah controls one ministry in the 24-member cabinet. While failing to disarm as required under UN Security Council resolution 1559, Hezbollah was negotiating with the Lebanese government and other interested Lebanese parties, leading to hopes that the party's military wing would be disbanded within a few months. Prior to calling up reserves following the Israeli assault, Hezbollah could probably count on no more than a thousand active-duty militiamen.

In other words, whatever one might think of Hezbollah's reactionary ideology and its sordid history, the group did not constitute such a serious threat to Israel's security as to legitimate a pre-emptive war.

Having ousted Syrian forces from Lebanon in an impressive nonviolent uprising last year, the Lebanese had re-established what may perhaps be the most democratic state in the Arab world. Because they allowed the anti-Israel and anti-American Hezbollah to participate in the elections, however, the Israeli government and the Bush administration—with strong bipartisan support on Capitol Hill—apparently decided that Lebanon as a whole must be punished in the name of “the war on terror.”

Inverse Reaction to Threat

Just as Washington's concerns about the threat from Iraq grew in inverse correlation to its military capability—culminating in the 2003 invasion long after that country had disarmed and dismantled its chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs—the U.S. focus on Hezbollah has grown as that party had largely put its terrorist past behind it. In recent years, the administration and Congress—in apparent anticipation of the long-planned Israeli assault—began to become more and more obsessed with Hezbollah. For example, not a single Congressional resolution mentioned Hezbollah during the 1980s when they were kidnapping and murdering American citizens and engaging in other terrorist activities. In fact, no Congressional resolution mentioned Hezbollah by name until 1998, years after the group's last act of terrorism noted by the State Department. During the last session of Congress, there were more than two dozen resolutions condemning Hezbollah.

In March of last year, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution by an overwhelming 380-3 margin condemning “the continuous terrorist attacks perpetrated by Hezbollah.” Despite contacting scores of Congressional offices asking them to cite any examples of terrorist attacks by Hezbollah at any time during the past decade, no one on Capitol Hill with whom I have communicated has been able to cite any.

Adding to the hyperbole is the assertion that Hezbollah threatens not just Israel but the United States, despite never having attacked or threatened to attack U.S. interests outside of Lebanon. Cited as evidence in the nearly unanimous March 2005 House resolution is testimony from former CIA director George Tenet (who also insisted that the case for Iraq having offensive weapons of mass destruction was a “slam dunk”), in which he made the bizarre accusations that Hezbollah is “an organization with the capability and worldwide presence [equal to] al-Qaida, equal if not far more [of a] capable organization … [t]hey're a notch above in many respects … which puts them in a state sponsored category with a potential for lethality that's quite great.”

In reality, other than a number of assassinations of political opponents in Europe during the 1980s and 1990s, it is highly debatable whether Hezbollah has ever launched a terrorist attack outside of Lebanon. The United States alleges as one of its stronger cases that Hezbollah was involved in two major bombings of Jewish targets in Argentina: the Israeli embassy in 1993 and a Jewish community center in 1994, both resulting in scores of fatalities. Despite longstanding investigations by Argentine officials, including testimony by hundreds of eyewitnesses and two lengthy trials, no convincing evidence emerged that implicated Hezbollah. The more likely suspects are extreme right-wing elements of the Argentine military, which has a notorious history of anti-Semitism.

Not every country has failed to recognize Hezbollah's evolution from its notorious earlier years. The European Union, for example, does not include Hezbollah among its list of terrorist groups. As a result, in yet another effort to push the U.S. foreign policy agenda on other nations, last year's House resolution also “urges the European Union to classify Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.” This may be the first and only time the U.S. Congress has sought to directly challenge EU policy on a non-trade issue.

