Dialogue: Israel is focus of fury at America

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

Why has the world become such a perilous place again? For two decades during the Cold War mankind seemed poised on the brink of extinction in a nuclear war.

The tension built gradually from the time the Soviet Union declared in 1950 that it had operational atom bombs, an announcement virtually simultaneous with one by President Truman that the United States was developing the more powerful hydrogen bomb.

The brinkmanship continued until 1989 when the Soviet economy collapsed and, before we put too much faith in Western intelligence agencies, remember that not even the well-resourced CIA predicted that extraordinary event, despite what must have been significant evidence.

When democratic capitalism at last, deservedly, triumphed over Europe's centrally directed dictatorships, prospects for world peace looked better than for more than 50 years. But what followed was a kind of fatuous self-glorification by the West that the market was the hallowed symbol of freedom and virtue.

Some especially stupid scholars went so far as to say the triumph was so complete that the end of history was nigh, even though the world almost immediately began showing signs of becoming a dangerous place again with nuclear weapons proliferating, and with bands of well-armed marauders killing innocent people in every region of the world, motivated by a mad mixture of religion and nationalism, angered by a sometimes real and sometimes manufactured sense of oppression.

Let's pause now and ask ourselves if the burgeoning, unregulated, unrestrained marketplace doesn't carry in it the seeds of its own destruction. A news item last month from the New York Times read: "International arms sales grew 8 per cent last year to $US36.9 billion, with the United States further consolidating its stature of the supplier of choice, especially in developing countries, according to a new Congressional report.

"America sold about half the weapons on the world market during 2000, 68 per cent of them to developing countries (worth $US18.6 billion). Russia was second with $7.7 billion sales, followed by France ($4.1 billion), Germany ($1.1 billion), Britain ($600 million), China ($400 million) and Italy ($100 million). It was the third year in a row that armament sales jumped."

Does this make sense to you?

I wonder whose guns the lunatic Taleban are toting, whose ammunition may kill Americans if they move to capture Osama bin Laden?

When dealing with one of the two main scourges of modern life, drugs, most Western governments regard the users as victims and fight unrelentingly against the growers, manufacturers and distributors who mainly prop up the economies of impoverished South American and Asian countries.

But when dealing with that other scourge, guns, they blame the users and absolve, even encourage, the manufacturers and distributors whose exports enrich their economies.

Just think of all those television images of kids in the Middle East and Africa carrying automatic weapons as they once carried schoolbags, and remember that the US has lately opposed a United Nations attempt to restrict the international traffic in small arms.

I find the rising rhetoric of the US distressing, and obviously some European governments do, too.

The slogan, America at War, has been adopted by media and has a sinister, professionally persuasive ring to it.

Trouble is that if a government can convince its people they're at war, it can perhaps more readily waive some of the constricting rules of international discourse. Already, congressmen are discussing a reversion to the CIA's assassination policy, where warranted, that was stopped during President Gerald Ford's term of office.

It's a policy Israel has developed to a fine art: intelligence identifies a terrorist and he is officially assassinated. Are they never wrong?

Imagine if the Palestinians identified the head of Israel's security forces as a terrorist and he was killed at Arafat's direction.

Despite the understandable immensity of their grief and anger, the American people must not allow their Government, under the spell of President Bush's Wild West language, to reduce this tragedy into a good versus evil shoot-out at the OK Corral.

It's right that they should seek justice against those behind it, but they must also start asking themselves seriously why millions of people in the East hate them so. Are all these people stupid, evil fanatics?

They must ask themselves how much of this hatred is engendered by their seemingly unconditional support for Israel, now a bully state allowed to extend its own boundaries at no matter what cost to its neighbours.

Rightly or wrongly, Israel is a focal point of the anger of the Middle Eastern nations, which see the US as its protector.

Those who lived through most of the 20th century know that we live our free and affluent lives courtesy of the United States. It will be a tragedy if hubris destroys peace in the 21st.