Daily Sun,
Nigeria
Global Goodwill Over September 11 Turns to Outrage
By Lindsay Barret
September 14, 2006
Nigeria - Daily Sun - Original
Article (English) 
President Bush delivers his September 11
address to the nation, Sept, 11. (above).
—WHITE HOUSE VIDEO: President Bush's Oval
Office address to the nation, Sept. 11, 00:16:16
[SLIDE SHOW: September 11, Five Years On].
Firefighters Walking near the base of the destroyed
World Trade Center towers, Sept. 11, 2001. (below).
A man grieves at the World Trade Center site, September 11. (above).
—BBC NEWS VIDEO: Five years of the War on
Terror; Are we safer?, Sept. 11, 00:03:23
President Bush explains to a crowd in Atlanta how he
is 'fixing' the problems' exposed by Sept. 11. (above).
The President and Mrs. Bush at memorial ceremony
at Ground Zero, New York, Sept. 11. (above).
—BBC NEWS VIDEO: Americans remember
Sept. 11, 2001,
Sept. 11, 00:02:56
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is
highly unlikely that anyone of sound mind or basic human compassion, who
witnessed what occurred in New York on September 11th 2001, could ever forget
it or find reason to justify it. Similarly, we have always defended the anger
and resistance of the Palestinian people, who have been dehumanized and
disenfranchised by the disembowelment of their sovereignty in order to create a
homeland for the Jews, and by the hypocrisy of the West.
We also acknowledge
that the Jews had been equally dehumanized and disenfranchised in other parts
of the world. Nevertheless, we have constantly warned that the use of extreme
methods of terror to protest or challenge a crime against a people, rather than
alleviate the problem, aggravates it. Our belief remains that when a great
crime is perpetrated in the name of revenge or expiation, it diminishes the
cause that it is supposed to justify.
I felt
that the 9-11 events generated just such a diminishment. In spite of U.S.
support of Israel's devastation of Palestine, the attacks created more sympathy
for the American power mongers. These criminal acts, which the terrorists
sought to justify as vengeance for the deeply wounded Palestinian people, only
served to damage the Palestinian cause.
[Editor's Note: Actually, according to a 'fatwa' issued by al-Qaeda, the Palestinian cause is only one of a number of motives for the attacks 
].
On that
day, the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Presidents Khatami of Iran and Saddam Hussein of Iraq, were
among the first Middle East leaders to express sorrow and distress over the
event. Yasser Arafat even offered his own blood to
the wounded.
Five
years later, Yasser Arafat has been hounded to death
by Israeli firepower and the physical blockade of his home; Iran is described
by America's President George Bush as “a center of evil and America's greatest
enemy in the Middle East,” and Iraq, poor Iraq, lies in ruins. What has
happened?
We're not
by any stretch of the imagination suggesting that Saddam Hussein's well
documented acts of brutality against certain segments of his own people were
vindicated by his expressions of sympathy for America's tragedy. Subsequent
events have shown that good intentions sometimes do more harm than good, if these
are what America's invasion of Iraq was based on. In seeking to rid Iraq of its
dictator, America has devastated that nation's population far worse that the
way the terror attacks of September 11 did to the people of the United States.
There is simply no justice in America's attack against people who didn't attack
them and in fact, who truly sympathized with the people of the United States, since
Iraqis considered Osama bin Laden their common enemy.
The tale
that Iraq was attacked in retaliation for 9-11 has become one of the greatest
falsehoods of all time. During the recent memorial events in New York, one
American protestor who turned up to question the Bush Administration's record
since the terror strike carried a banner that said simply and devastatingly:
“You Intended to Attack Iraq Before 9-11.”
Mr. Bush
and his closest collaborators have repeatedly denied this, but more and more
people have come to believe it. Over 2,700 people died in America as a result
of the September 11 terrorist attack, and not all of them white American
Christians. Among the haunting images of the grief-stricken among those who
lost their loved ones, many were immigrant Muslims, several hundred were
African-Americans, and it cannot be forgotten that a number of Nigerians lost
their lives in the World Trade Towers. To date, 2,600 Americans have died in
Iraq, and at the present rate of violence far more Americans will have died in
Iraq and Afghanistan by the time the year is over than were killed on 9-11.
This is madness.
The Bush
Administration has squandered the greatest outpouring of goodwill and sympathy
toward America that the world has ever witnessed. Over the last five years,
instead of building a fundamental and strategic basis for global cooperation
and reform, the Bush Administration has bullied its way into a position of global
isolation. His nation more disliked and distrusted than it was before September
11. Some of Mr. Bush's allies, especially Britain's Tony Blair, have lost
influence in their own communities because of their attachment to Bush's
fundamentally flawed response to the September 11 outrage.
Mr. Blair
is a shadow of his pre-9-11 self, as he struggles to leave a legacy of
confidence and trust among his own followers before he leaves office sometime
next year. Instead of departing on a note of triumph, he faces the possibility
of leaving office still protesting his innocence over charges that he helped
provide a false basis for the Iraq invasion. Neither have his attempts to
recover some foreign affairs credibility been a total success. On a visit to
Beirut on September 11, he confronted a major embarrassment when a
number of well-behaved but determined protestors crashed his press conference
with the Lebanese Prime Minister and accused him to his face of duplicity over Israel's
recent attacks on Lebanon. Nothing could have better illustrated the
fundamental distress of Mr. Bush's foreign collaborators.
Mr. Bush's
protestations of innocence over the devastation in Iraq have escalated. All of
this while Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization, the enemy that Bush targeted
five years ago, continues to give every indication that it is growing in
strength. We want to make clear that we don't support the methods or doctrines espoused
by al-Qaeda, but we are convinced that Mr. Bush's
reactions to 9-11 have served to give al-Qaeda greater legitimacy, but as a resistance group rather than a terrorist organization.
This can
be said because American tactics have devastated so many Middle East communities
that any resistance to these strategies look like genuine
acts of martyrdom. The 9-11 attacks were universally condemned as an outrage,
but America's operations in Iraq, its bullying stance at the U.N., and its
attempt to force the rest of the world to join it in loudly condemning Iran
have diminished this sympathy.
That the
balance of power in the world is lopsided is obvious. But what is even more
obvious is that American power is being deployed to punish enemies of its own
choosing rather than to prevent and punish acts that threaten world peace. This
has been repeatedly proven since September 11, as the U.S. has taken actions
driven by racial arrogance rather than humane retribution. Whenever it
confronts issues related to 9-11, the psyche of the Bush Administration gets
locked in the cowboy syndrome, which is an improbable state of catatonic
dysfunction.
Unfortunately,
this dysfunction is backed up by America's overwhelming wealth and military
might, so the likelihood of a reversal of these misguided policies that have
lost America so much global goodwill may not be on the cards for a long time to
come.
For all
of the world's right-thinking people, the memories of that tragic day five
years ago are no less painful today. The pity is that as we mourn America's
loss the Bush Administration has created a situation in which we must also
condemn America's reaction to that loss. These years have been notable for the
squandering of the goodwill that a new order of global cooperation should have
been built.
But instead
of cooperation, a new level of division has evolved.