The Europeans have had far more experience with terrorism, are much closer geographically to the Middle East, and historically have had stronger commercial, political, and other ties to Lebanon than the United States and are therefore at least as capable as the U.S. Congress of assessing the orientation of Hezbollah. Furthermore, the European Union has had no problem labeling al-Qaida, Islamic Jihad, or Hamas as terrorist organizations, which suggests that it would have extended the same designation to Hezbollah if the facts warranted it. Both Republican and Democratic House members, however, most of whom have little knowledge of the complexities of contemporary Lebanese politics and apparently fearing European criticism of a U.S.-backed Israeli attack on Lebanon, arrogantly insisted they knew better and that they had the right to tell the European Union what to do.

The Rise of Hezbollah

Hezbollah did not exist until four years after Israel first invaded and occupied southern Lebanon in 1978. The movement grew dramatically following Israel's more extensive U.S.-backed invasion and occupation of the central part of the country in 1982 and the subsequent intervention by U.S. Marines to prop up a weak Israeli-installed government. In forcing the departure of the armed forces of the Palestine Liberation Organization and destroying the broad, left-leaning, secular Lebanese National Movement, the U.S. and Israeli interventions created a vacuum in which sectarian groups like Hezbollah could grow.

During the early 1990s, following the end of the Lebanese civil war, a revived central Lebanese government and its Syrian backers disarmed most of the other militias that had once carved up much of the country. By contrast, as the Israeli attacks continued, Hezbollah not only remained intact, it grew. Years of heavy Israeli bombardment led hundreds of thousands of Lebanese Shiites to flee north, filling vast slums in the southern outskirts of Beirut. From these refugees and others who suffered as a result of these U.S.-supported Israeli assaults Hezbollah received the core of its support. The Hezbollah militia became heroes to many Lebanese, particularly as the U.S.-led peace process stalled.

The Hezbollah also periodically fired shells into Israel proper, some of which killed and injured civilians. Virtually all these attacks, however, were in direct retaliation for large-scale Israeli attacks against Lebanese civilians. The United States condemned Hezbollah not just for occasional attacks inside Israel but also for its armed resistance against Israeli soldiers within Lebanon, despite the fact that international law specifically recognizes the right of armed resistance against foreign occupation forces. The United States was apparently hoping that enough Israeli pressure against Lebanon would force the Lebanese to sign a separate peace treaty with Israel and thereby isolate the Syrians. U.S. officials greatly exaggerated the role of Syria in its control and support for Hezbollah, seemingly ignoring the fact that Syria had historically backed Amal, a rival Shiite militia. By contrast, while the radical Iranian Revolutionary Guards did play a significant role in the initial formation of Hezbollah in 1982, most direct Iranian support diminished substantially in subsequent years. The emphasis by the United States in subsequent years on Hezbollah's ties to Iran has largely been to discredit a movement that had widespread popular support across Lebanon's diverse confessional and ideological communities.

By the mid-1990s, greater casualties among Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in occupied southern Lebanon led to increased dissent within Israel. In response to public opinion polls showing that the vast majority of Israelis wanted the IDF to withdraw unilaterally, Martin Indyk—President Clinton's ambassador to Israel who had also served as his assistant secretary of state for the Middle East—publicly encouraged Israel to keep its occupation forces in Lebanon. In other words, the United States, while defending its sanctions and bombing against Iraq on the grounds of upholding UN Security Council resolutions, was encouraging Israel—against the better judgment of the majority of its citizens—to defy longstanding UN Security Council resolutions demanding Israel's unconditional withdrawal. In an interesting display of double standards, the wording of the 1978 resolution demanding Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon was virtually identical to the resolution passed twelve years later demanding Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait, for which the United States went to war.

The Hezbollah militia finally drove the Israelis and their proxy force out of Lebanon in a hasty retreat in May 2000. In the wake of the failure of those advocating a more moderate ideology and a diplomatic solution, the military victory by Hezbollah greatly enhanced its status.

