Defeating Terrorism, Step One: Look in the Mirror

I think a crucial step forward in coming to grips with terrorism requires that we ask ourselves why individuals, some of them young, rational people with their whole lives ahead of them, would hate the US and its allies so much that they would commit acts of massive destruction and end their own lives as well.

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The entire façade of bureaucratic delays that made up the UN's efforts in Iraq in the last years of the sanctions was absurd. Did any of the UN workers who struggled to provide minute documentation that Iraq wasn't building bombs out of parts for water treatment plants, for example, really believe that the US cared about their work? After 5 years of "oil for food," it was clear that the U.S. was simply interested in finding excuses to maintain sanctions. Despite repeated denials, and incredibly detailed levels of "monitoring" and documentation, by UN officials across every agency working in Iraq, the US continued to pretend that the Iraqi government could have solved the problems by distributing hoarded medicines and was solely responsible because it refused to use the money and medicine it had available. The truth was that no amount of medicine could have saved the lives of children, then, and still won't be adequately effective, because Iraq's infrastructure is so badly debilitated that even now infant mortality at the neonatal clinic in the Yarmuk Hospital in Baghdad is twice that of last year. And at Baghdad's Central Teaching Hospital for Children, where gallons of raw sewage wash across the floors, the hospital's doctors say "the hospital drinking water is contaminated" and "80 percent of patients leave with infections they did not have when they arrived."(NYT "Chaos and War Leave Iraq's Hospitals in Ruins" Jeffrey Gettleman, February 14 2004)

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I wonder if people who flock to see Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" understand that the brutality Jesus suffered was the punishment for those convicted of insurrection against military occupation. Military occupation then and now is not much different. Imagine anyone in Iraq, Israel or Palestine, whether civilian or military, occupier or occupied, who survives a bombing, – their limbs shattered, organs ripped open, flesh torn. Imagine arms aching for loved ones who'll never return. Or imagine someone armless and yearning, like the woman whom Faith Fippinger wrote of who had given birth to a baby just before a US bomb tore off her arms during the Shock and Awe campaign. Other women helped the armless woman nurse the infant by crouching behind her and holding the baby to her breast.

I recently read about a woman who carried her sister-in-law's newborn baby to a hospital where she had been advised that an incubator would be available. When she arrived, she learned another woman had arrived before her and the incubator was taken. A nurse tried to console the distraught woman, but her companion, the mother's sister, was willing to try an alternative. Using a manual ventilator, she followed a nurse's instructions: "…squeeze and let go, squeeze and let go, as long as she could. Shortly before dawn, after standing by the baby and working the respirator for eight hours, Mehdi's arms gave out…" (Washington Post "Iraqi Hospitals on Life Support" March 5, 2004). The baby died of respiratory failure.

http://antiwar.com/orig/kelly.php?articleid=2162


Edited to ad:, The author, Kathy Kelly, is a member of Voices in the Wilderness. She's been sentenced to a jail term for civil disobedience at Fort Benning, GA and at the ELF nuclear weapon facility in northern WI. For more information see www.soaw.org or www.nukewatch.org

thanks for posting it.
Its true, the US and some other western nations should look in the
mirror and scrutinize its actions, but that won't happen. There's a
little issue called "peak oil" that is very much at the forefront of
all this, although you won't hear about it on the TV or read about
it in the papers.
Western "civilized" nations are the modern versions of empires...as
they have been for the past 700 years give or take. They are not
willing to give up their life styles and they believe that we have
the right to impose ourselves upon other, less fortunate nations.

IMHO, this has been arranged since the turn of the 20th century.
Imagine if all these nations would have been permitted to "develope".

Its time for the paradigm shift...and Mother Nature is providing us
with that very paradigm in the form of peak oil.

...whether the explosion that blew her arms off was the act of a terrorist or a superpower?

When our military kills more than twice as many civilians in Iraq as perished on 9/11 -- in a country that was not responsible for that attack and posed no threat to us -- we are perpetrating the same kind of terror, except on a larger scale.