West reaps whirlwind of violence

By YASMIN ALIBHAI-BROWN

Let me try, as best I can, to describe the knots of fear, the coils of fury, the jumbled wires that mess up my head every time another act of violation explodes on the global landscape, splashing blood and horror and making inevitable acts of even more vicious retaliation.

My responses are complicated and shared by millions who never have seen, and never will see, the world as the power merchants of the UK, US and Israel say we must.

So last week when the strange quiescence of al Qaeda ( if indeed it was that rather amorphous, ill-defined organisation) broke to cause mayhem in Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Chechnya, and fear of mayhem in Pakistan and the east African states, while home-grown suicide bombers caused further turmoil in Israel and Palestine, I am sorry to report that I didn't react the way I might have.

I cannot simply produce, on tap, platitudinous condemnations that seem to be required every time there is an attack by Islamic Stalinists. Yet more than 200 people died, and it is intolerable to imagine the pain that has caused.

There is today a huge divide between people who see the universe through the eyes of neo-conservative America and its right-wing European devotees and satellites, and the rest of the world that feels disempowered and caught between all these New World barbarians who are seeking to dominate and destroy, to bully, threaten, humiliate and crush the will and spirit of populations the world over.

Individuals or groups causing planned havoc are not more evil than states, even democratic states, that do the same, particularly as the death tolls they can inflict would be beyond bin Laden's most outrageous dreams.

What is truly scary is that the powerful in the Wild West coalition do not begin to understand (nor do they want to) just how much dormant suspicion and hatred is now spreading to all countries many of which, during the Cold War, were on side and happy to be so.

The result, says Arundhati Roy, is a grotesque and permitted racism: "There is a tidal wave of hatred for the US and its allies rising from the ancient heart of the world. In Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, Australia, I encounter it every day from bankers, businessmen, yuppie students. America is a nation of morons, a nation of murderers, they say (with the same carelessness that they say 'All Muslims are terrorists')."

This distrust is found across Europe, too, among many of us who feel powerfully European but have an internationalist sensibility that refuses to comply with the senseless US-UK geopolitical plans for the next decade. And it is because we care about these countries.

The American historian Paul Kennedy was recently shocked when a Dutch journalist told him he was scared of the US. But many of us are as scared for the US and its allies. That is why I am contemptuous of American groupies who will not accept that criticism is exactly what that country needs today.

For we watch as the generous, idealistic, self-critical, inquiring and aspirational American nation is reduced to such paranoia that it cares no more about its own basic freedoms, principles of justice or capacity for productive co-existence with other nations. Guantanamo Bay will haunt them for ever.

America is so greedy that it is making itself ill with ideological overfeeding and this habitual rush to unnecessary wars, with Britain as habitual ally. Out of a curious mixture of a new vulnerability and a complacent and misguided sense of supremacy, a dangerous American foreign policy is being forged and a more reliable and orderly foreign policy discarded.

International "objectors" (if you wish to call us that) want to understand why on September 11 those men in those planes wanted to wreck the sanity and security of America - which is not the same as excusing the crimes they committed.

We believe the globalised world system can bring much benefit; but not if it is just another way of privileging those with ambitions for absolute cultural, political and economic hegemony. We are alarmed that our people are fed so many lies.

We know that only a real and transparently fair settlement between Israel and Palestine will reduce the power of the extremists on both sides. We also know that, even if this were to happen tomorrow, bin Laden wouldn't deliver his troops to the International Court in The Hague.

We "objectors" never believed either the Taleban or al Qaeda were finished. Nor did some of us believe in the illegal war against Iraq, which was never about the poor victims of Saddam Hussein, whose corpses are now being used as shameful covers by duplicitous politicians.

We want to know how many people were killed by our war. Yet we realise that, as with the hundreds of thousands of conscripts, these names and numbers will have been vapourised by our superior power.

We watch with alarm as the reconstruction of Iraq degenerates into an occupation.

Our leaders don't understand these things, they will not be able to stop the rise and rise of violent extremists. They are already active in 95 countries, and reformists of all sorts are being swept away or silenced.

Imams in Saudi Arabia are already calling for the murders of intellectuals and Westernised Muslims. In his book on al Qaeda to be published next month, Jason Burke is convinced that the network will grow and become more ruthless.

All our lives are now endangered. Most of the victims of this latest spate of terrorism are Arab or Muslim, the terrorists' own brothers, sisters and children - that is, if they really believe in the umma, the bond that unites diverse Muslims.

For a good long while these Muslim terrorists will have ruined tourism in Morocco, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, and those countries will fall perilously now into economic chaos just when things were looking better politically.

Talk to East Africans and Moroccans and they will tell you that they are traumatised by the bombs and threats thrown into their fragile countries by the suicide bombers. But they will add that they can understand why al Qaeda is attracting recruits and why this evil will not be beaten by Bush and Blair with all their weapons and hubris.

American citizens are today unsafe if they venture much beyond Europe; Britain has become the second most reviled country in the world; all white people, all Jews are now vulnerable wherever murderous Islamist cells operate.

The inhabitants of beautiful places that are terrorist targets are the collateral damage in this war, and their deaths hardly ever count in this clash of the pitiless.

And all we have to console us is George W. Bush, with a silly smile on his face, saying: "These guys are on the run, we are going to get them."

- INDEPENDENT