For more than a dozen years, the Hezbollah militia had restricted its armed activities to fighting Israeli occupation forces, initially in southern Lebanon and—following Israel's withdrawal in 2000—in a disputed border region with Syria still under Israeli military occupation. Both the Bush administration and Congress, however, have sought to blur the distinction between armed resistance against foreign occupation forces, which is generally recognized under international law as legitimate self-defense, and terrorism, which—regardless of the political circumstances—is always illegal, since it targets innocent civilians. (Few Americans, for example, would have labeled the sporadic attacks by Kuwaiti resistance fighters against Iraqi occupation forces during the six months Saddam's army occupied their country in 1990-91 as acts of terrorism. By contrast, had the Kuwaiti resistance planted bombs on buses or in cafes in Baghdad or Basra, the terrorist label would have been quite deserved, however illegitimate Iraq's invasion and occupation of Kuwait may have been. The same holds true for apologists for Palestinian terrorism who attempt to justify the murders of innocent Israeli civilians on the grounds that it is part of the armed struggle against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.)

Despite some unconfirmed reports linking individual Hezbollah operatives with Palestinian terrorist groups, it appears that the movement as a whole had become another one of the scores of former terrorist groups and political movements with terrorist components that have evolved into legitimate political parties in recent decades. These include the current ruling parties or ruling coalition partners of the governments of Israel, Algeria, Uruguay, Zimbabwe, and Afghanistan. Indeed, some prominent leaders of the U.S.-backed Islamic coalition in Iraq were once part of organizations labeled terrorist by the U.S. State Department and a few have even maintained longstanding ties with Hezbollah.

Rather than welcoming Hezbollah's important shift away from the use of terrorism to advance its political agenda, however, the Bush administration and Congress—in apparent anticipation of a U.S.-Israeli assault against the group and its supporters—instead became increasingly alarmist about the supposed threat posed by this Lebanese political party. And, given the refusal by the Lebanese government to ban the political party and their inability to disband the militia, the United States has given Israel the green light to attack not just Hezbollah militia, but the civilian infrastructure of Lebanon as well.

Why Hezbollah?

Given the number of dangerous movements in the Middle East and elsewhere that really have been involved in ongoing terrorist activities in recent years, why this obsession over a minority Lebanese party that had, prior to last month's assault by Israel, largely left terrorism behind?

A key component of the Bush Doctrine holds that states supporting groups that the U.S. government designates as “terrorist” are as guilty as the terrorists themselves and are therefore legitimate targets for the United States to attack in the name of self-defense.

This doctrine applies not just to Lebanon, but to Syria and Iran as well, the two countries that the neoconservative architects of the U.S. invasion of Iraq have proposed as the next targets for attack. Though outside support for Hezbollah has declined dramatically from previous years, Syria and Iran have traditionally been Hezbollah's primary backers. By formally designating Hezbollah as a “terrorist organization” and exaggerating the degree of Syrian and Iranian support, the Bush administration and Congress are paving the way for possible U.S. military action against one or both countries some time in the future. Just as Soviet and Cuban control over leftist movements and governments in Central America and Africa during the 1980s was grossly exaggerated in order to advance the Reagan administration's global agenda, a similar, bipartisan effort is afoot to exaggerate Syrian and Iranian control over Hezbollah.

During the Cold War, nationalist movements that coalesced under a Marxist-Leninist framework, such as the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam, were depicted not as the manifestation of a longstanding national liberation struggle against foreign domination, but part of the global expansionist agenda of international communism. As such, sending more than a half a million American troops into South Vietnam and engaging in the heaviest bombing campaign in world history was depicted as an act of self-defense for “if we do not fight them over there, we will have to fight them here.” Once American forces withdrew, however, Vietnamese stopped killing Americans. Similarly, Hezbollah stopped attacking French and American interests when they withdrew from Lebanon in 1984. As noted above, they largely stopped attacking Israelis when they withdrew from Lebanon in 2000 (with the exception of the Shebaa Farms, which they claim is part of Lebanon).

