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Beating Around the Bush:
Don't Let Him Turn Tragedy Into War

by Dave Zirin
October, 2001
volume 38, number 8

Sixteen minutes. For that stretch of time on September 11, 2001, I did not know if my father was dead or alive. He had worked on the 70th floor of what was the World Trade Center. In those sixteen minutes I trembled, paralyzed with the thought of losing my dad. After those sixteen minutes, those 960 endless seconds, my father called that he was all right. Countless others were not nearly as lucky. There are no words to express the sympathy we all must have for the victims of the Air Attacks. But fear and dread replaced my original shock and sadness as George W. Bush - once he emerged from his subterranean bunker - howled for war.

Bush said, "We're going to find those evildoers, those barbaric people who attacked our country and we're going to hold the people who house them accountable, the people who think they can provide them safe havens will be held accountable, the people who feed them will be held accountable." The media quickly took their cue from Bush. The Philadelphia Daily news wrote, "Revenge. Hold onto that thought. Go to bed thinking it. Wake up chanting it. Because nothing less than revenge is called for."

Fear and dread. Every day since - more reason to feel it. Bush has been granted unprecedented ability to crush civil liberties as part of the National War Powers Act. He has, according to the Washington Times, "activated some 500 dormant legal provisions including those allowing him to impose censorship and martial law." This has included access to Executive Order 9066, infamously used by Franklin Roosevelt to intern thousands of Asian-Americans during WW II. The FBI now has the right to detain people for months without charges being filed. Already, at least 50 people are trapped in this gauntlet. The Senate has passed legislation to let law-enforcement personnel obtain private e-mails without a court order, to allow U.S. attorneys to approve wiretaps in terrorism cases, and to lift the longtime ban on CIA spying within the United States.

Fear and dread.

As in all preludes to war, right wing crack pots who otherwise are gagged by their own party, are given national platforms to spout hate. Pat Robertson was on National Fox News spewing, "We are dealing with an enemy that has no soul. An enemy that thinks if he kills himself in one of these suicide missions, Allah will give him a harem of women in heaven."

Fear and dread. It is difficult not to feel in the face of this racist backlash against Arabs and Moslems - many of whom are getting caught up in a pogrom of hatred and violence. A Pakistani grocer in Dallas and a Sikh man in Mesa, Arizona are dead for the crime of fitting an "Arab" racial profile. This cuts across the US - a car being driven into a mosque in Ohio, a 300 person march with American and Confederate Flags on a mosque in Chicago - and it has reached England, as last week an Afghani cab driver was beaten to paralysis.

Fear and dread.

It is clear that the first casualty of war is truth. No politicians are asking the simple question of why. Why is the US a target in the first place? Bush said, "We represent freedom and there are people who hate freedom. They are the enemy." And like everything Bush says these days, this is treated like Churchillian wisdom. But is it truth? Does it reside on the same planet as truth?

There is no discussion of Grenada, Libya, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Yugoslavia. There is no discussion of the "proxy wars" fought by armies and militias armed by the US throughout Central America and the Middle East. Not a word about the 500,000 children killed by UN sanctions. Not a word about Madeline Albright's chilling words justifying these deaths, saying on 60 minutes "The price is worth it."

As radical historian Howard Zinn put it in the days after the Air Attacks, "The military response just perpetuates a cycle of terrorism and counter-terrorism. If we want real security, we will have to stop being an intervening military power and to stop dominating the economies of other countries." Or as Martin Luther King wrote a generation ago "I am sad to say that the nation in which we live is the supreme culprit. We have committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride, and our arrogance as a nation." In other words, if we are to stop this cycle of violence, our opponent is not in the "caves of Afghanistan," but right here at home.

That can be a scary truth. Many groups on the left have called for a long, indefinite period of reflection. The Sierra Club, for example issued a statement where they wrote in part, "Now is a time for mourning, for reflection and for solutions to the immediate crisis at hand. Our nation faces other long-term problems and challenges, but now is not the time for those debates." They called for standing together as "one nation". Many unions issued similar calls. I would argue that we do not have that luxury. To stand silent for the drums of war while hate crimes engulf people in every community is not an option. To stand silent while George W. Bush grips an executive power unparalleled perhaps in American History is not an option.

For those of us trapped in a vice of fear and dread, we can take our lead from thousands around the country already calling for peace. 4,000 in Berkeley, 1,000 in Iowa City, 300 in Atlanta, and countless numbers in Union Square in New York City. Here in DC, on Friday September 14th, over 600 people marched in candlelit vigil for peace. As one peace activist remarked to me, "What we are seeing already is far in advance of what we saw during the Kosovo war or even the first Gulf War."

Let's build on this sentiment. Let's reach out to the Arab and Moslem community. Let's link with the Global Justice Movement. Let's keep communicating with regular folks in DC - many of whom are not clamoring for war. This is a response that is not built on fear and dread, but honor and solidarity. Honor to the victims already dead, and solidarity with the victims that the US may create in our immediate future.

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