Therefore, a second reason for the U.S. government's disproportionate hostility toward Hezbollah may be to convince Americans that radical Islamist groups with a nationalist base will not stop attacking even after troop withdrawal. The Bush administration has insisted that the United States must destroy the terrorists in Iraq or they will attack the United States. But the rise of Islamic extremist groups and terrorist attacks in Iraq came only after the United States invaded that country in 2003. And if Americans recognized that attacks against Americans by Iraqis would stop if U.S. forces withdrew, it would be harder to justify the ongoing U.S. war. Similarly, if Americans recognized that terrorist attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad would likely cease if Israel fully withdrew its occupation forces from the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza Strip and allowed for the emergence of a viable independent Palestinian state, they would no longer be able to defend their financial, military, and diplomatic support for the ongoing occupation, repression, and colonization of those occupied Palestinian territories by the right-wing Israeli government. (As with Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad did not come into existence until after years of Israeli occupation and the failure of both secular nationalist groups and international diplomacy to end the occupation.)

This, of course, is not what the Bush administration or Congressional leaders want people to think, however, since it would make it far more difficult to defend the wars in Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon. Therefore, it is politically important to convince Americans that Hezbollah is a terrorist group engaged in “continuous terrorist attacks” that constitute an ongoing threat to the national security interests of the United States and its allies.

The tragedy is how easily the mainstream media and the American public are willing to believe these simplistic misinterpretations of the complex Lebanese political situation, and how easily the war on terrorism can be manipulated to justify a U.S.-backed offensive against a small democratic country's civilian infrastructure.

Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and Middle East editor of Foreign Policy In Focus. He is the author of Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism (Common Courage Press, 2003).

© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/40009/

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How 9/11 Could Have Been Prevented

By Rory O'Connor, AlterNet
Posted on August 7, 2006

"Wherever you are, death will find you/even in the looming tower."
-The Holy Q'ran

Was 9/11 preventable? Add New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright, author of "The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11," to the growing ranks of those answering a resounding "Yes!" to that simple but highly-charged question.

The failures of the CIA, FBI, the National Security Agency and many other branches of government to share information - and the concomitant failure to stop the 9/11 hijackers - have already been well-documented by others, but few have offered Wright's coherent focus on what the New York Times accurately describes as "the stupidity, hubris and dereliction of duty that occurred within the United States government." In particular, Wright's relentlessly detailed account of the flawed investigation of the October 2000 bombing of the American destroyer USS Cole - a seminal and largely misunderstood event in the run-up to the 9/11 attacks - amply demonstrates how "jealousy and turf wars" were used by U.S. intelligence operatives as "an excuse to hide information that should have been shared."

"9/11 could have been stopped with a functional intelligence community," Wright states forthrightly. "But instead, things were hidden for no reason from people with a vital need to know them."

When the Cole pulled into the port of Aden, Yemen, for refueling on Oct. 12, 2000, "The Al Qaeda presence there was very well-known," says Wright. His claim is buttressed by on-the-record testimony from, among others, military intelligence analysts associated with the secret Able Danger program. The Able Danger team had already identified five different Al Qaeda cells by then, including one active in Aden.

They had also brought this information to Gen. Peter Schoomaker, then-head of the Special Operations Command (SOCOM), now chief of staff, U.S. Army, as well as to high intelligence officials at the Central Command (CENTCOM), which oversees the Fifth Fleet to which the Cole had been tasked. It remains unknown what - if anything - the high Pentagon officials did with this information, but clearly none of it was ever conveyed to the Cole's commander, Kirk Lippold.

As a result, a fiberglass boat filled with plastic explosives pulled alongside the destroyer and blew a forty-by-forty-foot hole in its side, killing 17 crew members and injuring 39 others.

"You had 17 dead sailors," says Wright. "And they had pertinent information that might have stopped 9/11." Such actions "look like obstruction of justice," he adds, "It's an outrage that no one has been held to account."

In his book, as well as a recent New Yorker article, Wright explains how the CIA withheld vital information from FBI agents who were in Yemen investigating after the attack on the Cole. In particular, the spy agency lied about its knowledge of a terrorist planning meeting in Malaysia that took place before the Cole bombing, which had been attended by two Al Qaeda operatives named Khaled Al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hamzi. It also failed to reveal that the men - both of whom ended up on planes involved in the 9/11 attacks - were living in Los Angeles, information that the CIA was legally bound to share with the bureau.

"Given all the alarm bells, I just can't understand why they would tolerate the presence of two known Al Qaeda members in California," says Wright. "Everyone in the CIA knew they were Al Qaeda, but they did nothing! Had this information been given to the FBI, they could have uncovered the 9/11 plot at that time."

How to explain this astonishing failure? One theory has it that the CIA may have been trying to turn the two Al Qaeda members into double agents as a means of infiltrating the terror group. "Half the guys in the bureau think CIA was trying to turn them to get inside Al Qaeda," Wright told me. "It's never been proven, but it's extremely suggestive that this was a failed CIA operation to recruit them." If so, that would at least explain why, when FBI Cole investigator Ali Soufran repeatedly queried the CIA about the meeting in Malaysia - attended not only by the Cole bombers but also by the two 9/11 hijackers - the information about al-Mihdhar and al-Hamzi was withheld.

And what of the other, egregious and repeated intelligence failures that resulted in the worst terror attacks ever on U.S. soil? Were they also due to bureaucratic bungling and turf wars, as some have suggested? Were they instead the result of a bipartisan attempt to cover up ongoing intelligence failures dating back several administrations? Or, as some have suggested, was the intelligence community simply drowning in the tsunami of pre-attack "threat assessments" and warnings that were flooding in during the months leading up to 9/11?

"What is the explanation?" Wright asks rhetorically. "Turf wars? A bipartisan cover-up? Drowning in threats? Can I choose 'All of the above'?"

Wright cites a post-attack report on the CIA failures by the Department of Justice's inspector general. "There are lots of reasons to release the report and lots of culpability there," he says. "The CIA failed in its moral and legal obligations. Yet the report is still secret."

Nor is the National Security Agency blameless, says Wright. "NSA also has lots of complicity," he says. "The agency had crucial information that it did not share with the FBI either." The NSA, for example, had been monitoring Al Qaeda telephone calls after the U.S. embassy bombings to a number in Yemen. "That number was called by Osama bin Ladin both before and after the embassy bombings. Khaled al-Mihdhar was the son-in-law of the guy who owned the phone. He called there from California eight times! Had the NSA shared its information, the FBI could have mapped the entire global Al Qaeda network."

In conclusion, Wright says he believes that "all the clues were there, but the pieces were in different people's hands and were never put together." More disturbingly, he believes that we are no safer today than we were five years ago.

"So many in the U.S. intelligence community are demoralized and drifting away," he reports. "Moreover, the reorganization of our intelligence hierarchy has done nothing to make the situation better. Instead, it's only muddied things further. The lines of responsibility are not at all clear. Who's responsible? Who's in charge? It's only gotten worse since 9/11

"They say that each bureaucracy creates its own culture, and that it eats its young," he muses. "But our intelligence community is a sick culture. It does not reward creative, courageous and aggressive people. The people within it who really know things have been stigmatized and excluded - and I don't know how to fix it."

Al Qaeda, on the other hand, is "not a fractured structure like our intelligence community," says Wright. "Our own confused response pales in comparison to their discipline."

If "The Looming Tower" has any message, says Wright, it's this: "9/11 was not just an intelligence failure, but failure of understanding. We didn't know or even care who these people were! We had NO appreciation for the entire situation and just didn't take it seriously. I can only hope that the book will increase our level of understanding and we can then act appropriately."

Filmmaker and journalist Rory O'Connor writes the Media Is A Plural blog.

© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
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